A Note to Professor Yemi Osinbajo By Pius Adesanmi.

Now that a world-acclaimed Professor of Law is running the show in the land, you'd expect him to use this window to inject some strange notions into the system.

Strange notions such as actions and consequences, especially legal consequences a.k.a the sort of legal consequences that can land you in jail after due process.

Professor Osinbajo has been presiding over the distribution of tranches of the Paris Club Refund. As I said yesterday, the elephant is dead and all kinds of carnivorous state governors are out with glittering carving knives of various shapes and sizes.

Democracy, even a kwashiokored, emaciated pretext to democracy such as obtains in Nigeria, can be so inconvenient. Otherwise, it should even be a crime to give another tranche of the Paris Club Refund to ANY state Governor in this country, given their antecedents with earlier tranches.

What ought to be happening is a very busy EFCC and Federal Attorney-General preparing dossiers against all these current Governors so that they can all be arrested and made to face charges of criminal diversion of the Paris Club Refunds as soon as their term is over and they lose immunity.

None of them hasn't stolen from the funds. The difference is in the scale and manner of the stealing. The polished ones among them have stolen the funds with some finesse; the ponmo and eja shawa ones among them have stolen it with palm oil stains all over their chest. You cannot really argue with your background.
But I was talking about consequences and what Osinbajo ought to be doing by now. That part of my reflection has nothing to do with the Governors. Academic curiosity should make Professor Osinbajo want to know and understand how we got into a situation of Paris and London Club Refunds in the first instance.
He ought to be interested in the history and sinews of criminal negligence, corruption, and racketeering that led to the over-deductions in the first place. You dig and dig and dig and they say the problem started with the Debt Management Office and moved along the paths of Nigerian corruption to CBN and other places.
People were running the system in all those places. To this day, not a single explanation has been given to Nigerian citizens. I know that not many citizens understand that they are in fact owed explanations so not too many of them are asking for explanations.

I am.

I am also asking Professor Osinbajo: how do you live with a system that is never curious about criminality or really interested in finding the political will to prosecute it? Sir, how do you wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and not feel uncomfortable that the man looking back at you has not deemed it necessary to begin a process to make somebody or some people accountable for the over-deductions that got us here in the first place?

Nnamdi Kanu calls Nigeria a Zoo. Senator Shehu Sani and Mrs. Aisha Buhari are in agreement that Nigeria is metaphorically littered with lions, hyenas, and weaker animals. President Buhari also once metaphorically thought that there may be dogs and baboons all over the place.

Professor Osinbajo, your folks in the elite are wrong about all these animals they are throwing around. There are actions and consequences in the animal kingdom. In a pride of lions, among hyenas, baboons, meerkats, zebras, etc, there are always consequences if your actions are deleterious to the common interest of the group. Depending on the nature of the animals in question, you could get banished or killed for endangering the collective good and interest.

In essence, Professor Osinbajo, the only place where there are actions and consequences in Nigeria is among the residents of the Yankari Game Reserve.

You will recall that your boss promised to transfer the elementary values of the Yankari Game Reserve to governance so that we, the human owners of the animals in that park, can at least learn something. Then people padded his first budget. He promised consequences and shuffled them around in offices in Abuja.
To date, nobody has been punished for budget padding.

When you started distributing the Paris Club Funds, I said to myself, now, this is a Professor of Law. He is going to understand that things need to be done beyond mere distribution and sending Kemi Adeosun to howl for greater accountability. We need to understand how the over-deductions happened. People need to be investigated and punished.

Above all, the Nigerian citizen needs full explanations in a detailed national press conference by the concerned authorities. Professor Osinbajo, unlike majority of the ignorant and half-illiterate people in government, I am sure you fully understand that explaining these things to the Nigerian citizen is not a privilege you are bestowing on him and her?

It is your duty to explain.

It is their right to be explained to.
Pius Adesanmi 

On Biafra and Nnamdi Kanu by Eddie Iroh

Before glib thinkers and talkers start running loose, let me state my case. I was carrying ON ABURI WE STAND placards in Enugu in 1967 before today's Children of Biafra were born. Gowon unilaterally abrogated the Aburi Accord and launched his famous "Police Action". That led to full blown civil war.

We fought gallantly and lost. For me and most of my generation that was the end of the struggle. But here is where I vigorously disagree with the glib talkers. I fully concede to the Children of Biafra their right to make their own case and validate their own existence as they deem necessary out of their own perception and conviction. Nnamdi Kanu has risen to the challenge of his own generation.

Glibly calling him names -- idiot, mad man, etc etc - is an abysmally puerile resort of the intellectual scoundrel. Insult has never been a substitute for logical argument and indeed says more about the insulter than the insulted. Make your own case and leave us to judge and mutter our insults to whom deserves it.

In offering the surrender of Biafra in January 1970, the mortal General Philip Effiong also offered General Olusegun Obasanjo this immortal advice: TREAT THE SURRENDERING BIAFRANS WELL OR RISK THEIR CHILDREN RISING AGAIN. Before you deride Kanu, it is the duty of every thinking Igbo to determine for him or herself whether Effiong's advice was heeded.

Finally those who are unwilling to concede to Kanu and his generation their right to validate their own existence should stop to consider that their agitation for IPOB has put RESTRUCTURING front and centre of national debate.

From the rigid stand of NOT NEGOTIABLE nearly every group interest and individuals are talking about Restructuring. Before Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB upped the ante with their agitation the only voices were Atiku and Soyinka. Nigeria put an iconic hero's crown on Kanu by putting him in Kuje prison, with echoes of Mandela ringing in the ears of his supporters. A people have no greater hero than a political prisoner.

In other words, it is the FGN that made Kanu the overnight legend he has become in a very short time in his young life. And if and when Restructuring comes to be, I can wager that elements of the Aburi Accord will be part of it.

And that, fellow country men and women, would be a posthumous victory for General Emeka Ojukwu if not for Nnamdi Kanu.

So long a letter!
Eddie Iroh