Public Affairs Analyst

In the next 72 hours, it will be a goodbye to the Year 2021. A lot has happened in the outgoing year. Governance in Nigeria remains a serious challenge. The global community spent another year battling the coronavirus pandemic with its attendant ripple effects on the economy, security, politics and governance. The good news is that vaccines were rapidly concocted across many laboratories to tackle this pandemic and news has it that about nine of such antidotes have been approved for human inoculation. As Nigeria gears up for the forthcoming 2023 general election, a lot of prep work has been going on. The political scene has been buzzing with lots of activities. At the level of the Independent National Electoral Commission, a lot of programmes and projects were carried out. Some of these were stand-alone while many others were preparatory to the 2023 general election. For instance, the electoral management body set the date and accomplished 14 different activities leading to the succe...

 “The high cost of governance and rising personnel budget in Nigeria is as a result of illegal recruitment, illegal and unilateral increase in wages and remuneration by some MDAs, indiscriminate local and international travels, unreasonable demands by some political appointee board members of MDAs without regard for extant circulars on cost management; procurement fraud, budget padding, etc,” – ICPC Chairman, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye on November 30, 2021. In case you do not know, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission is one of the foremost anti-corruption agencies in Nigeria. Information garnered from its website says that the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act 2000 (Act 2000) brought a fresh and decisive perspective to the fight against corruption in the form of a holistic approach encompassing enforcement, prevention and educational measures. The Act brings under its purview all Nigerians, in the private and public sectors and eve...

  Security and welfare of citizens are the primary purposes of government so says section 14 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria, as amended. This regime of the President, Major General Muhammdu Buhari (retd.), promised an onslaught against the monster called insecurity six years ago. Unfortunately, much as it tried, it has not succeeded. Should the verdict of history come today, the president and his lieutenants at the state and local government levels will definitely be rated very low. The truth is that Nigeria is faced with worsening insecurity on a daily basis. Let’s look a bit at statistics. According to 2020 Global Terrorism Index rating by a group known as Vision of Humanity, “Nigeria is the third country most impacted by terrorism. Yet, total deaths from terrorism in Nigeria fell to 1,245 in 2019, a 39% decrease from the prior year. Terror-related incidents also fell by 27%, marking the lowest level of terrorist violence in Nigeria since 2011. Boko Haram, Nigeria’...

  Ahead of the 2015 general elections, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), campaigned on the mantra of change and highlighted three pillars of attention if voted into office. These are economy, security and anti-corruption. Six years down the line, how well has the president fought corruption? If you ask the anti-graft agencies, they are likely to tell you that they are doing great and are winning the fight against corruption. On the other hand, average Nigerians and international rating agencies, such as Transparency International, are not convinced that the country is getting the upper hand in the war against graft. In this piece, I decided to focus on an area many Nigerians are not paying attention to. That is asset recovery and disposal by the anti-corruption agencies. Does the country have a comprehensive asset recovery register? The answer is No! Is there a standard operating procedure for the disposal of recovered stolen funds or assets? Doubtful. Yet there are several...

  Since Tuesday, November 9, 2021, when the National Assembly passed the Electoral Amendment Bill after the report of the conference committee that harmonised the different versions of the bill passed in July 2021, there has been a raging controversy over the adoption of only the direct primary as the mode of candidate nomination process. In case you do not know, party primaries are internal elections of registered political parties aimed at choosing parties’ standard-bearers that will participate in general elections. Other internal elections conducted by political parties are elective congresses and conventions organised to elect party members into party executive positions. It is part of the leadership recruitment process. In the extant law, which is the Electoral Act 2010, as amended, the mode of party primaries is enunciated in section 87. It has 10 subsections. Provision was made for two types of primaries viz direct and indirect primaries. Direct primaries involve all elig...

  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana I am currently attending a capacity building workshop for selected Nigerian journalists on “Reporting corruption in Nigeria”. The workshop, which is organised by Transparency International, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, has in attendance journalists from both print and electronic media across the country. It started on Monday and ends today. 12 papers were scheduled for presentation at the training but only four had so far been presented as of the time of writing this article. It is one of the papers that I am x-raying today. I singled out this paper titled, “History of Corruption and its Effects on National Development” by an erudite scholar, a senior lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University, Dr. Adetunji Ogunyemi, due to its historicity. Did you know that Nigeria’s Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Act, both of which prohibit and seek to punish c...

  I was not in Anambra State to observe the November 6 governorship election but I was there in spirit. Apart from having physically observed the 2010 election that brought former Governor Peter Obi back to office for his second and final term, I observed the 2021 election won by former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo, remotely and virtually. Before, during and after the election, I was on several radio and television stations to analyse the preparations and the conduct of the poll. On D-Day, I crisscrossed three media houses, Love 104.5 FM, Police Radio 99.1 FM and Nigeria Television Authority, all in Abuja. In fact, the following day, I was on NTA for 10 hours analysing the results of the election. Anambra State is very unique in many respects. It is called the Light of the Nation. It is one of the five Igbo states located in South-East Nigeria. It is a centre of trade and commerce boasting of two international commercial centres namely: Nnewi and Onitsha...

  It’s another victory for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission as the anti-corruption agency was able to successfully prosecute the former chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team, Abdulrasheed Maina, for corruption. Last Monday, November 8, 2021, the Federal High Court in Abuja sentenced Maina to eight years’ imprisonment for money laundering offences involving N2 billion in pension funds. The judge, Okon Abang, jailed Maina after convicting him and his company, Common Input Property and Investment Ltd, on all the 12 counts filed against them by the EFCC. According to the News Agency of Nigeria, the judge sentenced Maina to various jail terms ranging from three to eight years, which are to run concurrently beginning from October 25, 2019, the date he was arraigned. This implies Maina will spend only five years in prison. As for the Common Input Property and Investment Ltd’s punishment, the judge ordered that it should be wound up and its assets forfeited to the Federal ...

  This country has gone to tatters, I dare say. The recent revelations about the mindboggling cases of corruption by some of Nigeria’s civil servants and political leaders show that it will take divine interventions to rescue Nigeria from the shackles of corruption. Today, I want to examine the recent revelation by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye, as well as the planned auction of some of the stolen property of former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Dieziani Alison-Madueke. Starting with the ICPC story, the commission’s chairman last Thursday, October 28, 2021 said the agency recovered 301 houses from two public officers in the Federal Capital Territory. The revelation was made at the inauguration of the House of Representatives ad-hoc Committee on Investigation of the Operations of Real Estate Developers. The ICPC chairman said while 241 buildings were recovered from one of the suspects at diffe...

    “If the criminal justice system works effectively, everyone – policemen, lawyers, warders, even inmates – benefits. If it doesn’t, we all lose some way – because we’re all in this vicious cycle together. The only problem is that rather than enthrone a society that works for all, too many want a society that works for them – at the expense of everyone else.” – Fisayo Soyombo, award-winning journalist in his undercover investigative report on Ikoyi Prison in July 2019. Jailbreak is not peculiar to Nigeria. It is a global phenomenon. However, it is not something that should be occurring with the frequency with which it is happening in Nigeria. This year alone, there have been three of such in Owerri, Kabba and more recently, Oyo town. Last October, during the #EndSARS protests several Nigerian prisons and police cells were breached by some criminal elements in society with thousands of detainees and inmates released. Many of them have never been recaptured despite the thre...