SKETCHES

Like a grounded ship in the ocean
It appears that the Muhammadu Buhari administration has become so overwhelmed with the challenge of office that it is seemingly behaving like a captain whose ship is trapped in the middle of an ocean and he cannot even locate the compass. Or how else would anyone explain a situation where government watches as everything is falling apart in the country. Job losses have become the order of the day. Hunger now walks the length and breadth of the country and crime rate is on the increase as a result of economic suffocation. It has never been so bad!

What manner of religion!
If the aim of religion is to moderate the lifestyle of adherents; if religion is indeed aimed at preparing people for a better life hereafter, one then wonders why some people will hide under religion to commit all manner of atrocities. How would any one justify the senseless killings in the Northern part of the country all in the name religion? A band of deviants and miscreants, masquerading as religionists lynched an innocent woman in Kano in front of her husband. If I may ask, what part of heaven would such murderers hope to go to? As Nigerians were trying to overcome the shock and consternation of the Kano madness, another sad episode occurred in Kaduna State. A carpenter, Emmanuel Francis, a non-Moslem, was gruesomely attacked and wounded because he did not take part in the Ramadan fast. My major worry is the spontaneous reactions that greeted the dastardly acts. It has always been medicine after death. Government has always been too reactionary. Nothing ever comes out of the cosmetic grandstanding of government and its agencies. We shall soon forget about these ugly incidents until another sad episode. We have since forgotten Gideon Akaluka, who was beheaded in the same Kano in the 90s over certain allegation bordering on lack of respect for certain religion. What a nation!

Needless grandstanding
It amounted to lack of understanding of who performs what role in government and smacks of utter hypocrisy for a minister of Labour, whose government has not created one job since inception over a year ago and has, through unfavorable policies worsened the operating environment for businesses, to threaten to withdraw licences of banks and telecom companies which recently offloaded thousands of staff into the already overflowing unemployment market. Apart from the fact that the banks and telecom firms are under the direct supervision of constitutional bodies, that a government that has allowed suffering to fester in the land, whose actions and inactions have pushed the banks and other companies to cut jobs, is making an empty threat, is very thoughtless.

Needless call
It was a needless call. I mean the one that was made the other day by Ben Nwabueze, a professor and constitutional lawyer. Nwabueze (SAN) said there should be a convocation of a fresh national conference of ethnic nationalities. What Nigeria needs at this moment is not a fresh conference; we have had enough of that. Since Independence, the country has had so many conferences aimed at addressing the ills that had frustrated its development, and nothing has been done to implement the resolutions arrived at in those conferences. For instance, the robust recommendations harvested at the most recent National Conference convoked by the Goodluck Jonathan administration are yet to be implemented even though commentators believe that its implementation would help the country a great deal. Don’t forget also that the country lost trillions of Naira in that jamboree. Now, for Professor Nwabueze, who also participated in many of the past ones, to be calling for a fresh conference, under whatever guise, is not in tandem with the spirit of the hour. What anybody should be thinking about is how to prevail on government of the day to implement the recommendations already on ground.

PDP: Still a thorny path to full re-invention
Peace still appears to be on holiday in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) camp. The crisis of leadership which gripped the party since it lost power last year has continued to eat deeper into the fabrics of the organisation. The party’s latest stanza of the challenge reared its head following the appointment some months ago of Ali Modu Sheriff, a former governor of Borno State, as acting national chairman of the party. Although Sheriff was the choice of many of the state governors of the party, a greater number of other stakeholders could not understand why a “new comer” into the party should become its leader. Those who led the protest against Sheriff are mainly of the old establishment, such as Ibrahim Mantu, a former deputy senate president, Jerry Gana, who had been many things in the party and in the country since 1999. Although steps have been taken to placate Sheriff and all those who felt hard-done-by in the latest development in the umbrella party, the aggrieved leaders have stuck to their guns. Pray, is PDP truly working to reinvent itself or will the crisis lead to the eventual demise of once a mega political association? The signs are just ominous.

Too bad
In this 21st Century when governments across the world are working to ensure that education is free to every child at least at certain levels, Oyo State Government is thinking differently. In a country where the word privatization is synonymous with “death”, it beats anybody’s imagination why a sitting government would sell off all the public schools in the state. It amounts to playing the Ostrich for Governor Abiola Ajimobi to have conceived the idea of pushing off the responsibility of funding the public schools. Since the announcement was made, the governor, expectedly, has not known peace. It appears that Ajimobi has sown to the wind and it is most likely that he will reap the whirlwind. The Labour has since declared strike and is determined to paralyse activities in the state, unless government rescinds its decision.

“The strike will continue until all our demands are met. Our demands are the immediate withdrawal of all trumped-up charges levelled against us. Government must rescind its decision to sell-off any public schools in the state. Proper and adequate funding of the education sector including payment of living wages and other incentives for educational workers and the immediate payment of 6 months outstanding salaries and all pension arrears,” Labour insists.