A Season Of Carry Talk

Abraham Ogbodo

 

"Buhari probably thinks it is virtue to turn 360 degrees and become the chief prosecutor of one’s country in a global court where everyone is protective of his or her own deeds and misdeeds. And so, anytime it is announced Buhari is going outside Nigeria, we all wait with bathed breathe in anticipation of the next big carry talk."

IF you are from the old Bendel State now Edo and Delta States, you may not require any tutorials to decode the headline above. For others, I shall attempt to explain. When a man or woman just says things without due consideration or thinking through what he or she is saying, we from Bendel, would say, the person dey carry talk! That is, s/he will just carry anything that runs smooth in his or her mouth and talk gbragada!

    Let me use a more restrictive parlance to further drive home the transliteration. When such happens in Urhobo land for instance, it is called omuta, which is a dual notation from the combination of muo (carry) and ota (talk). Its synonym is ogbeta another dual lexical package deriving from ogb (bad) and ota (talk). And so among the Urhobo, omuta (carry talk) and ogbeta (bad talk) mean the same thing and either could be applied to call derailed speakers to order in a discourse.

   Today, we are in a season of omuta, ogbeta or carry talk in Nigeria. Quite unfortunately, the national discourse on war against corruption and good governance has slipped into a free-for-all. Many of the speakers are not speaking. They are talking and most painfully, talking anyhow too. No decorum, no governing rules.The talkers just open their mouths and talk. It is a regime of flippancy, utopia of demagoguism where sophistry and baseless proclamations have been lifted to state craft.

   Yet, in this new national affliction (of verbal diarrhea), there is no physician to turn to. President Muhammadu Buhari who should inject therapies is himself down with the same ailment and badly needs a cure. His is even a more chronic condition because it manifests both at home and abroad almost at equal intensity. And since becoming democratically elected president some nine months ago, President Buhari has visited more than a dozen countries where he has not missed too many opportunities to display this strange affliction.

   In South Africa, United States, France, India, Iran, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom and elsewhere he has visited, the President has been consistent in underscoring the hopelessness of the Nigerian situation. He talks as if a prize exists for running down Nigeria.

   Recently outside the country, Buhari got so close to cursing God for making him president of Nigeria at a time when every dime has been stolen from the national treasury. What is more, he lamented that all the good efforts he is making to recover what has been stolen from the thieves are being frustrated by the country’s judiciary and some stupid concepts called ‘rule of law’ and ‘due process.’ He, more or less, told his foreign audience that corruption will stop and democracy shall flourish in Nigeria once the judiciary is put out of the way.

   Everybody understands that Buhari is only trying to paint a picture of how bad the Nigerian situation is. But in doing so, he often forgets he is the president who should speak to the issues with the poise and optimism of a statesman. He so gladly descends from his privileged height onto the streets and talks angrily like any other aggrieved citizen of Nigeria.

  Buhari probably thinks it is virtue to turn 360 degrees and become the chief prosecutor of one’s country in a global court where everyone is protective of his or her own deeds and misdeeds. And so, anytime it is announced Buhari is going outside Nigeria, we all wait with bathed breathe in anticipation of the next big carry talk. But instead of just talking everywhere he goes, Buhari should speak more with his team on how to come around the current mounting challenges and deliver on his electoral promises.

   Unfortunately, the affliction is festering and the APC national Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun is exhibiting outstanding capacity to do far greater damages. Maybe the APC needs another publicity secretary in the garb of Alhaji Lai Mohammed (by the way who is the new APC’s publicity secretary?) so that Oyegun can talk less as party chairman. For now, Chief Oyegun who retired in 1985 as federal permanent secretary and will be 77 years on August 12 is also carry-talking like others. He said the other day that the Supreme Court should be probed because the apex court confirmed the victories of the PDP candidates in the governorship elections in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States and denied the APC a golden opportunity to own some oil states. . Days later, he struggled to say he was quoted out of context by the press.

   Whichever, my only happiness is that Chief Oyegun’s mother is from Agbarha Ame(water),which has its origin in Agbarha-Otor (land) where I come from. And so, Uncle Oyegun should understand that being pushed by partisan considerations to denigrate the highest court of the land with speech is omuta and ogbeta put together. Surprisingly, he is not relenting. Last week, following the sack of about 26 heads of federal parastatals by President Buhari, Chairman Oyegun was on call once more. He said all the sacked workers were PDP members working to sabotage the administration of President Buhari and he and the APC had no apologies for the sack. In an apparent hurry to carry talk, he forgot that one of the persons sacked, the Director-general of Budget Yahaya Gusau got on board with the APC Federal Government.

    Alhaji Lai Mohammed should not strike any strange note in the emerging culture. He has been a constant factor in the carry talk affliction and will only attract extra attention if he changes from and begins to sound other than himself. That is, if he begins to present situations as they are without the colourations of a propagandist. For instance, we will be worried if Lai Mohammed says weapons bought for the military by the previous government have proved helpful in the war against the insurgents. Or to hear him say the December 2015 deadline set by President Buhari for the defeat of the Boko Haram terror could not be met by the military for reasons other than Jonathan and the PDP.

    The other man that has come close to earning a constant coefficient as Alhaji Lai Mohammed in the carry talk affliction is Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State. If some American officials are not telling him that only one minister stole $6billion from the national treasury, he is on his own discovering the billions that former governor Lucky Igbinedion and his family took from Edo State. Other times it would be to remind Nigerians about his personal attributes that got him a 30-year old virgin for a wife. I should think by now, Dr. NgoziOkonjo-Iweala must have come to accept that the comrade governor talks more than he speaks.

   But there is a new rave in the spread of the affliction. He is Ibrahim Magu, Assistant Commissioner of Police and Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC). He talks as if he and the EFCC constitute the entire gamut of criminal justice in Nigeria. He wants to create an orchestra that will orchestrate the refrain:thief, thief, thief!Catch am, catch am! Kill am, kill am! Rogue, rogue! Kill am, kill am, once he pronounces a man or woman thief!

  The man has even identified those who do not want the orchestra to function smoothly. They are lawyers, journalists, yes, journalists, and that should include me I guess, and then judges. He is actually working hard to jail one big lawyer for injecting discordant tunes into the orchestra. He wants to use him to send unmistakable signals that whoever, no matter how tall, that stands on the way henceforth shall be uprooted and sent to jail.

   And so, lawyers, judges and journalists beware! This is a bad season of carry talk and those talking want whatever they talk to remain stuck with the people like a piece of law!

The Gorilla Was A Man

 

"In the journey to economic prosperity, it is vision and strategy that show the way all the time. It is a clear walk to doom if the profiling changes and money stays ahead of vision and strategy. A demonstration of that is the huge mess that is the 2016 budget. No vision or deep thinking went into the preparation of the document."

I shall begin today with a very short story. You see, the gorilla, which today lives in the jungle was once part of organised human settlement.  He however took to the bush when the cost of living among humans became an unbearable burden on him. As we all know, to keep the society running and organised, money, which comes by way of taxes, levies, fines and sundry payments is required.
   In truth, the gorilla had tried to meet up with all payments but the frequency and intensity of the payments were such that his best efforts remained inadequate. What to do, he voted for liberation and ran with his entire household into the jungle where nothing is paid to nobody. And so, besides the science of evolution, which connects man with apes, the gorilla was actually a man at one time. He could not rise up to the challenge of taxation in the normal human setting and simply backed out to become part of the freedom in the jungle.
   The Urhobos call gorilla ossia. If in the course of deliberations that border on the need for more revenue for whatever purpose and an Urhobo man drops the reminder that ossai was a man, do get his message right. He is saying the quest and drive for more money within the given circumstances could drive some people to the jungle like ossai. By error or design, there is no Urhobo man or woman in the federal cabinet and so there is nobody to drop that line – ossai was a man – to caution on the Federal Government’s excessive quest for money through taxation.
The speed at which the revenue vehicle is driving is too much. It is the kind of speed that sent the gorilla to the bush and I don’t want what happened to gorilla many, many, years ago to happen to any Nigerian. In fact, it could be worse in the event of a fatal crash as men and women would be forced beyond the jungles into early graves.
    Penultimate week, PMB was in London to continue the lamentation of paucity of funds to run a successful government due to the same overbeaten reason – the stealing of all there was in the national treasury by the immediate past regime. He even regretted coming in as president at these fiscally perilous times as if good leadership is about coasting home in good times and tides. He came close to throwing up his hands in the air in absolute helplessness. Sincerely, I am tired of reminding Buhari that the star shines only when it is dark enough and not when the day is bright and fair.
   He is fixated on money and not ideas. That is the real problem and I do not know who to approach to refocus him. The man has successfully pushed and sustained the fallacy that good governance comes with good money and not good ideas. Thus, instead of searching for big ideas, the President is obsessed with looking for big money to make his mark as a leader and the London lamentation is part of the gimmick to raise big money to govern Nigeria.
   It is a native logic that puts money before vision and strategy. That is why President Buhari is crowing to high heavens of the miracle of a TSA (Treasury Single Account) that has mopped up over two trillion naira for safe keeping in the vaults of the Central Bank (CBN), while the banking system, the manufacturing sector and the economy generally edge towards extinction from the resultant liquidity squeeze.
   In the journey to economic prosperity, it is vision and strategy that show the way all the time. It is a clear walk to doom if the profiling changes and money stays ahead of vision and strategy. A demonstration of that is the huge mess that is the 2016 budget. No vision or deep thinking went into the preparation of the document.  As it were, the motivation was to appropriate monies into whatever capital and recurrent sub-heads and then raise a huge invoice of about N6 trillion in anticipation of an unguided public spending.
   Consequently, the 2016 budget has lost its essence as a documented guide to development within the time specified. It is looking more like a proposal by a group of individuals to raise funds for self help. And we are all being co-opted into this fund-raising effort through taxation. In this regard, Babatunde Raji Fashola is doing far better than others. He comes across as a better tax master than he does as a super minister in charge of works, power and housing.
   For instance, while Buhari was lamenting the absence of funds in London, workers under the aegis of the Nigeria Labour Congress were in the streets in Nigeria protesting the 45 per cent hike in electricity tariff announced by Fashola. The workers complained that Nigerians were being asked to pay even more for darkness. Fashola did not say anything about visible and quantifiable improved supply of public electricity that would warrant the huge hike. Instead he went further to drop hint that tolls may return on federal highways in continuation of a suffocating tax regime to keep government liquid.
   At the level of doing business, the driving speed is even more breath taking. There are overlapping tax descriptions, all bordering on multiple taxation to squeeze money from the private sector for government. I will not be able to state things as they are but importers who wear the shoes can tell better the experience at the ports where payment of duties has become almost boundless. In the face of declining oil revenues, the Nigeria Customs Service now has an onerous mandate to over reach itself in revenue collection to bridge the shortfalls. Waivers have been cancelled pushing manufacturer into an unprepared and hurried search for creative ways to engage the challenges. It has not been too smooth and it is beginning to appear more profitable to stop doing business altogether. It explains the dwindling industrial capacity utilization and the attendant loss of jobs.
   It is also beginning to sound nice to retain money outside the banking system since banking has become one big burden on people. Sundry bank charges have been rationalized into a tax policy to take money from the people to government. Everybody – business people, workers and ordinary Nigerians – is feeling the choking grip of the new revenue drive of government because there is no corresponding buoyancy in the economy to cushion the incidence of taxation.
    This is the contradiction in the Buhari’s approach. He is over taxing an economy that is almost comatose without first spending big to stimulate production. Somebody among those milling around should introduce him to John Maynard Keynes and also tell him that in macroeconomics management, government does not save but spend big when the economy is moving southward. As it is today, Buhari is seeking to reap without sowing. In plain terms, the government is over taxing a population that is not producing and therefore not earning. That is voodoo and it has no slot in a scientific macroeconomic order where things are measured and predictable.
  Enough to say if the heat continues, all options shall evaporate, leaving everyone with the gorilla option – vote for self-liberation and take to the bush. I kindly advise that instead of sounding sanctimonious and claiming to have all the answers, Buhari should seek help outside himself. The ugliness surrounding the preparation and presentation of the 2016 budget shows clearly that the President does not have in place a substantive or even shadowy team to drive recovery for the economy. The federal cabinet is just a bunch of persons working most times at cross purposes because each has a different understanding of CHANGE.
   Buhari should therefore remember that ossia was a man and act fast. If nothing happens, everybody will take to the jungle like the gorilla in search for economic liberation.   

The Making Of A Democrat

"Put differently, it is naïve to expect the snake to bring forth short offspring and even more naïve to expect the snake to change character, because it has changed skin.  Buhari should be left alone to freely apply his expertise to do the job we have assigned him."

I WANT to use today to passionately appeal to the critics of President Muhammadu Buhari to show some understanding. His expected conversion from a well-rounded dictator to a full-fledged democrat cannot be automatic. The man retired from the public service 30 years ago as a soldier and military head of state. Nothing in his credentials indicates that he had had training in democratic practice and attitudes before he began the quest to return to the presidency in 2003.
   Although the revered Prof. Soyinka had announced to us that the intervening time (between 1985 and 2015) recreated Buhari for democratic competition and even put him a notch higher than other competitors, I still insist, actually on behalf of Buhari himself, that a dictator does not become a democrat with the sheer passage of time.
    And let us be sincere for once. We did not vote for Buhari because he had become a democratic. We voted for him to essentially do a job, which is the ridding of Nigeria (by any means possible) of the evil of corruption and terrorism. The man has been doing what he was hired to do. We are now the ones impeding him with the sophistry of ‘rule of law’, ‘due process’ and all-what-not to create windows for thieves to run away with the big money they have stolen.
    In 1984, Buhari did not have these problems doing the same job. He just collected all the thieves that operated in the Second Republic into jail and asked for every kobo stolen to be returned. But, Nigerians, ever impatient, did not give him the benefit of time to clinically finish the good job he had started. He was pushed out and almost immediately the journey back to corruption began. Alarmed, the APC, on behalf of Nigerians, literally begged Buhari to return and lead the way to the Promised Land.
   Regarding the job at hand, Buhari is not reinventing the wheel. As it was in 1984/85 so it is now. He knows how to achieve results in record time, Nigerians are the ones worrying unnecessarily. They want him to apply new methods to tackle a familiar problem at this old age. It is like telling a 74-year old man who had been left-handed all along to start doing things with his right hand.
    Put differently, it is naïve to expect the snake to bring forth short offspring and even more naïve to expect the snake to change character, because it has changed skin.  Buhari should be left alone to freely apply his expertise to do the job we have assigned him. Although he has named the judiciary as part of the clog in the wheel of the anti-corruption drive, Buhari can still approach a court of competent jurisdiction for an injunction to perpetually stop Nigerians of whatever description – critics, civil/human rights activists, free thinkers, fiery lawyers, opposition politicians and so on – from condemning the strategies he has adopted to fight corruption.
   Come to think of it. Nigerians knew who Buhari was/is before they contracted him to kill corruption for them. To tell him midstream to change from Buhari to something softer and less serious than himself is a breach of the original contract, which is actionable. In fact, if push comes to shove and Buhari comes under pressure to change from himself, he should sue Nigerians for breach of contract and claim huge damages in billions to add to his most modest assets and become a billionaire in dollars like Dangote. There are so many Senior Advocates of Nigeria out there to do the job for him. 
   The point here is that corruption must be killed and anybody offering to protect corruption under the guise of ‘rule of law’ will be killed along with corruption in Jesus Mighty Name, I pray! Amen! Whether we like it or not, Buhari must operate his four-year contract with Nigerians, which could be renewed for another four years if corruption refuses to be killed after the first four years.
    No matter the degree of provocation, Buhari should not contemplate abdicating the throne for corruption to take over. That is not the way of good leaders. Good leaders keep sailing in spite of prevailing turbulence until they anchor safely. For instance, Moses neither abandoned the Israelites in the wilderness nor returned them to Egypt, because they were stubborn and difficult to lead. Instead, he pleaded with God to show infinite mercy on the world’s most recalcitrant race. Even when he went to the mountain top to have good time with God, he refused to be carried away by the bliss up there. He still returned after some time to put the unruly camp of Israel in order. 
     Buhari cannot do less. He is the Moses of Nigeria. He should not resign from the presidency in anger, because the judiciary and legislature are introducing the jargon of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘due process’ to frustrate genuine efforts at killing corruption, which could kill all us if nobody picks up courage to kill it as he is doing. What is important is the death of corruption and the means with which this is achieved is not as important.  Let the end justify the means.
     Some idle people are saying the economy is also being killed by the lethal weapons deployed to kill corruption. In fact, they say the economy is in danger when corruption is still breathing and kicking around. What does it matter if the economy dies today and corruption dies tomorrow? Surprisingly, many people are still not getting the point that Buhari is making. I mean, can’t they understand that Buhari does not see any economy?  He sees only corruption with or without his reading glasses. To him, corruption and the economy are one and the same and so one cannot get killed without the other dying too.
   Perhaps, Alhaji Lai Mohammed may need to come in here to push the message more forcefully across to Nigerians. He should tell the people that every other thing, especially, a buoyant economy and virile democracy,  will be added unto their plates once corruption and the present sinful economy are killed and buried. In fact, something novel is already evolving from the side to take the centre stage of the political economy as soon as the vacuum is created.
 Instead of taking, taking and taking and getting bloated with corruption, Nigerians, in the new order, will be paying, paying and paying taxes until they become fiscally trimmed and disciplined. The new economy has been designed to run almost entirely on taxation without production. If it succeeds by the special grace of God, and it becomes established beyond all reasonable doubt that taxation can thrive without corresponding production, it will be Nigeria’s wonderful contribution to the world on macroeconomic management.
   With this, Buhari does not only look good for re-election in 2019, but could actually be pushed for the Nobel Prize in economics in the years ahead. And so, instead of shouting about the economy that is dying alongside corruption, we should liberate our minds to embrace the new invention of wondrous public wealth without work.
   As for those expecting Buhari to pull new tricks at old age, they should think deeper. Things don’t work that fast. Buhari retired or was retired from the army in 1985 after 24 years meritorious service that got him to the very pinnacle – Commander-In-Chief. If it took 24 years to get conditioned as an autocrat, by inverse logic, it should take far more than eight months to get reconditioned into a democrat. 
  Let’s therefore bear with Buhari. ‘Due process,’ ‘rule of law,’ ‘separation of powers’ and all of the other sweet songs we love to sing to underscore true democracy shall come as the migration from autocracy to democracy gains momentum!