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OPINION: Ibadan Blast, Makinde And Federalism

Published

2 years ago

January 22, 2024

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Mr Youssouf Sawane, a Malian money-maker, leads miners from Mali in Oyo State. He was asked by the Nigerian Tribune how much his group was paying into the coffers of the Oyo State government. He answered that he owed the Oyo State government nothing; his business was with the Federal Government. Displaying a remarkable knowledge of Nigeria’s centrist federalism, the Malian said “natural resources deposited in states are owned by the Federal Government…We are paying to the Federal Government.” The Malian made that statement in November, 2020 – three years, two months ago. But, last week, when explosives allegedly from Malian groups’ mining misbehaviour devastated the length and breadth of Ibadan, it was the Oyo State government and its people that had to carry the can of the resultant humanitarian crisis. That was a classic case of paying for what one did not buy. It is normal with Nigeria.

Until the social media exploded with cries of a deadly blast in Bodija, I thought it was an impudent rainstorm that played pranks with my rafters. Google Map says my house is some 30 minutes drive (14.8km) to the epicenter of last week’s explosion at Bodija Estate, Ibadan, yet the bang rattled my roof and shook my doors. People died in Bodija where it happened; the estate lost a whole street. Adjoining streets got scarred with mortal injuries – the kind you see only in today’s Gaza. An elderly friend, former minister and ambassador to Germany lives on the street next to the incident scene. I remembered that fact and rushed a call to him that night. An otherwise strong man was heard struggling for words to describe what happened. His building was safe but the bang scrambled his furniture and cracked his things.

A spark in a duplex set off that explosion which shook the entire city. You’ve probably read stories of a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia and causing a hurricane in the Caribbean, South America. It is in a 1990 American film entitled Havana. You’ve also read of a golden butterfly whose death dramatically altered the way the world works. It is in Ray Bradbury’s science fiction short story, ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ Those two works and some others are attempts at explaining the nature of chaos – how small fires lead to conflagrations. Chaos theorists call it the butterfly effect and they have several examples. One was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 which historians say was the catalyst for the two world wars. Another was the 1945 swap of the serene city of Nagasaki for the arms factory city of Kokura. Kokura was the original target of America’s plutonium bombing but a cloud blocked the B-29 crew’s view of the target. Three times the pilot scanned Kokura, three times the pilot saw nothing. The cloud below stood between the bomb and its intended victim. Because the opened bays must deliver their load of death, the bombsight panned elsewhere to the backup target. Nearby Nagasaki got the horrific atomic bomb and lost some 100,000 lives.

Because of some small men and failure of intelligence, boisterous Ibadan lost its security last week. It is still in shock. Almost all survivors of the explosion spoke of that moment of flash and sudden death. A survivor said he thought “we were being bombed.” A former deputy governor who lost his home said “I thought I was dead.” The living victims’ accounts of how it happened keep sounding like it was another America bombing World War II Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima received the first atomic bomb, named ‘Little Boy’, on August 6, 1945. The second was ‘Fat Man’ which knocked out Nagasaki four days later on August 9. Explosives, whether low or high, know neither purity nor neutrality nor innocence. Cindered with Nagasaki in 1945 were, ironically, its anti-war Catholics who massed for God at a Mass. They all got incinerated with their Urakami Cathedral. Many unsoiled souls, including a U.K. returnee, died in the Ibadan explosion.

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We’ve not heard that those who kept the explosives went with the disaster. All we know for now is that around 7.45pm on Tuesday, 16 January, 2024, Dejo Oyelese Close in Bodija, Ibadan had its own Nagasaki experience. Some foreign fellows warehoused suspected high-order explosives in a building there for illegal mining. No one took note that that was an accident waiting to happen. No one remembered Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. As should be expected, something went wrong with those explosives. In catastrophic proportions, they rained devastation and terror on the city. Is somebody asking how many more volcanoes of dynamites are stocked unseen in towns and cities where these miners operate?

We all ask what kind of people would keep military-grade explosives in residential apartments. We forget that some businesses share meaning with daredevilry. Mining is one. In the normal world, the shell of the snail is spared after eating its meat but miners eat the snail with its shell. Only devils do that, and in myths. Go to the precious stone mines in Oke Ogun (Oyo State), the gold mines of Ilesa (in Osun State), Maru and Maradun (in Zamfara). If you are looking for those who eat rams with their horns, they are the operators in those places of blood money. Even vultures do not eat sacrifices with the offering pans but miners do. It is at the mines that you encounter men who munch tortoise flesh and shell. No fellow-feelings, no empathy for man and the environment. They go for money and money only; it is the only matter that matters.

A Malian whose home country has not known peace for almost a decade now because of federalist issues is benefiting from our crooked ‘federal’ structure here. A decade ago, the Tuareg rebels of Mali demanded a federal system that would grant sovereign rights to individual states. But the then government said no. “Mali is a unitary state. The subject of a federal state is not on our schedule…reforms must be done within the framework of a unitary state.” The rejection of that demand birthed today’s Mali of chaos and terror. It is a mini Nigeria.

I call Sawane and his group federal agents. They are instruments of the Federal Government – the man claimed in that 2020 interview that his activity and those of his people were licensed by Abuja. He said so three years ago and there has been no rebuttal from the supposed licensor. Even after the sad event of last Tuesday, the government at the centre has still not said that the man lied.

Coincidentally, earlier on the day the barrel bombs of Abuja’s miners exploded in Ibadan, killing and destroying all on their way, Oyo State governor, Mr Seyi Makinde, was at the University of Ibadan begging friends of the Federal Government to get their knees off the neck of Nigeria and allow its rebirth as a true federation. Makinde declared at Chief Bisi Akande’s 85th birthday lecture at the University of Ibadan that there was “a strong link between the trio of fiscal federalism, restructuring and state policing, and running a government that places the people’s interest first.” He stressed that it had become imperative for the country to consider the path of constitutional reform to accommodate these ideas if the government would begin to benefit the people.

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Perhaps if Nigeria had been a proper federation, a track of legal and illegal miners would have been properly kept and an Oyo State-owned police would have uncovered the ‘bombs’ before they went off. And, perhaps those alien wasps of death would not have nestled undetected in the canopy of elite Bodija Estate. The United States where we copied our federalism does not suffer such maladies. American states have considerable control over their lives and resources. That is why they prosper and their country continues to brag and swag as the strongest of the superpowers.

Miners in Nigeria have zero respect for their states of operations. Abuja is where their bread is buttered and that is the shrine where they worship. Our constitution vests ownership of lands in governors, yet it forbids states and their governors from controlling mining on those lands. The Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act forever lurks as Abuja’s waiting hammer against errant states. Its Part 1, Sections 1 and 2 are a study on how not to structure a federation: (1) “The entire property in and control of all mineral resources in, under or upon any land in Nigeria, its contiguous continental shelf and all rivers, streams and watercourses throughout Nigeria, any area covered by its territorial waters or constituency and the Exclusive Economic Zone is and shall be vested in the Government of the Federation for and on behalf of the people of Nigeria. (2) All lands in which minerals have been found in commercial quantities shall, from the commencement of this Act, be acquired by the Government of the Federation in accordance with the provisions of the Land Use Act.”

That law gives no role to states in the extraction – or even in the regulation of extraction, exploration and exploitation of all mineral resources in their territories. If a governor thinks he is clever and wants to dodge that bullet by investing in this sector, he will have to ‘dobale’ for the minister in Abuja for licences to operate in his own territory. And, if you are a state governor and you feel aggrieved by the unfairness of what you see and you want to go to court for redress, think twice. The law has been carefully structured to take care of such audacity. Cases on mines and minerals can only go to the Federal High Court. The court of ‘the enemy’ has exclusive jurisdiction on mine and mining matters.

Nigeria is the only federation on earth where everything is warehoused in the pocket of the central government. But it has not always been like this. If our ancestors read the Malian in Ibadan as he said he paid mining dues to only the Federal Government, they would shake their heads in surprise and sadness. Nigeria became a federation in 1954 through the Lyttelton constitution with all the regions retaining all rights and powers that have now been taken from the successor states. Even before 1954, the country was not as choky as it is today. Africa’s preeminent historian, Toyin Falola, dug into mining matters thirty-two years ago. I read his ‘An Ounce Is Enough: The Gold Industry and the Politics of Control in Colonial Western Nigeria’ (1992). I have read that piece like four times in the last two years. It teaches me that miners of all ages are the same in behaviour. It also teaches that Nigeria has not always been this structurally crooked with no respect for law and its enforcement. Falola takes us through the bumpy roads of colonial construction of legal frameworks for the mining industry. Illegal miners existed but they were not allowed to ply their trade as if the law did not exist to take care of their criminality. There were laws against the kind of illegality that birthed the Ibadan tragedy. There were licences for miners and dealers. Every inch of the road from the mines to the gold market was policed with the law. There was the Hawker’s Licence for those who wanted to trade in the products manufactured by goldsmiths. Significantly, unlike now that all licences are minted and sold by the big boss in Abuja, the colonial law vested the power to grant this licence in the Resident. The Resident was the equivalent of today’s state governor.

My old university teacher, Professor Adebayo Williams, described the Ibadan tragedy aptly as the apocalypse. It was an accident that should not have happened if Nigeria had been a country ruled by the law. But if you are a compulsive scorner of wise counsel, you will make seers of your advisers. If you are deaf to sacrifice, you will vindicate the diviner. The diviners here are Governor Makinde and all who believe in having a proper federation that would make invasions from Mali and elsewhere impossible.

It was nice reading words on federalism from the governor. But his sermon that day were to the deaf. In his audience were scorners of truth, sniggerers of wise counsel – people who flapped their ears as he finished speaking. They are very comfortable that day and today with Nigeria’s structure of unfairness because they have seats in the royal court. The Yoruba among them think their capture of Abuja must not be upended by any talk of justice and restructuring. They think their old call for a structural reappraisal of Nigeria should be dead. I wish they listened to Christian revivalist, Vance Havner’s three-word counsel: comfort precedes collapse. The dry winds of harmattan will soon land from the north to whip loin-clothed backsliders back to their senses. There is no escaping the snares of Nigeria as it is. Without the country restructuring as the Oyo State governor advised, there will continue to be bad news north and south. Bandits will rule the day; kidnappers the night. The Federal Government will continue to license felons to wreck the states and their ecosystems. The states will remain broke, broken and prostrate and useless to their people. Local and foreign vultures will continue to tug at the entrails of the comatose behemoth. Criminalities of various hues will keep their foot on the pedal, driving the country towards certain death.

May the souls of those who died in the Ibadan explosion rest in peace. May their families and those who lost property there be comforted; may the wounded be healed.

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Edo Gives Estate Developers Ultimatum To Register

Published

22 minutes ago

October 5, 2025

Editor

The Edo State Government on Friday issued a final two-week ultimatum to all estate developers operating within the state to register and obtain formal approval for their estate layout plans or face decisive enforcement actions.

The directive, announced by the Ministry of Physical Planning, Housing, Urban and Regional Development, aligns with the state’s ambitious urban renewal campaign under “Project Shine” and the 30-Year Benin City Master Plan.

According to a statement signed by the Functioning Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Arc. Kate A. Isokpunwu, this move follows a recent stakeholders’ engagement session, where the government emphasized the urgent need for compliance, sustainable development, and orderly urban growth.

“All estate layouts must be duly documented and regularized with the Ministry to align with the state’s long-term spatial and environmental objectives,” the statement said.

“From October 2025, the Ministry will begin a comprehensive enforcement operation targeting illegal developments, especially those encroaching on government-designated forest reserves and protected areas.

The statement further added that “Unapproved estate layouts will be sealed off, and violators prosecuted under existing laws. The government reiterated its zero-tolerance policy on unlawful developments, including land grabbing, unregulated construction, and distortion of urban planning frameworks.

“This measure is not punitive but corrective,” Arc. Isokpunwu stressed. “It is designed to ensure that development in Edo State remains sustainable, orderly, and consistent with our collective vision for a modern, well-planned city.”

The PS urged developers to visit the ministry without delay to complete the necessary registration and approval processes to avoid stiff sanctions.

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Don Pushes For More University Funding

Published

31 minutes ago

October 5, 2025

Editor

The newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of Ambrose Alli University Ekpoma, Edo State, Prof. Eunice Omonzejie, has called on the Nigerian government, multinational agencies, and other stakeholders to collaborate in increasing investment in education to enhance the global relevance of Nigerian graduates.

Omonzejie made the call while receiving the national leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), led by its President, Olushola Oladoja, at the university’s premises in Ekpoma.

She emphasized that the country’s educational system requires urgent attention, from primary to tertiary levels.

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OPINION: Iyaloja-General At Oba Of Benin’s Palace

Published

48 minutes ago

October 5, 2025

Editor

Festus Adedayo

The earliest example of personal rule gone awry in the world was given in the biblical account of Eli, the prophet. Personal rule has become prevalent in Africa and other Third World countries. In the account, Eli was High Priest and Judge of Israel in the city of Shiloh. Kind-hearted to the troubled and oppressed, the prophet’s renown for kindness became weightier in the narrative of his comforting words to Hannah, one of the hitherto barren wives of Elkanah. When Hannah eventually gave birth to a son named Samuel, Eli extended his affable disposition to Samuel’s upbringing at the tabernacle. Powerful man of God that he was, Eli was however irredeemably lax in the upbringing of his two children, Hophni and Phinehas, who served as priests at the Tabernacle. The children were corrupt, wicked, greedy and morally bankrupt. They abused their father’s priestly office and authority at the sanctuary.

Hophni and Phinehas deployed their positions for personal gains and in the process, were embroiled in acts of adultery with women who served in the sanctuary. Again, whenever sacrificial offerings of meat were being offered to God, even before the fat was burned, Eli’s sons stormed the venue, forcefully appropriating the best portions of the meats for themselves. In Israel of the time, this was a profound contempt for God’s law and a grave sin. Eli’s rebuke of his sons was tepid and weak. In His wrath against this selfish use of personal rule, God’s judgment on Eli was fierce. Hophni and Phinehas were both killed in battle. When he heard the news, Eli fell headlong from his chair and died. Worse still, his lineage was forever de-linked from priestly reign.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president from 1960 to 1980, co-founder of the Negritude movement, poet and cultural theorist, gave an apt definition of personal rule. According to him, it “is not… the art of governing the State for the public welfare in the general framework of laws and regulations. It is (a) question of politician politics: the struggle… to place well oneself, one’s relatives, and one’s clients in the cursus honorum, that is, the race for (benefits)”.

Personal rule, otherwise known as presidential monarchy, is a plague in Africa. It is another variant of despotism. It operates where institutions are replaced with persons and systems with individuals. Arising from another plague called the Big Man syndrome, the state is ruled by a strong man who informally distributes offices to friends, relatives and associates, according to the dictates of his whims. The state is then informally captured by patronage and a distribution networks of spoils of office. Individuals who are not formally recognized take over the formal functions of the state. What we then have is widespread corruption, impunity and abuse. This leads to the atrophy of public institutions, thus severely limiting the ability of public officials to make policies in the general interest of the people.

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In Nigeria’s 65 years of self-rule, either under military or civilian, personal rule has been very prevalent. In it, government is run like a monarchy or, in the lingo of lawyers, as chattels personal. Personal rule has little or no demarcation of private and public domains, or even purses. Apart from giving official responsibilities to cronies and family members, being relative of the Big Man opens doors, vaults and commands attention.

The first publicly known instance of the familial brand of personal rule in Nigeria was under General Sani Abacha. Before him, little was known in the interface of the families of military despot leaders and the public. For instance, little was known about the excesses of families of Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Shagari or even Ibrahim Babangida. Under Abacha, however, familial impunity reigned. It came in the form of usage of Nigeria’s presidential aircraft by children of the military leader. On January 17, 1996, for instance, Ibrahim, son of the late despot, was on a jolly ride in the Nigerian Air Force presidential Falcon jet. He was headed to a party and private family engagement in Kano. Lagos being his departure, he was flying with 14 other friends, including his Yoruba girlfriend, Funmi; Bello, younger brother of Aliko Dangote and a wealthy young man called Dan Princewill. The jet was almost landing in Kano when it mysteriously exploded mid-air, swallowing all and their dreams.

Obasanjo was particularly loath to this deployment of public assets for personal use. So also were there no public examples of such deployment during Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan’s time in office. Perhaps taking a cue from their parents’ personal rule disposition, children of successive Nigerian presidents have made this a pastime. Deploying public asset and office for private advantage resurfaced in 2020. Late President Muhammadu Buhari’s daughter, Hanan, flew the presidential jet on a private photography trip to Bauchi State. By convention, only the president of Nigeria, the First Lady, Vice-President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Chief Justice of Nigeria, ex-presidents and a presidential delegation are authorized to use the presidential jet. The convention does not grant the president any powers to transfer his right of usage of the presidential jet to any of his children.

Hanan had then recently graduated with a first-class in photography from Ravensbourne University, London. She was in Bauchi on the invitation of the Emir, Rilwanu Adamu, as special guest of honour. Photographs, which Nigerians considered presidential obscenities, showed Hanan disembarking from the presidential aircraft and being welcomed by Bauchi State government officials. The Buhari government justified Hanan’s action. Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, said the shameful act received the blessing of Buhari. Shehu turned logic and protocol on their head to accommodate this perverse usage of a common wealth.

Following in these footsteps, in October 2023, First Son, Seyi Tinubu, flew the presidential aircraft to attend polo games in Kano State. Before him, children, spouses of Nigerian leaders and top government officials who should have no business with the aircraft, had become forerunners of this aberration. This provoked the question: is this an endemic problem that should bother us as a people, or it is a mere frivolity that we have allowed to detain us overtime? Why do Nigerian public officials always fail to see the divide between the public and the private?

Of particular interest has been the two children of the current Nigerian president, Seyi and Folasade Tinubu-Ojo. In a May 4, 2025 piece I entitled Tinubu’s Ajantala son, I articulated how, if indeed all those democratic flowery words ascribed to the Nigerian president are not cosmetic, Seyi Tinubu must be a pain in the neck of his father, as he is to responsible parenting. I wrote, “In Nigeria’s history, I am not aware of any president’s child who has threatened public peace, public decency and the public space as Seyi. His name has come out in every socially distasteful national issue.” I also wrote further: “You will recollect that this same young man was one who, but for his father’s peremptory scold, would probably have been attending Executive Council meetings with ministers. Seyi has no precis in illicit behaviour, so much that he outperforms himself in irresponsible public acts. He is reputed to have nominated ministers and behaves in socially anomalous manner that baffles… He causes so much stir with his long convoys of glittering automobiles and is chaperoned to occasions by Nigerian security apparatuses.”

Around the time when he paid “official visits” to northern states early this year to donate billions of Naira to victims of Nigeria’s social malady, an allegation by the NANS President that Seyi ordered him tortured, beaten and his nude pictures taken for his voyeuristic pleasure took over the stratosphere. There are allegations that he will be put forth as the next governor of Lagos

The president’s daughter, Tinubu-Ojo, who christened herself ‘Iyaloja-General of Nigeria’ – whatever that means – is another sore thumb pointing at the evil of deploying personal rule for familial advantage. The eldest daughter of Nigeria’s president, from inception of her father’s presidency in 2023, Tinubu-Ojo has positioned herself as ‘godmother’ of Nigerian open-air markets. Immediately her father came into office, in a baffling manifestation of an inflated hubris, she was said to have updated her Twitter bio with the title, “First Daughter of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN)”. She thereafter sent tongues wagging when a viral video of hers, with Nigerian flags flying behind her, positioned her as addressing what looked like a national broadcast. It was seen as pointing at a desire to appropriate all the perks from her father’s presidency.

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Capitalizing on the low capacity to stick to rules that is Nigeria, Folasade catapulted herself from Lagos market headship where she made herself Iyaloja. That position was appropriated by her after the passage of Mama Abibatu Mogaji who occupied same position. After this, she then made herself the market godmother of the whole of Nigeria. She was apparently yielding to an earlier call for an Hobbesian flee after power by her father in that famous counsel, to “fight for it, grab it, snatch it and run with it.” Folasade has made a pastime of positioning her representatives in various markets across Nigeria. The ultimate aim, it is said, is to protect her personal financial interests. In a Nigeria where genuflection before public office is widespread and public officials are like god, the president’s daughter, with the panoply of power and wealth at her disposal, is dreaded and worshiped.

Edo State, it will seem, will prove a fatal limitation of this hubris. In 2024, Folasade was said to have begun an attempt to impose an “Iyaloja of Edo State markets” on the ancient city of Benin. Last Tuesday when she visited the palace of the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II, the president’s daughter however met her match in the impregnable culture of the Edo people. She must have assumed that, like other states, Edo palace bows before ineptitude dressed in the garment of political power. Either out of stiff-necked resistance or inability to mentally penetrate, appreciate and understand the ancient culture of the Benin, the president’s daughter had continued in her imposition gambit which seems to have become a familial trait. At the palace, she told Oba Ewuare 11 that a Pastor Josephine Ivbazebule would be her surrogate for all markets in Edo State.

After she was done talking, the palace taught her a lesson with words that were harmless on the surface but lacerating in deed. Not only was she taught that she couldn’t recreate her power drunkenness in Edo, she was told in plain terms that the cultural and historical foundations of market leadership in Edo State were far different from what obtains elsewhere in the country. Speaking through an interpreter as he does whenever he considers it demeaning to exchange verbal reply with a guest, Oba Ewuare told Folasade that in Benin culture, market leadership is not a political creation nor is it an external imposition. It is the product of tradition and which is under the suzerainty of the Oba of Benin.

If Nigeria’s No 1 citizen is not embarrassed by the activities of his children, parents all over the world are. The Yoruba, deploring this grotty descent in character of the First Family, say when an elephant trumpets, its child should not, too. They also counsel that, if one’s barn posts a bountiful yam harvest, a wise man would cover it from prying eyes. Apart from the raw power to browbeat and be kowtowed to, as well as illicit funds and majesty associated with being the president’s children, Nigerians will be glad to harvest what these ones’ parents planted inside their skulls for national benefit. Certainly not the cunning that produces quick wealth and unearned advantage. Folasade Tinubu-Ojo could have attracted more umbrage from the people of Edo State for her audacity if not for the decency of the palace. Let the little darts from the Bini palace remind the president’s daughter that it is the over-ripe orange that invites throwing of stones at the mother tree.