News

OPINION: Mike Adenuga’s 71 Resilient Steps

Published

1 year ago

April 30, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

We were in Abuja on an official assignment; one of the entertainment engagements of Globacom then. The phone rang. The leader of the team, a Director in the Marketing Communications Department, looked at all of us sitting at the table, brainstorming on the evening’s assignment. We got the message. The Big Man was at the other end. Silence! We could hear the voice from the other end, though the phone was not on speaker. “Awe o, we need you to be in Johannesburg this evening or first flight tomorrow. Do you have a South African visa?” Our Director responded: “No sir.” “Ok”. The line went off and we resumed our talk.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again and the Director jumped up, picking the phone and moving away from us. We were by the pool side of the hotel. I prayed silently that our boss would not fall inside the pool. He was just nodding his head, with intermittent “Yes sir”; “Mo ngbo yin sir”- I can hear you sir. The call ended and the Director returned to our table. “I need to take my passport in the room. Suyi, tell Tosin (one of the drivers attached to the project) to get the Hilux. We are going to the South African Embassy”, he announced. Minutes later, we were on our way to the embassy. I asked our boss what was in the offing. He responded: “Baba said someone will be waiting at the embassy.”

To cut the long story short, we got to the embassy, and we met a woman waiting for us. We were ushered in and the Director was taken into an inner office. Half an hour later, he came to join me at the waiting room. I asked him again (curiosity won’t kill my cat sha): “Are you getting the visa, today?” He answered that he was asked to wait. We didn’t have to wait long. A young man stepped out of one of the offices and asked our Director to follow him. A few minutes later, the man came out of the office and beckoned on me. In the car, he showed me his passport with the visa approval. Wao! Then, the director sent a message to the Big Man thus: “Thank you sir. I got the visa. Agba yin a dale -may you live long- sir.” The simple response from the Big Man reads: “That is why I am the Chairman. My name opens the door for you.” God, I must be a big man!

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Onitiri-Abiola And The Madness In Ibadan

Age grades are in three categories in my native place. The first set is known as “Boranje”, which literally means those who don’t give a damn about the consequences of their actions. They have the energy and they represent the restive segment of the society. Those in this category are materials for recruitment into the community’s army. The middle class is the Elekurupa. They are the moderates. They fill the gap between the first and the last categories. They are the intermediate class. The last group are those we call Agba Ule – Council of Elders. This categorisation is at the family level. They are the elders. Their first selling point is their wisdom. Whatever the Elekurupa cannot resolve, the Agba Ule class handles. They only refer very knotty issues to the Agba Ulu- council of community elders. Agba Ulu is presided over by the oba of the town. Incidentally, most Agba Ule are also members of Agba Ulu. So, whatever decisions taken at the level of Agba Ule are mostly sustained by the rulings of Agba Ulu. To get to this last grade, age counts. Depending on the level of longevity in a family, there are cases where people in their early 60s are still in the Elekurupa age grade. Whereas, in some families where they are not blessed with long life, some people in their 50s are already Agba Ule. However, anybody who has crossed the age of 70 is an Agba Ule. One unique mystery about Agba Ule is their ability to stand where others fail and fall. How is it?

There is a saying that illustrates that. It goes thus: Nnkan ti agba fi nje eko ti o ra lowo wa labe ewe. I attempt a transliteration here: what the elder uses in eating eko (corn meal) without smearing his fingers is underneath the leaf. Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr, the Chairman of Globacom, turned 71 years old yesterday, Monday, April 29, 2024. At 71, the man known as Mr. Chairman, is a qualified member of Agba Ule and Agba Ulu. Many things qualify him for that position. I would not be dwelling on those ones here, but, as an eminent Agba Ule, Dr. Adenuga has demonstrated over and over again that the mystery of the successes of his business empire lies only with him. Nothing demonstrates this more than the recent breakdown of the underwater cable services across the West African sub-region a few weeks ago. Globacom, the telecommunication outfit of the Ijebu businessman, has one of the independent, and the only single underwater cable owned solely by an individual, the Glo 1 Submarine cable that runs from Lagos through 13 different countries to the United Kingdom with a point of reference in New York, United States of America.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Why Were Miyetti Allah And Tinubu’s Iyaloja In Ibadan?

Whatever it was that happened to other international underwater cables, such as the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) and MainOne, Glo 1 remained standing. The company, Globacom, came up with a statement to reaffirm that its facility was not in any way affected by the damage that caused a lot of disruptions in the telecommunications industry with companies having huge bandwidth suffering unmitigated losses. In a discussion with some people while the submarine cable crisis lasted, someone asked why Glo 1 was spared. My immediate response to that is that the fortune or misfortune of any business concerns depends largely on the mission and vision of the promoter(s) of the business. And this is true with Globacom. It is practically impossible to divorce the resilience of the owner, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr. from the success of the company.

The underlying principles of “People, Power, Possibilities”, on which the business was established cannot but speak for it when things are tough. If you have ever passed through Globacom, you would realise that ‘impossibility’ means “I’m Possible” in the system. Theirs’ is a diehard, never-say-no spirit which empowers them to navigate through the cruellest terrains. An average mid-level manager in Globacom is a super CEO of any other company. Why? Because Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr. ‘roasts’, ‘cooks’, ‘fries’ and ‘fires’ every fibre of his employees till they become the best anyone can be. The working environment may not be the best; it is no doubt an institution that brings the best out of the individuals in its employ.

In the introductory story of this piece, the Big Man, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr. was quoted to have said his name opens doors. I think it does more than that. Nigerians will never forget that it is the name, Adenuga, that bailed them out of the financial enslavement of the earlier entrants into the nation’s GSM business by introducing the Per Second Billing System (PSB), at a time they were told it was not technically possible. What about the BlackBerry revolution: didn’t Adenuga’s name open that door? Do we talk about the first deployment of 3G network, rural telephony and cheapest acquisition of telephone and people-friendly and affordable tariffs? Nigeria’s entertainment industry today is what it is because a Dr. Mike Adenuga opened the door of bountiful corporate endorsements for our artistes.

So, if you have ever wondered why Glo 1 stood gidigba while others fell yakata, know that the man behind the business, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr. is a complete Agba Ule. And as such, know also that Nnkan ti agba fi nje eko ti o ra lowo wa labe ewe!

Here is my toast to the epitome of Nigeria’s resilience at 71! Here is wishing Mr. Chairman many more years in sound health. Happy birthday, the Great Guru himself! Agba yin a dale sir!

News

FULL LIST: CAC Removes 247 Companies From Database, Urges Public To Disregard Them

Published

15 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has removed 247 companies from its database, declaring that they were never duly registered as limited liability companies.

The Commission announced the move in a notice posted on its official X handle on Friday, saying the purported incorporation of the affected companies was invalid.

According to the CAC, the Registration Certificates (RC) numbers allegedly linked to the companies had never been assigned to any entity.

It urged the public to disregard any claims suggesting that the delisted companies exist as legal persons.

Check full list here

News

OPINION: You Be Terrorist, I No Be Terrorist!

Published

17 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

When the weight of words spoken is weightier than whatever response it may attract, my people say Oro p’esi je. The English say such wordless period is an ineffable moment. In its literal rendition, perhaps saying it better than the English and more graphically too, the Yoruba say ‘word has killed response’. Even at the height of his musical wizardry, the dictatorship of the Nigerian military government killed appropriate response from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. So, in one of his songs, Fela turned the wordlessness into musical rhapsody. With the declaration by a Canadian court on June 17, 2025 that the two leading Nigerian political parties, the PDP and APC, are terrorist organizations, the court declaration provokes similar wordlessness. What immediately jumps up one’s lips is Fela’s “Oro p’esi je o… rere run”.

In Nigerians’ faintest imagination, no one expected such extreme labeling from Canada. Certainly not from a temple of justice. While delivering judgment in an asylum case involving a Nigerian national, Douglas Egharevba, Justice Phuong Ngo upheld an earlier decision of the Canadian Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) which denied asylum to him. It cited Egharevba’s decade-long affiliation with the PDP and APC. Justice Ngo then affirmed that, under paragraph 34(1)(f) of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), “mere membership of an organization linked to terrorism or democratic subversion” could trigger inadmissibility of an applicant for asylum – even without proof of personal involvement.

Earlier court filings by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness had submitted that the two Nigerian political parties were implicated in “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” which were further buttressed, among other incidents, by the PDP’s alleged violent conducts in the 2003 state elections and 2004 local government polls. The minister cited widespread ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and the killing of opposition supporters in those elections. The IAD said its findings indicated that the two parties’ leadership benefited from the violence, didn’t see a need to stop it and that, under paragraph 34(1)(b.1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), such acts met Canada’s legal definition of subversion and terrorism.

Expectedly, both APC and PDP are blowing their tops. Fulminating, the PDP labeled the classification as “misinformed, biased, and lacking evidence,” and deserving outright dismissal by any right-thinking person. Its Deputy National Youth Leader, Timothy Osadolor, was quoted as saying this.

The APC, through its National Secretary, Ajibola Bashiru, in his characteristic gruff persona, chose to descend down a logical pitfall called ad hominem. Rather than the issue, persons accused of this argumentative pitfall attack persons. So, to Bashiru, the judge was “an ignoramus.” Thereafter, he queried the Canadian court’s jurisdiction to determine the status of a Nigerian recognised political party “not to talk of declaring it as a terrorist organisation… The so-called judgment was obviously delivered from a jaundiced perspective and within the narrow confines of determining eligibility for asylum by an applicant.” Lastly, Bashiru queried “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” who seek greener pastures elsewhere, who he said “allow the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary by racist judges on account of self contrived application for asylum.”

The Federal Government, too, in a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokesperson, Kimiebi Ebienfa, described the judgment as “baseless, reckless and an unacceptable interference in Nigeria’s internal affairs.”

Now, the issues are not as straightforward as the persons above saw them. At least three issues are implicated in the Canadian judge’s ruling and its subsequent analyses. One, as Bashiru alleged, is racism; second, the state of Nigeria’s electoral/party system and third, the social status of Nigerian citizenship. There is the need to decouple them. First, we should be clear about one fact and it is that, electoral violence is as old as Nigerian electoral system. Violence as icing on the cake of elections gained notoriety during independence and since then, elections in Nigeria have been characterized by high-scale electoral malpractices, violence, money politics, and deployment of ethno-religious divide as weapon of influencing votes. Since September 20, 1923 when the first election in Nigeria was held, Nigerian politicians have scaled up, from one election to the other, the patterns of electoral violence that have today resulted in an epidemic of political violence. Yesterday marked the 42nd bloodied anniversary of Second Republic’s political violence in the old Oyo and Ondo States. On Tuesday, August 16, 1983, all hell was let loose with multiple political killings in tow in Akure, Ilesa and other parts of the states.

In the April and May 2003 elections that Justice Ngo referenced, according to Human Rights Watch in its report entitled, ‘The Unacknowledged Violence,’ “more than 100 people were killed in election-related violence with many more injured.” The EU Election Observation Mission, (EUEOM) in its ‘Final Report on the National Assembly, Presidential, Gubernatorial and State Houses of Assembly Elections,’ also claimed to have recorded a total of 105 killings in pre-election violence in Nigeria. Continuing, the report claimed that, from publications in the Nigerian press, at least 70 incidents of election-related violence were reported between November 2006 and the middle of March 2007 in 20 of Nigeria’s 36 states. It claimed that the press report “may greatly underestimate the true scale of the problem” judging by a report of another international organization with a comprehensive conflict monitoring programme in Nigeria, which also claimed it recorded 280 reports of election-related deaths and more than 500 injuries over an eight-week period ending in mid-March of the year. Other Nigerian elections are no less better.

In terms of political assassinations, the Human Rights Watch report said that between November 1, 2006 and March 10, 2007, quoting the Nigerian press and other sources, “at least four assassinations and seven attempted assassinations of Nigerian politicians, party officials and other individuals who were directly linked to various electoral campaigns” occurred. It further reported that two most notorious murders involving PDP primaries occurred in mid-2006, and were in respect of PDP gubernatorial aspirants – Funsho Williams in Lagos State and Ayo Daramola in Ekiti State, both of whom were murdered in July and August 2006 respectively.

But, was Justice Ngo wrong to have described what happened in the 2003 electoral contest in Nigeria as terrorism? Scholars have attempted to define what exactly is terrorism. Charles Ruby, in his book, The Definition of Terrorism, (2003), citing Title 22 of the U.S. Code, defined terrorism as a “politically motivated violence perpetrated in a clandestine manner against noncombatants.”

If you critically assess the above definitions, viz a viz the level of atrocious political killings and violence that have happened in the last 26 years of democratic practice in Nigeria, it may be difficult to fault Justice Ngo’s labeling of Nigeria’s two topmost political parties as terrorists. The judge alluded to Egharevba’s failure to prove that there were no “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” in the Nigerian two political parties which the asylum seeker claimed to have been a member of. With this, it is my considered opinion that, faulting the labeling of the political parties by the Canadian judge may sound very impassioned and derisive of prevailing facts.

Yet, the allegation of racism against Justice Ngo may be sustainable. Of a truth, Canada wears on its lapel the myth of a “peaceable kingdom”. This is generally as a result of its genial political culture when compared to Nigeria’s. While the country today has had a limited political terrorism experience when compared to other forms of political conflicts or even other countries of the world, its pedigree does not totally acquit it of violence, nor does it give it a total sainthood. All considered, it could be racist for the judge to abandon his country’s violent past while criminalizing Nigeria’s present. Though there is no recency to the reports of Canada’s involvement in violence, Micheal J. Kelly and Thomas H. Mitchell, in their “The Study of Internal Conflict in Canada: Problems and Prospects,” Conflict Quarterly, Vol. II no. 1 (1981) examined publications of the Canadian newspaper called Globe and Mail from 1965 to 1975 which identified 129 incidents of collective violence in Ontario. Also, Julian Sher, in her White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan (1983) examined case studies of terrorist groups or groups using terrorist tactics which operated in Canada. The scholar used the activities of the FLQ, the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to peel Canada of any claim to a sainthood pedigree where terrorism is concerned. Whilst numerous terrorist events have occurred in Canada since 1981, the period between 1968 and 1974 is actually the point a glut of such incidents can be located.

When Bashiru now accused “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” seeking greener pastures elsewhere of allowing “the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary” through “self-contracted application for asylum,” he must have deliberately played the ostrich, apparently for political reasons. This must have blinded him from seeing the peculiar nature of Nigeria’s social crisis. Over the decades, at least in the last 26 years of the 4th Republic, both APC and PDP have literally socially and economically grounded this country. Many of the politicians in the ADC today are also complicit in this. Comfortable existence has become a mirage in Nigeria, yet politicians flaunt ill-gotten wealth. It is so bad that Nigerians desperately seek the citizenship of saner countries. Blaming Nigerians who seek bailouts from this socio-economic Gulag inflicted on them by Nigerian politicians will thus sound misplaced and self-centered.

The story of Egharevba in the hands of the Canadian judge is a replica of the aphorism of the “son” of an orange tree which invites multiple stoning and wood-beating from those who want to pluck it. If Nigeria had met his dreams of a place to live, I doubt if Egharevba would have openly disdained his country as this in the hands of a perceived racial judge and system. But come to think of it, this same “racist” Canada opens its arms wide to embrace thousands of Nigerians who possess legitimate papers!

In looking at the Canadian judge’s ruling, Nigeria should look inwards rather than outwards. First lesson to be learned is that, being a global village, not only is the rest of the world watching Nigeria with its binoculars, information about dissonances in our country are at the tip of the world’s fingers. Because they seek the consistent sanity of their countries, it is natural that countries of the world would want to guard against importation of social frictions into their territories. It was the lesson that same Canada was trying to pass across when it denied our Chief of Defence Staff visa last year.

Are Nigerian elections truly devoid of violence of the terrorism hue? The answer is No. As lawyers say, res ipsa loquitur; the facts speak for themselves. Our political parties have the notoriety of gangster violence pre, during and after elections. We shouldn’t be surprised if, very soon, a citizen is penalized, in a manner similar to Egharevba’s, over our country being where there are no consequences for negative actions. A country that reverses punishments and rules within few hours intervals, just because a street ally of the president is trapped in a criminal loop, cannot but receive the excoriation of a sane world.

Today, Nigeria is on the radar as a country where rule-breakers are garlanded. Rather than gripe and wail ceaselessly like a witch accused of killing her husband, we should rather embark on self-introspection because, in the words of Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. Another election season is coming. Will Canada and the world see a different Nigeria? If Fela were alive today, he probably would inflect his previous track and sing, “You be terrorist, I no be terrorist/Argument, argument, argue…” to explain this cacophony of denials between the APC, PDP and a Nigerian government which willingly leave the footpath and walk blindly in a maze of shrubs.

News

5 Benefits Of WhatsApp Business App For Small Entrepreneurs

Published

17 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

The WhatsApp business app was built to help small entrepreneurs. This app has tools designed to reduce your workload. You can sort, automate, and quickly respond to customer messages — this enables quick interactions. You can also set up a profile for your business and catalogs, whereby you list your products, the prices, and other information for easy browsing.

Here are the benefits of the WhatsApp business app for small entrepreneurs:

1. Business Profile
WhatsApp Business has a feature where you can create a profile for your business. Here, you would share every necessary information about your business, including email address, business description, phone number, website, and physical store address if available. This is a way you can create visibility for your work and get customers to discover you.

2. Smart Messaging Tools
The smart messaging tools in the WhatsApp business app allow you to save and reuse messages you often send to customers. You would be able to answer many common questions with this tool, ‘quick replies.’

Another one is ‘automated messages’, which are sent to your customers when you’re not available to give responses, so they know when to expect your reply. Also, you can create a greeting message to introduce your business to buyers.

3. Messaging Statistics
This feature, messaging statistics, allows business owners to review every metric behind the messages being sent, such as the successfully sent messages, the ones that have been read, just delivered, and so on.

4. WhatsApp Web
You can use the account you use to send and receive messages on your phone on other devices such as a laptop, tablet, or desktop. So you don’t have to worry when you’re out of the house; you can still be responding to your customers.

5. WhatsApp catalog
Catalogs are for you to showcase your products to customers so they can check what they want and order from you. You don’t need to send every product price and description individually.

Catalogs allow you to group everything, including product code and any other information. This feature saves time, no need for multiple questions on what your items look like and the price.