News

OPINION: Nigerian Leaders As CBEX Ponzi Chancers

Published

6 months ago

April 20, 2025

By Festus Adedayo

On Page 28 of his very provocative book, The Present Darkness: A history of Nigerian organized crime, (2016), Stephen Ellis, British historian and Africanist, compared Nigerian politics to con artistry. Their practices, he said, were not different from acts of fabulists and fraudsters. Ellis’ take on Nigerian leaders synchronises with Henry Louis Gate’s The New Yorker piece of September 25, 1995. With the title, “Powell and the Black Elite,” the piece quoted ex-American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, as saying, “Nigerians as a group, frankly, are marvellous scammers… I mean, it is in their natural culture.”

As it is done in scholarship, traditional Africa also gives justification for the Ellis comparison. It says, when the shape and size of a peanut’s shell bears striking semblance to the coffin of a species of mouse called Eliri, then a justification is successfully established. Last week, there was an eruption of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in many homes. Investors in the digital financial platform called CBEX met their financial waterloo. CBEX ultimately unraveled as a Ponzi scheme, with about 600,000 Nigerian victims in tow. It has given critical minds an opportunity to examine whether there is a meeting of minds between Ponzi chancers and Nigerian political leaders. Why do we dwell so much on Nigerian economic scams and scammers, while we sacralise the equally cancerous virus of political scammers?

The genealogy of this crave for quick wealth dates back in time. In 1925, J. K. Magregor, headmaster of Scottish-Presbyterian-founded, Hope Waddell Institute, of which the great Nnamdi Azikiwe was an alumnus, had written the Nigerian governor-general. His complaints were based on a motif of pupils of the school writing incredibly suspicious letters to unknown persons abroad. In the letter, the pupils asked to be sold medicines of esoteric teachings which guaranteed success and happiness. They turned out to be quack. In a single mail delivery, said Ellis, Magregor discovered 125 of such scam letters. One laughable example was a 12-year old pupil who had purchased through post from India a “Mystic Charm” with an instruction to him to send more money so that he could be sent “blessings from the Hindu deity Siddheswari”. The letter also told the boy that the sign he would get to confirm the efficacy of the deity was “by watching the flow of his nasal mucus”!

Our visible connect to this pre-colonial crave for mysticism was re-enacted during the First Republic Nigeria. During this period, secret societies played pivotal roles in governance. The barbarism and primitivism of killing people for sacrifice in order to gain ascendancy in political circles became rife. The Ogboni cult held a supremacist place in Western Nigerian politics. It was only the northern part of Nigeria that was saved the barbarity. By the end of the Third Republic, however, military despots like Sani Abacha had reportedly began to seek spiritual interventions of Muslim brotherhoods of Senegal for a mystic buy-in into their infernal rule. Cows were reportedly buried alive in all outposts of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory by the goggled General. By the Fourth Republic, politicians had fully imported into Nigeria this Islamic mysticism which was spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. The marabouts were Islamic priests who combined Islam with the syncretic practice of local healers, fortune tellers, spiritual guides and diviners. Today, virtually all Nigerian politicians, like that 12-year Hope Waddell old boy, still seek mysticism, either from Islamic mullah, clergies, Babalawo or Senegalese marabouts to guarantee their political happiness and success.

Economic chancing of the CBEX kind is not purely native to Nigeria. In August 1920, after months of covert investigations by Clarence Barron, Boston Post newspaper’s top financial journalist, of the activities of Charles Ponzi, burst his bubble. Barron had found out that Ponzi, an Italian, born 1882, who immigrated to the United States in 1903, was a notorious con artist. In January 1920, Ponzi had established a “Securities Exchange Company” where he promised investors returns of up to 50% in 45 days. The scheme attracted thousands of local investors who, mimicking early Christians of Jerusalem’s mode of spread of the religion, engaged in a mouth-to-mouth spread of the “good news”. Gradually, they escalated its rapid growth and staggering participation. At the height of the scheme, Ponzi collected not less than $250,000 a day from unsuspecting victims, quadrupling his wealth to over $15million. Immediately after Barron’s investigation leaked, Bostonians rushed to and camped outside Ponzi’s offices. They were panicky crowds of local investors demanding a return of their money. Last week, same scenario was reenacted as angry and exasperated Nigerian victims of CBEX stormed its Nigerian offices.

Ponzi and CBEX’s gambits were not dissimilar. They were predicated on paying existing investors funds that were collected from new investors. As the Ponzi scheme left thousands of investors devastated, having lost their life savings, its traits ultimately became known globally as the ‘Ponzi scheme’. After Ponzi’s infamy, the fraud ring mutated severally all over the world. Like in Bernard Madoff. For 17 years, Madoff duped investors of billions of dollars. He eventually got sentenced to 150 years. Nigeria also had the MMM. Launched in 2016, this infamous financial scheme attracted huge investment traffic, such that when it froze its transactions, it left thousands of investors crushed and heartbroken. CBEX is said to have ripped off Nigerians of over a trillion Naira.

The divide separating economic, political and leadership Ponzi in Nigeria is very thin. It is welded together by the glue of voodoo, talisman, juju and marabout. I learnt that victims of CBEX gave testimonies in churches before their waterloo, with some pastors telling congregants that the chancers had brought a new wave of God’s blessings. While greed and straitened economic times resulting in citizens seeking desperate escape have been attributed to the flourishing and successes of these scams, Prof Ellis established a corollary between Ponzi chancers of pre and post-colonial Nigeria and emergent political and military rulers. He then situated Nigeria as one huge forest of a fraud ring: “Most Nigerian practices of organized crime, including document fraud, embezzlement and large-scale smuggling, originate in politics and the state itself, or at least have important and durable connections to the state.”

As Ponzi scammers feed fat on the red blood corpuscles of trickery and deceit, so do Nigerian leaders and politicians. Ellis insinuates that scam can be found in the bloodstream of Nigerian politics and political leadership since they first began in the 1940s. If you break Ponzi to its most basic moral component, it is driven by unrighteousness, desire to outwit the other person, gain personal advantage and in most cases, leave sorrow as mementos. Nigerian politics and leadership are founded on same nefarious aspiration.

Only last week, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered top US law enforcement agencies to release confidential information generated during a 1990s federal investigation. One Mr. Greenspan had, between 2022 and 2023, filed 12 FOIA requests seeking information about a joint investigation of the FBI, IRS, DEA, and the US Attorney’s Offices for the Northern District of Indiana and Northern District of Illinois. He wanted the charging decisions on the activities, including money laundering, of a Chicago heroin ring that operated in the early 1990s made open. The Nigerian president is said to be located at the vortex of this investigation.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Tinubu Is The Law!

While reacting to the American court ruling, the Nigerian presidential media office dismissed it as “having been in the public space for more than 30 years,” and did not in any way “indict the Nigerian leader” while concluding that “lawyers are examining the ruling.” My people say, if someone does not move in gaits that resemble an African pouched rat’s, no one would ask them to eat a meal of palm-nut seeds that is the culinary preference of this species of rats. (Bi eeyan ko bá rìn ìrìn awasa, wón o ní fi ekurọ lọ). The fact that the president’s name is enmeshed in such shame is already a national disaster. I don’t know of any scam bigger than a presidential Ponzi of paying millions of dollars to American lawyers so as to keep blocking American courts from disclosing to Nigerians and the world the truth or lie in the allegation that our president was involved in a heroin trade in the 1990s.

Ellis provided a nexus, no matter how tenuous, to the Ponzi. As far back as 1952, he wrote, Nigeria had become a staging point for heroin drug trade. According to him, the country was “a heavy dope traffic” from the near East to the USA via Europe, with one of those implicated at the Nigerian end of this pipeline being “one O. Chagoury.” Ellis’ conclusion on this pre-independence Nigerian drug trade gives the reader of the book today the latitude to connect its frightening nexus. He had written: “A few decades later, a Lebanese family with the same name had become very influential in both business and in political finance: Gilbert Chagoury, born in 1946…He was very close to the military dictator of the 1990s, Sani Abacha…It seems he is a descendant of a heroin trader who arrived Nigeria in 1952…the heroin trade may provide start-up capital for other forms of business…” You may find this on Page 92 of Ellis’ book.

While we lament the Ponzi scam of CIBEX, I put it to us that we are merely being hypocritical. Ponzi, MMM, CBEX, either figuratively or literally, have always constituted our ways of life. In our individual, collective and national relations, our modus operandi has never been dissimilar from these scammers’. We take delight in sucking the nectar of the joy of our fellow man. We elect known scammers into political offices and when they scam us, we complain. We are like the farmer who knew that the land he planted peanuts on was squirrel-infested. At the time of harvest, this same farmer became grumpy because squirrels had eaten up all his farm proceeds. When a man tells his people he was going on a two-weeks “working vacation,” which we all knew was a euphemism for a date with his Chagoury business partners or a date at the infirmary, didn’t both the man who spun the yarn and we, the people who received it, know we were mutually involved in a CBEX transaction? Or, didn’t we know that the spinner of the lie wasn’t dealing with us straight? Our forebears sounded alarm on characters like this in their saying that, when you meander round truth and refuse to walk straight, you are most likely encumbered by issues of finance (Sàn làá rìn, ajé ní mú ní pẹ kọ̀rọ̀)

Our scam began from the very beginning when Nigerians brought in a presidential baggage they didn’t have access to its constitution. Last week, the White House released President Donald Trump’s annual health report. Nigerians are left to make guesswork on what ails theirs and the billions of their patrimony spent to maintain it. Our president’s health is run like a coven, which reminds one of the miasma that surrounded the health of monarchs of pre-modern Africa. The king must not be seen to have taken ill like a commoner. It is a sacrilege. What Ponzi is greater than this, full of its opacity!

Replying to criticisms that, after almost 200 Nigerians had been killed in the president’s absence, he is still oscillating like a spirit from France to London, his media office told us he could rule Nigeria through remote control from anywhere in the world. Nigerians instantly remembered they had walked that punishing road before. At Easter, the statement purportedly issued by the president was that, “evil forces will not triumph in Nigeria” at a time when Evil had been crowned as King. What evil is greater than the carnage ongoing in Plateau and Benue states which, as usual, was dressed beautifully in a refrain, “the president has ordered decisive action”. Both of us, the president and Nigerians at large, know that this statement is a complete scam. There is no action coming from anywhere, not to talk of its being decisive. When the killers strike again soon, the presidency will recalibrate the commiseration refrain. Charles Ponzi must be happy he has identical offspring in the Nigerian presidency.

In Nigeria, we live in a world of deception which the Yoruba call “Ìlú ẹtan”. It is an antonym for the kind of trade that catapulted Charles Ponzi into global infamy. Claude Ake, in his, Is Africa Democratizing (1996) slammed our brand of politics as one “that does not know legitimacy or legality, only expediency.” If you listened to Nyesom Wike’s media chat on Friday, you will see hope receding for a Nigeria of our dreams. You will see crude audacity and man God-ifying himself. It affirms the Ake expediency as the credo of Nigerian politics, in agreement with Ellis that Nigeria is one huge river of Ponzi traders. If it wasn’t CBEX on parade, why would a man gloat as his own party is bleeding?

Wherever you turn, Nigeria is a an ocean where sharks feast on sharks and lesser fishes devour one another. Atiku Abubakar and his co-travellers on a coalition have started spinning their own political Ponzi, which they know its end is not basically for the Nigerian people. Peter Obi is busy with his own Ponzi as well. Muhammadu Buhari, who regressed Nigeria colossally in eight years as president is the one to decide Nigeria’s political future now because he is patrons to millions of Almajiri voters who know not their right from left. As the week was ending, Reno Omokri, the Peter Obi-hating political Smart Alec, spun another of his serial Tinubu intervention Ponzi yarns. “Nigeria is safer now under Tinubu”, he said. If any of Omokri’s family members was among the almost 200 victims of Nigerian Ponzi rulers, killed in Benue and Plateau states in the last two weeks, a period when Nigeria had, not even a scare-crow placeholder for president in Aso Rock, will the “Ambassador” spew this undiplomatic puke?

What is glaring is, by the time this current CBEX government in Aso Rock finishes with us, we will have a long roll-call of victims.

News

OPINION: Ofala: Glo And An Invite From Agbogidi

Published

2 hours ago

October 13, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

‘Teacher of Light’ is the title of a biography of Chinua Achebe written by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tijan Sallah. What does it mean to teach light? Or, rather, what is light? If you know what darkness does, you would know what light means and the value it holds.

“When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” With that proverb and its moon metaphor, Chinua Achebe established himself as a true teacher of light. My muse pushed the proverb to my presence as I read through an invitation to me from the Obi of Onitsha asking that I be part of this year’s Ofala Festival. It occurred to me that moment that it is not only the moon that gives light; culture is an illuminator, it also gives light, especially to people like me who routinely forget how to dance to ancestral summons.

I had the very rare privilege of being honoured by the Nigerian Academy of Letters with its Honorary Fellowship in August this year. From the North to the South, only three Nigerians were so honoured: I was one; my brother, culture scholar and media icon, Jahman Anikulapo, was one; the deeply intellectual Obi of Onitsha, His Majesty Igwe Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe (Agbogidi), was the third, the biggest of us. At that ceremony, the Obi, who said he had looked forward to meeting me, met me, held me and has kept me close as a son.

So, his invite to the Ofala Festival came. The festival holds this week. I wish I could be there as the king’s guest; but wishes are not horses. Because the mountain here is blocking the view of the mountain over there, I cannot honour the invitation. So I prayed for the success of the festival. The Obi answered with a thunderous ‘Amen’.

Ofala? I checked and found that the word “Ofala” is an enduring offspring of the Igbo words ọfọ (authority) and ala (land). Ofala is history retold in performance; it is also culture renewed. It relives the Obi’s authority over the land and its people.

Ofala is Obi’s return from sacred silence. The festival celebrates royalty’s reborn, and the Ndichie’s renewal of loyalty to the king. In Iru Ofala and Azu Ofala, the king returns from ancestral presence to repossess his warriors with their red caps.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: ‘Federal Highways of Horror’

Etymologists say the word ‘festival’ derives from the Latin ‘festum’. Anthropologists have followed the word through centuries and civilisations as its meaning evolved across cultures and disciplines. Émile Durkheim and James George Frazer were influential figures in early anthropology. Scholars, in summaries, say that to Durkheim and Frazer, festivals are communal expressions of belief and solidarity. They say that with festivals, people renew their social and spiritual bonds. In Ofala, we see that they are right.

Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist and archaeologist, was in Africa on multiple occasions between 1904 and 1935. In the 1910s, Frobenius observed festivals in diverse places; he documented them and saw in them vital celebrations of familial, tribal, and religious life deeply rooted in ancestral history and beliefs.

The German observed right. Ofala and similar festivals bind communities; they celebrate social cohesion and keep sacred traditions alive. They fuse communal history with spiritual renewal and survival. In them, the rhythm of everyday life comes alive.

Ofala has grown to attract great brands. Its major sponsor is telecoms giant, Globacom, which has been there since 2011. I have very solid people in Globacom, which makes me an envoy of its greenery and deepens my interest in everything, particularly, festivals in which the company is involved.

The Yoruba tell their children: When you behold greatness, honour it with reverence. Tí o bá ri olá, pón olá lé. That is what I am doing here. It is what Globacom’s long partnership with the Obi and Ofala does; an act of reverence to the greatness of the culture that birthed them.

From Lisabi in Abeokuta to Ojude Oba in Ijebu-Ode, and from Ofala in Onitsha to other vibrant festivals across the land, Globacom’s partnerships reflect a philosophy rooted in understanding that just as a zebra is defined by its stripes, a people are defined by their culture. In other words, a person without culture is like a zebra without stripes. Sustaining culture is sustaining the people.

That is what corporate sponsorship does to cultural events. Obi’s people say in a proverb, “Nku di na mba na-eghere mba nri (The firewood of a community cooks for that community).” Globacom’s firewood has kept the flame of the festivals it supports alive, warming the hearts of millions who gather yearly to honour tradition.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION Generals, Marabouts And Boko Haram

To sponsor a festival is one thing; but to nurture its essence and future is another. Through resources and resourcefulness, community engagement, and cultural reverence, Globacom has redefined what corporate responsibility can mean. That is what I gleened from the firm. I agree with those words. Shakespeare writes in Hamlet that “The purpose of playing… is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” The playwright suggests that the aim of acting and theater is to reflect reality, showing “virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.

By supporting these festivals, the company, Glo, holds up a mirror to our shared identity, allowing us to see ourselves, our beauty, our resilience, our history.

Globacom became a major sponsor of the Ofala Festival in 2011 and has sustained the sponsorship yearly since then. Fourteen years on, like the Ekwe and the Udu, two Igbo drums beating the same rhythm, the company’s unwavering support has demonstrated that corporate success and cultural preservation can walk (and work) together. I read this out and my friend, the Igbo man, chipped in: “Egbe bere, ugo bere” (let the kite perch and let the eagle perch). When business and tradition walk together, culture gains.

The Yoruba routinely remind us that it is when we walk in the rain that we know who truly walks with us. Companies get involved in arts and culture for various reasons. Some, like leeches, place their names beside great traditions so as to benefit from the greatness. But what I see with Glo here is much more than profit in cash and kind. I see a telecoms giant, wholly indigenous, that has chosen to walk tall with the ancestors, deploying its enormous muscle to connect the past and their history to the world of the modern. One word defines this; it is renewal.

The rich who spend on their people’s historical and cultural essence are not frivolous; neither are they stupid. It is patriotism; if you like, call it cultural nationalism. The wealth of culture, like all wealth, grows when shared.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Every democracy ‘Murders Itself’

Cultural promotion yields dividends that confound account books. It stitches the torn fabric of community; it keeps the hearth of local enterprise burning, and rekindles pride in who we are and where we come from. It renews pride in our shared heritage. It makes us all richer.

If you do well the society notes and records all you do for posterity. The Alake and paramount ruler of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo said in 2017 that “Glo is number one in culture and support for the people. The company pioneered per second billing and others followed.” The Alake wrote that admirable testimonial eight years ago. The flag of patriotism is still there on the mountain top, flying.

In Ofala, the king dances the dance of joy of a fresh start. In the drumbeats and dance steps, the king delights that yam is harvested as proof of life, not of death. The beats retell a people’s story as told by the ancestors. A people are as strong as the stories they tell of themselves.

This weekend (Friday and Saturday), Onitsha will be draped in Globacom’s green, the colour of growth and renewal. Colour green in French is vert, the Italian call it verde, the Spanish, in Castilian voice, say it is verde. They all draw their source from the Latin word for green which is viridis, a word that denotes freshness and vitality. History is an endless rope. English words, verdant and viridian, have this same Roman ancestry. To viridis again belongs “a large family of other words that evoke vigor, growth, and life: virere (to be green, to be vigorous), vis (strength), vir (man, masculine singular), ver (spring), virga (stem, rod), perhaps even virtus (courage, virtue).” For those insights, check French professor of medieval history, Michel Pastoureau’s ‘Green: The History of a Color’ as translated by Jody Gladding.

Whenever I meet Globacom chairman, Dr Mike Adenuga Jr, I intend to ask him the specific reason he chose colour green for his giant.

I congratulate the Obi and Glo as the moon glows on Ofala. In the dance of that festival, drums speak, colours sing, and heritage dances. In perfect rhythm, the people breathe, act and rejoice as tradition bathes in innovation. With the moon shining brighter, Obi’s land is renewed this weekend. Congratulations, Agbogidi.

News

OPINION: ‘Federal Highways of Horror’

Published

3 hours ago

October 13, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

You know where the latest anti-government journalists are in Lagos? Kirikiri. On a day that Nigerians were celebrating an additional spur of 100 kilometres to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, the killjoys of Kirikiri struck. They took a happy, joyous people of 200 million on a gruelling, bumpy ride across the country. They ran painful stories of craters and potholes and headlined them: ‘Federal Highways of Horror.’

It is a miracle that our Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, has not pummeled the Lagos newspaper called Vanguard. It ran the bad stories. It is still unclear why the minister has not rebuked its owner and spanked its journalists for publishing what they were not supposed to publish. Not once, but twice, last week they allowed the devil to use them to tell stories of collapsed federal roads from the north to the south. Their stories portrayed hardworking Umahi as a failure in monumental proportions.

Those journalists, injected with an overdose of impudence, said they did an investigation. They painted a grim picture of federal highways across multiple Nigerian states suffering severe neglect. They said the neglect has made travel dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming. They wrote as if they were sent to pull down a house built by God.

In the South, they came up with a long list of bad roads. They said northern states shared the same story of pain. They described some roads as crater-filled horror scenes; some as barely passable, others as sites long abandoned by contractors. On the few ones harbouring contractors, the signs they displayed showed slow men at work.

It does not rain; it pours. Amid narratives of millions of bad federal roads, Umahi made himself professor last week. “I am a professor of Engineering,” he announced on national television. Professor Umahi? I pray he is not asked to name the king who blessed him with that chieftaincy title. Some Arise News television journalists, whose eyes lack lashes, forced him to make himself professor. They habitually tug at the hem of Umahi’s professorial gown. They pelt him with questions that should never be asked. They remind our working Minister of Works that a river that is not dirty does not hide its depth. Last week, they demanded the cost of federal roads per kilometre. Who does that? And, I am happy, Minister Umahi gave it back to them. He said they are illiterates. Yeah. Don’t they know that for our federal government, spirits decide the total costs of projects? If they were truly not illiterates, they would know that this government is a wholesale seller and buyer; it is too rich to do retail business measured with short tape rules and elementary school rulers.

Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, thought because he was governor and engineer he could join the talk and say that calculating the average cost per kilometre was possible in road construction. He was similarly told by our minister to shut up or he would be summoned to a debate on the very difficult mathematics of road construction. Umahi said he is Makinde’s senior in engineering. Senior Prefect Umahi described electrical electronics engineers as ‘technicians’ who must not speak on project costs.

Now, what we are told to hold as knowledge from Professor Umahi is that it is impossible to know how much a kilometre of road costs in Nigeria until such projects are completed. God is great. The World Bank must have missed that wisdom back in 1999 when it created the Road Costs Knowledge System (ROCKS), a database that calmly lists what it costs to build or fix a kilometre of road from Umahi’s village in Ebonyi to Makinde’s Ajia in Ibadan. A key feature of the World Bank’s ROCKS is its record of actual and estimated road work costs, clearly defined per kilometre and per square metre. Apparently, only in Nigeria do roads and their costs defy mathematics and logic.

In utter helplessness, we watch the roads and their costs stretch and shrink like chewing gum depending on whose fingers are working the calculator. While other countries classify their roads by type and cost per kilometre, we prefer a more spiritual approach – if you are an enemy, call it faith-based budgeting.

Clarity is the father of all openness. Why is it missing here? Again, that is not a question or a proverb that we must hear again from anyone, especially professional troublemakers called journalists. What is the problem of Nigerian journalists? Because their eyes have no skin, they query power. Where a cup is half-full, what our journalists see all their lives is a half-empty cup. They didn’t start today. They are historically insolent. What they do to this government, they did to even our ancestor, Lord Lugard, in 1913, one full year before Amalgamation. On 8 March, 1913, one rude journalist working with a newspaper called Lagos Weekly Record wrote that Lugard was a wicked, ruthless character, “a man whose walking stick is a pistol and whose thoughts by day and dreams at night are punitive expeditions and military patrols.”

And what was Lugard’s reaction to such attacks? He fought them with laws and knocks. At a point, he documented their impudence with a letter to his wife, Flora. In the letter, he bunched the journalist with all the other “educated native” who deserved no sympathy. He wrote about the native enemy of the state: “His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to me, his lack of natural dignity and of courtesy antagonise me.” Lugard’s biographer, Margery Perham, graciously remembered to put this in the book: ‘Lugard: The Years of Authority’ on page 585. If you can’t get Perham but are fortunate to get Jonathan Derrick’s ‘Africa, Empire and Fleet Street’, check the details there. They are on page 115.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Hobbes, Nigeria, And Sarkozy

So, as Lugard, the creator of Nigeria rightly wrote, the Nigerian journalist is arrogant and lacks courtesy. Such are called alárífín in Yoruba. In the days of old, the crime of àrífín carried capital punishment. Aróbafín l’oba npa. But today’s journalists are lucky that they are in a republican democracy. Even then, someone should pay for their bad behaviour. The slap they get from ministers like Umahi is the first tranche of the cost of their bad manners.

What should the state do to the conceited who won’t let expressway contracts be awarded expressly in peace? I have a solution to their problem: Like the Vanguard, they should all be relocated to Kirikiri; all of them, from Lagos to Ibadan; from Ibadan to Lagos. And, if I had my way, I would tip off Umahi and all his harangued hardworking colleagues to award contracts this week for more cells for enemies of the president’s coastal elephant and other projects of renewal. Their new accommodation should enjoy maximum security. They deserve Kirikiri, Kirikiri deserves them.

What comes fast cannot be delayed again. It happened to cricket. Cricket set his wedding day and simultaneously asked his doctor to start preparing for child delivery. The contracts for a safe house for Nigerian journalists can be awarded today, or, latest tomorrow. There is no need for formalities. Exactly like the Coastal Road contract, this is another no for competitive bidding. We already know contractors with proven track records of expertise in casting beams and building cells. We select and hit the site digging. We can fix the contract cost after the job is done.

From this point, we see long shadows over the country; there is no clarity about important things government do. But, one day soon, like sun rays, clarity will force its way in; it is the father of openness.

Now, beyond the scaffold of satire, I wish I could just tear the mask and tell Minister Umahi that what we have today under his watch is road transportation without roads. And he is Minister of Works in charge of roads. It is a shame.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Every democracy ‘Murders Itself’

In May this year (2025), I wrote ‘The shame of Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road.’ The first two paragraphs of the piece read:

“Mr Dele Alake represents Ekiti State in the Federal Executive Council. Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola represents Osun State in the Federal Executive Council. Mr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo represents Ondo State in the Federal Executive Council. All three of them are the president’s core men. Each time the council sits and approves federal roads for reconstruction in states other than theirs, what goes on in their minds? They are very powerful ministers but all federal roads that lead to their states are decrepit and abandoned. And they know. So, what is the problem?

“The Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road that links these ministers’ states to Lagos and to the North is the worst in Nigeria. Senate leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, is from Ekiti State. He belongs to the president’s inner caucus. Tough-talking PDP Senator Francis Fadahunsi represents Ife-Ijesa senatorial district. There are seven other senators and several Reps of APC and PDP from those three states. Has anyone heard them say or do anything to make that road well again? Do these people go home and how do they get home whenever they go home? Nigerians of all states lose lives and limbs on that road daily. Death by installments on the road is harrowing and it is a daily experience. It is a fitting tribute to the attention we pay to our people’s welfare.”

That was on May 12, 2025 (five months ago). If the road was “going, going” when I wrote that piece, it is gone now. Gone. An ex-senator told a columnist in May this year that N20 billion had been “released for repairs” of that road. In August 2025, Umahi announced the release of 30 percent of the contract sum. How much is the contract sum? Don’t even go there. If you go there, the minister will be angry. He will remind you that you are not a road professor. If you must ask any question at all, ask what has happened to what Umahi said was released, his 30 percent. Ask, because, nothing that is worth one kobo has happened on that road this year.

But the total collapse of the road did not come to me as a surprise. By the noon of May 12, 2025 when I published the article, one of the senators I called out in the piece called me.

“They have just read to me what you wrote.” He told me. Big men don’t read newspapers; newspapers are read to big men. Senator said he laughed at my naivety. He wondered why I was disturbing myself writing rubbish about a contract that may never be executed.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: A Minister’s Message To Me

“Do you think Nigeria can ever be better than it is? (Sé ìwo rò wípé Nigeria lè dára jù báyìí lo ni?)” He asked and proceeded to shame me with names, facts and figures all of which answered his question with a no. He said I should record and publish all he said. I laughed at the audacity of his directive. An orphan like me will never dare court a wound on the back.

Besides, I was taught early in life to make my eyes flexible enough for them to see the nose. That was the wisdom that eluded Partridge who claimed to know it all, and because he made that claim, he blocked his own opportunity to learn Ifá from the pigeon. ‘Mo m’Obàrà, mo m’Ofún,’ tí kò j e kí ẹyẹlé k’ àparò n’Ífá (I know Obàrà, I know Ofún’ made the pigeon not to teach Ifá to the partridge).

So, my pigeon listened attentively to the incantation from the hawk. This senator ended his long, windy speech with a submission that the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, and other federal roads in the South-West were decrepit and abandoned because the Works Minister “does not like hearing South-West at all.” I heard him and sighed.

When the outspoken gentleman spoke with me five months ago, he was a PDP senator. He has since moved to Dave Umahi’s party. Now, I wonder if he will still say what he said now that he is in APC.

Author and literary critic, Robert M. Wren (1928-1989), in 1982 wrote “The Last Bridge on ‘The Road’: Soyinka’s Rage and Compassion.” He tells us that in 1962, Wole Soyinka, in a Lagos Daily Express essay entitled ‘Bad Roads, Bad Users, Bad Deaths’ captured Nigeria’s enduring road crisis. Writing with outrage and in satire, Soyinka lamented the deadly state of the highways. He agonised over the state of the Lagos–Ibadan road (Mile 34); there was what he called “the death-trap at Ife”, and “the last bridge on Ikorodu Road.” Soyinka recalled and deplored a senator’s refusal to carry a crash victim with a spinal cord injury to Ibadan. More than six decades later, the roads are still bad, very bad; they still kill; senators are still cold-blooded; they still wonder why anyone bothers to care that the roads are bad.

News

Edo GIS Denies Report Of 17-year-old Purchasing 14 Hectares Of Land

Published

5 hours ago

October 13, 2025

Editor

The Edo Geographic Information Systems (Edo GIS) has debunked reports circulating on social media that a 17-year-old boy purchased 14 hectares of land in Edo State and was subsequently denied a Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) by Governor Monday Okpebholo.

In a statement released by the Director of Press, Tunde Egbiremonlen, the agency clarified that no such transaction exists in its records.

According to the statement, a 17-year-old is legally considered a minor and, as such, is not eligible to register land ownership under Edo State law.

“The Edo GIS system will automatically reject such applications due to age restrictions,” the statement read

“In the first place, a 17-year-old cannot apply for registration of land in Edo state because that age bracket is assumed to be a minor; the Edo GIS system will automatically reject the application.

“To compound the objective of the rumour-mongers, the peddlers of the story did not explain where in Edo state, such 14,000 hectares were purchased by the minor.

Egbiremonlen also pointed out inconsistencies in the viral report, noting that it failed to mention the specific location of the alleged 14 hectares and described the story as “deliberately mischievous and fabricated.”

He accused the originators of the false information of attempting to cause disaffection and blackmail the government, saying significant funds were spent to circulate the fake news.

Edo GIS urged the public to disregard the claims and remain vigilant against disinformation aimed at undermining the government’s credibility.