News

OPINION: ‘Protest’ That ‘Restructured’ Nigeriass

Published

10 months ago

August 6, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should count himself lucky. What he feared most has happened to him. What his predecessors in office could not do, he has done effortlessly. What others before him, including him, had used in the past to deceive Nigerians, while campaigning, but would never do when they got to the office, God has made it happen for Tinubu, seamlessly! Nobody can use it for political sloganeering anymore. Nigeria is ‘restructured’ without anyone calling for a roundtable discussion. Nature abhors vacuum. The cosmic has taken care of our desires.

We can no longer live under the pretence of Nigeria being one. The August 1, 2024 ‘nationwide protest’ that is no protest, has taken care of that for us. I have never believed in the ‘protest’. I have never believed that it would achieve anything. But I have been proved wrong! The ‘protest’ has brought to the fore the uniqueness of the three regions that constitute Nigeria.

The North has remained monolithic with the outcome of the ‘protest’ over there. Those children of the North have demonstrated to us in practical forms what their forebears had hidden from us for ages. The North does not think like the rest of the nation. Hunger also has its different forms. We now know that when people are hungry over there in the North, anything becomes edible. Computers now taste like masara (maize). Furniture tastes like tuwo shinkafa delicacies. Concrete slabs and iron rods are jollof rice spices. One of the ‘protesters’ in Kano carried a placard with the inscription that the price of ‘weed’ (Indian Hemp) should be reduced. I agreed with him. Once one is dazed, hunger will no longer be felt! What afflicts the North is different from what afflicts the South. It is like a case of the affliction of the mother being different from that of her child. The child is crying for breast milk, the mother needs a plate of amala to be able to lactate very well!

Even in the preparation for the ‘protest’, the North had its own agenda. It became open to us all that what afflict them is the temporary loss of power to the South. So, the ‘protest’ provided an opportunity for the leaders of the North to relieve themselves of the bottled-up frustration. Their foot soldiers who invaded the Palace of the Sultan of Sokoto in the name of #EndBadGovernance ‘protest’ asked, openly, for the Military to take over. Their war cry was Sojaji muke so (Soldiers take over). For them over there, bad governance ends only when the Military takes over, and a General Halidu Maisari Maiduguru is announced as the Head of State! Shame! In Kano, they paraded the streets, flying Russian flags! Yes, the North has a message for us in the ‘protest’, to wit: we will rather go our own way than lose power to the South. My reading of the ‘protest’ over there, of course. Why those boys did not shout yancin kai (independence) or araba (secession), beats my imagination!

I have been wondering if any leader in the North who contributed to the warped reasoning of those completely untrainable children we saw in the various videos of the ‘protest’ has sat down to ruminate over the creatures the region has donated to the Federation. What goes on in their minds now, I mean the leaders over there, who for decades have held the poor children of the North down, depriving them of any vestige of education? Do they think, as I do, that the next round of ‘protest’ will come for them, the leaders? I can imagine (God forbid o), that in the name of a ‘protest’, I found myself in a library! The police and other state authorities would arrest me reading! I can’t imagine how I would be able to take my eyes off the collections in the library; of how many synopses of the books I quickly want to read. But not so with the ‘protesters’ of the North. The brooms, waste bins and window frames are of more value to them. Someone made them like that. We are all in trouble. So much for the ‘protesters’ across the Niger River! A Mas’ud Muhammad Yakubu, who claimed to be a “Youth Copper” in the Federal University, Dutse, and holds a B. Sc in Criminology and Security Studies, captures the whole event in his “I am afraid, we have a problem in Kano!” piece that has since gone viral!

Let us look at the ‘protest’ in the South-East. I say this with every sense of honesty: if there is anytime I wish I were of Igbo stock, it is now. During the preparation for the ‘protest’, I was apprehensive. I asked myself whether the Ndigbo would allow the thunder to strike them for the second time on the same spot. I was alarmed. The genocidal campaign against the Ndigbo over the ‘protest’ was palpable; very ominous! Who would talk to my kedu, odinma brothers; who would lend them brains? Lagos was waiting for them. The “Oro Court”, as my great senior and Students’ Union President at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Akeem Adeola Soetan, is wont to call them, was waiting for the Ndigbo in Lagos.

Alas! The Ndigbo proved to be the wisest of all ‘protesters’ in all! Rather than hit the streets and be slaughtered like it happened in the 1966 pogrom in the North, the Ndigbo hit their homes. They borrowed the debased cliché of Senator Godswill Akpabio, our Senate President, who said that while those who wanted to protest could go ahead, he, and other warped minds would be in their homes making merriment! The sons and daughters of Ndigbo did what those waiting in the wings for them did not expect. They stayed indoors, drinking and winning. One of them, a friend, even had the temerity to send me a video of him eating ugba and fish and washing it down with fresh juice. Ka bu ndu, (is this life?) was my response!

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Even in their five states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo, there was peace. Rather than making themselves available for the security agents kitted with deadly arsenals to ‘curtail’ the ‘protest’ in the East, the Ndigbo locked up their shops and imposed on themselves “sit-at-home”! In frustration, and somewhere in Lagos, when the ‘waiting-in-the-wings’ state thugs stationed to “deal” with the Igbo boys and girls that would come out to protest, they mistook a Yoruba lady, one Olufunmilayo for an Igbo. I watched the video of the encounter, and I shook my head. Does hunger separate tribes? What if Olufunmilayo had turned out to be an Ibo lady? That is the question I have not been able to answer.

Granted, we have so many Ndigbo guys that are terribly bad. I have encountered a lot of them. But the Ndigbo are in good company as other tribes of the nation also have their own fair share of the bad and the ugly. We also equally have so many fantastic ones too that through them, you would wish to be an Ndigbo. Every tribe has such two categories. Even the North has so many other fellows that are more rational in thinking than many educated southerners. So, why should we prepare the slaughter slabs for an ethnic group over a ‘nationwide protest’ because our man is in power? What is the difference between the proponents of the “Ndigbo must go” campaign and the Kano boys who went to a library and looted brooms and dustbins leaving books intact?

We are talking of hunger that is ravaging the entire nation here. But even at that, there are still some people who don’t feel the pang like others. If a bag of rice goes for N100,000 today, and a bag of beans goes for N500,000, that Alaba International Market Igbo traders will buy them, while the ora esa (all right sir) streets urchins unleashed on the ‘protesters’ will still be on the streets begging! Now that the Ndigbo have shown that they can be ‘peaceful’ in the face of State provocation, who carries the shame? This, however, does not mean that the South-East is completely free from the malady that afflicts the entire country. But in this instance, the region has demonstrated that it could also do things differently from the ‘nzogbu nzogbu’ battle cry! That is a new lesson for us that the East thinks differently. But the greatest ‘restructuring’ from the South-East to the rest of us in this ‘protest’ is that should the country go aflame, the Ndigbo will watch from afar. I may be wrong!

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Now, we come to the ‘sophisticated’ South-West, and to a great extent, the South-South. I wept for Yorubaland! The region proved to be the most unfortunate group in the ‘protest’, no thanks to the Abóbakú (the one who dies with the king) group, which ensured that everything about the hunger in the land is as a result of the ‘hatred’ for Tinubu! I feel so ashamed each time I come across the state-sponsored narratives that have emanated from the South-West over this ‘protest’. So many disgusting narratives, everywhere! But that comes with its own lesson. We no longer, as Yoruba, have any moral justification to accuse any tribe in Nigeria of ethnic bigotry. We are worse, down here! Big shame!

Again, the pro-government groups and individuals in the South-West have also shown that Nigeria is a superglued nation! For many of these ‘Hallelujah’ groups, it doesn’t matter if Tinubu performs in office or not as long as it is a Yoruba man that is there! They don’t care if or not their man would be leaving behind any legacy. These are the set of people (very many of them hungry and beggarly), who have taken the “Èmilókán” campaign to a level that no matter how fatuous a government policy is, as long it is Tinubu that initiated it, ‘all true sons and daughters of Yorubaland’ must embrace it! These are educated people for crying out loud! Among this group is “Eleyi Dapo yi” (this one called Dapo), Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State, who sees the entire pain in the land as the handiwork of those who lost the 2023 election. Governor Abiodun said Nigerians are “sore losers” and advised them to wait for 2027 if they wanted a regime change. To him and many others with that kind of thinking faculty, the hunger in the land is because people lost elections. The inability of farmers to go to their farms because of farmers’/herders’ clashes can be traced to election losers. The floating of the Naira, poor economic policies of the government and the extravagance at all levels of government is all about 2027. Pity!

When you have a president surrounded by a Governor Abiodun, Senator Akpabio, and other unfeeling aides, you cannot but have the type of address that President Tinubu delivered on Sunday to the “protesters” and their agitations, where the President said nothing! For me, I never expected anything from Aso Rock, and when I got nothing, I was least bothered! “There’s something I have to tell you: How to communicate difficult news in tough situations”, is authored by Charles Foster, a licensed psychotherapist. In closing, I have something to tell President Tinubu thus: Sir, there was no protest on August 1. You have nothing to fear. That is why your broadcast did not convey anything!

News

Ground Rent: 34 Embassies Risk Closure Tuesday

Published

37 minutes ago

June 9, 2025

Editor

Thirty-four embassies in Abuja risk being closed down by the Federal Capital Territory Administration over unpaid ground rents spanning 11 years, according to The PUNCH.

The PUNCH, however, learnt that the opposition Peoples Democratic, Federal Inland Revenue Service and the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, who were also listed as defaulters, had settled their ground rent with the FCTA.

A publication by the FCTA revealed that many foreign missions had not paid their ground rents since 2014, with the affected diplomatic missions collectively owing N3,662,196.

On May 26, the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, ordered officials to commence enforcement on 4,794 properties that were revoked due to non-payment of ground rent, spanning between 10 and 43 years.

But President Bola Tinubu intervened, granting a 14-day grace period, which ends on Monday (today), to affected property holders to settle their outstanding obligations.

The Director of Land, FCTA, Chijioke Nwankwoeze, disclosed that the defaulters would pay penalty fees of N2m and N3m respectively, depending on their locations.

The defaulting embassies include the Ghana High Commission Defence Section (N5,950); Embassy of Thailand (N5,350), Embassy of Côte d’Ivoire (N5,500); Embassy of the Russian Federation (N1,100); Embassy of the Philippines (N5,950); Royal Netherlands Embassy (N5,950); Embassy of Turkey (N3,350), and the Embassy of the Republic of Guinea (N5,950).

Also included are the embassies of Ireland (N500), Uganda (N5,950), Iraq (N550), and the Zambia High Commission, which owes (N1,189,990).

Other missions on the list include the Tanzania High Commission (N6,000), German Embassy (N1,000), Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo (N5,950), Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (N459,055), Embassy of the Republic of Korea (N5,950), and the High Commission of Trinidad and Tobago (N500).

The Embassy of Egypt (N5,950), Embassy of Chad (N5,950), Sierra Leone Commission (N5,900), High Commission of India (N150), Embassy of Sudan (N5,950), Embassy of Niger Republic (N500), and Kenya High Commission (N5,950) are also listed among the defaulters.

Others are the embassies of Zimbabwe (N500), Ethiopia (N5,950), and Indonesia (Defence Attaché), which has an outstanding balance of (N1,718,211).

The Delegation of the European Union (N1,500), Embassy of Switzerland (N5,950), Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia (N5,950), China’s Economic and Commercial Counselor’s Office (N12,000), South African High Commission (N4,950), and the Government of Equatorial Guinea (N1,137,240) also featured on the list.

Reacting, the Embassy of the Russian Federation firmly denied any outstanding debts.

“The Embassy pays all bills for the rent of the territory on which the Embassy complex is located in good faith and on time. The Embassy also has all necessary documents confirming payment,” it stated.

Similarly, the Embassy of Turkiye questioned its inclusion on the FCTA’s list, citing a possible administrative error.

A Turkish official told our correspondent, “We have not received a formal notification about the debt. We regularly make our payments on time, and we will check if we are on the list because of a bureaucratic mistake or a misunderstanding, and will fix the issue as soon as possible.”

The German Embassy, in a chat with The PUNCH, clarified that no formal claim or demand regarding unpaid rent had been brought to its attention by the FCTA.

“We understand that you are referring to reports suggesting that the German Embassy in Abuja has outstanding rent obligations. We would like to clarify that no such claim or demand has been formally brought to our attention by the Federal Capital Territory Administration,” the embassy stated.

It further insisted that all official financial obligations relating to the embassy’s premises had been settled as of the end of 2024, adding that there are no known outstanding payments.

The embassy emphasised its commitment to maintaining a respectful and cooperative relationship with the Nigerian government and the FCTA, reaffirming its dedication to transparency and mutual trust.

“Moreover, we can confirm that all official financial obligations relating to the Embassy’s premises have been fully settled as of the end of 2024. There are no known outstanding payments.

“The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany highly values its respectful and cooperative relationship with the government of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory Administration and remains fully committed to transparency and mutual trust,” the statement added.

The Embassy of Ghana also told The PUNCH that even though it had not been notified officially of the development, it would reach out to the Foreign Affairs on ways to resolve the issue.

The embassy stated, “The High Commission has noted the publication but has not been officially communicated to. We will liaise with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this matter.”

An official at the Sierra Leone Embassy said they were unaware of the issue and would verify the claim.

He noted, “I am not aware and I am not in the office now. On my return, I will inform my authorities to cross-check.”

Concerning the claims by some embassies that they were not indebted to the FCTA, spokesman for the FCT minister, Lere Olayinka, stated, “This claim will be promptly investigated and appropriate action will be taken.”

Commenting on the development, a former Nigerian ambassador to Mexico, Ogbole Amedu-Ode, referenced the 1961 Vienna Convention and urged caution.

“For the diplomatic premises, if we are to go by the Vienna Convention of Diplomatic Relations, the premises of a diplomatic mission are inviolable,” he submitted.

“But that is not to say that they are not supposed to obey local municipal rules and regulations or the rules and regulations governing such things as relate to property ownership. However, there may be a caveat,” Amedu-Ode said.

He suggested that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should handle the matter diplomatically.

“It is a question of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs looking at each one on a bilateral basis and implementing it on a reciprocal basis,” the ex-envoy stated.

A foreign affairs analyst, Charles Onunaiju, also questioned the legality of applying ground rent rules to diplomatic missions, arguing that it was not applicable under international laws.

“By the Vienna Convention establishing diplomatic missions, diplomatic premises are sovereign territory of their respective countries,” Onunaiju pointed out.

He warned that any enforcement action against embassies could trigger diplomatic fallout.

“If you get into their premises to lock it down, you are obviously violating a very advanced diplomatic protocol. It will be a breach of diplomatic protocol,” the analyst warned.

Meanwhile, a reliable source close to the Peoples Democratic Party leadership, who spoke on condition of requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the issue, told The PUNCH that the PDP had settled all matters related to ground rent with the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory.

He stated, “The PDP has resolved all issues with Wike regarding the ground rent. Action was taken on Friday to make the payment, so there is no longer any problem.”

When asked about the development, the FCT minister’s spokesman, Lere Olayinka, said, “Some of these things, there is no way we can know. Some are paying through Remita, people are paying online. So, it’s until they bring their receipts that we can know.”

It was also learnt that the Federal Inland Revenue Service had mended fences with the FCTA after their offices were sealed off following non-compliance.

On May 26, the FCTA sealed off the FIRS premises for non-payment of its ground rent, but the action sparked a row between both bodies, with the latter denying owing ground rent on its properties in Abuja. The revenue generating firm thus demanded a public apology from the FCTA for sealing off one of its offices.

However, the FCTA insisted that the shutdown was due to the non-payment of ground rent, a statutory land charge.

Refuting the allegation that FIRS owed 25-year ground on two of its office at No 12 and 14, Sokode Crescent, Wuse Zone 5, Abuja, Director, Facility Management Department, FIRS, Tyofa Abeghe, said nothing could be further from the truth on the claim as FIRS had paid the said money.

He said a demand notice from Abuja Geographic Information System dated September 2023, asking for ground rent on the properties was honoured with a payment of N2, 364, 003 three months after the notice was issued.

It was learnt that the payment issue had been resolved.

In a similar vein, NAPTIP, which also had its office sealed, had settled their outstanding ground net, a source at the federal agency told The PUNCH.

“It’s been resolved,” the source said.