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OPINION: Protestant Greeks in Abuja [Monday Lines]
Published
1 year agoon
By
Editor
By Lasisi Olagunju
An old friend reviewed the ways of this government and said he thought Bola Tinubu should be afraid of the Greeks. “Yes, especially if they come with gifts,” I added to my friend’s warning. He smiled; I nodded. In that short conversation, we had just gone through the mythical Trojan War, the Greek story of a siege, a gift, a city and its destruction.
For ten years, the Greeks and the Trojans fought a war which you and I would describe today as senseless. A Trojan prince eloped with the wife of a Greek (Spartan) king and because of that, a decade-long war had to ensue and thousands had to die. David Bevington, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and world authority on Shakespeare, says the causes of the Trojan war were “the betrayal of love, the absence of heroism and the emptiness of honour.”
More than once, you’ve read and heard about ‘Greek Gift’. That expression is from that war of the stone walls of the city of Troy and a grueling Greek siege on the city for a full decade. Troy’s igneous walls won’t let the Greeks in for ten bad years, the besieging warrior king dropped his spears and shields; he changed his strategy and tactics. He went for guileful warmth to get what swords and fires couldn’t fetch him. The Greek built a giant wooden horse and donated it to the gates of Troy. The Greek king dropped the artful gift and then sailed his army’s ships out of sight.
The Trojans thought the Greek had gone back home in frustration. The Trojans took the horse as a gift of peace from their enemy. They thought wheeling it into their city and even worshipping it wouldn’t be a bad idea. A lone voice belonging to a priest warned the Trojan General and his troops against having anything to do with the horse gift from the Greeks: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (Fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts).” The priest’s warning rang round the city. But the voice of caution was drowned in the Trojan ocean of a binge party. They said what is this one saying? They had defeated the Greeks who even left the horse as a gesture of peace. The ‘valiant’ Trojans wined, they dined and danced in a celebration of victory. Then they all went to sleep, blind drunk. One historian wrote that while they were in that state of stupid stupor, “a host of armed soldiers crept out from the belly of the horse and opened the city gates. Troy was overrun and destroyed and the ‘Trojan Horse’ became revered as one of the most successful military tactics ever.” The story is told in Homer’s Iliad; in Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde.’
Now, the Greeks are surrounding the Nigerian Troy. Some persons clapped or feigned sleep while Muhammadu Buhari’s regime raped town and gown, forest and flowers. They are now crying war and threatening to cross the Rubicon and confront Pompey. It is interesting. They are threatening a protest for early next month. “It is treason,” the government has warned. It has also told the dog handlers to put their canine on a leash. We hope they listen. We also hope the government shuts them up by doing good and draining its swamp of excessive wetland of mosquitoes.
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The protest pledgers, like master wrestlers, even gave a definite date – August 1. We call it Ogun Àwítélè (Foretold War). There is a popular play of that title by Adebayo Faleti, late Yoruba playwright of excellence. A band of robbers write to a town of hunters that they are coming to rob and pillage the people and their palace. And the thieves truly come as promised. But how are they received? Well, the robbers fail, not because they are not worthy of their promise, but because their intended victims are not led by arrogance and ignorance. The community of hunters win because it is not commanded by chiefs who are deaf to reason and receptive to disruptive flattery.
The Nigeria we have today is a forest of the heartless – Igbó òdájú in Yoruba. In the last years of Goodluck Jonathan as president of Nigeria, he received many Greeks into his fold. And almost all of them came with one ‘gift’ or the other. A prominent politician (from the North) told one of my female friends: We will help him to make enemies. We will turn him against his true friends and turn the people against him. Nothing he works on will work. My friend reported that encounter to me and we agreed to watch as events unfolded. It turned out that the promise was delivered as promised. As I type this, I see Troy and its history repeating themselves.
I hope Tinubu takes ownership of himself at this moment and listens to his inner voice. I think his wife should get for him ‘Iwe Itan Ibadan’ published in 1911 by Oba I. B. Akinyele. It is a book of ambition, gallantry, treachery, bravery,
conspiracy, flattery, rebellion, private and public protests, justice and fairness, deposition, even, forced suicide. Tèmbèlèkun is the Yoruba word for mixtures of conspiracies and insurrections. There are more than a slew of it in the book. Reading it may help our man now that the jungle is maturing. But, why am I even writing this? Meddlesome interloper. A Lilliputian reporter telling the powerful how to use his limitless powers.
Some people advised President Muhammadu Buhari not to withdraw subsidy on petrol during the pendency of his presidency. They said if he did it, it would make him hugely unpopular. He sidestepped it. The same people are around his successor now telling him that today’s excessively expensive petrol can still sell for any amount per litre, and that nothing will happen if he endorses it. That is how you charge a child that is not yours – you send them on an errand with an order that they must come back home no matter how late. A child who would not get lost in the darkness of the way would take direct charge of his journey.
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The West prescribed the bitter medicine which Tinubu has been administering to us. The western press hailed Tinubu when he pronounced subsidy dead on May 29, 2023 and pushed the naira downhill. They described him as a star reformer, almost putting on him the messiah’s cassock. But the patient is now in a coma and they say something else about their lovely doctor and his competence. Read this: “In the nearly 15 months since Bola Tinubu became president, he has forced his 220 million fellow Nigerians to swallow some bitter medicine. He removed a generous fuel subsidy, one of the few benefits citizens receive from their inefficient and corrupt state. He allowed the country’s currency, the naira, to enter free fall, fuelling imported inflation and triggering the worst cost of living crisis in a generation.” It is difficult to believe that this statement you just read came from an editorial published last week by the Financial Times. That is a newspaper that hailed Tinubu last year when he withdrew subsidy on petrol and floated the naira. In an October 3, 2023 editorial, the newspaper said he “started well” and “with a bang” by removing “a costly fuel subsidy and in shifting towards a market-driven exchange rate which has sharply weakened a previously overvalued currency…” Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Today’s lord of Abuja, just like his predecessors, loves Greeks and their graven gifts. Among the Greeks are the lawmakers housed in our federal capital. They enact any law that gives erection to their purse. Tinubu so much loves them because the gifts they give are what Caesar craved – imperator perpetuo. The losers, ultimately, are the lawmakers. Almost a century ago, Roger V. Shumate in his ‘A Reappraisal of State Legislatures’ published in January 1938 said the legislature was largely seen as a haven for “ward heelers, petty politicians and yokels”. He adds that the disquisition could even be worse with some people saying lawmakers “are more or less equally engaged in clowning and enacting laws designed to loot the public treasury or to favour some special interest at the expense of the common good.”
The battle for Abuja has always been intense because it is a Treasure Island. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 classic adventure novel of that title; read the sequel, ‘Return to Treasure Island’ (1985) by John Goldsmith; read the sequel to the sequel – ‘Silver: Return to Treasure Island’ (2012) by Andrew Motion. Read all about the ugliness of the pirates in those stories. Read about mutiny, about murder, sword fights, about treachery and – blood-curdling romance. The island called Abuja will always be in turmoil as long as unearned treasures are there for pirates to pillage.
All these take us back to the urgent need to make Nigeria work as a federation. At independence, our constitution provided enough safeguards and guardrails against ambitious corrosion from an excessively opulent centre. John P. Mackintosh’s ‘Nigeria Since Independence’ (1964) says it well. He says the independence constitution provided “both the Federal Government and the regions with adequate independent sources of revenue. The central government was allocated most of the import and excise duties, corporation taxes, and death duties, while the regions had income tax, export duties on primary produce, import duties on tobacco and petrol, and a half of mineral royalties and rents. Some revenues had to be paid by the central government into a distributable pool and this was then allocated according to fixed proportions among the regions.”
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Read the above again: The regions took half of mineral royalties and rents. Crude oil and gold and other precious stones are minerals. The regions took export duties on primary produce. Cocoa, cotton, groundnuts and palm oil are primary produce. These are what a centralised structure took away from the regions when it splintered them into states. The federal government bites more than its share of the Nigerian cake. Yet, it wants more.
The federal government keeps creating offices and duties for itself because it has careless, excess funds in its kitty. The creation of a livestock ministry is one of such errant actions. The bill on federal agency for local government election is another. We don’t know what else is yet on their to-do list on how to undo this federation. At independence, the centre knew its limits and rarely went beyond its bounds. On the powers of the constituent units, Mackintosh recalls that the constitution provided as follows: “The Federal Government was charged with foreign affairs, defence, external borrowing, the currency, capital issues, customs and excise, control of the exchange rate, shipping, railways, trunk A roads, posts and telegraphs, and aviation. There was a concurrent list, the main items being industrial development, labour conditions and relations, water, power, and higher education, while the regions were left all residual powers. Of these, the most important were health, education, agriculture, public works, and secondary roads, so that the regions could engage in their own economic development.” That was the constitution the British gave us.
A leader is as good (and bad) as his advisers are. Look at how the planners of Abuja designed the axle of power there. There is in there the three-arms zone: The lawmaker, the law giver and the law breaker. The principalities of Nigeria lie right there – with all the puns embedded. Collectively they are leading us into a situation almost like Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’ – a 2022 comedy drama in which a couple “sails on a lavish cruise ship” led by a drunk captain. And, as a reviewer says “what seems glamorous at first comes to a horrific end, with survivors battling for life on a barren island.”
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News
FCT Court Summons Dino Melaye For Non-payment Of Over N500m Tax
Published
6 hours agoon
August 27, 2025By
Editor
Former Senator representing Kogi West, Dino Melaye, has been summoned to the Federal Capital Territory Magistrate Court over alleged failure to pay his mandatory Personal Income Tax for 2023 and 2024.
The summons dated August 21, 2025, also included that an underpayment of taxes in 2020, 2021, and 2022 owed by Melaye requires him to appear before the Magistrate Court at Wuse Zone II, Abuja, on September 5, 2025.
According to the FCT Internal Revenue Service, Melaye only paid N85,000.08 in 2019, N100,000.08 in 2020, N120,000 in 2021, and N1,000,000 in 2022, despite declaring much higher annual incomes.
It revealed that, for instance, in 2022, he declared an annual income of over N6.5 million.
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It was revealed that an administrative assessment for 2023 and 2024 was issued on May 23, 2025, but when Melaye failed to respond within 30 days, a notice of best judgment assessment was issued on June 23, 2025.
The notice outlined that Melaye’s total tax liabilities for 2023 and 2024 were assessed at N234,896,000.00 and N274,712,000.00, respectively.
The notice read, “Despite reminders and ample time provided, your non-compliance with Section 41 of the Act constitutes a breach of your obligations.
“Consequently, the Federal Capital Territory Internal Revenue Service (FCT-IRS) has, in accordance with Section 54(3) of the Personal Income Tax Act, proceeded to raise a Best of Judgment Assessment in respect of your tax liabilities for the years under review.
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“Accordingly, your tax liability has been assessed in the sum of N234,896,000.00 and N274,712,000.00 for the period of 2023 and 2024, respectively. The computation and assessment are attached for your action.
“Please note that the Service has also identified income under declaration and under payment for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 years of assessment, during which payment of N1,000,000.00, N120,000.00 and N100,000.00 were made respectively. Notices of additional will be issued upon the conclusion of our review.
“Your are hereby informed that you have the right to object to this assessment within thirty (30) days from the date of receipt of this notice. Any objection must clearly state the grounds of your objection and be substantiated with relevant supporting documents.
“Failure to make payment or file objection within the stipulated period will result in the assessment being deemed final and conclusive, and recovery proceedings will be initiated without further notice,” the FCT-IRS said.

The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, has directed mining marshals to seal an illegal gold mining site in Gwagwalada, Federal Capital Territory, to avert potential environmental hazards.
This was contained in a statement signed by the Special Assistant on Media to the Minister, Segun Tomori, on Wednesday.
This follows an earlier operation on August 16, 2025, which led to the recovery and sealing of another site around the District 2 Extension layout in Gwagwalada, where 16 suspects were arrested.
Authorities confirmed that the suspects will be prosecuted soon.
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He said, “Following reports of illegal gold mining in the Gwagwalada area of the Federal Capital Territory, the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, has directed the mining marshals to seal off the site to mitigate potential environmental hazards.”
Preliminary findings revealed that artisanal miners invaded the Gwagwalada area after a gold vein was accidentally discovered during the digging of a soakaway pit near a residential property.
The latest incident occurred on farmland behind CKC in Gwagwalada.
Upon receiving intelligence on renewed unlawful mining activity, “Alake promptly ordered the deployment of mining marshals to secure the site,” the statement read.
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During an on-the-spot assessment on Wednesday, officials of the ministry led by the Director of Mines Inspectorate, represented by the Deputy Director, Sunday Okhuoya, “expressed satisfaction with the level of compliance with the minister’s directive, disclosing that relevant departments of the ministry have launched a thorough investigation to unravel the root of these incidents whilst recommending measures to prevent a recurrence.”
Commander of the Mining Marshals, Assistant Commandant of Corps John Onoja, confirmed that “his team has established 24-hour surveillance over both affected sites, pending the outcome of the Federal Government’s ongoing inquiry.”
Alake, cautioning residents to steer clear of the areas, reiterated the Federal Government’s resolve to eradicate illegal mining activities nationwide.
He also disclosed that the ministry was fast-tracking the deployment of satellite surveillance technology to monitor mining operations and strengthen enforcement capacity.
News
Ondo Bans Graduation Ceremonies In Primary, Junior Secondary Schools
Published
6 hours agoon
August 27, 2025By
Editor
The Ondo State Government has banned private schools from organising graduation ceremonies for pupils of nursery and primary schools, as well as students of Junior Secondary School in the state.
The state Commissioner for Education, Professor Igbekele Ajibefun, on Wednesday, said this was part of the decision of the state government to sanitize the education sector of the state.
According to the commissioner, other decisions included the prohibition of illegal and unregistered schools, the banning of graduation ceremonies for nursery schools and the re-accreditation of all private schools for quality assurance.
Ajibefun, who spoke with all proprietors and proprietresses of schools in the 18 local government areas, in Akure, the Ondo State Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Professor Igbekele Ajibefun, declared that the state government was poised to reposition the education sector and was taking deliberate steps to encourage and support private school owners through different policies.
READ ALSO:Benue Bans Nursery Graduations, Customised Textbooks In Schools
The Commissioner said, “My interactions start with private school owners because the private sector plays a critical role as you are major stakeholders in the education business. It is more serious than any other business.
“It is obvious that things have gone bad in the education sector; there are urgent issues we need to address so that we can bring back the lost glory.
“The schools operating illegally in the state would be given a six-month grace period to get approval, and the state would review the conditions for school approval to make it easier.
“When you run an unapproved school, you are running an illegal business. This administration will not allow illegalities, and that is the reason we are reviewing it. In the next couple of weeks, the new conditions will be rolled out. All private schools operating in the state must meet minimum standards.
“We are also banning elaborate graduation ceremonies, especially for nursery and JSS classes in state.”
Ajibefun also stressed that the state would no longer tolerate schools organizing excursions without approval or clearance from the Ministry due to the state of security in the nation.
He advised private school owners to be circumspect on the issue of making extra lessons compulsory after normal classes.
READ ALSO:Another Ondo Varsity’s Female Student Killed By Boyfriend
On the reuse of textbooks, the government has banned the exploitation of parents through the purchase of new textbooks every year, stating that siblings of a particular pupil can continue to use the same textbook for a period of time.
The commissioner also mentioned that the process of digitizing all schools in the state was in progress, noting that all students in the state’s primary and secondary schools would soon be migrated to the digital platform of the Ministry of Education.
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