Opinion

Reformed Civil Service Commission: Comparative Lessons for Nigeria

Published

3 years ago

December 22, 2021

NewTimes

Professionals In Government: Issues In Navigating The Policy Space In Nigeria

Tunji Olaopa

The emerging fourth industrial revolution is transforming the human world in ways that could not have been envisaged by the other three industrial revolutions on which the march of human civilization depended. Based on its fusion of the biological, physical and digital worlds of humans as well as the emergence of radically new technologies—artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud computing, robotics and advanced wireless technologies, the fourth industrial revolution is reshaping human endeavors in fundamental ways that have transformed expectations about how our world should be organized in more efficient and productive ways. The unraveling of the fourth industrial revolution, in specific terms, therefore ties into the governance activities of governments across the world to facilitate democratic governance in ways that deploy the benefits and efficiencies of the new technologies for the wellbeing of the citizenry. The fourth industrial revolution therefore reinforces the acute and defining relationship that already exists between the states and their public service. This is to the extent that with the new technologies, the public service has now been placed at a point of significantly altering its capability readiness to deliver on the policy aspirations of the governments.

All across the globe, the public service has been undergoing tremendous institutional reforms that are meant to bring it up to speed in terms of the modernizing of its regulations, processes, infrastructures and operations. This is to the extent that it might be brought up to date in its attempt at achieving a democratic service delivery to the citizens who are the end users of its efficient implementation of policies of governments. The modernizing of the public service takes on an added significance within the African continent and especially with states like Nigeria still struggling to make development and governance enabling for the transformation of the lives of the citizens. In most of these states, the public service still operates the Weberian bureaucratic system and culture that are less than optimal in terms of performance and productivity. But much more than this, modernizing the public service concerns the totality of the effort to restore and enhance its reputation as a vocation—a priestly calling charged with transforming the quality of life of the citizens everywhere democratic governance is in place. Thus, with the fourth industrial revolution, and especially the changing character of work across the globe, the public service is being served the opportunity to rescue itself and its agelong significance as the human face of the state to make meaningful impact in its effective and efficient intervention in the welfare and wellbeing of the people of a state.

Making the public service more vocational and more efficient immediately implicates the capacity of the civil service commissions, the gatekeeper of public service public-spiritedness and professionalism, to be more efficient in its gatekeeping responsibility. The civil service commission (CSC) regulates the recruitment and appointment on the basis of a meritocratic principle that ensures that both the government and the public service have the best of candidates with the capacity to function efficiently. As an agency instituted by legislative approval, the CSC is given the constitutional authority to regulate the conditions of employment and service for the civil servants, including recruitment, promotion, transfer, discipline and the guarding of the values that define the public service. In Nigeria, the significance and role of the Civil Service Commission become fundamental not only as a gatekeeper of civil service values, ethos and professionalism, but more significantly as a strategic framework that harnesses and reinforces the existing professional and administrative capacities, competences, and high-end expertise of the office of the head of service (OHCS), establishment, manpower development institutes (MDIs) and pension offices to implement the institutional reform dynamics that is at the very heart of the government change agenda. And this implies that the CSC is also a candidate for reform itself. In other words, to be able to implement the institutional reform that would transform the public service, the CSC must allow itself to be transformed by the reform dynamics.

One significant means for getting reform right is to facilitate best practices learning and sharing across the globe that speaks to the modernizing of the CSC in constitutional, structural and institutional terms, and adopting and adapting them for Nigeria’s peculiar administrative context. And these best practices are not all too strange because they have been crafted within the commonality of the Commonwealth administrative practice and its template of the British colonial administrative legacy. How have other countries who are struggling with development and the modern impulse attended to the urgent need to transform the public service optimal efficiency through the reform of the CSC?

The first insight derives from the reform experience of the United Kingdom and the independence of her CSC from the influence of the UK government. To be able to achieve its responsibility as the go-between between the government and the public service, the CSC ought to be undergirded by the values of transparency, integrity, objectivity and impartiality. And these would be compromised when the regulatory activities of the CSC are oversighted by the government itself or is managed with less than a professionalized CSC secretariat. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act of 2010 established the UKCSC on a statutory basis to be independent of both the government and the civil service. On the contrary, the experience of the CSCs in Nigeria puts to question the significance of such independence in manner that seems contrary to the provision of Section 158(1) of the Nigerian Constitution.

Section 44 of the Public Service Act (1999) states clearly that the Australian Public Service Commissioner is mandated to annually submit a report to Parliament on the performance of the Australian Public Service. The report speaks to the current state of the public service and its performance efficiency as well as the workforce dynamics and its capability readiness. Each year, the report by the commissioner submits an assessment based on specific themes. The 2018-19 State of the Service Report was prepared around the themes of culture and capability. Such a state of the service report indicates in the Australian case—as it ought to in the Nigerian case if it were to exist—that there ought to be an eternal vigilance on the performance of the public service for which the CSC emerged in the first place. The absence of such a regular annual report seems to demonstrate an absence of a proper regard for the significance of oversight over the governance of the public service.

To be able to perform its gatekeeping responsibilities seamlessly, the Federal CSC specifically, needs to define an institutional relationship with other public institutions, especially the National Assembly, the Ministries, the OHCSF, and the state CSC. These relationships are fundamental solely for the sake of institutional accountability. In other words, the proper regulation of the civil service also depends on how the FCSC is able to relate with cognate institutions and structures involved in making the civil service work efficiently and better. The Iraqi and Australian CSC prepare annual reports for their Parliaments to scrutinize, debate and outline resolutions for the implementation of the recommendations of the FCSC. And even though it reports to the Parliament, the Iraqi CSC, like the UK’s, is financially and administratively independent. Unlike the Iraqi and Australian FCSC, the Nigerian FCSC is still hampered by constitutional constraints that lock its operation in some administrative rigidities without proper modelling of FCSC-OHCSF-MDAs strategic human resource policy and governance shared responsibilities and commitment in enabling the overall performance of a developmental state.

Within the framework of her Civil Service Reform Programme (1987-1993), the Ghanaian Public Service Commission introduced a Performance Evaluation System in 1992, and a Performance Agreement System in 1997. The PES and the PAS became necessary within the deficiency of the earlier annual reports and financial audits that were fraught with credibility abuses that undermined genuine assessments. By 2012, and still within its continuing efforts to learn from its administrative lapses and errors and keep rolling with the curves of efficiency, the Ghanaian Public Service Commission, in collaboration with stakeholders and the Australian Public Service Commission, developed a Performance Management Policy for the Public Services of Ghana. This policy seeks to provide a more integrative and objective instrument that deploys rewards and sanctions for achieving performance management and monitoring. This Ghanaian innovation speaks about the crucial relationship between the CSC and other nodal points of the human resources management policy architecture, governance and dynamics in the civil service. The HR function is therefore key to the CSC’s regulation of the civil service for performance and productivity. The challenge is moving from personnel to a strategic HRM framework that will institute a performance management system like Ghana’s in performance assessment of especially the senior civil service cadres.

While the FCSC has a Human Resources Management Department, divided into two divisions—Appointment, Promotion and Discipline (APD) and Staff Welfare and Training, the Commission’s core mandate is still locked within the old personnel management tradition. The Ghana Public Service Commission example for instance speaks to the need for a proactive policy intelligence on the part of the FCSC which, unlike the Indian CSC, is not restricted to a mere advisory role in the recruitment, training, transfer and discipline of the civil servants. This implies that a creative policy like the performance management policy will encompass comprehensive guidelines, statements and manuals (rather than piecemeal circulars and memos) that address and standardize rules and regulations concerning entitlement, discipline, leave, training, performance, etc. The IPPIS is a unique human resource dynamic backend, that happily plays into the FCSC’s aspiration for transparency and integrity in the pubic service. However, beyond the programmatic framework of the system, the IPPIS needs to be drawn into a wider human resource audit that encompasses the entire public service into workload, competences and gaps assessments.

The Federal Civil Service Commission of Nigeria has come a long way in its objective of gatekeeping the vocational integrity of the public service in Nigeria. However, it still has a long way to go in terms of adapting to global and regional best practices that will position it better in salvaging the lost glory of the public service in Nigeria. the critical issue is whether the administrative will to adopt and adapt these practices is available, rather than the paucity of the practices themselves.

Olaopa is a former Federal Permanent Secretary , and Professor of Public Administration, National Institute for Policy & Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos.

tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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Opinion

Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2024

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.

Opinion

Burning Issues: (FCT Minister And Paulosa) (2)

Published

3 days ago

December 19, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tony Afejuku

By Tony Afejuku

The other burning issue, apart from Farotimi and Babalola’s, which I wish to take a look at – and which I am taking a look at now – relates to what is happening in our capital territory. What is this burning issue – which our human rightists and civil society organisations and personages are surprisingly and un-satisfactorily not inclined to focus attention on and examine as they should? I may be wrong, but it surely seems to me that this issue, this burning issue, which is of more importance than Farotimi and Babalola’s – which has been given undue adulation – is deliberately being neglected and depreciated by proclaimers and heroes and heroines of human rights, justice, equity and equality of rights in your country my country our country. Why, why, why and why, why, why? Anyone who has any iota of patriotic sensibility, feeling and judgment well watered and buttressed by a very great influence upon his or her critical judgment will keep on asking the question I am asking.

Mr. Nyesom Wike, as almost everybody who can read and write a little knows, is the current minister of your, my and our Federal Capital Territory. His post or office is akin to that of a governor of a state. As the immediate past governor of Rivers State who was drafted, after his two terms there expired, to continue in the FCT as its new minister-governor or governor-minister under the auspices of a party he is not a true member of, Mr. Wike cannot but be seen as a lucky man. He is in every possible and impossible way. Minister-Governor Wike is a lucky man and a very fortunate one indeed. No former governor of Rivers State (or of any Nigerian state), as far as I know, has achieved what the famed political rouser of rabbles has achieved in one short gubernatorial life-time, and at a relatively young and fertile age. His dual achievement with and in two different political parties at this delicate point of Nigerian politics indicates to our politicians and us all that there is always time for a reminder that there are ready-made high rewards for arch-angels of betrayals. And Mr. Wike may go down in Rivers and Nigerian history as both an arch-angel and an emperor of betrayal of us all if we attempt to indicate what I have defined here as his dual achievement.

We can roughly divide, briefly, Wike’s political development into two periods. During the first, excluding his lower political positions before he became the governor of Rivers State, he quickly adapted his style to that of an emperor who became a rabble-rouser of rabble-rousers whose gubernatorial efficiency moved from stiffness to stiffness. He did not at any time feel that he needed suppleness to govern Rivers State. “Let the heavens fall if they must fall!” We are not there yet in this attempted analysis of the stiff-hearted and stiff-minded one. True? But he is already demonstrating this characteristic in Abuja. False? Judge and give the answer yourself.

Even after he left Rivers State a short while ago as governor, he is still trying to control happenings there to the political discomfiture of his hand-picked successor, his erstwhile “boy” and “son” – with whom he has fallen out. As the minister-governor or governor-minister of the FCT, Wike is occupied with the other taste of the emperor-juggernaut formulator – doing the work of two key political masters in one room and desk of political jugglery. Since his appearance in the FCT, minister-governor or governor-minister Wike has allegedly attempted to recover or transform for Abuja what is not traditionally or socially Abuja’s, for example, the city’s social idiom and landscape and terrain as well as its environs. In doing this he sometimes over-steps his bounds and mark of human/inhuman decency/indecency and psychological understanding of human nature, if you follow well what I am saying; he has so far become at best not really better than a typical pedestrian Nigerian lawyer and officer of political power: in his explorations so far in the Federal Capital Territory we have come to the realization, as T. S. Eliot would say, that “it is so often true that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go.” But one has to be a very negatively obstinate and self-serving emperor and a thorough-bred arch-angel of betrayal of the people and masses to justify such perilous and perfidious expeditions and adventures.

Last week, I saw on Arise Television “The Morning Show” Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the dutiful widow of the late Nigerian supreme patriot and soldier, Colonel Ogbebor (of Benin stock) battling, so to say, to wrest the legacy of her late husband from the tight grip of the adventurous FCT minister-governor who has registered his name and signature in the hearts and consciousness of the people as the depriver of their possessions. The three anchors of “The Morning Show” were in their respective ways splendid in their structures of remarks and questions to Chief (Mrs.) Rita Lori-Ogbebor whom I have had occasions in times past to call patriotically Rita A-K 47 on account of her natural right to fire her beautiful tongue at any person, usually an enemy, of just actions. When she made the case she made to protect the estate of Paulosa Nigeria Limited, her late husband’s aforesaid legacy in the FCT, she was in her natural territory, habitat and element where even at age eighty-four, she never ever loses her stability – although she unusually restrained herself in the Arise Television appearance. Dr. Reuben Abati, Rufai Oseni, and Ayo Mairo-Ese clearly explored seriously but delightfully the mind of the mother-hen of Warri – my other coinage and appellation I gave her in my poetry. Her “The Morning Show” appearance enabled me to see the poignant cry de profundis of the FCT inhabitants whose property and residences in different guises have been demolished. She did not say anything that was out of joint. She spoke and came out as a mother, protector and symbol of the people who have suffered – and are suffering – from the state of affliction and anguish Wike’s demolitions have placed – and are placing – the people.

Ojy Okpe in her delicious and delectable “What is Trending” slot on the same show, showed without exaggeration but with further elaboration what people in and outside Abuja/FCT think of the mighty Wike’s demolitions, a burning issue that the Senate has asked “Let Heaven Fall” minister-governor Wike to halt as the committee the Senate set up on the issue starts its work. Of course, we cannot but assume that Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Mrs. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan as well as Mrs. Ireti Kingigbe, the senator representing the FCT in the Senate and other patriotic senators diligently did what they did on the floor of the Senate when the burning issue was tabled for debate with the gracious understanding and authorization of the Senate President.

I need to state further that the “The Morning Show” anchors did well and extremely so by giving the minister-governor the opportunity to air his anti-Paulosa story. His senior special assistant on public communication and social media, Mr. Olalere Olayinka, stood in for him. After he gave the reasons for the clamp-down, his responses to the questions the anchors put to him followed the usual pattern of denials by artificial men in power – denials that they always use to intimidate and betray the people. In fact, Mr. Olayinka’s ploy to ride easily over our dear Rufai Oseni, a wholesome representative of the deprived, that the chap (or is it guy?) and his boss always employ their colloquial speeches and remarks to dishonor, failed. Yes, the ploy failed woefully. In stanza after stanza of the exchanges between Mr. Olayinka and the Arise anchors, he deteriorated – and his deterioration was hall-marked when he unwittingly revealed that the Paulosa land had been acquired by his minister-governor’s close cohort, an act that was nothing short of gross abuse of power and authority.

Because the Senate is already using its authority, power and privilege to resolve the burning issue, hopefully, in a way that the late Colonel Ogbebor’s legacy and family will not be subjected to any kind of degradation, I will utter no more words for now. I trust, however, that the liberties the Senate is taking – or has taken – are for the sake of order to favour the down-trodden.

As for the minister-governor, the PDP emperor at large, here is an immortal quote from Marcus Aurelius, the magnificent and authentic Roman Emperor and philosopher (A.D. 121-180): “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” You lose nothing by giving us a slice of your humanity by your right acts and correct words. Everything changes and passes. Be humane as a human being.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.