You would think it was a scene from Geoffrey Chaucer’s classics, The Canterbury Talesand its tale of a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Members of the Election Jury (EJ) have journeyed from earth to Heaven and are standing in the dock before The Throne, their hands clasped behind them like convicts about to deliver an alocutus. They are led by their Chairman, Buba Ibrahim. Faces ashen like a four-day old excrement mercilessly petered by an angry downpour, they had died a few hours earlier and had been brought straight to the presence of The Great One.

The five of them had strapped round their loins the cloths with which they were buried while on earth. Also in the dock are Nigeria’s serial presidential aspirant, Atiku Abubakar, Mohammadu Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo and Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Ahmed Tinubu, all of whom had been summoned by Heaven’s bailiffs. They finished their earthly engagements in their 90s and had all been languishing in Hades, waiting for the Last Judgment which, according to Heaven’s Cause List, was specifically focused on the judgment delivered by the election petition crew on earth, in Nigeria, in September. By their side, in the dock, are APC Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) counterpart, Uche Secondus, Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed and many party aficionados.

“Hail Him! Hail Him, the Lord of the Universe!!” a man who looked like a deity, his apparel white like blooming cotton in a plantation, announced.

Everybody stood to their feet. He was ostensibly Heaven’s Court Registrar. Then a heavy wind suddenly began to blow, so heavy that everyone in the court was forced to lie face down. Two cherubs flew into the Court, occupying the two sides of the mighty, gold-plated seat that stood like a judge’s seat. Everything was a total replication of the earthly courtroom. When the storm subsided, a volcano-like sound erupted in the courtroom, escorted by a heavy wind which again swept everybody, including the cherubs, to a supine state. When the wind abated and litigants began to take their positions, they beheld one indescribable personality seated on the Judge’s seat. Though he had the features of a man, the countenance was like that of a King of the Cherubs. His majesty was beyond description. He was neither man nor woman and no one could look at his face. When he spoke, his voice was like a volcanic eruption. His whole body was covered with a huge colourless cassock of no earthly description.

“Are these the litigants from Nigeria?” the voice of the person, called the Great One, boomed like multiple canyons with a reverberation that was beyond description. “Yes, My Lord!” the man who looked like a deity said, looking sideways.

The most astonishing part of this proceeding is that there are no advocates on both sides. A parchment-like scroll is handed each of the accused, containing all the charges against them. They are expected to make their allocutusright in the presence of the Great Throne.

“Buba, why is man so blind and yet I gave him two big eyes to see? Did it occur to you that I deliberately chose September 11 as date of your judgment, peradventure man would realize the need to be truthful? Have you ever seen the real size of a man’s eye, how massive it is?”, the occupier of the Great Throne with a booming canyon voice asked.

Oh, September 11! That was the day Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the Twin-Towers in America. Could the Great One be talking of September 11 as a potentially redemptive memory for humanity, showcasing the vanity of life and the quest for man to come together, speak the truth for the liberation of mankind?

“Buba, let me ask you this, why do you earthly Judges parody the Creator by allowing yourselves to be called ‘My Lord’?”

Shaking, uncoordinated and apparently afraid, Buba muttered, “Great One, it is believed that You vested in us the role reserved only for You, the Judge of all Creations… and that we are little Creators whenever we enter the seat of Judges…”

“So if earthly Judges knew this, why do they compromise… why do they subvert the course of justice? Don’t they know that, yes the doctor can be evil, the journalist can be compromised, the accountant can be corrupt but the moment the Judge is compromised, there is no society left?”

There is eerie silence. The Heavens Chief Registrar notified the accused that, unlike in the earthly court, accused would not be sworn on oath as the Great One had second-by-second recording of all the acts of man, what transpires in his closet and indeed, what thought courses out of him at every point. He said the Great One had with him all the overtures made by both APC and PDP to members of the tribunal to subvert the course of justice. He knows who was guilty and who was worthy of an acquittal.

“Buba, and this goes for all members of your panel, do you honestly believe that the Respondent, Muhammadu, possesses a school leaving certificate, or actually passed through a secondary school?”

Still waffling, Buba muttered, “There… There was no contrary evidence before the tribunal, Great One…”

The Great One asked that one of the accused, Muhammadu, be brought before him. He had gone leaner than he was while on earth and had grown some beards, while his face was as pale as mutton. He too had the white sepulcher cloth wrapped round his loins and he was taller than everyone in the courtroom.

“Mohammadu, you are before the Great Throne. Hope you know that any lie you tell here will earn you everlasting fire in Jahamah? Right, did you win the 2019 presidential election?”

“They… they told me I won, Great One,” he said, to which the Great One further enquired, “Who are the ‘they’?” Mohammadu had a long list of the “they,” ranging from Oshiomhole, Tinubu, Lai Mohammed, etc. Some of them could not be subpoenaed before the Throne because they are still on earth. This necessitated the Registrar asking Oshiomhole and Tinubu to be brought before the Throne.

“Did you make overtures to members of Buba’s tribunal in respect of this judgment?” the Great One asked. “I…I…I am not aware, Great One,” the Chairman of APC replied. The Judge then asked the Registrar to show the litigants what looked like a slide. Unlike a slide however, the characters bore real human features and the scene was the personalities themselves, live. On seeing the slide, they fell face flat on the floor, weeping like babies. Without saying anything, the Great One asked that Abubakar and Secondus be invited before the Great Throne.

“Abu, I do not need to tell you that you are before the Great Throne… and that you know the consequences of not being truthful here. Let me remind you that you are no longer on earth and what we need here is just a simple corroboration. We have slides of all your earthly engagements. Did you win the last election?”

“I was told by my people that Mohammadu and his people rigged me out, Great One…” Abubakar said. “Once again, I ask, did you win the last election… did you send people to compromise Buba and his team?” the Great One again asked. Before he could say anything, the slides were showing on the board. And Abubakar too fell down, weeping.  

Then the Great One began what looked like a judgment. He found all of them guilty. He told Buba and his panel members that they were poor imitations of the Throne which He said was the initial design of the Creator in a Judge. “The Judge must have in mind in every of his pronouncements on the bench that today will come, the day of Judgment. I am specifically interested in earthly judges because they are my idea of judgment. Every act of the Judge is recorded in the Slides of Heaven and they will give special account before the Great Throne,” He said.

“Abubakar, your guilt before the Great Throne is that you are not my idea of a President of a country I created to change the lives of my people,” the Great One began. “You represent virtually all the evils, the vices that my people are crying over. I personally frustrated your ascension to that earthly throne because you are not different from those who have ruined that country. If I had allowed you to become President, you would have surrounded yourself with the Ayo Fayoses, the Nyensom Wikes, the same people who have brought sorrow and tears to my people on earth.”

The Great One faced Mohammadu, who was lying on the floor, weeping and dabbing his tears with his sepulcher cloth. “Muhammadu, I allowed you the first and the second time, knowing your limitations. I deliberately ensured that you were brought on the Kadaria Ahmed’s show of the NTA shortly before the 2019 election, to show you to the people of Nigeria as incapable of leading them to any Promised Land. For once, I left Nigerians to their fates. I was not surprised that, in spite of all I showed them about you, because of what your people wanted to eat, they kept on routing for you as President of Nigeria.”

He turned to Osinbajo and said, “I weep every day when I review your stewardship on earth. You are a sad reminder of the stewardship of my Arch-Angel, Lucifer, while he was here with me in Heaven. You sold so much untruths to my people, all in the name of your ambition and your comfort. You even profaned my name, prefixing my church to your name. Of all of them, you were the one who made me weep daily throughout your period of being in government.”

“Adams, Adams, Adams…” the Great One continued, facing Oshiomhole, who was sprawled on the floor, weeping, aware that the Sword was dangling. “I denied you education, but I compensated you with the gift of the garbs. Adams, you have disappointed me. You make me remember my creature I called home last week, Bob Mugabe. You are involved in all destructive human engagements, all in the name of politics.”

When the Heavenly Registrar brought Tinubu forward for his own verdict, there was pin drop silence. Like earthly judges, the Great One cleared his throat. “I don’t want to call you that name they call you. You are the greatest disappointment of them all. You foisted Muhammadu and all his gross incompetence on your people, for your selfish interests. You are the greatest example of how I bring man from the miry clay. I pretended as if I had forgotten all your infractions… all your evil deeds, yet you still persisted, even up until I took back your soul to receive your judgment...”

Then a very massive storm coursed through the courtroom. It was as if the room would fall. The Great One suddenly turned His back on the court. And he began to speak, as if amid weeping. “My judgment is this: All of you would roast forever in Hell. I have instructed the guardians of Hades to increase the intensity of the fire. You made living a hell for my people; you lied from the base of power at every point.”

As the accused began another round of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, this time, a far stronger storm engulfed the courtroom. In a jiffy, the Great One could not be seen any longer. And Heaven’s policemen came in, shepherding the convicts to a great dungeon they call “Eternal Damnation Only.”  

Masari and his AK-47-wielding accomplice on Resurrection Day

When I saw the picture of Katsina State Governor, Aminu Bello Masari, a former Speaker of House of Representatives, in a group photograph with a man clutching an AK-47 assault rifle, said to be the leader of bandits who killed and maimed hundreds of people in Katsina state recently, what came to my mind was Richard Rive’s short story entitled, Resurrection. Resurrectionis a story in Alex la Guma’s collection of short stories entitled Quartet. It was set at a funeral.

Old Maria Wilhelmina Loupser, who though black, was married to a white man, had just died at the age of 75. Frustrated till she headed for the sepulcher, she had four children, Jim, Rosie and Sonny who were white and Marvin, whose skin pigmentation marks her out for the mockery of the then South African white-dominated system. Marvin was black like her mother. Due to the color of their skins, the children hated their mother to her death. Because she constituted a source of embarrassment to them, especially in the presence of their friends who came visiting, Old Maria and Marvin were consigned to the kitchen’s back door and lived inside the boys’ quarters.

“They want me out of the way too, Ma, because you made me black like you, I am also your child, Ma. I belong to you. They want me also to stay in the kitchen and use the back door. We must not be seen, Ma, their friends must not see us. We embarrass them, Ma, so they hate us. They hate us because we’re black. You and I, Ma,” Marvin soliloquized by the corpse of Old Maria.

The part of Resurrectionthat suits the scandal in Katsina State that is Masari is Marvin’s stream of soliloquy, punishing one at that, a long mourn of Old Maria’s painful death and searing fate in the hands of her white children.

Rive, reporting Marvin’s dialogue with Old Maria over their racial fates as mother and child in the hands of their blood kin, had said: “And she had tormented the Old Woman, who did not retaliate. Who could not retaliate. Who could not understand. Now she sat tortured with memories as they sang hymns for Ma.”

Masari, apparently in his search for peace in Katsina State, had entered into negotiations with the dangerous and maniacal bandits whose atrocities have painted the media crimson. Apart from their kin, Boko Haram insurgents, these bandits have caused so much unmitigated havoc in the country, killing hundreds of people and freezing investments into the zone. In Masari’s photo-op with the leader of the bandits, who is asking the simple question: what is the lot of hundreds of people who were sent to their painful early graves by the bandits? Who is negotiating for their families at the moment while Masari is negotiating with the bandits? Who is negotiating for the hundreds of the maimed, families that are literally dead here on earth as a result of the madness of the bandits? Who is negotiating for them?

Like every Third World country where attention is seldom on the victims but their victimizers, it is apparent that the world’s attention would be on the stumbling block to peace which the bandits are and not those whose lives they have taken. This is where I find Rive’s very instructive. Like the tormented Old Maria Wilhelmina Loupser, the victims of Katsina’s bandits are lying disconsolate in a God-knows-where, forlorn and lost to the world. Fathers are weeping uncontrollably somewhere, lamenting the losses of their children who were slaughtered like rams by the maniacal bandits. Soldiers who were killed by the bandits had wives, fathers, mothers and siblings, you know?

Like the tormented Old Woman who did not retaliate, who could not retaliate, the victims are lying in some dinghy sepulcher, unable to retaliate and dead to the emotions and sympathy of the world. But beyond them, their dependents who have no wherewithal to continue this journey would never understand, like Old Maria, why their lives can never and would never matter to the Masaris.

The one that seems most bothersome is the picture of the Chief Security Officer of President Muhammadu Buhari’s home state in camaraderie with an acknowledged bandit. Perhaps the next picture we would have is the President himself in a pose with one of the gangsters. The only fitting analogy in Resurrection that I can imagine is a Marvin asking for a photo-op with her tormentors, Jim, Rosie and Sonny. It was even said that there are negotiations between the bandits and government and arrested murderers/bandits are being exchanged for people who were kidnapped. When did Nigeria or its state become this type of sissy that it had to surrender state power to bandits?

Anyway, as Masari negotiates with the bandits, can he please spare a thought for the victims as well; the hapless soldiers whose families lay disconsolate back home, the thousands of people who are homeless at the moment and the thousands of dependents of the dead whose tomorrow has been punctured midstream?

In 1950, just two years after the state of Israel was founded, the country’s first commercial delegation set off for South America.

Israel desperately needed trading partners. Unlike its Arab adversaries, Israel did not have natural resources to fund its economy. There was no oil or minerals. Nothing.

The delegation held a couple of meetings but was mostly met with laughs. The Israelis were trying to sell oranges, kerosene stove tops and fake teeth. For countries like Argentina, which grew its own oranges and was connected to the electrical grid, the products were pretty useless.

It’s hard to imagine this is what Israeli exports looked like a mere 67 years ago. Today, Israel is a high-tech superpower and one of the world’s top weapons exporters with approximately $6.5 billion in annual arms sales.

Since 1985, for example, Israel is the world’s largest exporter of drones, responsible for about 60 percent of the global market, trailed by the US, whose market share is under 25 percent. Its customers are everywhere — Russia, South Korea, Australia, France, Germany and Brazil.

In 2010, for example, five NATO countries were flying Israeli drones in Afghanistan. How did this happen? How did Israel, a country not yet even 70 years old, become a superpower with one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world that is changing the way modern wars are fought?

The answer, I believe, is a combination of a number of national characteristics unique to Israel.

First, despite Israel’s small size, about 4.5 percent of its GDP is spent on research and development, almost twice the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average. Of that amount, about 30 percent goes to products of a military nature. By comparison, only 2 percent of German R&D and 17 percent of US R&D is for the military.

Another major contribution is the culture of innovation and creativity in Israel. Israelis are more willing to take risks than other nations. They get this from their compulsory military service during which they are tasked, at a young age, to carry out missions often with deadly consequences.

While Israeli 19-year-olds embark on operations behind enemy lines, their Western counterparts can be found in the safety of their college dormitories.

Lastly, Israel has been in a perpetual state of conflict since its inception, fighting a war almost every decade. This reality, of having your back against the wall, sharpens the mind. It forces Israelis to be creative and come up with innovative ways and weapons to survive.

This is the Israel story …

Robotic border patrols

The Guardium is a part of a new category of robotic weapons known as Unmanned Ground Vehicles or UGVs. Israel is the first country in the world using these robots to replace soldiers on missions like border patrols.

Already, Guardium UGVs are deployed along Israel’s border with Syria in the north and the Gaza Strip in the south.

The Guardium is based on a Tomcar dune-buggy-like vehicle and equipped with a range of sensors, cameras and weapons. It can be driven by a soldier sitting in a command center miles away or receive a pre-designated route for its patrol, making it completely autonomous.

An IDF unmanned ground vehicle, called a Guardium, patrols the border with the Gaza Strip.

The increasing use of robots by the Israel Defense Forces is part of a larger strategy to minimize risk to soldiers when possible. In addition, soldiers require breaks, food and water. All a Guardium needs is a full tank of gas. Other UGVs in use by the IDF include the Segev, which is based on a Ford F-350 pickup truck.

Facing terrorists who use tunnels to infiltrate into Israel from places like the Gaza Strip, Israel is also relying on UGVs like robotic snakes to slither into underground passageways and enemy headquarters. The robots will then map out the structures, giving soldiers an accurate picture of a battle area before the place is stormed.

The same is happening at sea. Israeli defense contractor Rafael has developed an unmanned patrol ship called Protector which is being used by Israel to protect its strategic ports and patrol the country’s long Mediterranean coastline.

The Arrow anti-missile program

In 2000, the Israeli air force received its first operational Arrow missile battery, making Israel the first country in the world with an operational system that could shoot down incoming enemy missiles.

The idea to create the Arrow was born in the mid-1980s after US President Ronald Reagan floated his Star Wars plan and asked America’s allies to partner in developing systems that could protect the country from Soviet nuclear missiles.

The Arrow was a revolutionary idea. Due to Israel’s small size and lack of territory, all ballistic missiles deployed in the region — by Syria, Iraq and Iran — can reach anywhere within the country and pose a strategic and possibly even existential threat. Israel, the developers argued, needed a system that could shoot down enemy missiles over neighboring countries and provide overall protection for the tiny Jewish state.

An Arrow missile batteryIDF

The program had its ups and downs but got a huge boost in funding after the First Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles into Israel, paralyzing the country and forcing millions of Israelis into bomb shelters with their gas masks.

The Arrow was just the beginning. Today, Israel has the Arrow, which is partially funded by the United States, to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, David’s Sling to intercept medium-range rockets and cruise missiles as well as the combat-proven Iron Dome, which has intercepted hundreds of Katyusha rockets fired from the Gaza Strip in recent years.

Israel is the only country in the world that has used missile defense systems in times of war. These systems do more than just save lives. They also give the country’s leadership “diplomatic maneuverability,” the opportunity to think and strategize before retaliating against rocket attacks.

While other countries have also invested in missile defense, none has created a multi-tier architecture like Israel.

Mini spy satellites

In 1988, Israel launched its first spy satellite into space, gaining membership in the exclusive club of just eight nations with independent satellite-launching capabilities.

From the beginning, there were those who doubted Israel was capable of developing, building and launching its own satellite, but in the nearly 30 years since that day, it has grown into a satellite superpower, now operating eight different spy satellites in space.

This is a critical capability considering the threats Israel faces from countries like Iran, which it still suspects is planning one day to build a nuclear weapon.

Israel has shied away from building big satellites and instead designs what are known as “mini satellites,” which weigh about 300 kilograms (661 pounds) in comparison to America’s 25-ton satellites.

Israel’s spy satellites are split into two categories.

A model of Israel’s Tecsar satellite, which uses radar instead of a camera to create high-quality imagesIAI

Most of Israel’s satellites come with advanced high-resolution cameras like the Ofek-9, launched in 2010, which can discern objects as small as 50 centimeters (20 inches) from hundreds of miles away.

Israel’s other category of satellites are known as the TecSar. These satellites use a synthetic aperture sensor, basically a radar system that can create high-resolution images at almost the same quality as a regular camera.

The advantage this technology provides Israel is tremendous. A camera cannot see through clouds or fog, but radars can work in all weather conditions and can even see through camouflage nets. What this means is that Israel has the ability to track its enemies and gather intelligence on them at all times of the day and through rain, fog or clouds.

Israel’s success in developing state-of-the-art satellites has caught the world’s attention. In 2005, the French entered a strategic partnership with an Israeli company to develop a satellite, and in 2012, Italy ordered a reconnaissance satellite, paying $182 million. Singapore and India have also reportedly purchased Israeli satellites over the years.

Drones

It is referred to in Israel as the “drone that can reach Iran.” The Heron TP is Israel’s largest unmanned aerial vehicle with an 85-foot wingspan, the same as a Boeing 737 airliner. It can stay airborne for 24 hours and carry a 1-ton payload.

While Israel doesn’t openly admit it, the Heron TP is believed to also be capable of launching air-to-surface missiles.

Israel was the first country in the world to operate drones in combat operations. Its first use of drones was in 1969, when the Israel Defense Forces flew toy airplanes with cameras glued to their bellies along the Suez Canal to spy on Egypt. In 1982, it flew its first combat drone, called Scout, in Lebanon, where they played a key role in locating and neutralizing Syrian anti-aircraft missile systems.

A Heron TP drone takes off in Israel.IAI

That operation caught the world’s attention, and in 1986, Israel supplied the US Navy with its first drone, known as the Pioneer. A few years later, one Pioneer made history when it flew over a group of Iraqi soldiers during the First Gulf War. The soldiers saw the aircraft, took off their white undershirts and waved them in the air. It was the first time in history that a military unit had surrendered to a robot.

Israel’s drones have revolutionized the modern battlefield. They cost a fraction of a manned fighter jet — some as little as a few million dollars — and participate today in every single operation conducted by the IDF.

Drones give soldiers the ability to make calculated decisions before invading territory or storming enemy compounds.

Before Israel bombs a building in the Gaza Strip, for example, it always has a drone in the air to ensure that civilians are not inside. They also reportedly fly almost daily over Lebanon, tracking fighters for Hezbollah, which is believed to have about 130,000 missiles capable of striking Israel.

The top-secret tank

To this day, the Merkava tank is one of Israel’s most top-secret projects. It is said to be one of the most lethal and protected tanks in the world, and its construction started out of pure necessity — the United Kingdom and other countries refused to sell Israel tanks. So in the 1970s, it started to build its own.

The newest model — known as the Merkava Mk-4 — is the most impressive. It can reach speeds of 40 mph and comes with a new modular armor kit, meaning that the tank can be fitted with the armor it needs based on the specific mission it is heading into.

A Merkava tank during a drill with IDF soldiers in northern IsraelIDF

An area, for example, known to be full of anti-tank missile squads requires heavy armor, while an operation without the threat of anti-tank missiles means less. This also allows tank crews to replace damaged pieces of armor on the battlefield without having to bring the full tank back to a repair shop inside Israel.

In 2012, the Merkava underwent its biggest change yet when a new system — called Trophy — was installed on the tank. Trophy is an active-protection system, basically a personal missile defense system for an individual tank.

Trophy uses a miniature radar to detect incoming anti-tank missiles and then fires a cloud of countermeasures — basically metal pellets — to intercept them. The radar also interfaces with the tank’s battle management system. This means that once a missile launch is detected, the coordinates of the enemy squad that fired the missile are immediately obtained, allowing the tank to retaliate quickly and accurately.

New York Post

I sent my car for service in preparation for my trip to Benue since Wednesday. The vehicle was not returned until yesterday evening.

I was very angry that the mechanic delayed my planned trip but was also glad that he brought the car back for me to leave this morning.

So I decided to drive around to be sure the car was in good condition for the trip, this was about 7.30pm...I drove up to the Games Village Traffic Junction and the car stopped. I tried starting it and it won't start, so parked, called the mechanic, who told me he has gone home but will see if he can make it back to me.

So I decided to start the car once more and Bang! The car burst into flames...I ran out of the car in  shock and confusion. The next episode of this mishap is the reason for my narrative.

From the moving traffic, I saw men and boys park their cars and were rushing to my burning car with fire extinguishers, some where struggling to open the bonnet.     

From a building inside games village, I heard women screaming and passing buckets of water, bags of detergents. I saw a guy removed his t-shirt, soaked it in water and was trying to open the bonnet with fire covering his hands.

In all this, I was just standing by a tree, with my eyes staring into space, till I saw the flames go out eventually and I heard someone asked...where is the owner of the car?

It was then and only then that I stepped forward and found myself being hugged and consoled by strangers, Nigerians, Muslims, Christians, traditionalist and may be atheist.

All joined to wish me well and they turned to their cars or homes one after the other. The last being the guy who suffers a deep cut to his leg where he was helping out.

As soon as he left, I turned to see what was left of the car and I counted 13 fire extinguishers that were used, other items that were used and also the charred remains of someone's t-shirt that was used.

Just when tears started forming in my eyes, I noticed I was not still alone, there were two policemen who helped to salvage the burning car and have chosen to remain with me till I get family and friends to come take me away.

At that moment, my belief that a New Nigeria is possible was renewed and  I was  proud to be a Nigerian.

I woke up this morning thinking, where and how did we get so divided and polarised as a nation, when before my own eyes I saw Musa, Obi, Femi, Andrew, Mike all helping to salvage my car, without caring who I was. I thank God for his mercies and for the good people of Nigeria...together we shall overcome.

• True story by John George Itodo

Much of the global market in 2019 has been driven by trade wars between the United States and The Peoples Republic of China. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that no US company should use telecommunications equipment made by technology companies that pose national security risks.

The ban was targeted at Huawei, the Chinese tech company leading 5G revolution in Asia. Experts say the US may lose as much as $500 billion, if China beats America to the best 5G technology — highlighting how important 5G will be in the years ahead. The countries that lead the 5G revolution will earn billions of dollars, and greatly improve their economies, and drive global change — one of such countries is the United Kingdom.

According to Nicola Sturgeon, the first woman to become the first minister of Scotland, the country is aiming to be the 5G leader in the United Kingdom. She says 5G could enable Scotland to add about £17 billion to GDP by 2035 and create 160,000 jobs.

At the heart of Scotland’s 5G revolution is Nigeria’s Yusuf Abudulrahmam Sambo!

WHO IS YUSUF SAMBO?

Yusuf Abdulrahman Sambo is a research associate and the 5G-SON (self-organised network) testbed lead at the University of Glasgow, UK. Sambo was born in 1988 in Kaduna. He hails from Ikara local government, Kaduna state.

He is the son of Abdulrahman Sambo, former acting executive secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

The building blocks of his sterling career were laid at Command Children School, Abuja, where he had his primary education, and Zaria Academy, Shika, where he learnt at the secondary education level. He would go on to Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, where he graduated in 2010 with a second-class upper degree in electrical engineering.

By 2011, a year after graduating from ABU, Sambo already completed his master’s degree in Mobile and Satellite Communications at the University of Surrey (with distinction and two publications).

Born to a medical doctor, who remains his role model, Sambo says his love for IT was encouraged by his father, who introduced him to the power of information and communications technology at a very young age.

Sambo says his father, despite being a medical doctor by training, proofreads all his tech papers, and has always been interested in all he is research and academic works.

PHD AT 27

Following a distinct result during his masters at Surrey, Sambo got a full Ph.D. scholarship to work on a European Union-funded project on designing low electromagnetic emission future networks. He took the offer and started the Ph.D.

But like everything with the golden fish, there is no hiding place; during his first year of Ph.D., he secured a mobility funding, to conduct research on mobile communications at the Texas A&M University in Qatar.

At the age of 27, he completed his Ph.D. in Mobile Communications from the 5G Innovation Centre, reputed as the world’s largest academic research centre dedicated to next-generation mobile and wireless connectivity, at the University of Surrey in 2016.

Sambo has since tapped into the centre’s vision to drive the fourth industrial revolution “to enable a world where everything is provided wirelessly to the end device by a fixed and mobile (converged) infrastructure that functions across the whole geography”. The internet of things!

QUICKFACT: 5G could make it possible for a surgeon in India to carry out an operation on a patient in Australia or anywhere else in the world. It promises unbelievable medical advancements.

LECTURER AT BAZE UNIVERSITY, ABUJA

Despite being able to thrive anywhere in the world, Sambo returned to Nigeria upon graduation from Surrey, to transfer knowledge and give back to the Nigerian system. He worked briefly as a network engineer at Suburban Telecoms. 

He also lectured at Baze University, Abuja, between July 2016 and August 2017. He taught three modules to undergraduate students at the university, and would later become a supervisor of the Electrical Engineering Department at the university in Nigeria’s capital.

His students made a Bluetooth controlled rover (picture above), which was demonstrated when Abdullahi Ganduje, governor of Kano state, visited the university.

While at Baze, he co-founded Baze Youth Forum, a gathering for progressive youths to share ideas on issues of common interest. During this period, he also joined Fleissen & Company, an independent research and consulting company, as a consultant and worked on several projects.

The company helps organisations to resolve complex problems in oil and gas, power, manufacturing, telecoms & technology (T&T), and water sectors.

PRODUCED THE WORLD’S FIRST 5G POPUP NETWORK

Sambo is currently a research associate in the Communication, Sensing and Imaging Group of the University of Glasgow working on a £1.2 million EPSRC-funded project on designing autonomous and resilient emergency communication systems. His main research interests include EMF exposure reduction, radio resource management, energy efficiency, wireless sensor networks and device-to-device (D2D) communication.

He has designed and built the first real-time 5G testbed dedicated to Self-Organised Networks (SON) in the UK which runs on general-purpose processors.

At Glasgow, he has also produced several proofs-of-concept and demonstrated various 5G use-cases including a prototype for the world’s first popup network that can be deployed in less than 2 minutes for emergency communications and rural connectivity.

His works have also made it possible to dynamically switch on/off 5G small cells by using machine learning for traffic prediction and multi-sensor fusion that result in over 20 percent energy savings.

Following his array of excellent ideas and implementation, he was awarded the coveted Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) grant for research on novel cooling systems capable of reducing the energy consumption of 5G networks by up to 50 percent.

QUICKFACT: With 5G, you can download your favourite HD movie in f-o-u-r seconds!

LEADING SCOTLAND’S 5G REVOLUTION

The 31-year-old co-edited the world’s first books on the verticals of 5G and EMF radiation from future wireless communication, published by the prestigious Wiley-IEEE and the IET, respectively in 2019.

In September 2018, the tech guru was engaged in an EPSRC-IAA funded research mobility to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China to work on 5G testbed design.

He leads the University of Glasgow research team on the widely-celebrated Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)-funded 5G RuralFirst project. The project focuses on implementing a pop-up network for a healthcare use case in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.

He recently coordinated a demo for the first minister of Scotland to showcase the research and successes of his team’s 5G plan. This was widely reported in the British media, including coverage by the BBC, STV, the Scotsman, Daily Record, the Herald and the Daily Mail.

The Kaduna-born engineer currently has 21 publications in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is also a reviewer for several top journals and conferences, serving on technical program and organising committees of many international conferences and workshops.

When he is not revolutionalising 5G networks, he is supporting Arsenal Football Club, playing squash or traveling. Sambo says he loves food and is strangely a pen collector — he has about 100 pens from random places.

The Cable

Glowing tributes of Zimbabwe’s strongman and former longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, have been pouring in since he died Friday morning. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta called Mugabe a “shining beacon of Africa’s liberation,” while South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said, “We remember him as a towering leader of a struggle for independence of the people of Zimbabwe” and “as an outstanding leader on the African continent.”

This praise may come as a surprise, particularly in the West, given Mugabe’s infamous record of human rights abuses. Yet the glaring reality is that, for Zimbabweans, Mugabe’s legacy is more complicated than many abroad would think. He was a liberator who turned into an oppressor — and both sides are being remembered after his passing.

To many in Africa, Mugabe was a revolutionary who freed his people and reclaimed land from the colonialists to give to native Zimbabweans. He was a great orator and an unwavering leader who promoted an empowerment and education agenda. The law professor and politician Lovemore Madhuku — a man who has long opposed Mugabe through his organization, the National Constitutional Assembly — had this to say about Mugabe’s education policies: “My parents are poor peasants in Chipinge. They could not have afforded to pay for my university education. Under the leadership of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the government of an independent Zimbabwe paid for my university education. My generation benefited from that vision.” Others — whether they supported Mugabe or not — will no doubt relate.

This is the memory President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government is honoring by naming Mugabe a national hero and announcing a mourning period until his burial. Kenya, too, announced three days of mourning for the “icon.” In Shona (one of Zimbabwe’s vernacular languages), we have a saying that goes “afa anaka,” which loosely translates to the way someone can become a saint after they pass on, whether or not they deserve it. We can certainly see this happening with Mugabe already.

But Mugabe didn’t always practice what he advocated for, and his methods could be brutal. He was known for ruling with an iron fist and exhibiting a gross disregard for human rights. His government was implicated in reports of abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings, including the notorious Gukurahundi massacre of thousands, that have yet to be resolved. Luke Tamborinyoka — a politician who has served as the spokesman for the late Morgan Tsvangirai, who led the main opposition party Movement for Democratic Change during Mugabe’s brutal regime — calls being in opposition during the Mugabe era “a tenuous experience. ... There was so much brutality, there was so much violence against the people of Zimbabwe.”

Mugabe maintained a firm grip on power through a complex system of patronage, jealously guarded by the elites who surrounded him. This system unfairly rewarded those who supported him and persecuted those who did not. It has come to be known as Mugabeism — and while its namesake may be gone, the underlying system remains intact.

He also left the country in economic disarray, with extraordinarily high levels of inflation, unemployment and shortages of food. His passing comes in a week when Zimbabweans living in neighboring South Africa were victims of xenophobic attacks. This is a reminder of the thousands of Zimbabweans who fled to South Africa as economic refugees, forced to leave their homes in search of greener pastures. There are millions more scattered around the world who escaped Mugabe’s rule for economic or political reasons.

His death in Singapore, a country he frequented for medical attention, is testimony to Zimbabwe’s poor quality of health care. Ironically, doctors in Zimbabwe have not been reporting for duty this week, citing lack of pay. Even as many remember Mugabe the liberation figure, this grim reality is the Zimbabwe he left behind.

Perhaps the mixed reactions that have greeted Mugabe’s death — even from within Zimbabwe’s corridors of power — are fitting for such a polarizing figure. But as the dust settles on the inevitable mourning and denunciation, Zimbabwe is not any better than it was under Mugabe. At the end of the day, Zimbabweans are still waiting for the same thing they hoped for during his rule: a brighter Zimbabwe where jobs, freedom and human rights are respected.

Washington Post

Engineering and medicine have in many respects become separate from their respective underlying sciences of physics and biology. Public-policy schools, which typically have a strong economics focus, must now rethink the way they teach students – and medical schools could offer a model to follow.

It is now customary to blame economics or economists for many of the world’s ills. Critics hold economic theories responsible for rising inequality, a dearth of good jobs, financial fragility, and low growth, among other things. But although criticism may spur economists to greater efforts, the concentrated onslaught against the profession has unintentionally diverted attention from a discipline that should shoulder more of the blame: public policy.

Economics and public policy are closely related, but they are not the same, and should not be seen as such. Economics is to public policy what physics is to engineering, or biology to medicine. While physics is fundamental to the design of rockets that can use energy to defy gravity, Isaac Newton was not responsible for the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Nor was biochemistry to blame for Michael Jackson’s death.

Physics, biology, and economics, as sciences, answer questions about the nature of the world we inhabit, generating what economic historian Joel Mokyrof Northwestern University calls propositional knowledge. Engineering, medicine, and public policy, on the other hand, answer questions about how to change the world in particular ways, leading to what Mokyr terms prescriptive knowledge.

Although engineering schools teach physics and medical schools teach biology, these professional disciplines have grown separate from their underlying sciences in many respects. In fact, by developing their own criteria of excellence, curricula, journals, and career paths, engineering and medicine have become distinct species.

Public-policy schools, by contrast, have not undergone an equivalent transformation. Many of them do not even hire their own faculty, but instead use professors from foundational sciences such as economics, psychology, sociology, or political science. The public-policy school at my own university, Harvard, does have a large faculty of its own – but it mostly recruits freshly minted PhDs in the foundational sciences, and promotes them on the basis of their publications in the leading journals of those sciences, not in public policy.

Policy experience before achieving professorial tenure is discouraged and rare. And even tenured faculty have surprisingly limited engagement with the world, owing to prevailing hiring practices and a fear that engaging externally might entail reputational risks for the university. To compensate for this, public-policy schools hire professors of practice, such as me, who have acquired prior policy experience elsewhere.

Teaching-wise, you might think that public-policy schools would adopt a similar approach to medical schools. After all, both doctors and public-policy specialists are called upon to solve problems and need to diagnose the respective causes. They also need to understand the set of possible solutions and figure out the pros and cons of each. Finally, they need to know how to implement their proposed solution and evaluate whether it is working.

Yet most public-policy schools offer only one- or two-year master’s programs, and have a small PhD program with a structure typically similar to that in the sciences. That compares unfavorably with the way medical schools train doctors and advance their discipline.

Medical schools (at least in the United States) admit students after they have finished a four-year college program in which they have taken a minimum set of relevant courses. Medical students then undergo a two-year program of mostly in-class teaching, followed by two years in which they are rotated across different departments in so-called teaching hospitals, where they learn how things are done in practice by accompanying attending (or senior) doctors and their teams.

At the end of the four years, young doctors receive a diploma. But then they must start a three- to nine-year residency (depending on the specialty) in a teaching hospital, where they accompany senior doctors but are given increasing responsibilities. After seven to 13 years of postgraduate studies, they finally are permitted to practice as doctors without supervision, although some do additional supervised fellowships in specialized areas.

By contrast, public-policy schools essentially stop teaching students after their first two years of mostly in-class education, and (aside from PhD programs) do not offer the many additional years of training that medical schools provide. Yet the teaching-hospital model could be effective in public policy, too.

Consider, for example, Harvard University’s Growth Lab, which I founded in 2006 after two highly fulfilling policy engagements in El Salvadorand South Africa. Since then, we have worked on over three dozen countries and regions. In some respects, the Lab looks a bit like a teaching and research hospital. It focuses both on research and on the clinical work of serving “patients,” or governments in our case. Moreover, we recruit recent PhD graduates (equivalent to freshly minted MDs) and graduates of master’s programs (like medical students after their first two years of school). We also hire college graduates as research assistants, or “nurses.”

In addressing the problems of our “patients,” the Lab develops new diagnostic toolsto identify both the nature of the constraints they face and therapeutic methods to overcome them. And we work alongside governments to implement the proposed changes. That is actually where we learn the most. In that way, we ensure that theory informs practice, and that insights gained from practice inform our future research.

Governments tend to trust the Lab, because we do not have a profit motive, but rather just a desire to learn with them by helping them solve their problems. Our “residents” stay with us for three to nine years, as in a medical school, and often take up senior positions in their own countries’ governments after they leave. Instead of using our acquired experience to create “intellectual property,” we give it away through publications, online tools, and courses. Our reward is others adopting our methods.

This structure was not planned: it just emerged. It was not promoted from the top, but was simply allowed to evolve. However, if the idea of these “teaching hospitals” was embraced, it could radically change the way public policy is advanced, taught, and put at the service of the world. Maybe people would then stop blaming economists for things that never should have been their responsibility in the first place.

Project Syndicate

Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine and Michael Useem

• CEOs are finally starting to wake up to the idea that long-term investment is better than short-term cuts.
• This was evidenced by the letter from 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable, who pledged to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders.
• A perfect example of why this long-term strategy is better is the divergent paths of Kraft Heinz and Unilever.
• Since trying to take over Unilever, Kraft Heinz has tried to cut its way to growth, with disastrous results. Unilever, on the other hand, has invested in the long term, and it's paying off.
• Dennis Carey is a vice chair of Korn Ferry and founder of the CEO Academy. Brian Dumaine is a contributor to Fortune magazine. Michael Useem is a professor and the director of The Wharton School's Leadership Center. They are coauthors, with Rodney Zemmel, of "Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking Is Your Best Short-Term Strategy.

CEOs have for decades chanted the mantra of shareholder supremacy and placed cost cutting and short-term profits above all else. That mindset, however, just might be changing.

On August 19, 181 CEOs, all members of the Business Roundtable, signed a statement pledging they would lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and, of course, investors.

Superstar CEOs including Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, all of whom signed the pledge, have come to the realization that the only way to be successful in the long term is to invest in a way that benefits their workers and communities in the short term.

Why the change of heart? Growing evidence and experience suggest that investing for the long term is better for shareholders. And for a compelling example of why a long view is the best path to future growth, look no further than the wildly different fortunes of the two consumer-products giants: Kraft Heinz and Unilever.

In 2017, Kraft Heinz launched a $143 billion hostile takeover of Unilever, the European behemoth run at the time by Paul Polman. The two companies were very different in how they were led.

"I couldn't think of two more opposite philosophies coming together here" if the takeover succeeded, Polman told us for our book, "Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking Is Your Best Short-Term Strategy." And he believed that the other's was doomed to fail.

"Frankly, someone who thinks they can buy us because they have a lot of money and think they can leverage up our company and then run it with an entirely different model doesn't make much sense to me," Polman said. "Our system is there to satisfy a few billion people in the world, not a few billionaires."

In the end, Polman successfully fought off the Kraft Heinz takeover bid, and the results since the attempted acquisition have only confirmed the value of the Unilever CEO's long-term thinking.

Heading in opposite directions

The years of deep cost cutting caught up with Kraft Heinz this year.

As The Washington Post wrote, it was "hard to imagine things getting worse" for Kraft Heinz as it announced a $12 billion loss and $15.4 billion write-down.

But things did get worse. This month, Kraft Heinz said that organic sales fell 1.5% year over year, operating income plummeted by more than 50%, and it was pulling its full-year guidance, sending its stock plunging to all-time lows.

The CEO, Bernardo Hees, had blamed the company's operations. The company was "overly optimistic on delivering savings that did not materialize by year-end," he told investors on a conference call. What an irony, in our view, that Hees believed the same short-term cost-cutting measures that got the company into such deep trouble would save it now.

Kraft Heinz had not spent a lot of time or money on brand building, innovating products, or motivating employees. And now the company would try to turn itself around for the long run without a long-term strategy for doing so. We'll just cut our way to prosperity, thank you.

By contrast, Unilever's Polman believed in going for the long term from the start. Yes, he reduced costs — every business in a cutthroat field has to watch expenses — but he also invested, for instance, in environmentally sound new products, a strategy he dubbed the "Unilever Sustainable Living Plan."

Polman had been cutting $1 billion a year at Unilever but also reinvesting three-quarters of it back into the company for growth. And he gave his workforce a purpose beyond reducing costs and producing immediate profits.

The company promised to increase social impact by, for example, providing products with less salt or fat and pressing customers with measures as simple as hand washing and teeth brushing. Polman built campaigns around his soap, Dove, forself-esteemamong young girls, and Lifebuoy to help young children in the developing world reach the age of 5 through better hygiene.

"The most important thing we did," Polman told us, was to create a long-term business model, the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. And in retrospect, it proved a good thing that Polman avoided the clutches of Kraft Heinz, as Unilever's shares are now up 6%.

With that and the Business Roundtable's urging, Wall Street will hopefully now take more note that long-term thinking pays, and good guys can win.

Compiled by Olalekan Adeleye

Business Insider

A dying Irishman went for one last big score in Nigeria. The project failed, but a London tribunal says his company’s owed $9 billion and counting.

Gaslighting

The oilfield fires of the Niger Delta burn day and night. Metal pipes snake through the swampland, spewing flames so vast they cast the sky in apocalyptic orange. Southern Nigeria sits atop a bubbling stew of oil and gas. Companies want only the former, so they incinerate the latter. The industry calls it “flaring.”

For millions of Nigerians, flaring is a curse. It fills the air with toxic fumes that cause respiratory disease and cancer and later fall as acid rain, which damages homes and crops. It also wastes vast amounts of energy in a region where many villages lack electricity and cities suffer daily blackouts.

In 2008 the Nigerian government said it would end flaring by using oilfield gas to generate electricity. The minister of petroleum resources acknowledged that the challenge would be “enormous.” Converting gas requires it to be captured, transported, refined, and piped back to power plants and onto the grid.

Officials struggled to persuade big multinationals to invest in the required infrastructure, so concessions were granted to 13 smaller companies, some virtually unknown. One was Process and Industrial Developments Ltd., or P&ID, which was registered in the British Virgin Islands but had no website or track record. Its chairman was Michael “Mick” Quinn, a 68-year-old Irishman with a rakish mustache and decades of experience in Nigeria, mostly as a military contractor.

Quinn knew powerful people, including the petroleum minister, who guaranteed P&ID a 20-year supply of “wet,” or unrefined, gas for a plant the company would build. The raw material would be supplied for free, to be treated and returned at no cost. P&ID would instead profit from the byproducts, butane and propane. Everyone stood to benefit, not least the villagers whose homes would be lit by electricity rather than the wan glow of flaming methane.

Then the plan fell apart. The government failed to secure any waste gas from oil companies, let alone link up the necessary pipeline, and the plant was never built. In 2012, P&ID notified the oil ministry that it was suing for breach of contract in a London arbitration forum. After a set of closed legal proceedings, judges awarded P&ID $6.6 billion, one of the biggest amounts a company has won from a sovereign state. When Nigeria dragged its feet on payment, P&ID teamed up with a hedge fund and moved the case to public courts, where it could ask judges to seize state assets, including bank accounts and cargo ships.

In the summer of 2018, a man who’d worked for Quinn contacted Joseph Pizzurro, a veteran New York lawyer hired by Nigeria to lead its defense in the U.S. The caller wanted to talk about the P&ID case. “I don’t think it’s genuine,” the man said, according to an account he gave Bloomberg Businessweekon condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety. He told Pizzurro that Quinn had conspired with officials to profit from government projects that were doomed from the start and that P&ID was one of at least three such lawsuits involving Quinn. The caller couldn’t provide enough evidence to substantiate his claims, though, and he didn’t contact Pizzurro again.

This August, P&ID won a ruling from a London judge allowing the firm to start seizing Nigerian assets. Hailed as a vindication by Quinn’s company, it caused an outcry in Nigeria. The country’s finance minister said at a press conference that the size of the award, which has risen above $9 billion with interest, meant all Nigerians would pay a price. The chair of the central bank said that the case has affected monetary policy. Toward the end of the month, the justice ministry opened a corruption investigation into how the gas plant deal was struck. “The contract was designed to fail right from inception,” attorney general Abubakar Malami told reporters. If the Nigerian government is right, P&ID was an audacious scheme that had made unwitting accomplices of legal professionals, financial institutions, and politicians around the world.

The company and its founders remain elusive. A Nigerian newspaper recently published a list of unanswered questions about the firm: Where are its offices? How many people does it employ? How did such a tiny company win such a large concession? Quinn isn’t around to answer them; he died of cancer in 2015. But a close examination of his career, drawn from public records, leaked documents, and interviews with friends and former associates, shows that P&ID wasn’t the only Quinn project to end in disappointment, lawsuits, and corruption allegations. It was just the largest—the one that was supposed to provide his biggest payday.

Man in Mohair

Quinn grew up in Drimnagh, a tough neighborhood in Dublin. After leaving school as a teenager in the 1950s, he trained as a mechanic. An ordinary blue-collar life might have beckoned had one of his neighbors not started a show band, the Royal Olympics. These groups were unique to ’60s and ’70s Ireland: shiny-suited young men playing rock ’n’ roll or jazz, perpetually touring church halls and farm sheds to earn shoeboxes full of cash.

The Olympics needed a manager, and soon Quinn had a new career as one of the natty, ruthless handlers a BBC documentary labeled “men in mohair suits.” He ran some top acts: Daddy Cool & the Lollipops, Twink, Dickie Rock. An old friend recalls that he’d approach a singer and say, “How much are you earning? One hundred pounds a gig? I can get you 1,000.”

Quinn stuck with the industry for a while after the show bands’ popularity declined - newspaper reports suggest he arranged an Irish tour by Diana Ross and the Supremes - but there was more money to be made elsewhere. At some point in the ’70s he started working in Nigeria, either as an oil trader or a financier of cement deals, depending on which of the scattered accounts of his life you believe. He began profiting from a construction boom taking place in Lagos, which was then expanding with such chaotic abandon that hundreds of cement-bearing cargo ships were lined up at port waiting to dock.

He kept working in Ireland, too. In 1979 he and a partner, Brendan Cahill, formed an umbrella company with the resolutely dull name Industrial Consultants (International) to oversee their interests. They began working with the government, for example getting a public grant worth $450,000 to start a videocassette factory near Dublin. The project went bust within two years.

Quinn’s business drew on some powerful allies dating to his show band days. One of the closest was Albert Reynolds, a former music hall impresario who was elected to Parliament in 1977 and became prime minister in 1992. Two years after being elected PM, Reynolds was promoting Kent Steel, one of Quinn’s companies, as a potential savior of Irish industry. Kent had recently won 3 million Irish pounds (about $4.3 million at the time) from the European Union to explore cleaner technology for making steel - potentially a huge boon. Instead, the project produced nothing but some sketches and a bunch of debris.

Joe McCartin, then a member of the European Parliament, says he raised concerns with an EU official that the deal was a scam and was told, “Don’t worry. Your prime minister, Albert Reynolds, knows all about the project.” The EU did eventually start a probe into the grant, and McCartin, who’s now retired, says its investigators showed him a letter from Irish prosecutors relaying that a fraud had been committed but that they couldn’t identify the perpetrators. The probe was eventually closed without penalty; the EU refused to fulfill a freedom of information request about the case, citing privacy rules. Reynolds passed away in 2014.

Quinn’s name came up again during a nationwide corruption inquiry in Ireland. The Mahon Tribunal, as it was eventually known, lasted for 14 years, compiling evidence of graft on an epic scale. Quinn was called as a witness in June 2007, one of the few times he ever spoke on the record. The tribunal wanted to know more about relationships Industrial Consultants had with Frank Dunlop, a shady lobbyist, and Liam Lawlor, a corrupt Republican MP who’d resigned in disgrace before being killed in a 2005 car crash outside Moscow.

Quinn denied knowledge of invoices that bore his company’s name- payments for golf fundraisers, he guessed - and said he thought his signature had been forged on checks. He had no recollection of many of his dealings with Dunlop. “You are a singularly unhelpful witness,” Alan Mahon, the presiding judge, told him. “What you are telling us is nothing, absolutely nothing.” The tribunal later found that tens of thousands of pounds had flowed from Quinn’s companies to Lawlor, but Quinn wasn’t recalled to the stand, and neither he nor Industrial Consultants faced any action.

By then, Quinn had developed a fearsome reputation. Several former associates told Businessweekthey were scared to speak on the record about him, because they believed he had ties to Irish paramilitaries; one said Quinn told him his father had been in the original Irish Republican Army in the 1920s. Employees introduced him as “the chairman,” and he employed a man with a pugilist’s squashed nose to drive guests around Dublin, apparently without great regard for red lights. A former Quinn associate says that when Quinn’s daughter ended a brief marriage to David Boreanaz, an American actor best known for roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayerand Angel, Boreanaz called Quinn to make sure there was no bad blood between them. Boreanaz’s manager didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Trouble With Nigeria

Throughout the 2000s, Quinn lived a kind of double life, divided between Nigeria and a comfortable suburban house near Dublin. At home he was Mick from Drimnagh, living with his wife, Anita, who’d been his childhood sweetheart, and their two Doberman pinschers. On Tuesday nights he’d drop Anita off at bingo, then pick up fish and chips for dinner.

Life in Nigeria was very different. The country’s freewheeling capitalism was fraught with risk and opportunity. The writer Chinua Achebe detailed the climate in his 1983 polemic The Trouble With Nigeria: Contracts with the military government were currency, doled out by senior politicians to allies and friends as the public bore the burden of hidden kickbacks, inflated prices, and stolen materials. Military rule ended in 1999, but democratic Nigeria was proving just as restive and complex. There were tribal uprisings in the Niger Delta and kidnappings and religious conflict elsewhere.

Quinn nevertheless thrived, befriending presidents and civil servants alike. He and Cahill used a company called Marshpearl to bid for lucrative military contracts, initially registering the name in Ireland, then in 1999 using the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co. to create Marshpearl Ltd. in the British Virgin Islands. To the outside world, the BVI company was practically untraceable. Mossack Fonseca documents leaked to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitungand made available to Businessweekby the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show that Marshpearl Ltd.’s directors were nominees, paper executives whose sole job was to sign documents. (Reached by phone, one of them, Nigel John Carter, a Geneva-based trusts specialist who was also a director of another Quinn BVI vehicle called Kristholm Ltd., said, “I’ve never heard of those two companies.”)

Marshpearl sponsored a local polo team, giving Quinn an excuse to mix with the Nigerian ruling classes. His sons attended elite private schools with the sons of politicians and generals, who asked Quinn to help them acquire helicopters, Japanese motorcycles, and more. On the golf course back in Ireland, friends recall, Quinn would pick up the phone to talk to various officials or military leaders. “Did you get them guns?” one friend remembers him asking in his distinctive Drimnagh drawl. His golf buddies were never sure if he was joking. His contacts included Theophilus Danjuma, who’d risen to prominence in the ’60s by leading a bloody coup against Nigeria’s military ruler. Danjuma went on to become a general, then entered business and eventually politics, ascending to defense minister in 1999. He later sold a stake in a Nigerian oil field to a Chinese state company, helping make him a billionaire.

One of the few people who would speak on the record about Quinn’s life in Nigeria is Neil Murray, a friend of 30 years who was involved in several Quinn projects there. Sitting one night at the Abuja Hilton piano bar, a favorite haunt, Murray wasn’t hard to spot: a gray-haired figure so hunched over he was bent almost double, puffing cigarettes and chatting with businessmen and prostitutes, who called him Papa. After initially accusing a Businessweekreporter of being a spy for the Nigerian government, he agreed to talk. “Mick knew Obasanjo. He knew Yar’Adua,” Murray said, referring to former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. “He knew everyone.”

Among the projects Murray was involved in was a contract to repair and upgrade 36 British-made Scorpion tanks at an abandoned plant at Bauchi, in the dusty heart of Nigeria. It had all the hallmarks of Quinn’s deals in the country: complexity, misdirection, and a substantial payday for the middleman. “There was a subsequent contract, and a subsequent contract, and a subsequent contract,” Murray said. “It was an ongoing process.” Quinn personally recruited military experts to manage the work and find replacement parts. At one point, Danjuma visited the site.

Several people involved in the venture described each vehicle as an opportunity for profit. Petrol engines were replaced with diesel engines. New radios were installed. When faulty valves needed replacing, one former employee said, he found a British supplier for a few pounds a unit. “Too cheap,” he remembered Quinn telling him. They found costlier valves elsewhere. The more expensive the new part, the bigger Marshpearl’s cut.

A memo viewed by Businessweekthat circulated among Quinn’s team noted that Marshpearl had charged the Nigerian army for undelivered tank parts, making his organization “vulnerable.” But the company kept winning contracts, in spite of this hitch and others. It’s not clear how many millions of dollars Nigeria spent on the Bauchi project, but the relationship likely made Quinn a fortune.

For one contract, a spinoff from the main deal, his company sought to supply about 4,000 rounds of tank ammunition made by Belgian defense company Mecar SA. A January 2005 memo outlining Marshpearl’s plan says Quinn’s staff told Mecar they would handle bidding, contracts, and billing. Mecar’s managers “do not want to know the details as they would be embarrassed with Belgian authorities and U.S. owners,” the memo said.

The blueprint called for Marshpearl to establish a company called Mecar SA, register it in Cyprus, and open a bank account for the new offshore entity to avoid Nigerian taxes on the income. The original Mecar would write up a bid for the contract and send it to Marshpearl, where the document would be scanned and altered to increase its value by 20%—commission for Quinn and his friends. Payment to the original Mecar would be routed through the offshore one. All documentation was to be delivered by hand.

The “paper trail” was Marshpearl’s greatest area of concern, the memo’s author wrote, without explaining why. Broadly speaking, while offshore companies have legitimate purposes, they’re also favored by those trying to avoid tax or government scrutiny or hide illicit income. In some jurisdictions, secrecy laws make it virtually impossible to find out who owns them. Registering a company with a virtually identical name to a separate, legitimate business would have the effect of further obscuring the real beneficiaries.

To a watchdog or another outside observer, the Mecar arrangement would look like a simple transaction between a respected manufacturer and the army, with the middleman getting its cut. A tender bid document sent by the offshore Mecar to the Ministry of Defense a few months after the memo’s date placed the contract’s ultimate value at €4.9 million ($5.6 million), meaning Marshpearl would have made almost a million euros.

Shown the memo at the Hilton bar, Murray said, “Very clever.” He didn’t see anything improper in the deal’s structure but added, “I wasn’t directly involved.” A spokesman for Mecar’s current owner, Nexter Group, said the Marshpearl deal took place before it acquired the company in 2014 and that it complies with rules and regulations.

The Art of the Failed Deal

It’s said that in Nigeria you can go from pauper to millionaire overnight and back again just as quickly. Even old hands could be caught out by a sudden shift in the political climate, as Quinn was in October 2006. That month, he was charged with espionage and handling secret military materials, alongside his son Adam, a close associate from Ireland named James Nolan, three Nigerian officials, and three individuals from Israel, Romania, and Russia. Details are sketchy, but one of the Nigerian officials submitted an affidavit saying the indictment was over a “large scale of contract scam which involves very senior officers of the Ministry.” Nolan and Adam Quinn didn’t respond to requests from Businessweekfor comment, but they denied the charges at the time. The prosecution appears to have been dropped within a year. A defense lawyer involved with the case recalls that the government intervened.”

That same year, Quinn formed P&ID and began exploring opportunities in gas power. He also branched out into medical technology. In 2006, more people were living with HIV/AIDS in Nigeria than in any country but South Africa or India. The Nigerian health ministry’s efforts to tackle the crisis included a multimillion-dollar partnership with Dublin-based Trinity Biotech Plc to supply HIV testing kits and help set up a factory at the Sheda Science & Technology Complex, which was being constructed outside Abuja. The contract for the factory went to an entity called Trinitron, which local media assumed was a subsidiary of the similarly named Irish company. In fact, it had no formal connection to Trinity Biotech of Dublin and was jointly owned by the health ministry and a group of Irish and Nigerian businessmen. Trinitron’s Irish directors included Adam Quinn and James Nolan, according to three people familiar with the deal. Quinn’s firm Industrial Consultants became a shareholder.

A few years into the contract, Trinity discovered that Trinitron had registered a company called Trinity Biotech Nigeria domestically and another called Trinity Biotech Joint Venture in the British Virgin Islands. Executives from the original Trinity were furious when they learned of the clones. In 2008 and 2009, they pulled out of the project entirely.

“Trinity Biotech had no ownership stake in Trinitron or the Sheda project or in any entity or assets within Nigeria,” the Dublin company said in a statement to Businessweek. “Our role in the project was the provision of HIV test kits, which we did, although we were left with a significant unpaid debt when the project ended.” Eventually, government funding dried up, and, according to two sources, Trinitron was reported to local police for allegedly misspending state funds, though no one was charged.

Gerry Nash, Trinitron’s former project director, said in a statement that test kit production at the factory in Nigeria hadn’t progressed because the health ministry wouldn’t buy the kits locally. “People in the Nigerian Ministries were more interested in picking up commissions on imported products,” he wrote. He said that Trinitron had succeeded in developing an IT system and in training HIV specialists, and he denied that the venture was a failure overall, even though the Sheda factory wound down after a few years.

Today, the Sheda site outside Abuja is overgrown with weeds. A pockmarked sign outside the front gate attests that Trinitron once operated there, but none of the buildings look functional. Gravel piles dot the parking lots. The handful of bored security guards and administrative staff on-site say only that Trinitron is no longer there.

When it wasn’t possible to squeeze profit directly from a floundering project, Quinn could enlist the law for the purpose. In 2010, Industrial Consultants brokered a $5 million deal with the Nigerian Air Force to repair ejector seats in six Alpha Jets, small fighter craft often used to train pilots. A British company called North Wales Military Aviation Services Ltd. would do the fixing.

A few months into the contract, the air force terminated it for no apparent reason. The ensuing dispute ended up before a Nigerian arbitration panel, which found that the military had pulled out for “flimsy, untenable, and unacceptable reasons.” It awarded NWMAS about $2.3 million for work allegedly done, plus interest, according to a copy of the private judgment seen by Businessweek.

The case was straightforward enough, apart from one detail: NWMAS didn’t know about any of it. In a statement, the company said its executives had hosted Nigerian officials but never got word it had won the job. Instead, a few months after the visit, it received a letter saying the air force was suing for nonperformance. NWMAS managers forwarded the letter to Quinn’s team and heard nothing further on the matter until being contacted by Businessweekearlier this year.

If NWMAS didn’t participate in the lawsuit, who did? Individuals from the Quinn organization. Long before the ejector seat contract was finalized, unbeknownst to the original company, Quinn’s team had registered a local entity called NWMAS Nigeria Ltd.—another clone.

Murray testified at the arbitration on behalf of NWMAS. “They never f---king paid,” he told Businessweek, referring to the Nigerian air force. He said the British NWMAS had been fully aware of the case and that NWMAS Nigeria had been created to comply with local regulations.

Quinn’s organization apparently had trouble collecting the award. In 2013, Cahill sent a message to colleagues about the struggle to enforce the judgment in Nigeria’s chaotic courts. “The moral of the story is that ideally the ‘seat’ of arbitration should be outside of Nigeria and preferably in London,” he wrote.

Quinn and Cahill already had a stake in at least two lawsuits against Nigeria before the British courts. One of the cases relates to IPCO (Nigeria) Ltd., formerly part of Singapore-based construction group IPCO International Ltd. The parent company sold most of its stake in 2003, leaving behind a shell company whose sole activity seems to have been to engage in lawsuits—notably a $150 million case against the Nigerian petroleum ministry over delays to the construction of an oil terminal. There were familiar allegations of overcharging, and the suit went all the way to the U.K. Supreme Court before being settled on confidential terms last year. How much IPCO Nigeria’s owners received and who benefited remains a mystery. You won’t find Quinn’s or Cahill’s name in the countless claims, counterclaims, and rulings produced since the case began more than a decade ago, but according to three people familiar with Cahill’s role, he helped manage the U.K. lawsuit for IPCO Nigeria in return for a share of the proceeds. The company’s director, Olu Adewunmi, declined to comment on whether Cahill was involved in the lawsuit.

The Big One

The other case, of course, was P&ID. Nigeria’s desire to end flaring and provide power to the troubled Niger Delta had offered Quinn, almost 70 and in poor health, an opportunity to secure his legacy. “Mick was sick,” Murray said. “He wanted to go out on a big one.”

In 2012, once it had grown obvious the gas project wouldn’t come off, P&ID invoked its right to take Nigeria to arbitration in London. Three judges, two Brits and a Nigerian, oversaw the proceedings. From the start, Nigeria’s government seemed reluctant to participate. Its lawyers in Lagos didn’t provide a list of preliminary arguments until January 2014. Later that year, a few weeks before the first scheduled hearing, they told the tribunal they might not be able to set out the government’s case in writing or attend, “due to the inability of our client to provide us with complete instructions.”

P&ID’s submissions included a lengthy witness statement from Quinn, one of his last public declarations before he died. He described spending two years and an estimated $40 million on preparatory work for the gas plant, including a 3D digital model. “I cannot say with any certainty why the government failed to honour the GSPA,” Quinn wrote of the gas sale and purchase agreement. He suspected pressure from international oil companies was to blame. “In any event, I very much regret that we were prevented from implementing the GSPA, which I firmly believe would have been of significant benefit to the nation.” In outlining his history in Nigeria, he didn’t mention any of his military deals, the espionage charge, or the two other lawsuits against the country.

On the basis of largely unchallenged evidence provided by P&ID, the judges dismissed Nigeria’s objections and proceeded to the next stage: damages. According to the Abuja-based Premium Times,Quinn’s company agreed to settle for $850 million, but the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, who’d taken office in May 2015, rejected the deal. When the tribunal convened a hearing on the matter, Nigeria called only one witness—a lawyer who, in the words of the judges, didn’t “claim firsthand knowledge of any of the relevant events.” In January 2017 they awarded P&ID the profits they calculated it had missed out on because the plant wasn’t built: $6.6 billion, more than three times its original estimate of losses.

A ruling in London didn’t guarantee payment, though. P&ID’s lawyers took the judgment to several hedge funds that specialize in wringing cash from bad debts, according to someone familiar with the conversations. Records show they found at least one taker: VR Capital Group Ltd., a fund manager with offices in London, New York, and Moscow.

VR acquired one quarter of P&ID—which really meant, because the only thing of value P&ID possesses is a favorable legal ruling, that it was buying a share of the suit’s proceeds, presumably in return for helping finance the legal action. (Reached by phone, VR Capital President Richard Deitz said, “No. Can’t talk. I’m busy,” then hung up. The company didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.) The remainder of P&ID is held by Cayman Islands-based Lismore Capital Ltd., whose ultimate owners are unknown. If the Nigerian government ever pays up, it will be impossible to know who benefits.

Last October law firm Kobre & Kim and public-relations specialist DCI Group registered with the U.S. Senate to lobby on behalf of P&ID. Op-eds critical of Nigeria soon appeared in Forbesand the Daily Telegraph, urging its government to honor the judgment; another, authored in London’s City A.M.newspaper by Priti Patel, a former British secretary of state for international development, accused the country of flouting international law. Journalists also began receiving messages from a group called P&ID Facts, whose emails list the same address as that of DCI Group. “The founders of P&ID have a track record of delivering in Nigeria and for Nigerians,” the organization’s website says. “The P&ID project was to be their swan song project after over three decades of public works projects in the country.”

Nigeria’s president thus far appears unmoved. A former general who styles himself as a simple cattle farmer and anticorruption crusader, Buhari has a relatively clean reputation. He responded angrily to Patel, issuing a statement through his spokesman that echoed what Pizzurro’s whistleblower had said: The P&ID lawsuit wasn’t what it appeared to be. “Before the coming of the Buhari administration, there existed in the country a racket encompassing elements in the three arms of government, the executive, legislature, and the judiciary through the activities of which artificial, engineered, and factored breaches of contract are made, judgments are obtained, appeals are delayed, and the penalty imposed is paid and shared,” the statement read. “Nigerians need to pity their own country for the way things were done in the past.”

A spokeswoman for P&ID said the panel of arbitrators had heard evidence from both sides and ruled unanimously that Nigeria failed to uphold its contractual commitments and was liable to P&ID. “It is unfortunate that instead of accepting the tribunal judgment and engaging in good-faith discussions to bring about a solution, President Buhari’s government has resorted to spreading unfounded allegations,” she said. She described the justice department’s corruption probe as a “sham” and said the government’s allegations were “entirely fictional,” adding, “The Nigerian people would be better served if the government made a serious offer to resolve this dispute rather than only blaming others, which will not make the legal obligation to pay go away.”

The list of Nigerians skeptical of P&ID’s position includes Danjuma, the 81-year-old billionaire and former general. In an interview with Businessweek, he said the gas flaring project was originally his idea, and that one of his companies, Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Ltd., had spent the $40 million preparing it, not Quinn. The Irishman had been a consultant, using Danjuma’s funds and office space, the general said. When Quinn applied for the contract himself, Danjuma was upset.

The realization dawned, he said, that “my consultant was going to steal my project.” He recalled being promised a share of P&ID in return for his initial investment, but added that he hadn’t heard from the company in years and that Cahill hadn’t replied to letters about the lawsuit. At one point, Danjuma dusted off his hands to emphasize the relationship’s end. P&ID’s spokesperson declined to comment on Danjuma’s involvement or any other matters raised in this story. Cahill didn’t respond to attempts to contact him directly.

Lights Out

At Quinn’s funeral in February 2015, they played The Lonesome Boatman, a flute ballad by the Fureys, one of the bands he’d managed in his youth. His obituaryin the Irish Independenttraced his love of Nigeria to those days, saying he’d found doing business there much like running show bands in the ’60s. “He was a clever guy, an honorable guy,” Murray said of his longtime friend. “He was trusted. How much money he made I don’t know. His house is a hell of a lot bigger than mine.”

In spite of Buhari’s comments and the criminal probe, Nigeria hasn’t made any formal allegations of misconduct, and it isn’t clear whether the country will challenge the deal’s legitimacy in court. Meanwhile, the $9 billion debt is growing by more than $1 million a day, because of interest. P&ID is now owed enough to fund Nigeria’s school system for seven years.

Or perhaps enough to eliminate flaring for good. In May an Abuja TV news program aired a segment about villagers who were using flames from the Niger Delta’s gas pipes to dry their fish, seemingly unaware of the health risks. “Communities don’t know the difference between day and night because they go to bed with active gas flare sites,” said Faith Nwadishi, a local activist. The show’s host was just beginning a sermon about electricity’s importance for economic development when a power outage struck, plunging central Abuja into darkness.

With Tope Alake, Matthew Campbell, Gavin Finch, Daryna Krasnolutska, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and Süddeutsche Zeitung

Bloomberg

In a memo by the Presidency to Mr Babatunde Fowler, Executive Chairman of Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the revenue boss was asked to explain why “actual collections for the period between 2016 and 2018 were significantly worse than what was collected between 2012 and 2014.” The memo also sought explanations for why actual revenue collections were consistently lower than projections in the three years under reference. Fowler was appointed to the position in August 2015.

For the discrepancies between targets and actual collections, the numbers are N5.008 trillion actual collection against the N3.64 trillion targeted for 2012; N4.806 trillion actual collection against the target of N4.469 trillion for 2013; and N4.715 trillion against the N4.086 trillion targeted for 2014. These give a total N14.529 trillion actual collection against N12.195 targeted for the three-year period. The extra N2.334 trillion represents 19 percent excess collection over projection for the period.

Under Fowler, actual collection in 2016 was N3.3 trillion against N4.2 trillion targeted; in 2017 it was N4.0 trillion actual against N4.8 trillion targeted; while in 2018, it was N5.3 trillion actual against N6.7 trillion targeted. The N12.6 trillion collected contrasts with the N15.7 trillion targeted for the full three years under Fowler. This represents 19.7 percent shortfall of target set for the 3-year period. In the 15-year period of 2000 to 2014, It was only in 2006 that failure to meet or surpass target occurred, despite the zigzag movement of GDP growth rates in that long period.

In gross terms, what Fowler collected between 2016 and 2018 was N1.869 trillion short of what was collected in the corresponding three years of 2012 - 2104. In real term - that is, controlling for inflation - Fowler’s actual collection of N12.6 trillion is worth only N7.2 trillion in 2014, if we discount 13 percent average annual inflation rate from 2018 back to 2014. It was for this dismal performance that the Presidency must have written to Fowler.

The parameters for assessing performance, to be sure, should be three: gross amounts actually collected, real value of actual collection (controlling for inflation), and target revenue set for the comparative periods. In the three parameters, Fowler failed spectacularly.

What was Fowler’s excuse for this failure? Low crude oil prices, the brief period of recession, and low GDP growth rates after recession. To start with, revenue targets are not set arbitrarily, but based on measurable indices as projected crude oil prices, GDP growth rate, inflation rate, Naira exchange rates, etc. Targets are also not set and handed to FIRS by some external authorities, but arrived at in collaborative work between Federal Ministry of Finance and FIRS on the basis of the measurable indices cited above. For Fowler to now seek to rationalise his failure on the basis of low crude oil prices and reduced GDP growth rates, both of which had been factored into the relatively low targets set for him, is to be clever by half.

When ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo assumed office in 1999, he met crude oil prices that went as low $12 per barrel. Yet, actual revenue collections consistently exceeded targeted revenue in his 8-year presidency, except in 2006. In the same period, GDP growth rates were sluggish.

Since Fowler mentioned the fact of lower crude oil receipts in the period under him vis-a-vis 2012-2014, it is important that we disaggregate that also. If, for instance, crude oil sold on the average of $100 per barrel in the period 2012-2014, while it sold for half of that in the corresponding period of 2016-2018, with the percentage royalty from the gross crude oil prices paid to Nigerian government kept constant, then, certainly the Petroleum Income Tax (PIT) paid to FIRS would be roughly half of what it used to be. But between 2014 and 2018, Naira was devalued from N160 to N306 to $1. Since FIRS is paid in Naira and its collections denominated in the same Naira, what was lost in reduced oil prices and sometimes reduced crude oil quantities was compensated for by the more Naira volumes collected for lower dollar volumes.

Whatever gross shortfall that might still remain (I doubt if any should) should be made up for in the expansion of the base from the 10 million tax payers Fowler inherited to the reported 20 million under him. Even if the new addition to the tax base paid only 30 percent of the extant amount paid by those inherited, the results posted by Fowler would and should have been far better.

In another defense of his performance, Fowler pointed out that non-oil taxes such as VAT, capital gain tax, stamp duties, etc, increased consistently on his watch. Good. But how did those other taxes increase steadily under the same inclement GDP and macroeconomic conditions that Fowler cited as his undoing? See the contradiction?

So, if the macroeconomic circumstances cited by Fowler as cause of his gross underperformance are not the culprits, what then is the cause?

In a news report by The Sun newspaper of August 26, 2019,  many cases of corruption reported by key staff of FIRS were cited. While I do not have means of getting foolproof evidence of those allegations, but those of us who knew the goings-on in Lagos Internal Revenue Service (LIRS) under Fowler and subsequently, as well as the Barracuda of a godfather who nominated him to the post, were certain that Nigeria would get the short end of the stick under him at the FIRS. Fowler is too much of an establishment person, a social circle constant, to make any transformative contributions in FIRS. Did anyone one hear of any prominent player in the private sector prosecuted for tax fraud under Fowler? Dogs don’t eat dogs!

For a touted wizkid brought in time of crisis to make a fundamental difference in the revenue profile of the country to cite the same crisis that warranted his appointment in the first place as reason for non-performance is fraudulent and an insult to public intelligence.

Professor Ishaq Oloyede met a JAMB where his predecessor had been making a yearly remittance to the Federal Government of N3 million. In the first year of his tenure, he remitted N7.8 billion. Even after slashing the examination fee paid by JAMB candidates, and greatly improving both the processes and quality of the examination, Oloyede still remitted more than N5 billion after the last examination. We’re also aware of the transformation Dr Dada is making at the Federal Medical Centre, Ebute Meta, Lagos with the same inherited staff and allocated resources. These competent and honest Nigerians, to cite just two of them, are operating under the same harsh socio-economic environment that Fowler is crying about.

I close by asking the Presidency to beam its searchlights on other revenue generating agencies as the Nigeria Customs Service, NPA, NIMASA, Immigration, among others. A lot of incompetence and heists will be uncovered in them also. This is absolutely necessary given the alarm sounded by the Federal Government that the country is faced with the threat of a terrible fiscal crisis.

* Kawonise, a former Commissioner for Information and Orientation in Ogun state, is Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of NewsScroll newspaper

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn – Proverbs 29: 2.

One tale by the moonlight that Granma regaled us with in those good old days involved Tortoise, Lion and Monkey. Tortoise, mischievous as ever, came across a gathering of other animals and said what seemed as a simple prayer: May we not pay the debt we did not owe; may the problem we knew nothing about not become ours; and may we not be asked to vomit what we did not eat (See also King David in Psalm 35: 11). The other animals, suspicious of Tortoise and his bag of deceits, demonstrated wisdom by saying “Amen” but Monkey, thinking he was wise, refused to follow suit. Tortoise went his way but not before he had boasted he would teach Monkey a lesson. Monkey, like Nigeria, went away, making trifles of Tortoise’s threat and thinking that was the end of the matter. Tortoise ransacked his bag of deceit. Soon, he found an appropriate recipe for his plot against Monkey.

Tortoise prepared a good-to-behold cake and laced it with honey. He then went in search of Lion. Getting to the king of the jungle, Tortoise saluted and said he had just made a discovery and, because of the highest regard he had for Lion, he felt he (Lion) should be the first to know of the discovery. Tortoise took out the cake he had made and gave to Lion, Lion tasted the cake and couldn’t belief his taste buds. He demanded for more of the delicacy but Tortoise said that was all he had. Lion would have none of that and insisted he must have more or Tortoise should consider himself a goner. Tortoise pleaded for his life and then told Lion the “secret” – That cake was the excreta of Monkey! Lion screamed! Tortoise saw the excitement on Lion’s face and knew his plot had worked. He advised the king of the jungle: If you want more of the delicacy, go early in the morning to Monkey’s house, his very first excreta will yield you the most delicious cake on earth. But if, as Monkey that he is, he chooses to play monkey game with you by refusing to bring forth a delicious cake, pummel his stomach very well and yell at him: ‘Monkey, bring forth delicious cake!’” Lion thanked Tortoise, went and laid ambush to Monkey’s house.

As Monkey came out in the morning, Lion pounced on him and commanded him to excrete delicious cake. Monkey, not understanding what Lion meant, protested. Lion remembered Tortoise’s advice and grabbed Monkey’s two hands and began to pummel his stomach, screaming: “Thou Monkey, bring forth delicious cake” Monkey excreted by fire by force. Lion grabbed the excreta and thrust it into his mouth. Rubbish! He spewed it out and eyed Monkey menacingly. So, you have decided, like Tortoise warned me, to play monkey game? He pummelled Monkey again and again. Each time Monkey excreted and Lion tasted it, it was not like the delicious cake Tortoise had given him. So he pummelled Monkey the more. Monkey’s life ebbed but Lion would not relent. Other animals gathered, the SOS of Monkey having reached their ears. Of course, an elated Tortoise hid somewhere near watching proceedings. The other animals asked Lion and Tortoise to state their case; it was then they realised that Tortoise was the proverbial “eku eda” or agent provocateur. So was Monkey rescued from the iron-grip of Lion!

Afterwards, Tortoise found out Monkey and repeated his prayer: May we not pay the debt we did not owe; may the problem we knew nothing about not become ours; and may we not be asked to vomit what we did not eat. This time around, Monkey, wiser after the act, wasted no time to say “Amen” That is why Monkey goes about to this day shouting “Amen”, “Amen” “Amen”.

Nigeria is the Monkey and a British firm asking Nigeria to pay for what it did not buy is Tortoise. We are being asked to vomit what we did not eat. This country may lose a whopping US$9.6 billion just for nothing – well, not just for nothing in the real sense of the word. It is for our famed tardiness and lack of seriousness; it is for our legendary fire brigade and lackadaisical approach to issues. We are being punished for our impunity and penchant to breach agreements and treat principles as scum. Petty local politics of seeing nothing good in a previous government may now cost us, a poor country by all standards, twenty percent of our meagre foreign exchange reserves. Not that the British company in question lifted a finger or turned the sod of any enterprise here. It is only leveraging on our folly, care-free-attitude, wastefulness, indifference, diffidence, and loss of respect and standing in the eyes of the international community to make this kill.

The oracle asked a man seeking after sudden wealth to go bring a man’s footprints for a sacrifice. He went all over but returned to say he couldn’t find the footprints of any sane man but those of a mad man. The medium was livid: Which sane man would let you have his footprints if not a mad man? Which sane country can fall into this kind of trap if not Nigeria? Which people or leaders, to be more specific, can be this laid-back and thread-bare of every modicum of responsibility and sensibility if not Nigerians and their leaders? Governments here treat agreements the same way Adolf Hitler held Versailles Treaty which ended the First World War, declared it mere piece of paper, held it up and tore it into shreds to the consternation of other world leaders, triggering the Second World War. Ask NLC! Ask ASUU! Ask anyone else that has had the misfortune of entering into agreements with Government here. We treat agreements as trivia. Ask our sportsmen and women at the on-going African Games in Morocco. Ask our footballers, dead and living!

It must be Monkey’s wisdom - and the monkey game our leaders play with our Treasury – that made a claim of US$40 million to become US$250million, then US$850million, then US$6.6billion, then US$8.9billion and now US$9.6 billion and still counting! And not that the foreign firm lifted a finger here! It did not put one brick upon another! What we are being punished for is our penchant for being careless and carefree. Everyone has come to know us as a country and people that throw away their riches while their people wallow in penury. Nigeria is a huge cesspit of corruption and anything-goes and only a mad man will not profit from it. We are a bazaar where everyone who has an opportunity makes a kill. In which other country of the world can this happen? Which other country can be this wasteful? Which other leaders can commit this hara-kiri and still sit pretty in office; not just sitting pretty but also junketing about, frittering the little that will remain after this judgment debt is paid? Only in Nigeria can this happen! And no one will be called to question! No heads will roll! The Muhammadu Buhari/APC government sat on this for over four years; at the point that the PDP/Goodluck Jonathan exited, our liabilities were just US$850m; that was bad enough. What it has now become under Buhari/APC is simply bewildering. Fela aptly described this as “Oro p’esi je o/Oro di hun” Just confounding! Simply perplexing! Unbelievable! Such mediocrity! Such wantonness!

Now, this is a classical case of a Nero that fiddled while the country burned. Between this leadership deficiency and notoriety and the e-mail and other internet fraudulent activities of Nigerians (youths?) abroad that have given the country a bad image, which makes us more of a laughing stock? Can we still disagree with David Cameron’s characterization of Nigeria as a fantastically corrupt country or of Donald Trump description of our leadership as lifeless and our country as shithole? Can we look Robert Mugabe or the Russian and Chinese leaders in the eyes and complain about their making Nigeria and Nigerians the butt of cruel jokes? How many days of national mourning will Government declare for this monumental calamity and for the national flag to fly at half mast?

FEEDBACK

The Nuremberg treatment was good for Ike Ekweremadu: The yams that were planted and harvested in his ancestral home, he went to eat and celebrate in Germany! What a shame! The cost of his travel and sundry expenses for this purpose were more than enough to make his village and community happy. Go to his village – so many farmers don’t have wheel barrows to transport their yams from the farm to the house; neither improved seedlings nor fertilizers to increase their yield in the next farming season. He incurred the wrath of the gods! – Frank, Aba.