Masari’s strange musings and other stories

The original title for this write-up was The Strange Logic According to Masari and Marwa. Aminu Bello Masari is the governor of Katsina, North-West Nigeria. Brigadier-Gen Mohammed Buba Marwa (rtd), former military governor of Borno State (1990-1992) and Lagos State (1996-1999) is the chairman of NDLEA (National Drug Law Enforcement Agency). Both men were in the news last week for different reasons: Masari was interviewed by Seun Okinbaloye for “Politics Today” on Channels TV, on Wednesday, March 17, 2021. Among other things, Masari while trying to prove that security has improved under President Buhari said: “Let’s take 2015, you cannot go to the church, you cannot go to the mosque. If I travel from Kaduna to Abuja, it will take five hours, three of those hours are for checkpoints. I will meet nothing less than 30 checkpoints. Is the situation the same today? It is not… Yes, there are kidnappers, there are bandits around but look at the whole world and look at the position of Nigeria in the Sahelian region. Are we not the richest? So, the attraction even for kidnappers to come to Nigeria is there. If you kidnap somebody in Mali, where are you going to get thousands? If I kidnap you in Nigeria, I get millions. So, all of us will have to rise to the occasion.”

There’s a lot to unpack from this quote alone. However, what caught mine and the attention of many others was the bit about Nigeria being attractive to kidnappers because it’s the richest country in the ‘Sahelian’ region. What sort of reasoning is this? And I have to wonder who is the “all of us” that “will have to rise to the occasion”? How many of us are responsible for security in Nigeria? How many of us made an election promise to make insecurity a thing of the past? I’m tired of this sort of revisionist history about 2015. So, life was horrible in 2015? But that was why Nigerians presumably voted for ‘change’, not so? No one really needs to be reminded about 2015 because quite a few people are now seeing the light, having tasted 6 years of the current government.

Marwa, on the other hand, was reported as saying that parents may soon be required to provide documents showing their children’s potential spouses are drug-free. This document to certify potential spouses free of illicit drugs will expectedly be given by the NDLEA. Marwa was a guest in Ado-Ekiti, at a colloquium titled: “Walk Away from Drugs’’, organised by the ministry of justice, Ekiti state. Will this proposed document be renewable? If yes, what’ll be the expiration span, every 2 or 5 years? How will the NDLEA ensure that people don’t go back to drugs as soon as they’ve got the document? And so on and so forth the confusion goes. I’m also not clear if only men are expected to get this document. Or will both sets of parents (bride and groom) need to get the drug-free certificate? It doesn’t appear as if enough thought has been given to this. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone announced a national policy on policing alcohol, some sort of back door Hisbah. Kano is very clean and holy at the moment. Why not spread the good news? But I digress.

So, for the purposes of the write-up, I’ll focus on Gov. Masari. Not just because of what he said but because he was in an actual interview. His interviewer Seun Okinbaloye had the opportunity to push-back on some of the Governor’s more misleading statements. For instance, what did Seun Okinbaloye say when Masari said: “Let’s take 2015, you cannot go to the church, you cannot go to the mosque. If I travel from Kaduna to Abuja, it will take five hours, three of those hours are for checkpoints. I will meet nothing less than 30 checkpoints. Is the situation the same today? It is not…”? People travelling from Abuja to Kaduna are robbed and kidnapped at will and many are complaining of inadequate policing on that route. Instead of the many checkpoints denounces, today’s travellers complain there isn’t adequate police presence. This is fairly common knowledge. Between 2015 and 2019, all kinds of people have been kidnapped. In June 2016, Alfred Nelson-Williams, Sierra Leone’s deputy high commissioner to Nigeria was kidnapped on the Abuja Kaduna highway. Surely the Channels TV presenter knows this and more?

The other half of Gov. Masari’s conversation on “Politics Today” that didn’t get as much traction is what he had to say about how well his party the APC is doing. The main question was how the APC will cope after President Buhari’s exit or words to that effect. I’ll attempt to share excerpts and because there was little or no pushback from host Seun Okinbaloye, I’ll insert likely questions he could’ve asked. In responding to APC’s chances in 2023, Masari said: “APC has a bright future in Nigeria…We are marketing APC and people are coming out to register” [Which people? Hungry and frustrated politicians who can’t stand being in the opposition? Or is the idea to impoverish people, make them survive hand-to-mouth so they’ll have no option but join the ruling party?]

“Yes, we have problems with elites like you…but no government since Independence has brought social intervention like the APC government…” Masari couldn’t help his victory song. He then waxed on about the social intervention being given by the federal government especially in his state, Katsina: “Billions of Naira has been paid to ordinary people…People are getting alerts of 30k, 500k all over the country.” YET. Talk about giving people fish instead of teaching them to fish. Suffice it to say that I do not know anyone who has received these alerts. And I do know a few people who need financial assistance.

“It’s not about long roads or 100 floors skyscrapers,” someone else can come tomorrow and build taller buildings. But aren’t roads good for business, helping to transport goods, etc? If we follow his logic, can’t someone else pay larger sums of money in future? By this logic, I wouldn’t be surprised if Masari said the provision of regular electricity was overrated so long as you can keep sending money to people they can’t even account for.

At some point, Seun Okinbaloye managed a pushback by pointing out that inflation figures are higher today than in 2015 and that the poverty rate tells a different story. I would’ve preferred if he had some actual stats. Not sure if this could’ve fazed the governor as he cut in to ask if the population in 2015 is the same with 2021? I am not sure how this is relevant. He also mentioned that oil prices had fallen, and asked if COVID-19 was a creation by APC? The governor concluded by saying that without the government’s social intervention programmes, the situation would’ve been worse. Worse than Nigeria being the poverty capital of the world? Yet, Masari insisted that: “If APC hadn’t come back with “Go back to the land” with Anchor (loans), banned the importation of rice, what would’ve happened, would there be food?” Seun Okinbaloye could’ve asked whether we now have food in surplus. much is a bag of rice, local or foreign? He could also have asked how the ‘Go back to the land’ was panning out considering that farmers can’t go to their farms because of insecurity. Just last week, Benue State governor Ortom barely escaped with his life when he was chaased by suspected kidnappers or assassins who chased him from his farm. A whole sitting governor!

When Seun Okinbaloye responded to the governor with: “So you think your party was a saviour” to Nigerians,” I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. But Masari promptly cut in with: “Of course! By all means, let everyone come with their balance sheet for the government of yesterday and today and compare notes.” How about $1 being almost N500. In February 2015, $1 was about N196.

Again, it isn’t about what Masari said. I’ve listened to enough political office holders especially in this dispensation to not be surprised by his reasoning. There’s a certain deliberate stubborn obtuseness, an arrogant denseness which sometimes defy logic. Sometimes it seems as if there’s a competition on who can say the most ridiculous things, which is putting it mildly. It’s like there’s some #MumuOlympics And because the mouth speaks from the abundance of what’s in the heart… If this what these people are saying in public, I shudder to think of what goes on behind closed doors. This also shows the quality of thinking t(or the lack thereof) that goes into policymaking at the highest order.

As I was writing this, there are all kinds of headlines: Government wants people to prove the source of their wealth, etc. Lauretta Onochie, a presidential aide on social media attributed the #lifestyleaudit to the ICPC. Talk about chasing shadows. Youth unemployment was announced as being 45.5%. How does government respond? It’s like the government is stuck on pre-2015 propaganda. Before ordinary citizens prove the source of their livelihood, who is tracking the kidnappers who’re making a killing on ransoms? Is the EFCC or DSS or even the ICPC following up? In fact, whatever happened to the alleged Nigerian sponsors of Boko Haram reported by the UAE?

Nwabuikwu, AIRTIME columnist is a renowned TV/film critic and film scholar. She also has experience in advertising as a senior copywriter and corporate communications as a communications consultant.