Reporting News and opinions
Central to the indictment was the breathless lamentation over the demolition of the old Benin Central Hospital. Listening to the rhetoric, one would assume the facility was a pristine sanctuary of modern medicine arbitrarily flattened to make way for art.
At the recent television and press send-off for the immediate past Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, this ritual reached a high art. The man who spent a decade at the helm was rightly credited with making JAMB more technology-driven, more orderly, and less of a cash-and-carry bazaar than the one he inherited. Fair enough. Reforms happened. Remittances improved. The board stopped resembling a particularly leaky colander. One can acknowledge progress without descending into hagiography.
Yesterday’s political victim can become tomorrow’s political kingmaker. Yesterday’s opposition politician can become tomorrow’s occupant of the very office controlled by the political establishment he once opposed.
We are told this is the silver bullet for our security paralysis. But as Nigeria stands on the precipice of altering Section 9 and dismantling Item 45 of the Exclusive Legislative List, we must ask: Are we solving a modern security crisis, or are we reawakening old ghosts that once broke the back of our democracy?
Nobody disputes the premise. Hunger did, in fact, predate Bola Tinubu, in the same sense that gravity predated Isaac Newton. The trouble is what the premise is being asked to do. It is not offered as background. It is offered as an alibi, the rhetorical equivalent of a defendant telling the court that crime existed before he was born, and therefore he cannot reasonably be expected to account for the burglary. The doctrine of necessity has been stretched to cover many things in Nigerian constitutional history; this may be the first time it has been invoked to cover a grocery bill.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 