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There is a saying, long attributed to the fog and frustration of Anglo-Irish relations, that goes roughly as follows: anyone who claims to have an answer to the Irish Question has clearly not understood the question. The precise origin of the quip is itself disputed, a fitting irony for an observation about irresolvability. Some give it to Benjamin Disraeli, that most theatrical of Victorian prime ministers.
There is something almost uniquely Nigerian about discovering that a government agency is fake after it has been given an office, treated as official, populated with officials, recognised by other parts of government and, in one case, even found its way into the national budget.
Tinubu also ordered the immediate suspension of three permanent secretaries allegedly linked to the operation of the fake agency and ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to conduct an investigation into its formation and operation.
When Senator Oluremi Tinubu mounted the altar during the inter-denominational church service at the National Christian Centre in Abuja on the eve of the inauguration of the then president-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu and gracefully announced that she would be one of the oldest first ladies in Nigeria, not many knew she would also go down in history as one of the most influential wives of presidents.
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 