Solomon Jirgba

Tony Elumelu speaks on the reason why investing in Africa is the best thing you can do for yourself as an investor. Let’s hear him: Why is the perception of risk towards Africa so skewed? As an investor with a diversified portfolio across 4 continents—from power to oil & gas, financial services, and healthcare—I can tell you one thing: nowhere else offers the kind of ROI than Africa does. Take our Heirs_Holdings Group, for example. We have the capacity to generate 2,000MW of electricity daily, and today, with available capacity of circa 1000MWs-That’s transformative impact and significant value creation on a continent where energy access remains a key challenge. Africa’s greatest asset? Its people. With a median age of 19 and 65% of our 1.5 billion population under 30, we have an unstoppable demographic advantage. This youthful energy is a goldmine for investment, innovation, and economic growth. Every challenge in Africa—whether it's infrastructure deficit , energy insufficiency , or transportation inadequacy —is an investment opportunity. The key is identifying these gaps and structuring your approach to mitigate the risks. That’s where the competitive edge lies.

Gov Hyacinth Iormem Alia has approved a training program for 2000 young individuals aged 18-40 in sustainable agricultural systems development. Location: Training will be held in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). How to Register: - Visit the Benue State Agricultural Development Company, Wadata Silos, 69/71 Bank Road, for data capturing. - Alternatively, you can send your details (NIN, name, date of birth, phone number, gender, and Local Government Area) to 07067580235. Registration Deadline: Closes on 19th February 2025 @ 12 noon. Important: Participants must be indigenes of Benue State. Signed, Donald Aorkwagh Akule MD/CEO, Benue State Agricultural Development Company

Ukpo-born billionaire Arthur Eze this afternoon donated 500 million in cash to the IBB presidential library. He was not the only one. Dangote dropped 8 billion for the construction of the library, which is 2 billion every year for the next 4 years and an extra 2 billion if the library extends to the next year after the expiration of the 4 years. BUA Cement founder, Samad, dropped 5 billion. Nigeria’s richest woman, Alakija, dropped her own donation, which was not mentioned. It was a gathering of the super-rich Nigerians, and they gathered to honour Nigeria’s former president, IBB. Babaginda is no longer in power and has no favour to dispense to these successful men and women, but these wealthy businessmen and women were all made by him, so they came to say thank you, just like the lepers healed in the Bible by Jesus Christ. In a glowing tribute, Arthur Eze revealed how Babangida made him what he is today. Without you, I could have been a dead man." He met IBB in 1979, and his life changed after that encounter. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, said the same thing. He was a small trader when Babangida became president in 1985. IBB’s influence and help helped him to scale to the Aliko Dangote that we know today. As I was watching this moving tribute by Nigeria’s finest businessmen and women, I was reminded why it is important to empower and build people. We all need help, one way or the other, and when you empower one Arthur Eze, it creates a ripple effect. Families are taken out of poverty. Jobs are created, and more people in need are genuinely helped. No man is an island; we all need help one way or the other. Pentecostals of this world call people like IBB destiny helpers, and it is befitting. For the Arthur Eze of this world, it was IBB that gave them a shoulder to stand on to see far, a ladder to go far in life. To every enterprising young person out there who genuinely works hard, myself included. May our own destiny helper locate us soon.

QUESTIONS FOR GOVERNOR ALIA I have a question for my state governor, Hyacint Alia, and his people: what is his governing vision gan? Is it ruling through chaos and conflict? Is that the logic of his governing craft? The man seems to relish picking fights with any and everybody. He also seems to enjoy prolonging existing fights. Conversely, he seems uncomfortable and bored with normalcy and stability. The governor’s fights don’t seem spontaneous. Rather, they look like well orchestrated melodramatic events. The only problem is that one does not know what their end goals and endpoints are. What does he hope to gain from these fights and how do they advance whatever governing outcomes he envisions for Benue state in his first term? I’d appreciate it if the governor’s people would explain it to me in very simple terms and in doing so let us into the internal logic of the governor’s calculation. As we speak, Governor Alia is fighting with his political godfather, SGF George Akume, the state APC and its leaders, the Chief Judge and the state judiciary, his predecessor, numerous political stakeholders, members of the state NASS delegation across all three senatorial zones, and some members of the State House of Assembly. Another question: is he governing through denial? Is denial a strategy of governance? Many parts of the state are being attacked by armed herdsmen simultaneously. Scores are being killed in these attacks. Whole towns and villages are being sacked and occupied by the marauders. IDPs are being produced in numbers not seen recently. Yet the governor’s solution is to simply declare the state’s insecurity crisis solved by virtue of his becoming governor. He declared that attacks have ceased, ordered local government chairmen to accommodate and mollify the attackers, and frowned at people talking about the attacks, as though not talking about them makes them go away and vice versa. You don’t solve a problem by wishing it away or denying it, but that’s what Alia seems to be attempting to do in a perplexingly novel approach to governance. We will see how far this strange paradigm takes him. A final question: does the governor believe that Benue begins and ends in Makurdi, or that flyovers, the costly, concrete, and in some cases unnecessary urban infrastructure that’s the new fad among governors, are the short, medium, or long term solution to the state’s longstanding infrastructure deficit? I hope the governor realizes that the state’s rural areas need as much attention, if not more, than Makurdi.

In today's Saturday Tribune column, I look at the shifting alliances in the country in preparation for the 2027 election and point out that no one seems to care about the plight of common people: As Foes and Friends Unite Against Tinubu By Farooq A. Kperogi Although 2025 has only just begun, the Machiavellian maneuvers and the increasingly tensile, high-decibel political shrieks being emitted by politicians about the 2027 election might lead one to believe that the election will take place next year. Of all the political realignments that are forming preparatory to the 2027 election, it’s the unity in political adversity between former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Governor Nasir El-Rufai that strikes me as the most intriguing. El-Rufai feels understandably betrayed by his humiliating exclusion from the Bola Tinubu administration whose ascent to power he helped to facilitate with uncommon vim and vigor. Nonetheless, he is protesting his betrayal by making common cause with Atiku Abubakar whom he had serially stabbed in the back more treacherously than Tinubu has thrown him under the bus. It is akin, in a way, to a soldier who, after leading a fierce battle to enthrone a king, finds himself cast out of the palace. Wounded and seething, he seeks refuge in the camp of an old mentor and ally whom he once betrayed in the heat of war, hoping that their shared resentment for the new ruler will be enough to overlook past treacheries. Recall that El-Rufai consistently disclaimed any debt to Atiku Abubakar in his political rise even when leaked US Embassy cables quoted him as telling US Embassy officials that Atiku is the single most important reason he made an “accidental” detour to public service. Worse still, he was the lynchpin in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s all-out, no-holds-barred, scorched-earth decimation of Atiku’s presidential aspirations. As I pointed out in my August 12, 2023, column titled “El-Rufai’s Betrayal and Akpabio’s Buffoonery,” it was El-Rufai who carried Obasanjo’s messages to Western embassies saying Atiku must never be allowed to be president. “On September 21, 2006, for instance, El-Rufai met with the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and the UK High Commissioner ‘under instruction’ from President Obasanjo to inform them of and seek their blessing to deny Atiku Abubakar the chance to succeed Obasanjo,” I wrote and characterized El-Rufai’s volte face as “a wild change of loyalties.” Of course, it’s a banal fact of Third World life that betrayal is the lifeblood of partisan politics. So, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about El-Rufai’s duplicity. In any case, El-Rufai had also ridiculed Muhammadu Buhari as a bigot who was “serially unelectable” but later embraced him and even became the single most important reason why Buhari decided to run for president again, according to Buhari himself. Yet, although Atiku must have developed a thick skin to perfidy (I am sure he, too, has stabbed quite a few people in the back in the course of his political career), I can’t help but wonder what goes on in his mind when he strategizes with El-Rufai toward the political containment of their common foe now. Does he see El-Rufai as a repentant traitor seeking redemption, or merely as a desperate, scorned man whose newfound friendship is actuated by opportunistic political self-preservation rather than conviction? Atiku must feel like sharing a meal with a man who once poisoned his drink. He will probably watch his hands closely and weigh his every word, knowing that today’s ally could easily be tomorrow’s betrayer. Nevertheless, in the ruthless calculus of politics, perhaps Atiku understands that some alliances, however uneasy, are dictated not by trust, but by the urgency of a common enemy. This sentiment underpins the rumored subterranean rapprochement between Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Although they appear to be at loggerheads, there are credible hints that Abdullahi Ganduje’s recent appointment to the chairmanship of the board of the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria is a calculated first step to strategically ease him out of the chairmanship of the APC, which is said to be the irreducible minimum for Kwankwaso’s alliance with Tinubu. A Tinubu-Kwankwaso alliance is projected to be a formidable checkmate for the emerging Atiku-El-Rufai coalition. However, in all the alliances and re-alliances that are being formed and reformed and the boundaries of friendship and betrayal that are being negotiated and renegotiated, one thing has been remarkably missing: how to reverse the progressively worsening plight of common people. The condition of poor people who are vulnerable to the whirlingly blinding vagaries of market forces is the cornerstone of my public intellection. This sprouts from my own experiential brushes with poverty growing up. Although I have escaped my past condition, I have not lost, and won’t ever lose, my empathy for the poor. None of the people strategizing about taking over or retaining power in 2027 spares a thought for the seemingly irreversible death spiral that cruel neoliberal economics has visited on the masses of economically disinherited Nigerians. That worries me deeply. It is obvious that even so-called opposition politicians don’t have an alternative template for husbanding the economy. That’s why their criticism of the present torment has been muted at best. They all believe the state should be rolled back from the quotidian life of everyday folk and that governments have no responsibility to assist citizens to live decent, dignified lives. This style of government frees people in power from the responsibility to be accountable to the people and the license to jettison the unwritten social contract they signed with the people. They all want a country where, as I pointed out in the past, the economy will “grow” even if that causes the people to growl. “After the economy has ‘grown’ but the people still groan, where is the growth?” I wrote in my June 24, 2023. That is precisely what is happening in Argentina, which is pursuing similar inhumane market-centric policies as Tinubu. Argentina’s populist rightwing president is getting plaudits for “growing” the economy while the people are growling in anguish. He is being celebrated for achieving a budget surplus at the expense of deep deficits in people’s quality of life, at the cost of a recessionary economy that has plunged more than half of the country into extreme poverty. The Western press is also praising Tinubu’s “reforms.” No politician, to my knowledge, is talking about a more compassionate, people-centered approach to managing the economy. Unfortunately, the people don’t seem to care. Maybe that’s why the politicians don’t care, either. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the politicians stopped caring first, numbing the people into apathy through years of airy promises and performative concern. When hardship becomes routine and disappointment a certainty, cynicism replaces hope, and survival takes precedence over ideals. In such a climate, politics becomes a spectacle rather than a means of change, and the people, resigned to their fate, watch passively, expecting nothing and receiving exactly that. Betrand Russell could very well be describing Nigeria’s situation when he wrote 1923 that “A very large percentage of English-speaking people really believe that the ills from which they suffer would be cured if a certain political party were in power. That is a reason for the swing of the pendulum. “A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that was to bring the millennium. By the time he is disenchanted with all parties, he is an old man on the verge of death; his sons retain the belief of his youth, and the see-saw goes on.”

Akanbi was supporting the progressives as a private citizen when he was working at Mobil. It was because of that gesture that he was advised by Baba Olusi and other elders in the progressive family in Lagos to join politics. They felt that he would be more 'useful' in a public office than he was in a multinational organization. He resigned and joined politics and in 1992, he won election to represent Lagos West in the senate with the highest number of votes in Nigeria as a senator. He was to be the senate president until MKO Abiola showed interest to contest for president under same party, the real SDP, Social Democratic Party, not this present platform for the aggrieved. He felt that a country as ethnically diversed like ours can not have one geopolitical zone producing the senate president and the president and so without Abiola approaching him, he let go of his ambition and supporter Iyochia Ayu from Benue state to take that office. Abiola won but Babangida annulled the election and so Tinubu again used his enormous resources to finance pro-democracy groups and when Abacha wanted to eliminate him after setting ablaze his home where he lost some vital documents, he wore one of his wife's clothes to escape through the Nigerian-Benin Republic border and continued to sponsor the struggle for restoration of democracy to Nigeria. He was not the only rich man sponsoring these groups, Pa Alfred Rewane was doing same and that was why he was killed. Abacha died and Tinubu came back home to a rousing welcome by Lagos progressives. He wanted to return to the senate when Abdusalami seemed serious about returning us to democratic governance but those leaders who wanted to appreciate his contribution to the struggle for return to democracy turned him down and said that the only befitting office was the Office of the Governor of Lagos State. And that was how Ogunlere became Governor in 1999. He was in office for 8 years. He then wanted to return to the senate but there was a certain Fashola whom he had identified as a worthy successor but Fashola had no political structure anywhere in Lagos and so Tinubu felt that he would have to devote his whole time and resources to Fashola's project, his project. He therefore, asked Ganiyu Solomon to go to the senate instead of him. Tinubu backed Fashola and did not hold any position in office since the day he left office for Fashola. Rather, he was working underground, identifying great minds across SW age Edo state and supporting them to become governors with his resources as he was doing even before he joined politics. The climax came when he formed APC with Buhari and others. Tinubu was mocked for being irrelevant under Buhari government but Akanbi had installed fPMB and he knew that he must not rock the boat. He therefore, did not run to any tv station to run down the Buhari government just because he was mocked for not recognized by that government. He did not become the mouthpiece of the opposition. He was calm, observant and strategic. He was building more bridges across the country. When Buhari imposed Abdullahi Adamu on the party and did not allow election to take place where Al-Makura was poised to defeat Adamu, neither Tinubu nor Al-Makura went to a tv station to lament. Tinubu waited until when APC started selling presidential nomination form. He got his and because he was the best and the most prepared with patience and ability to control his emotions, he defeated a sitting vice president, a senate president, governors and ministers yet the last time he was in government was 2007! All of them combined did not get 50% of the votes he got. Again, he is calm now. He is focused on the job at hand which is to fix Nigeria while those who feel entitled to every slot that is allocated to their state including Kayode Fayemi are running to every tv station telling Nigerians that the party has failed them. They know that subsidy had to go. In fact they agitated for its removal when they were governors. They also know that the unification of the foreign exchange market was also necessary. At least, their emir, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi told them and they all agreed. They knew too that those two policies would cause us a temporary hardship but they have decided to become activists today. Lol They forgot that Tinubu was patient, calm, quiet and strategic after leaving office and did not become the mouthpiece of the opposition because he was not in office after 2007. 2027 will be interesting as Akanbi is poised to again trounce his opponents again without running from one tv station to another. #SWA