RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Kissinger makes Ukraine peace prediction

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has told CBS News that the conflict in Ukraine may be approaching a turning point, and that Chinese-brokered peace talks could begin by the end of 2023.

"Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year," the 99-year-old diplomat told CBS in an interview broadcast on Sunday. By that time, he continued, "we will be talking about negotiating processes and even actual negotiations." 

With the release of its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’ in February, China put itself forward as a potential mediator between Moscow and Kiev. The Chinese plan was rejected outright by the US and EU, while Russian President Vladimir Putin described some of its 12 points as “in tune” with Moscow’s position, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky welcomed only a handful of its points, but maintains that Kiev will not compromise with Russia in any way.

Zelensky’s refusal to negotiate with Putin’s government – the Ukrainian leader banned contact with the Kremlin in a decree last October – is just one stumbling block faced by China or any other potential middleman.

Russia considers the conflict in Ukraine a proxy war between itself and NATO, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that any negotiations would not be held “with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters.”

In Washington, the administration of President Joe Biden publicly claims that it is up to Ukraine to decide when to seek peace. Zelensky has been offered no incentives by the US to do so, with Biden offering to continue supplying him with weapons “for as long as it takes” to achieve his war aims. Among these aims is the capture of Crimea, a Russian territory since 2014. American military leaders have publicly admitted that the chances of this happening are slim to none.

Kissinger drew the ire of Kiev last year when he suggested that Ukraine should accept a return to the “status quo ante,” or relinquish its territorial claims to Crimea and grant autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, in the name of peace. He has since suggested that these territories become the basis of negotiations after a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal.

Moscow has repeatedly said that it is open to talks with Kiev but only if Ukraine “recognizes the reality on the ground,” including the new status of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as parts of Russia. Otherwise, the Kremlin has stated, Russia will settle the conflict by military means.

** Wagner to get ‘as much ammo as we need’ – Prigozhin

The Russian private military company Wagner Group, which is fighting Ukrainian troops in the Donbass city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), has been promised enough ammunition to continue the battle, the company's head, Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Sunday.

The statement comes after Prigozhin warned that his fighters would be forced to pull out of the city on May 10 unless ammunition shortages are addressed by Russia’s Defense Ministry.

In a voice message posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said that Wagner received “a military instruction … in which we were promised as much ammunition and weapons as we need to continue our activities.”

“We were told that we can carry out activities in Artyomovsk as we deem necessary,” Prigozhin added.

He also said that Army General Sergey Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, was tasked with “making all decisions related to the military activities of Wagner PMC in coordination with the Defense Ministry.”

On Friday, Prigozhin said that Wagner personnel were suffering heavy losses because of what he described as a 70% shortage of ammunition. He later announced that the positions held by Wagner would be handed over to Akhmat, an elite unit from Russia’s Chechnya.

The fierce and bloody battle for the mining city of Artyomovsk, known to Ukrainians as Bakhmut, has been raging for several months. Prigozhin claims his forces have taken control of nearly all of the city, while the Ukrainians are holding out in a small area in the western part.  

Capturing Artyomovsk, an important logistical hub, would allow Russian forces to make further advances in Donbass.

** Ukraine vows to continue killing Russians worldwide

Ukrainian intelligence chief General Kirill Budanov has told Yahoo News that his organization, the GUR, will continue its campaign of terrorism against Russians “anywhere on the face of this world.” The Kremlin has vowed that such attacks will “not be left unanswered.”

Budanov – who heads the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense – was charged with terrorism offenses by a Moscow court last month, and Russian authorities have linked him with a string of sabotage and assassination operations, most recently a foiled plot to murder top Russian officials in Crimea.

In an interview with Yahoo News, held last month but published earlier this week, Budanov declared that what Russia calls “terrorism, we call liberation.” Asked whether the GUR was responsible for the murder of Russian journalist and political activist Darya Dugina in Moscow last year, he gave a cryptic answer.

“Don’t continue with that topic,” he said. “All I will comment on is that we’ve been killing Russians and we will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine.”

Despite Budanov’s boasting, Washington apparently has the GUR on a short leash. Recently leaked Pentagon documents suggested that when Budanov ordered his subordinates to “get ready for mass strikes” on Russian cities in February, American spies, who had been monitoring his communications, intervened to call off the operation. 

Since Budanov spoke to Yahoo, two explosives-laden drones were downed over the Kremlin and a car bomb seriously injured Russian reporter and activist Zakhar Prilepin. A suspect in the bombing attack on Prilepin admitted to Russian law enforcement that he had been hired by an unspecified Ukrainian intelligence service, while Moscow has said that the US bears ultimate responsibility for both incidents. 

“We know full well that decisions to carry out such terrorist actions are made not in Kiev, but in Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the attack on President Vladimir Putin’s office. “Such crimes will not be left unanswered,”the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that the “Kiev regime”will face “a stern and inevitable punishment.” 

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russia launches mass strikes on Ukraine ahead of May 9 Victory Day holiday

Russia launched a large-scale wave of strikes on Kyiv and across Ukraine sowing destruction and injuries, officials said early on Monday, as Moscow prepares for its cherished Victory Day holiday that marks the anniversary of its defeat of Nazi Germany.

At least five people were injured due to Russian strikes on Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said, while Russian missiles set ablaze a foodstuff warehouse in the Black Sea city of Odesa and blasts were reported in several other Ukrainian regions.

The fresh attacks come as Moscow prepares for its Victory Day parade on Tuesday, a key anniversary for President Vladimir Putin who has evoked the spirit of the Soviet army that defeated Nazi German forces to declare that Russia would defeat a Ukraine supposedly in the grip of a new incarnation of Nazism.

Russia intensified shelling of Bakhmut hoping to take it by Tuesday, Ukraine's top general in charge of the defence of the besieged city said, after Russia's Wagner mercenary group appeared to ditch plans to withdraw from it.

Three people were injured in blasts in Kyiv's Solomyanskyi district and two others were injured when drone wreckage fell onto the Sviatoshyn district, both west of the capital's centre, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on his Telegram messaging channel.

The Kyiv's military administration said that drone wreckage fell on a runway of the Zhuliany airport, one of the two passenger airports of the Ukrainian capital, causing no fire, but emergency services were working on the site.

It also said that in Kyiv's central Shevchenkivskyi district, drone debris seemed to have hit a two-storey building, causing damages. There was no immediate information about potential casualties.

Reuters' witnesses said they had heard numerous explosions in Kyiv, with local officials saying that air defence systems were repelling the attacks. It was not immediately clear how many drones were launched on Kyiv.

Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Odesa military administration, posted on his Telegram channel photos of a large structure fully engulfed in flames, in what he said was a Russian attack on a foodstuff warehouse, among others.

After air raid alerts blared for hours over roughly two-thirds of Ukraine, there were also media reports of sounds of explosions in the southern region of Kherson and in the Zaporizhzhia region in southeast.

Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed local official in Zaporizhzhia, said that Russian forces hit a warehouse and Ukrainian troops' position in Orikhiv, a small city in the region. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.

Separately, Russian forces shelled eight locations in Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine on Sunday, the regional military administration said in a Facebook post.

In the past two weeks, strikes have also intensified on Russian-held targets, especially in Crimea. Ukraine, without confirming any role in those attacks, says destroying enemy infrastructure is preparation for its long-expected ground assault.

Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, calling it a "special military operation" to defend Russia from neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but Kyiv and its allies say it was an unprovoked, land grab.

The invasion sparked the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two and has killed thousands and forced millions to flee the country.

RT/Reuters

My column of last week with the title “Like Mamu, like Abdulsalami and the billion naira firefighter” drew the attention of retired Colonel, Dangiwa Umar. The respected senior citizen was more particular about the first part because I mentioned him.

In the piece, I pointed out that Tukur Mamu, publisher of Kaduna-based Desert Herald and an aide to Ahmad Gumi, a popular Islamic cleric, was arrested in September last year and taken to court on a 10-count charge bordering on terrorism financing.

He was accused of receiving ransom payments from families of hostages on behalf of the Boko Haram terrorist group that attacked the Abuja-Kaduna train. The government said the offence contravenes section 21 (3) (a) of the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022.

Then I went on to observe that four girls – Bilha Musa, Faiza Ahmed, Rahma Abdullahi and Hafsa Murtala – out of the remaining 11 schoolgirls of Federal Government College, Birnin Yauri, in Kebbi State, abducted by bandits on June 17, 2021, were released not out of magnanimity but because of what Mamu was accused of – negotiations and fundraising to get the abductees released.

“It took six days of negotiations in the forest before four of the girls were released to us,” Salim Kaoje told pressmen after their release. ₦80m was also said to have been given to the bandits out of the ₦105m they demanded. They held the remaining seven back until the balance was made available to them."

"Abdulsalami Abubakar, Attorney General Malami, Aminu Bande, who is also the Kebbi State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) gubernatorial candidate, Adamu Aleiro and Malamawan Kebbi were said to have contributed the funds while Umar, who also contributed, went round the country to get the rest.

“This group”, according to the article, “donated and got some from the abducted girls’ relatives and good Samaritans, including organisations, to convey such to the abductors who, in turn, released their captives.” 

And then the question: “Is this not exactly what Mamu did, which was termed ‘financing terrorism’?”

But Umar, who called me on my mobile phone, disagreed.

Courteous, straight to the point and diplomatic, he calmly asked, “Am I speaking to Hassan Gimba?” to which I answered in the affirmative. And he said, “I am Dangiwa Umar.” He told me that he had read my article and that “it was quite wrong to compare us with Tukur Mamu.” 

To those now opening their eyes to Nigeria, Umar was a fiery military governor of Kaduna State, comprising Kaduna and current Katsina State, between August 1985 and June 1988, during the regime of Ibrahim Babangida.

During the ill-fated coup attempt of Gideon Orkar on April 22, 1990, Umar, as commander of the Armoured Corps Centre and School, Bauchi, threatened to shell and neutralise the coupists from his base. He retired from the army in 1993 and founded a political party called the Movement for Unity and Progress.

He is a social critic. The Nation newspaper editorial of June 8, 2020, said this of him: “Dangiwa Umar rarely speaks, and when he does, he captures the conscience of the nation. He has done that since he retired as a young, idealistic soldier during the turmoil of the June 12 crisis in the early 1990s.”

He told me that two of the four girls released had returned with kids and that what they did was to help bring succour to traumatised people. He lamented that some of the parents of the abducted girls had died as a result of the trauma of having their daughters in the hands of unconscionable brigands. He said kidnapped females are subjected to sexual abuse and that no one would be happy if someone close to him is a victim.

I could feel the pain in his voice. If he had the opportunity, the 74-year-old retired armoured officer would lead troops into the bush to give bandits a bloody nose. With a heavy voice, he lamented, “Hassan, there are over a thousand people in captivity in the bush.” 

While I understood the pain of the Colonel, I also do not see dissimilarities in what Mamu thought or did. Perhaps he, too, was touched by the sufferings of captives and the agony their loved ones found themselves in. I try as much as possible to see humanism as the motive of both sets of “saviours.” Whether one has “gained” anything or not is a matter of conjecture to be left for the courts to decide.

However, my chief concern is not why money was paid to bandits by anyone. After all, we daily hear of kidnappers, in towns and bushes, being paid ransom. It has reached a stage now where people get kidnapped in broad daylight in schools, markets, workplaces, intra and inter-town commercial vehicles, etc. I believe almost everyone will pay, except if they have no money, to secure the freedom of a loved one. Sadly, that route has to be taken because it seems like it is the only way.

When 27-year-old American Philip Walton was kidnapped in the Niger Republic and the kidnappers brought him into Nigeria as a safer place, US Special Forces, including the Navy SEALS, mounted an operation in Nigeria and rescued him.

People like Mamu and everyone else take it upon themselves to negotiate with and give kidnappers money for the release of victims because there is a vacuum; those whose responsibility it is to secure citizens seem overwhelmed; the rogues among them even collude with the terrorists to make a killing on the misery of those they are paid to protect.

But when a retired General and onetime commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, a onetime fiery military governor, senior officials of a sitting government and other respected citizens pool resources and deliver the proceeds to brigands to release their captives because there is no other way, then it becomes sad. And scary. It makes one cry for Nigeria.

** Hassan Gimba is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Neptune Prime.

With the right foundation, your startup can overcome any crisis.

In the business-to-business (B2B) startup world, there’s an abundance of capital, renewed interest and a lot of new players who want to become active in the space. This is an area that we know very well. We’ve always been B2B, and we’ve always believed in the global depth of talent and ability to innovate. It’s from this background that I share some of what we’ve observed in successful B2B companies.

The big question for startup founders is this: How can they increase the chances that their startup will succeed and not become one of the many that fail each year? I dig deep into seven common causes of startup failure in my book Anticipate Failure. But in addition to that, there are certain laws of business building that have long been in place and must be followed. They can make the difference between a fast-scaling, successful startup and one that never quite reaches escape velocity.

Let’s take a look at these laws of business building.

It starts with observing a problem

To begin, every great B2B company starts with an observation about a significant customer problem that exists or a space in the B2B ecosystem that hasn’t seen innovation and really needs to be reinvented. What we find is that there is a product-oriented founding team that asks, “How can we reignite the space?” or “How do we solve this problem and express the solution in a product that a lot of people would be interested in?”

There’s usually an entrepreneur who isn’t steeped in a particular area, but who makes an outside observation, and the founding team has the relevant talent to build the product that needs to be built. They identify a pain point, design a new product to address it, and then they put together the right team to build it. Getting that initial product and product-market fit are essential. Even better is to secure product-market fit in a market that has many product adjacencies. This will enable second and third acts.

Then comes the founder-led selling phase

Next, there is the founder-led selling phase of the product — matching your product with the customer’s needs. This has to be done by the founders. A common mistake is when the founder is deeply technical, and the founding team hopes it can make a sales hire who will have the customer conversations and sell the product for them. Unless it’s another founding team member, that formula almost never works. This is the time when you’ve got to get that initial set of customers right, which is naturally the role of the founding team. It’s very important to lay that strong foundation for a B2B company.

Then, when the time is right, there is a transition from that founder-led selling to recruiting your first one or two missionary or professional salespeople who can then take over that role and get out to a much wider group of customers. A founder is not typically going to know how to scale a sales team to reach $1 billion in revenue. This is where you need to bring in an experienced executive to lead the charge — whether it’s building the sales team or a multi-product engineering team that can deliver on time with high quality. If you’ve never done that before, now is not the time to try to learn on the job.

The transition to execution-oriented sales leadership

After you get this sales team up and running, there’s a very important transition in getting from those initial salespeople to building sales leadership that’s execution-oriented, having marketing that can fill the funnel and then putting the systems and processes in place to execute. At that point, it becomes an execution game of knowing which customers to go after; having the right marketing in front of that; creating the right kind of funnel management and sales leadership; recruiting, hiring, training and enabling salespeople on the product; expressing very clearly the selling proposition of the product so that the next incremental sales hire can actually get it right; and so on. These things and more have to be executed in a perfect way. Fortunately, these are very learnable, doable and repeatable patterns.

Again and again, we see founders who haven’t done this part of the scaling before make the wrong sales hires; they don’t enable them or spend their precious marketing dollars on the wrong things. They don’t have the systems in place to know whether their sales are predictable or if the sales funnel is qualified. Ultimately, this is a phase in which you’re still taking very expensive capital, but you’re making all the same mistakes again and again. It’s better to make new mistakes than repeat old ones.

When everything seems like it's going right

And so, you are at a phase where you’ve got a lot of things going right: You’ve figured out the customer pain point, the product, the initial selling and the expansion part of it. And then, once you hit escape velocity — a $10 million run rate — a tremendous amount of cheap capital is available. This is a very important phase of a company where you’re moving from founder-led selling, to early selling, to repeatable, scalable selling. You have to get that right before you go off and raise a lot of capital that is just very cheap and totally hands-off.

Yes, ample capital is selectively available to the breakout companies. But there is still a lot of hard work and business building to be done from a company’s inception to its breakout. And if you’re not getting those steps right — if you haven’t followed the laws of business building — you could very well end up in a situation where you don’t have the right people around the table who are going to get you to that breakout level. And you’re probably just raising capital, but that capital that doesn’t understand how B2B companies are created, built and placed on a path to success.

The laws of business building still apply, and they must be followed if you want to guarantee your startup long-term success. Cheap capital is widely available, but you must use it at the right time. And until you know you’re a breakout, don’t settle for cheap, dumb capital. Hard work, the right people and discipline all play a signifcant role in getting a company to breakout status.

Entrepreneur

Speculators are once again fleeing the oil market, setting the stage for more extreme price swings. 

Money managers dumped their net-bullish oil holdings by 19%, the biggest drop in six weeks. The positions are now at the lowest seasonal level in more than a decade.

The exodus comes amid another crash for oil, driven by concerns over the economy. West Texas Intermediate futures have tumbled for three straight weeks, even briefly plunging to the lowest level since late 2021. 

With investors rushing for the exit, it’s drying up liquidity and leaving the markets largely in the hands of algorithm or momentum-based traders — a scenario that often creates even more volatility, said Michael Tran, managing director at RBC Capital Markets LLC.

“In short, the oil market needs more players on the field,” he said.

Money managers’ WTI net-long position, or the difference between bearish and bullish bets, dropped to 157,047 contracts in the week ended May 2, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The speculators’ share of open interest, a measure of market participation, is near the lowest level in three years.

Without speculators, prices can become disconnected from supply and demand drivers. That can create pain for hedgers, merchants and producers who can’t walk away from the market even when its moving counter to what physical fundamentals dictate. Implied volatility already recently climbed to the highest in more than a month.

This kind of exodus has driven extreme price swings in the past. 

Last year, a combination of higher collateral requirements and rising interest rates dented demand from speculators who sometimes use oil as a hedge against inflation. The sapping liquidity caused increasingly erratic intraday price moves. By the end of the year, more than $120 billion poured out of global commodity markets. 

Part of the reason oil speculators are staying on the sidelines is that they have been repeatedly burned. For example in early April, they were holding a very large short position, or bets on falling prices. But Saudi Arabia and allies, known as OPEC+, announced surprise production cuts that sent prices surging, leaving many investors wrong-footed. Instead of buying back into the market with long holdings or new short bets, the money managers have decided to instead stay on the sidelines. 

WTI settled on Friday at $71.34 a barrel. Earlier in the week, the price touched $63.64, the lowest since 2021. 

For bulls to return, it will likely take both signs of a meaningful slowdown in Russian output along with a sustained recovery in Chinese demand.

Ultimately, when the oil market struggles, it can also pull other commodities lower as traders get margin calls across the sector, said Carley Garner, a Commodity Broker and Strategist at DeCarley Trading. 

“We’re not there yet, but if oil drops below $63, it will cascade in other markets — even stocks,” she said. “Oil lures speculators when prices move higher. They need to see a more rational market.” 

King Charles III was crowned Saturday at Westminster Abbey, in a ceremony steeped in ancient ritual and brimming with bling at a time when the monarchy is striving to remain relevant in a fractured modern Britain.

At a coronation with displays of royal power straight out of the Middle Ages, Charles was given an orb, a sword and scepter and had the solid gold, bejeweled St. Edward’s Crown placed atop his head as he sat upon a 700-year-old oak chair.

In front of world leaders, foreign royals, dignitaries and a smattering of stars, the monarch declared, “I come not to be served but to serve,” and was presented as Britain’s “undoubted king.”

Inside the medieval abbey, trumpets sounded, and the congregation of more than 2,000 shouted “God save the king!” Outside, thousands of troops, hundreds of thousands of spectators and scores of protesters converged.

It was the culmination of a seven-decade journey for the king from heir to monarch.

To the royal family and government, the occasion — code-named Operation Golden Orb — was a display of heritage, tradition and spectacle unmatched around the world.

To the crowds gathered under rainy skies — thousands of whom had camped overnight — it was a chance to be part of a historic event.

Julie Newman, a 77-year-old visitor from Canada, said the royal procession had been “absolutely fabulous. Couldn’t ask for anything better.”

“But we’re ready to go back home and watch it all on the television,” she added.

But to millions more, the day was greeted with a shrug, the awe and reverence the ceremony was designed to evoke largely gone.

And to a few, it was reason to protest. Hundreds who want to see Britain become a republic gathered to holler “ Not my king.” They see the monarchy as an institution that stands for privilege and inequality, in a country of deepening poverty and fraying social ties. A handful were arrested.

As the day began, the abbey buzzed with excitement and was abloom with fragrant flowers and colorful hats. Notables streamed in: U.S. first lady Jill Biden, first lady Olena Zelenska of Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron, eight current and former British prime ministers, judges in wigs, soldiers with gleaming medals, and celebrities including Judi Dench, Emma Thompson and Lionel Richie.

During the traditional Anglican service slightly tweaked for modern times, Charles, clad in crimson and cream velvet and ermine-trimmed robes, swore on a Bible that he is a “true Protestant.”

But a preface was added to the coronation oath to say the Anglican church “will seek to foster an environment where people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely.” It was the first ceremony to include representatives of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh faiths, as well as the first in which female clergy took part.

Charles was anointed with oil from the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land — a part of the ceremony so sacred it was concealed behind screens — before being presented with the Sovereign’s Orb and other regalia.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby then placed the crown on Charles’ head, while he sat in the Coronation Chair — once gilded, now worn and etched with graffiti. Underneath the seat was a sacred slab known as the Stone of Scone, on which ancient Scottish kings were crowned.

For 1,000 years and more, such grandiose ceremonies have confirmed the right of British kings to rule. Charles was the 40th sovereign to be enthroned in the abbey — and, at 74, the oldest.

These days, the king no longer has executive or political power, and the service is purely ceremonial since Charles automatically became king upon death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September.

The king does remain the U.K.’s head of state and a symbol of national identity — and Charles will have to work to bring together a multicultural nation and shore up support for the monarchy at at time when it is waning, especially among younger people.

While most Britons view the monarchy on a spectrum ranging from apathy to mild interest, some are fervently opposed to it. The anti-monarchy group Republic said several of its members, including its chief executive, were arrested as they arrived at a protest in central London.

Police, who’d warned they would have a “low tolerance” for people seeking to disrupt the day, said they made 52 arrests. Human Rights Watch said arrests of peaceful protesters were “something you would expect to see in Moscow, not London.”

The multimillion-pound cost of the all the pomp — the exact figure unknown — also rankled some amid a cost-of-living crisis that has meant many Britons are struggling to pay energy bills and buy food.

Charles has sought to lead a smaller, less expensive royal machine for the 21st century, and his was a shorter, smaller affair than his mother’s coronation.

The notoriously feuding royal family put on its own show of unity. Prince William, who is next in line to be king, his wife, Kate, and their three children were all in attendance. Towards the end of the ceremony, William knelt before his father and pledged loyalty to the king — before kissing him on the cheek.

Then Archbishop Welby invited everyone in the abbey to swear “true allegiance” to the monarch. He said people watching on television could pay homage, too — though that part of the ceremony was toned down after some criticized it as a tone-deaf effort to demand a public oath of allegiance for Charles.

William’s younger brother Prince Harry, who has publicly sparred with the family, arrived alone. His wife Meghan and their children remained at home in California, where the couple has lived since quitting as working royals in 2020.

As Charles and the key royals joined a magnificent military procession after the ceremony, Harry stood waiting outside the abbey until a car arrived to drive him away.

Large crowds cheered as Charles and Queen Camilla, who was also crowned, rode in the Gold State Carriage from the abbey to Buckingham Palace, accompanied by a procession of 4,000 troops and military bands playing jaunty tunes. From the palace balcony, the king and queen waved to a sea of people who cheered and shouted “God Save the king!”

For many other Britons, the day’s events drew mild curiosity, at best.

Cherie Duffy, who was visiting London from Anglesey, Wales, on a trip planned before the coronation date was set, watched the ceremony on TV — but only because someone else turned it on.

“There’s a general not-botheredness,” she said about how she and her friends felt.

AP

Over 40 percent of deposits in local banks are now in United States (U.S.) dollars, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.

It blamed the trend of saving in hard currency on rising inflation and exchange rate volatility.

The IMF described the practice as a confirmation of loss of confidence in the local currency, adding that “it is usually difficult to reverse”.

According to the IMF, market participants defend their wealth by shifting to dollar savings under high and persistent inflation.

In its Report on dollar savings, the Fund said “Nigeria operates with dollar bias for international trade, finance invoicing and of recent, store of value. Over 40 per cent of Nigeria’s bank deposits are in dollars”.

The IMF said the process of reversing citizens savings in dollars could be complex even after addressing the initial trigger, such as high inflation and exchange rate volatility.

The use of dollars for storing value worsened in the country following the implementation of the naira redesign policy and issuance of new banknotes by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Under the policy, the CBN introduced new 1,000, 500 and 200 naira denominations and withdrew the old notes from circulation.

But a March 3 Supreme Court verdict on a suit spearheaded by Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara state governments forced the CBN to reintroduce the rested notes.

In its judgment, the apex court directed the CBN and the Federal Government to allow the old and the new naira notes to co-exist till December 31.

Analysts said the redesigning of the bank notes could inadvertently lead to the dollarisation of the domestic economy.

The IMF said most economies operate with a foreign exchange (FX) – the dollar bias for international trade and finance invoicing.

“The optimal choice between domestic currency versus dollars  will depend on the monetary framework and the benefits that each may offer as they co-exist as two currencies,” it said.

The IMF explained that in a highly dollarised economy, there is extended use of the exchange rate for price indexation (high real dollarisation and almost complete pass-through from depreciation to inflation). Forex is also used in foreign trade.

It said: “There is limited scope for fiat currency (tax payments, public expenditure, non- durable goods, and low- value transactions; extended forex use for durable goods, real estate, capital goods, and high-value transactions. Also, forex takes over the role of store of value as lending capacity in domestic currency becomes limited. Most loans become forex- denominated when forex bank deposits are allowed.”

The Fund said banking systems in many developing economies are bi-monetary while the  U.S. enjoys a privileged status as issuer of the most widely used international currency.

It said a bi-monetary system embodies the failure to conduct monetary policy in an effective way, such as, secure price stability, efficient payment systems, and well-functioning financial markets (including long-run financial contracts at comparatively low nominal interest rates).

“The most common type of dollarisation is financial dollarisation (FD), or asset substitution, caused by a poor performance of the local currency.

“The local currency is used more for payment transactions but is replaced by the dollar as saving asset or store of value, in line with Gresham’s law.”

Under extremely high inflation, such as in Venezuela or Zimbabwe, real dollarization (RD) – i.e., use of the dollar as means of payment transactions and store of value -also takes place.

It said: “On the one hand, in some countries dollarisation is entrenched and a bi-monetary system is formally allowed (e.g., Uruguay). On the other hand, in other countries it is not allowed, or dollar accounts are restricted. Under high inflation (e.g., Argentina or the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the public holds a large share of financial assets abroad and local financial intermediation is low.

“Countries with no history of extreme high inflation (e.g., Malaysia) impose restrictions on dollar deposits, but there seems to be no significant impact on local financial intermediation.”

The IMF said a bi-monetary system limits the role of the exchange rate as a shock absorber, as real dollarization implies a high pass-through from exchange rate depreciation to inflation.

It said: “Financial dollarlisation creates currency mismatches and liquidity risks for the financial system and the economy as a whole. Therefore, the exchange rate amplifies negative external shocks rather than absorbing them.

“Both financial dollarization and   real dollarisation jeopardize monetary transmission mechanisms, as inflation expectations are difficult to anchor with a weak interest rate channel.

“Financial dollarisation-related financial instability would need to be addressed via policy responses such as a central bank forex reserve buildup and associated regulation.”

The Nation

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the February 25 presidential election and his counterpart in the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, met on Saturday at the burial of the father of Bayelsa State Governor, Douye Diri.

The duo got talking at the funeral held at Sampou community in Kolokuma/Opokuma Local Government Area of the state in what appears to be their first public meeting after the general elections.

Vice President Yemi Osibanjo, former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, former and several prominent Nigerian leaders, also bid farewell to Pa Abraham Diri.

Others in attendance include former first lady, Patience Jonathan, National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Iyorchia Ayu, state governors, including  Ifeanyi Okowa, (Delta), Ademola Adeleke (Osun), Godwin Obaseki (Edo) and his wife, Betty, Udom Emmanuel (Akwa Ibom), Seyi Makinde (Oyo) and Darius Ishiaku (Taraba).

Governors-elect of Akwa Ibom, Plateau, Taraba and Niger states were also in attendance.

Speaking during the funeral, Osinbajo described Pa Diri as an exemplary teacher and community leader, who gave his children proper upbringing.

He said, “We are here to celebrate the life and times of Pa Diri. The array of personalities here is an indication that Pa Diri brought up and nurtured the aspirations of so many children.”

He noted that the late Diri’s reward as a teacher came not just through his son, but attracted so many notable Nigerians to Sampou.

“He could not have imagined that an array of personalities would come here to honour him. According to the book of Proverbs 14:23, “in all labour, there is profit.”

Former President Jonathan, in his remarks, said he was with the bereaved Diri family to appreciate Obasanjo, Osinbajo and all those who came to honour the family and the people of the state.

He recalled that Pa Diri died on a day that the present administration in the state was marking its third anniversary and prayed God to strengthen Diri and his family.

Also, former Vice President Atiku said: “There is a special relationship between me and the people of Bayelsa State. l am with you as a family and that is why l am physically here.”

Responding, Governor Diri said he and his family as well as the entire state were humbled by the large turnout of high profile dignitaries in his community to bid his father farewell.

He said: “We are indeed overwhelmed. There can be no love more than that. I would not have thought even in the wildest of my imaginations that there would be a large number of high profile Nigerians here to celebrate my father.”

Diri, who described his father as a disciplinarian, noted that he impacted positively on all who crossed his path and they all shared his positive attributes.

Daily Trust

Sudan paramilitary RSF to attend Jeddah talks with armed forces

Envoys from Sudan's warring military factions - the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces - were in Jeddah for talks on Saturday, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said, as international mediators pressed for an end to the three-week old conflict.

The U.S.-Saudi initiative is the first serious attempt to end fighting that has turned parts of the Sudanese capital Khartoum into war zones and derailed an internationally backed plan to usher in civilian rule following years of unrest and uprisings.

Riyadh and Washington earlier welcomed the "pre-negotiation talks" between the army and the RSF, and urged them to actively engage following numerous violated ceasefires.

But both sides have made it clear they would only discuss a humanitarian truce, not negotiate an end to the war.

Confirming his group's attendance, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, said he hoped the talks would achieve their intended aim of securing safe passage for civilians.

Sudan's armed forces said they sent a delegation to the Red Sea city on Friday evening, but special envoy Dafallah Alhaj said the army would not sit down directly with any delegation that the "rebellious" RSF might send.

Hemedti has meanwhile vowed to either capture or kill army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and there was also evidence on the ground that both sides remain unwilling to make compromises to end the bloodshed.

Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan said in a tweet he hoped both sides would "engage in dialogue that we hope will lead to the end of the conflict".

In the city of Bahri across the Nile from Khartoum, warplanes were heard overnight and explosions startled residents. "We don't leave the house because we're scared of stray bullets," said a resident who gave his name as Ahmed.

An eyewitness in Eastern Khartoum reported gun clashes and air strikes over residential areas on Saturday.

Other witnesses said later in the day that they heard a large explosion and saw a plume of smoke that appeared to be coming from the industrial zone in Bahri.

The Turkish ambassador's car also came under fire from unknown assailants, a Turkish diplomatic source said. The envoy was safe inside the embassy.

Turkey's foreign minister said Turkey would move its embassy from Khartoum to Port Sudan following the attack.

Both the RSF and army accused each other of being behind the attack.

The conflict erupted on April 15, following the collapse of an internationally backed plan for a transition to democracy.

Burhan, a career army officer, heads a ruling council installed after the 2019 ouster of long-time autocrat Omar al-Bashir and a 2021 military coup, while Hemedti, a former militia leader who made his name in the Darfur conflict, is his deputy.

Prior to the fighting, Hemedti had been taking steps like moving closer to a civilian coalition that indicated he had political plans. Burhan has blamed the war on his "ambitions."

HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE

Western powers have backed the transition to a civilian government in a country that sits at a strategic crossroads between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Africa's volatile Sahel region.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was travelling to Saudi Arabia at the weekend for talks with Saudi leaders.

Saudi Arabia has had close ties to Burhan and Hemedti, both of whom sent troops to help the Saudi-led coalition in its war against the Houthi group in Yemen. The kingdom is also focused on security in the Red Sea, which it shares with Sudan.

The U.N. has significantly cut back its operations in Sudan after three of its employees were killed and its warehouses were looted, and sought guarantees of safe passage of humanitarian aid.

The fighting has also impacted vital infrastructure and caused the closure of most hospitals in conflict areas. U.N. agencies have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe if clashes continue.

The World Health Organisation said on Saturday it had delivered medical aid to Port Sudan, but was awaiting security and access clearances that have prevented several such shipments from reaching Khartoum, where the few hospitals that are functioning are running out of supplies.

Reuters

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russia blames Ukraine, U.S. for car bomb that wounded writer

A prominent Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bombing that killed his driver on Saturday and investigators said a detained suspect admitted acting on behalf of Ukraine.

The attack took place three days after the Kremlin said Ukraine attempted to hit the Kremlin with drones - Ukraine denied it had anything to do with the attack.

Russia's Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine and the Western states backing it, particularly the United States, for the latest attack on the writer, an ardent proponent of Moscow's military campaign in Ukraine.

Ukraine's security services, in its standard response, refused to confirm or deny involvement. A senior Ukrainian official accused Russia of staging the incident.

Russia's state Investigative Committee said Prilepin's Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in Nizny Novgorod region, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, which it was treating as an act of terrorism. It said Prilepin had been taken to hospital.

The committee released a photograph showing the white vehicle lying overturned on a track next to a wood, with a deep crater beside it and pieces of metal strewn nearby.

The committee later issued a statement saying investigators were questioning a suspect identified as Alexander Permyakov.

"The suspect was detained and, in the course of questioning, he provided testimony that he acted on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services," said the statement, read by a woman in uniform.

The governor of Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, said on Telegram that doctors had successfully operated on Prilepin and that he was now under sedation to help his recovery.

Russia's Foreign Ministry, in a statement on its website said: "Responsibility for this and other terrorist acts lies not only with Ukrainian authorities, but also their Western patrons, the United States in the first instance...".

It said Washington's failure to denounce this and other attacks was "self-revealing" for the U.S. administration.

State news agency TASS quoted security sources as saying the suspect was a "native of Ukraine" with a past conviction for robbery with violence.

Ukraine's SBU Security Service issued its standard response of declining to confirm or deny involvement in the bombing.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he believed Russian authorities had staged the attack.

"Everyone understands that this is all a staged performance," Podolyak told Ukrainian television. "This is staged and the bombings at the Kremlin are aimed at domestic audiences."

The novelist was the third prominent pro-war figure to be targeted by a bomb since Moscow's full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.

Russia has blamed Ukraine for the deaths of journalist Darya Dugina and war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in the two previous attacks, and Kyiv has denied involvement.

Ukrainian news site UNIAN ran an online poll asking readers who "in the pantheon of Russian scum propagandists" should be targeted next after Dugina, Tatarsky and Prilepin.

Officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. No comment was immediately available from Britain's Foreign Office.

MOSCOW SAYS UKRAINE ACTING ON WEST'S BEHALF

It was the second time this week that Moscow has accused Ukraine of carrying out terrorist attacks on behalf of the West, a narrative it appears to be pushing with increasing urgency but which Kyiv and Washington reject as baseless.

On Wednesday, Russia accused Ukraine of trying to kill President Vladimir Putin with a night-time drone attack on the Kremlin. Ukraine denied that too, and the White House said accusations that Washington had a hand in it were "lies".

Prilepin often speaks out in support of the Ukraine war on social media, with more than 300,000 followers on Telegram and his own website and YouTube channel.

He fought for Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region before last year's invasion and led a military unit there, boasting in a 2019 YouTube interview that his unit "killed people in big numbers".

"These people are dead, they are buried and ... there are many of them," he said. "Not a single unit among the Donetsk battalions had such results. It was outrageous chaos what we did there ... Not a single field commander had such results as I had."

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

US responsible for Prilepin car bombing – Moscow

The US bears ultimate responsibility for the terrorist attack against Russian writer and political activist Zakhar Prilepin, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday. Killing ideological opponents, the ministry said, has become “the Kiev regime’s basic reflex.”

Prilepin, a journalist and novelist who fought in Ukraine in a Russian National Guard unit earlier this year, was seriously injured when a roadside bomb detonated as he drove past in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Region earlier on Saturday. Prilepin’s assistant, who was behind the wheel, was killed.

A suspect apprehended near the scene of the blast told Russian investigators that he had been recruited by an unspecified Ukrainian intelligence agency in 2019, and admitted to planting two anti-tank mines beside the road and detonating them remotely as Prilepin’s car passed.

“The terrorist attack against Evgeny Prilepin is yet another demonstration of [Kiev’s] systematic approach to eliminating ideological opponents,” the ministry said in a statement, referring to Prilepin by his birth name.

“The responsibility for this and other terrorist acts lies on the Ukrainian authorities together with their Western patrons, mainly the United States, through whose efforts the anti-Russia project blended with neo-Nazism has been painstakingly nurtured in Ukraine since the coup in February 2014,” the statement read.

The ministry then described how enemies of the Ukrainian state are added to the ‘Mirotvorets’ (Peacemaker) database, with their personal details listed next to a description of their “crimes” against Ukraine. This ‘kill list’ is allegedly maintained by the Ukrainian security services, and includes Western journalists and politicians who have spoken favorably of Russia or condemned Ukraine and its government.

The ministry added that the list is “used by hired killers” to target Kiev’s enemies, and noted that Russia has repeatedly called on Ukraine’s Western supporters to have the list taken offline, which they have thus far refused to do.

“Time has shown that Washington and its satellites deliberately ignore this and other crimes of the Ukrainian authorities,” the statement continued.

As Ukraine’s largest financial backer and provider of intelligence, Russia contends that the US was ultimately responsible not just for the attack on Prilepin, but also the murders of nationalist writer Darya Dugina and military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, and the attempted assassination of Tsargrad TV founder Konstantin Malofeyev. 

Moscow has also blamed Washington for a recent, albeit unsuccessful, drone attack on the Kremlin. “We know full well that decisions to carry out such terrorist actions are made not in Kiev, but in Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

** Suspect in Prilepin bombing admits Ukrainian intel ties

The suspect in the bombing of the car carrying Zakhar Prilepin has admitted links to Ukrainian intelligence services, Russia’s Investigative Committee revealed on Saturday.

Prilepin, a prominent Russian writer and political activist, was targeted by a roadside bomb earlier in the day in the village of Pionersky, some 70km from the eponymous city, located some 400km to the east of Moscow. The blast killed Prilepin’s associate, who was driving the car, and left the writer critically injured.

The suspect, identified as 29-year-old Ukrainian-born Alexander Permyakov, was apprehended shortly after the attack while trying to escape the scene on foot. Locals alerted the police to the fleeing man, who was ultimately captured in a nearby village.

During questioning, Permyakov admitted having attempted to assassinate Prilepin, revealing he had been recruited by an unspecified Ukrainian intelligence service back in 2018. The Investigative Committee released a video of the questioning, with the suspect telling investigators he had planted two anti-tank mines on the side of the road and waited for Prilepin’s car to pass before detonating the explosives remotely.

The blast obliterated the engine compartment of Prilepin’s car, flipping the vehicle onto its roof. While the writer was critically wounded by the blast, his close associate, who was behind the wheel, was killed on the spot. The explosion left a large crater by the side of the road, and sent sizeable pieces of the car, including its gearbox, flying some 100 meters away, footage from the scene shows. 

Prilepin was rushed to a hospital and underwent a successful operation after which he was sedated, the governor of Nizhny Novgorod Region, Gleb Nikitin, revealed without elaborating on the injuries. According to Russian media reports, citing eyewitnesses, the writer suffered fractures to both of his legs, and also reportedly received a spinal column injury.  

Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal probe into the incident, treating the blast as a terrorist attack.

** Russian forces take control over 95% of Artyomovsk — Prigozhin

Russian forces control about 95% of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and the remaining 5% have no influence on the progress of the special military operation, Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin says.

"Almost 95% of the city territory has been captured in Artyomovsk to date. The remaining 5% does not play any role for the so-called development of progress and the march of the ‘Red Army’ further to the West. Two square kilometers do not influence the progress of the military operation at all," he said, cited by the Prigozhin’s press office in its Telegram channel.

Nobody communicated with him about the shortage of ammunition, Prigozhin said. "The personnel of Wagner PMC will be preserved for the next operations in interests of Russia," he noted.

The Wagner PMC founder also said he had no ambitions of leaving his mark as the person "that took Artyomovsk." "I have ambitions to be of service to our nation and state," he added.

Reuters/RT/TASS

In Port-Harcourt, Rivers State last week as guest of Governor Nyesom Wike, President-elect, Bola Tinubu, promised to fight corruption. To delink judicial officers’ minds from corruption, Tinubu’s blueprint of fighting this goblin, he said, would be to incentivize judicial officers.

“You don’t expect your judges to live in squalor, to operate in squalor and dispense justice in squalor. This is part of the changes that are necessary. We must fight corruption but we must definitely look at the other side of the coin. If you don’t want your judges to be corrupt, you got to pay attention to their welfare. You don’t want them to operate in hazardous conditions,” he said.

Corruption has a long history in Nigeria, with some scholars submitting that it is buried deep down the skin of the African. Indeed, one of the Africanist scholars whose commendable works tried to locate the connect between the African and corruption, late Stephen Ellis, found out that “bribery and corruption were rooted in (African) social networks and moral conventions.” 

By 1970, however, as the Nigerian civil war was reaching its denouement, it had become obvious to the Nigerian military rulers that if the menace of corruption – with its twin nuance of kick-back and armed robbery – was not confronted headlong, the country was headed for ruins.

That generation of Nigerians deployed, among others, popular music to combat the evils of corruption, stealing and robbery. Most of Nigeria’s famous musicians of post-independence era keyed into this crusading and earned their stripes through social and political commentaries. One of them was Ilorin, Kwara State-born Salawu Woro Idofian. Salawu apparently hailed from Idofian in Ifelodun Local Government of the state. While Cameroonian-Nigerian highlife musician of Nigerian mother and a Cameroonian father, Nico Mbarga, struck the soft cord of many by eulogizing motherhood with his blockbuster vinyl Sweet Mother, Yoruba Sakara music deity, Kelani Yesufu, alias Kelly, among many other social thematic concerns, intervened on the social menace that the near-epidemic which the venereal disease, gonorrhea, called atosi in his native homeland, was causing among young boys and girls of the era.

As the epidemic soared, sufferers of its painful jab on their penile part rationalized the affliction as a popular disease that only the famous could contract. In that song he entitled Atosi Atogbe, Kelani deconstructed this widely held impression and submitted, via this fluidly racing track, that gonorrhea could never be a disease of the famous – gbajumo. How could a disease that causes so much pain and turmoil within the male genitalia, with the patient who was, most times, reaping the harvest of his libidinal rascality and thus forced to swallow several discomforting concoctions, be an affliction of the famous? he asked.

To combat armed robbery, in 1970, the military government enacted a decree which made the crime punishable by the firing squad. On April 26, 1971, the first public execution of an armed robber took place. Armed robbery was so rampant that, by 1976, 400 of such executions had taken place between its commencement and the end of the civil war. The rate of the executions was so frightening, especially with the realization that the southern part of the country recorded the highest figure of 338 executions in 1984 alone.

Salawu Woro Idofian’s genre of popular music was Apala. Almost sharing same cadence and pattern of singing with the mellifluous-voice of Epe, Lagos State-born Ligali Mukaiba who sang similar variety of music, Idofian stood in his own right. He was widely credited with having made those public executions of armed robbers the thematic preoccupation of his music. As he dramatized these harvests of executions, you would almost feel the pain, agony and sense of finality that the robbers felt as they were matched to the stakes.

One of such songs from Idofian was his 1971 album entitled K’ehin S’okun – literally translated to mean, Execution by the sea. April 24, 1971, the song goes, was the D-day of the execution of some condemned robbers. It was a Saturday and the crowd that gathered at the bar beach was massive. To Idofian, the public execution could be explained in the context of propitiation. Nigeria had offered the bodies of the condemned robbers to the goddess of the sea called Olokun, in exchange for her concession to spare the lives of the righteous. Since creation, the Olokun had never had such bounty of human flesh for the celebration of her annual festivity in the belly of the sea. However, this Saturday, the Olokun was lucky as three robbers’ bodies were offered to her by the military government, in lieu of her ceaseless swallowing of innocent citizens who strayed to its beach. This, Idofian, in that song, expressed thus – “Ni’jo alaye ti daye, eti Olokun o gba ore ri; a’i pa’niyan kale si eti okun pe ko ri’un mu sodun ri; ni’jo Satide, o s’ori re, a ti f’omo jaguda meta rubo si okun ko ye gbe wa l’omo mo; jaguda kekeke to nt’owo b’apo la o fi bo’ya alaro.”

The condemned robbers had been found guilty by the Armed Robbery and Firearms Tribunal for having robbed an Alhaja at the Surulere area of Lagos. Williams Oyasima and Joseph Ilogbo were the robbers in that brutal encounter. Babatunde Folorunso, Idofian’s narration continued, had robbed a man of his car and Ten pounds. As ricochet of bullets tore through the bodies of these robbers, their heads lost their hold and bowed in magisterial surrender. Brutal epilogue of promising lives, Idofian warned, awaited parents who condoned stealing by stealth by their wards: “Nigba t’ota at’etu ndun mo barawo lara, won nsori ko… omo yin o s’agbafo, o nk’aso wo’lu, ki le ti lo ma ri?”

Since the menace of armed robbery went full throttle in the immediate post-petrodollar Nigeria of the early 1970s, it has grown further into becoming a social pandemic today. Rivaling it as another menace that spreads like the metastasis of cancer, the way armed robbery has, is corruption. The spirit of acquisitiveness, the centrality and preferencing that wealth enjoys today in Nigeria is mind-boggling. This spirit has pounced upon the heart of virtually all Nigerians. Mammon today enjoys a pride of place as the reigning god of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Mammon didn’t get here in a day. Its reign began with the fad of bribery which was common in private and government offices in pre and post-colonial Nigeria. Polish-British sociologist, Stanislav Andreski, who lived in Ibadan in the 1960s, saw the menace and coined the word “kleptocracy” for its description. This variant of corruption so galled the coupists of 1966, led by Chukwuma Nzeogwu, who held the back of his tongue for its perpetrators, who he labeled ten-percenters. This appellation was got from the tradition of demanding ten percent kickbacks from every government contract. Today, Nzeogwu would turn in his grave to find out that awarded contracts running into billions of Naira are most times not executed at all and its total proceeds pocketed. In cases where they are executed at all, heavy shellacking of bribery and kickbacks ensure that they are so peremptorily and haphazardly executed. The result is that the projects last only in the now.

Last week in Port-Harcourt, Tinubu woke up the ghost of judicial corruption, an albatross that hovers over Nigeria like the Swords of Damocles. If the Nigerian democracy suffers spiritual legitimacy, the Nigerian judiciary is complicit. By the way, some scholars have reasoned that the lack of legitimacy, of perverted electoral justice, may be why Nigeria is this stunted and stymied.

In theory, we all know that the fundamental principle of the independence of the judiciary and the courts underpin the Nigerian legal system. This fundamental principle is predicated on the belief that the courts are independent as an organ of government. Embedded in this assumption is the philosophy of the centrality of the judiciary. This is what the concept of justice and the rule of law in Nigeria are based upon. With the role of the judiciary as central to global concept of justice, built-in and implicated in it is the need to maintain the pride of place of judicial ethics. 

There is no doubt that since its inception in 1999 till now, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has brought some measure of sanity into judicial practice in general and operations of judicial officers in particular. However, there are still a lot of patent doubts about the impartiality of Nigerian judicial officers. There are flying allegations of judges’ availability to lend themselves to the whims of politicians. There have also been cogent and seemingly irrefutable allegations that the top echelon of judicial offices in Nigeria are not totally insulated from the activities and the personal caprices of politicians. The influence of money in the determination of cases is also high.

One very potent case to back this up is the recent controversy on the Supreme Court judgment affirming the victory of Senate President Ahmed Lawan as the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the senatorial contest for Yobe North. In a majority judgment, the apex court allowed the appeal filed by the APC against Bashir Machina’s candidature. The court had pronounced Lawan victorious against Machina simply because it held that, where there is an allegation of fraud, it should not be commenced by an originating summons. Arguments are weighty to back up Machina’s allegations. However, legal technicalities prevailed. While technicalities cannot be discountenanced in law, fastidious sticking to them, at the expense of substantive arguments, can continue to impugn the judiciary, especially when decided cases have spoken vehemently on the need to face substantive matters of law and urging judicial officers not to be bound wholesale by technicalities. Though perceptions may not be real and could be misleading after all, conversely, perception is everything, especially when these judicial officers are dealing with Nigerians who are not abreast of the rules of technicalities. 

To combat this epidemic of corruption in the judiciary, Tinubu’s submission to tackle the epidemic is through what he called “the right incentives.” It will seem that Tinubu was just being simplistic, or at worst minimalist in his conception of judicial corruption. It is laughable that his proffer to deal with the octopodal dragons of judicial corruption is merely to throw money and comfort at judicial officers. This definitely cannot work. First is that, corrupt Nigerians today have not succeeded in drawing a line on when enough is actually enough. They amass sickening wealth that fails logic and common sense. So, if you incentivize judges, it is enough to deter them from corruption? Tinubu is apparently seeking judicial officers who live in a sequestered world, pampered so well that they are insulated from the vermin of corruption, away from the rest of the world. This can only exist in a dream world.

The Tinubu intervention on corruption provoked cynicism of the Nigerian media the second day of his Rivers State epistle. Newspapers that led their next day editions with that thrust did so out of an amalgam of mockery and cynicism. Whether real or imagined, global perception is that, a Tinubu presidency would battle everything but corruption. His pedigree is that of an insider-outsider in the sewage of corruption. Only during the week, the Premium Times reported the linkage of the president-elect with twenty high net-worth properties in the United Kingdom, which allegedly belong to him and his close associates and which were mostly acquired when Tinubu was governor of Lagos State. As we match into May 29, the day of inauguration of the new president, Nigeria will be transiting from the general perception (which is very likely unreal) of an austere and incorruptible president who is passing the baton of power, to another general perception of a robustly corrupt president (which is likely real). While the former perception didn’t keep corruption at bay in Nigeria, the latter perception may likely make the atmosphere free for corruption to luxuriate, flower and flourish.

What can keep corruption at bay in Nigeria is leadership by example. Which Nigeria may not have from May 29. In spite of general global perception that Nigerians cavort with maggots in the sewage, a stern leadership that is ready to make example of malefactors will scare corrupt people off their perfidy. That leadership must advertise itself as ready to throw anyone, including itself, under the bus if it is caught having saturnalia with corruption. It does not appear to me that Tinubu presidency, Nigeria will have this. Only a few days ago, Bloomberg reported that Tinubu’s son, Oluwaseyi, is the main shareholder in Aranda Overseas Corporation, an offshore company which bought a controversial US$10.8 million U.K. property in 2017. In the two reported damaging stories, mum was the word from Bourdillon.

If you now compare these two stories with how Nigerian petty thieves get jailed for minor offences as shoplifting and larceny, an empire will seem to be on the verge of being constructed for corruption to reign in at least the next four years. It is comparable to the Yoruba conception of injustice and unfairness. This was aptly depicted in a short fable that talks of a sick hired hand who is disdained for his temerity to fall sick, in comparison with a sick son of the taskmaster who is pleaded with to sip a broth of peppery soup - Ojojo nse iwofa, won ni alakori gbe’se e de; bo ba s’omo olowo, won a ni ko roju f’ata s’enu.

In my estimation, corruption will no longer strike Nicodemusly in Nigeria in the next four years, either in the judiciary or Nigeria in general. This is because the vultures that will surround power will fertilize the ground for corruption to luxuriate. The corruption to come will share same template with the legion demons in that famous story of the Madman of Gadarene, told in the three synoptic gospels of the bible. This story is about a demon-possessed madman with a thousand maddening spirits. When the mad spirits were commanded out of him, they begged to be sent, not out of the country, but into a herd of swine. If corruption played under the cover in the last few years under Buhari, going forward, swine with similar demonic spirit of corruption will be openly possessed by that spirit in years to come. They will however not perish in the sea like the swine of Gadarene.