The year 2024 is in a hurry to wind up. Indeed, in the next 48 hours, the last vestiges of the year will bow in the spiral of time and dovetail into a new year. On the socio-political fronts, the outgoing year is an odyssey of the good, the very bad and the utterly ugly. It is a year tinged in oddities and extremities. A year full of the cranky and the crappy.
The economic sphere is no less odious. It is a year of extreme lopsidedness, where the financially bullish literally heckle the haplessly wimpish; a year where the gap between the extremely opulent and the extremely poor has become as wide as that between the sky and the earth. A year where events occur at a pulsating and giddy pace.
We, in this review, cast a retrospective glance back at some of the salient events that shaped the year, many of which had featured in rave analyses in our editorials. The outgoing year opened with the news of the alleged N585.2million scandal involving the former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, beautiful and cerebral Dr. Betta Edu.
The story actually broke at the twilight of 2023 but dovetailed into 2024. The kernel of the matter was the content of a leaked memo, dated December 20,2023, which the then 37-year-old and youngest of the Tinubu administration’s 42-member cabinet wrote to the Office of Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF). The memo directed the transfer of the said amount, N585.2million, into a private bank account of one Oniyelu Bridget, said to be the Project Accountant of Grants for Vulnerable Groups.
The leaked memo momentarily spurred nationwide obloquy, as individuals and interest groups, who smelt a rat, called for the probe of the transaction, because the money was a grant for vulnerable groups in four states— Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Lagos and Ogun. The transaction earned the immediate suspension of Edu, who was not fazed by the allegation but rather dismissed insinuations of possible fraud against her as “baseless.” The outcome of the probe into the alleged malfeasance was never made public, but defiant Edu never regained her ministerial position as she was replaced in a subsequent cabinet reshuffle.
January was actually particularly loaded with hair-raising events. And that is the streak that punctuates the entire year. The cauldron of the Betta bedlam was still seething in hot emotions when the equivalent of a tremor hit three banks. The resultant echo reverberated across banking halls, in an industry that tends to quiver at the slightest hint of shock. The clincher came through a terse, three-paragraph statement from the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN), dated Wednesday, January10, 2024, which, like a cyclone, swept away the boards and management of Union Bank, Keystone Bank and Polaris Bank in one fell swoop.
The statement, signed by the Acting Director, Corporate Communication, Sidi Ali Hakama, adduced corporate governance failure and non-compliance with regulatory requirements as among the reasons for the dissolution.
The apex bank also accused the banks of involvement in activities, it said, posed a threat to the financial stability of the banking sector.
Financial buffs were still discussing the propriety or otherwise of the hammer that fell on the three banks when ubiquitous, dare devilish bandits-turned-kidnappers, quite like ravenous brutes let loose from the lair, suddenly swooped on our relative fortress, the nation’s seat of power, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
In an atrocious audacity that defied logic, these kidnappers, who were said to be renegades of bandits escaping from the military onslaught in the Northwest axis, began to break into homes near the seat of power from early January, abducting residents and demanding hefty ransoms.
The new dimension into the heinous activities of these goons for some time cast a huge pall of gloom over the FCT, as they resorted to the mindless killings of kidnap victims whose relatives delayed ransom payments and made a callous spectacle of some of their bodies on the Abuja-Kaduna highway.
Amid this security maelstrom, an explosion suddenly went off on Adeyi Avenue, Bodija, Ibadan, Oyo State capital, literally supplanting the otherwise tranquility of the popular idyllic haven, a picturesque abode of many of the city’s nouveaux riches. The strange explosion, which occurred at about 7.44pm on Tuesday, January 16, 2024, hit the street with the devastation of a rocket and by the time the fog cleared, the entire street had been flattened.
Most of the buildings on the street were reduced to near rubble. The few buildings spared by the blast were scarred by big ugly cracks. The deadly blast, which was later traced to some illegal aliens involved in mining activities in the state, completely razed virtually all the vehicles at the scene. The boom of the explosion, said to have spanned a 14-kilometre radius, reverberated across many parts of the sprawling city. It blew windows out of houses and shook buildings to their foundation, even in some streets far away from the scene.
Five people died in the explosion, while about 77 persons were injured and hospitalised.
Residents who were lucky to have survived, had horrendous tales to tell. They were literally stripped naked. All that most of them had laboured to amass in life went with the blast like a flash of lightning.
Before the Ibadan blast, tragedy had hit the banking industry, as the quintessential banker-cum-financial prodigy and Chief Executive Officer of Access Bank Holdings, 57-year-old Herbert Wigwe, died in an helicopter crash in the United States of America alongside his wife, Chizoba; his son, Chidi; the former Group Chairman of the Nigerian Exchange Group(NGX Group), Abimbola Ogunbanjo, and two crew members who were the pilots.
The consummate banker had left Nigeria on Wednesday, January 7, 2024 for the United States of America for the purpose of witnessing the Super Bowl, the annual NPF Championship game he cherished with passion. He rarely missed the sports, he considered his guilty pleasure, every year. Reports said the chopper flight conveying them, documented as N130CZ, operated by Orbic Air LLC, took off the night of Friday, January 9, 2024 from Palm Springs, California, going to Boulder City, Nevada, crashed at about 10pm near a small town in California’s Mojave Desert.
According to US authorities, a mix of rain and wintry weather was among the factors that contributed to the chopper crash.
Monstrous and pervasive best describe the degree of grief that overtook the nation over the tragedy. It was a quirk of fate, indeed, for Herbert’s parents particularly, who had 27 years earlier lost their then 34-year- old first son, Osita, in a fatal car crash. Herbert, to all intents and purposes, was a financial whiz-kid who affected many lives, even outside the banking industry.
His accomplishments were stellar and prodigious. These, coupled with his death and those of his wife and his son in such tragic circumstances had tended to unite the nation in deep grief.
The costs-of-living crisis took a new turn in February when hunger-induced protests swept through the nation from the North to the South. Protesters in some parts of the country took over the highways blocking the flow of traffic and clashing with the police. This was trailed by extensive pillaging of government warehouses and a few of private ones by miscreants, pleading hunger.
And the decision of the Tinubu administration to implement the Oronsaye report, which anchors essentially on cutting the costs of governance and enhancing the efficiency of the federal civil service, a laudable development, also took the centre stage. The removal of fuel subsidy, which dovetailed into the precipitous rise in the costs of living, had elicited more strident calls for the government to curb waste, work for a leaner bureaucracy and save money for development.
The 800-page report, generated by the Jonathan administration, had established the existence of 541 federal parastatals, agencies and commissions but discovered that only 263 were statutory, while 278 were not. It uncovered overlapping agencies “duplicating mandates and replicating extant laws.” They were nothing but terrible leeches on government’s resources, which the report aimed at addressing.
Another event that ruled the waves in March was the N3.7trillion budget padding allegation made against the Senate by a ranking senator, Abdul Ningi (Adamawa Central Senatorial District), who until the N3.7trillion imbroglio was the Chairman of the Northern Senators Forum (NSF). Ningi had stirred the hornets’ nest when he granted BBC Hausa Service an interview, alleging that a whopping sum of N3.7trn in the 2024 budget could not be traced to specific project locations. The matter raised a lot of dust, culminating in the suspension of Senator Ningi, who also resigned his position as NSF chairman because his co-Northern senators sided with the presidency against him. He has since been recalled.
Around this time, precisely March 25, an infamy worst than the Odi, Bayelsa State tragedy, occurred in Okuoma in Ughelli South Local Government Area of Delta State with the killing in one fell swoop of 17 military personnel. The victims, made up of four officers— the commanding officer of the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, two majors and a captain— and 13 soldiers, all attached to the 181 Amphibious Battalion of the Nigerian Army, were on a peace mission when they were ambushed and killed by persons suspected to be a militant gang in Okuoma community in a vengeful mission to avenge the death of three youths in a communal clash.
A week later, six policemen were also ambushed and killed in Ohoro Forest also in Delta State. The hoopla engendered by the horrendous murders are still reverberating almost 10 months after.
Less than two weeks after, precisely March 28, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) again sent the nation’s banks racing on the labyrinthine tracks of recapitalization, 19 years ago after the last exercise. The exercise is aimed at building enough capital buffer for the banking industry to support the $1 trillion economy being envisioned by the Tinubu administration by 2030. And it is, of course, to promote financial stability.
In the apex bank’s statement, signed by its Director, Financial Policy and Regulations Department, Haruna B. Mustafa, commercial banks, which have international authorization are to recapitalize to the tune of a minimum capital of N500 billion. And the minimum capital requirement for commercial banks that have national authorization is N200billion
Regional commercial banks are to shore up their minimum paid-up capital to the tune of N50 billion, while for national merchant banks, it is N50 billion as well. It is N20 billion for non-interest banks with national authorization and N10 billion for regional non-interest banks.
And against the grain of public outcry against any form of raise in electricity tariff at this time, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) eventually effected the hike. And it did it in a most indecorous manner. The commission created a sort of an ‘Orwellian’ scenario by segregating electricity consuming public into five bands, A to E, which will be enjoying differential power supply.
Then, on April 12, at about 9:55am, a gaggle of misplaced agitators undertook a ghoulish expedition to the Oyo State Secretariat, Agodi, Ibadan, an idyllic haven housing both the Governor’s Office and the House of Assembly. Decked in military camouflage and armed with pump action semi-automatic rifles and other melange of assorted arms, the invaders allegedly drew the first blood by opening fire on the policemen on ground, after hoisting their flag on the premises of the legislative arena.
They were, however, eventually overpowered and dislodged by a combined force of police reinforcement, personnel of the Nigerian Army, a detachment of the Department of State Security(DSS), Civil Defence Corps, Operation Burst and Amotekun operatives. The bizarre invasion came barely 24 hours after Mrs Modupe Onitiri-Abiola, one of the late MKO Abiola’s widow, emerged from the blues and, in a most infantile audacity, proclaimed an independent ‘Democratic Republic of Yoruba,’ a development that caused quite a stir.
And in May, the former Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, stirred up a hornets’ nest when he announced that the Federal Government would consider pegging the minimum age for admission into the universities and other tertiary institutions in the country at 18. He believed that most of the challenges at the universities are caused by underage students. But the issue, which generated a lot of storm, died a natural death when Prof. Mamman was dropped in a cabinet reshuffle.
Early June, a newly passed law returning the old national anthem stirred serious emotional outbursts. Titled, ‘Bill for an Act to Provide for the National Anthem of Nigeria and for Matters Related Thereto,’ which originated from the lower chamber of the National Assembly, the bill sought to replace the current national anthem, ‘Arise O Compatriots,’ with the old one adopted at independence on October1,1960, ‘Nigeria we hail thee.’ The old anthem was changed in 1978 by the Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo military regime. A lot of critics believed the law was ill-timed and a wrong foot forward.
The fuss about a new National Minimum Wage(NMW) following the spiralling costs of living dominated the news space for months. After a rancorous rounds of negotiations between the Federal Government and the tripartite committee saddled with the task, N70,000 was eventually agreed as the new NMW. The implementation is ongoing.
There were anxious moments at the nation’s seat of power at the Eagle Square, Abuja, venue of the 31st anniversary of the June12,1993 presidential election, won by the late Chief MKO Abiola, now being marked yearly as Democracy Day. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 72, was to ceremoniously ride an open-air motorcade round the venue to review the military parade mounted to commemorate the historic event. As he was climbing the presidential motorcade, he tripped and fell flat into the vehicle. And for a split second, the nation was held in suspense as Mr President was being helped to leap on his feet and steadied. But anxiety soon graduated into a relief as he regained his composure and continued with the programme, smiling broadly.
And between late June and early July, the ever boisterous and ubiquitous social media buzzed over the move to purchase new aircraft for both President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima. Most of the comments reek in angst against the planned purchase on account of the hardships in town. Nothing was heard about the planned purchase until months when the president began to fly a fairly used jet believed to have been surreptitiously bought by the presidency.
A judgment of the Supreme Court on the vexed issue of autonomy for local governments also spurred so much national interest. The apex court’s verdict effectively affirmed the financial autonomy of the nation’s 774 LGs. It gave the LGs fresh breath, as the apex court ruled that their allocations should, with immediate effect and henceforth, be paid directly to them from the Federation Account, thus bypassing their governors in accordance with Section 162(3) of the 1999 Constitution. The implementation is, however, still being worked out.
Like a relay race, a bitter pill forced down the throats of the banks soon snatched the baton of public attention from the LG autonomy blues. The Federal Government, through the National Assembly, had amended the Finance Act of 2023 to impose a 50 per cent one-off levy on the forex windfall made by banks last year. The levy was increased to 70 per cent after the bill was passed. The levy is part of the government’s plan to fund the N6.2 trillion supplementary budget submitted to the National Assembly by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The proposal sought to increase the 2024 budget from N28.7trillion to N34.9. And the federal lawmakers passed the bill, known as the Finance(Amendment) Bill, 2024, and hiked the forex windfall levy from 50 per cent to 70 per cent, with a retroactive effect from January 1, 2023!
In August, the directive by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited(NNPCL) to start selling crude oil to Dangote Refinery and other upcoming local refineries in Naira was a comic relief that somewhat attenuated the vitriolic outbursts generated by the forex windfall levy.
The presidential intervention itself effectively ameliorated the bitter recriminations between Dangote Refinery and oil sector regulators, which had been reluctant to sell crude oil to Dangote Refinery.
One of the most attention-inducing events of the year was the hunger protest that ripped through the soul of the nation between August 1 and 10. The degree of bestiality that signposted it read much like a surreal fib. Fireballs of anger literally seeped through the streets of our cities and states for days. The sooty relics still smouldered weeks after the fire had simmered. It witnessed an orgy of heists and burning binge, while an attempted regime change was alleged as some youths, believed to be acting out a script, were seen openly clutching Russian flags.
The gale of seizures of Nigeria’s offshore assets by a Chinese company over a trade dispute with a Nigerian constituent, which we saw as a cranky and an infernal assault on the nation’s sovereignty, also snatched some news space in August. The firm, Zhongshan Industrial Investment Company Limited, in an audacious move, recently got three Nigerian presidential jets, two of which were on routine maintenance, grounded in France.
The jets, seized on the orders of the Judicial Court of Paris, included a Dessault Falcon 7X, a Boeing 737 and a newly acquired Airbus A330. The dispute over which the Chinese firm seized those planes was between it and Ogun State, which is merely a sub-national entity, a legal conundrum that racked the nation concerning the Chinese firm’s rapacious obsession to corner the nation’s asset, was seen as reeking of subterfuge, international conspiratorial and insufferable mischief.
Borno’s rage of flooding was the piece of news that shook the nation in September. The tragedy began when the Alau Dam, impounding Ngadda River, suddenly burst its bank and emptied its raging volley, in a ferocious surge, into the state capital, burying more than half of the city.
The dam, located in the Konduga community, about 20 kilometers(12 miles) to Maiduguri city center, was said to have caved in due to the overwhelming surge of water from Ndagga River, which is a major tributary from River Yedzaram, as a result of heavy rainfalls. Alau Dam was built in 1986 to help Maiduguri farmers to practise irrigation. The massive flooding, described by the authorities as the worst in that area in three decades, left buildings and infrastructure, including water-cum-sewage systems and bridges in utter ruins.
The flooding killed at least 37 persons. The state government said about one million people were altogether affected one way or the other, 414,000 of whom were displaced. Many people had to use canoes to access their homes in many instances. Some perched on trees and many were on rooftops. People were clinging unto any strands they can hold to escape the rage of floodwaters.
The devastating floods also sacked the Sanda Kyarimi Park Zoo. Many animals, including snakes and crocodiles, were seen swimming in the floodwaters. Officials said the flood either killed or washed away about 80 per cent of the animals in that zoo. The floodwaters also brought down the perimeter fence of the Maiduguri Correctional Center, leading to the escape of at least 200 inmates, including controversial cleric, Rev King, who has been on death row since 2015. Some insurgents’ commanders and other hardened criminals were said to be among those who escaped.
There was also the busting of an hideous cybercrime, otherwise called ‘Yahoo Yahoo’, training school in Delta State, by the military late September, signposting the deep morass we have been sunk as a nation; the moral depravity into which we are now mired by the day. A ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ training school? This is a sordid tale of otherwise innocent teenagers already being descaled of every shade of moral rectitude. They are being weaned on a life of ‘professional’ cyber criminality and unleashed into the society as wastrels.
According to reports, about 150 teenagers, whose ages ranged from 17,18,19 & 20, were arrested by men of the 3 Battalion of the Nigerian Army, who stormed the Hustle Kingdom Cybercrime School in Effurun, Uvwie, Delta State. About 90 of the teenagers were arrested in the morning, while 60, including the owner of the odious school, were nabbed in the evening of the same day.
They were immediately handed over to the police for further investigation and prosecution.
The much awaited cabinet reshuffle came in October when President Bola Tinubu at last walked the talk and rejigged his cabinet. He eased out five ministers and injected fresh breath into the cabinet by appointing seven fresh ministers. The President also redeployed 10 ministers, wound up the Ministry of Sports, reverting all its functions to the National Sports Commissions and merged two ministries, among other actions.
One of the saddest and most mournful periods of the year was the death of Gen. Taoreed Lagbaja, the then Chief of Army Staff, whose prime star dimmed and fell from the military horizon on November 5 after a bout of an undisclosed illness.
Regarded as one of the best military brass hats ever produced by the Nigerian Army, Lagbaja was born on February 28, 1968, in Osun State. He began his military journey in 1987 at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA). He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Nigerian Infantry Corps on September 19, 1992. His tenure as Army chief was very brief, as noted earlier, but the imprint he embossed on the sand of time is large and prodigious. President Tinubu appointed him Chief of Army Staff on June 19, 2023, a position in which he recorded uncommon feats.
The incursion of a new terrorist group into the old Sokoko State, made up of Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara, caused some anxious moments in November. According to reports, the group, called Lakurawa in local parlance, who were holed up in the Marake and Tsauni forests in the Tangaza and Gude areas of Sokoto, were believed to have imposed their hegemony over the local communities, imposing levies on the locals and even flogging them under the guise of enforcing sharia. The gallant Nigerian troops are, however, already tackling the terror group, believed to be ‘renegades’ from Niger Republic, Chad and Mali.
Again, a cacophonous din had overtaken the announcement of the resuscitation of the Port Harcourt Refinery early this month, supplanting the streak of hope and exhilaration that initially seeped through the land, drawing many Nigerians into a strop. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited(NNPCL) had announced that the refinery had commenced operation that day.
The company’s Chief Corporate Communications Officer, Femi Soleye, had disclosed on his X handle that truck loading of petroleum products had begun at the plant. This had expectedly sparked off momentary sparkles of brio and excitement among Nigerians and industry stakeholders. But critics of the newly revamped Port Harcourt Refinery dismissed it as a mere blending plant, saying it is not as productive as being claimed.
Early December too, a slew of angry outbursts and obloquy have trailed the new Executive Tax Reform Bills, 2024, now before the National Assembly. The most blistering of the opposition shots, which have assumed mainly ethnic and regional hues, are from the northern governors, who fear that they will be shortchanged by the new derivation principle embedded in the new VAT revenue sharing formula enshrined in the tax bills.
The four bills, which have already been passed for second reading by the federal lawmakers amid the rancour, are: the Joint Revenue Board of Nigeria(Establishment) Bill, 2024; the Nigeria Revenue Service (Establishment) Bill, 2024; the Nigeria Tax Administration Bill, 2024 and the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024.The bills were proposals from the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms inaugurated in August, 2023 by President Bola Tinubu in Abuja. The objectives of the new bills are to expand Nigeria’s tax base, improve compliance and establish sustainable revenue streams for the nation’s development.
There were acidic exchanges by mid-December over two actions ascribed to Mrs Kemi Badenoch, the first black woman to emerge as the British Leader of Opposition, about Nigeria, the land of her descent: Her denigrating remarks in different forums about the country and the rebuff or cold shoulder with which she treated the olive branch extended to her after her historic victory.
Born in London in 1980 as Olukemi Adegoke, Badenoch was one of three children of Nigerian parents. Her father worked as a physician or general practitioner, while her mother was a physiology professor. She grew up both in Nigeria and US, where her mother lectured.
She returned to UK in 1996 at the age of 16 because of the worsening political and economic developments in Nigeria. Back to UK. Her disparaging remarks about Nigeria generated a bitter backlash, with many Nigerians, including those in the Diaspora, condemning her standoffish attitude towards the land of her descent and the tirades she has been hurling at the country.
The tragic stampedes that occurred in three places penultimate Wednesday and Saturday, in which a total of 74 lives, mostly children and elderly women, were wasted, have been generating national uproar. The tragedies occurred in an impatient shove and scuffle by beneficiaries to gain access into the venues of charity outreaches where philanthropic organizations had arranged to dole out palliatives for the Yuletide season.
According to reports, 35 of the casualties, all children, were trampled to death penultimate Wednesday in Ibadan, Oyo State capital; 29, many of them children too, died in Okija in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State, while 10 persons, seven of them also children, met their death in Maitama, Abuja. The police are probing the tragic stampedes, while some of the organizers of the Ibadan fun fair have been arraigned in court, a development that has been widely condemned.
This is the gloomy note in which the outgoing year is winding up. However, in spite of the gloom and as we bid goodbye to the outgoing year of extremities, let us keep hope alive for a more promising year 2025, expectant of a glimmer of providential fortune to smile on our dear nation.
