16102021 - Southeast Gov INEC top official in trouble over $4m bribe

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34—SATURDAY Vanguard, OCTOBER 16, 2021 This sounds like fairy tale. Enugu Rangers got 25,000 naira from General Olusegun Obasanjo in 1977 for lifting the African Winners Cup. Forty four years later, the players are waiting for their share of the money. It does appear that the largesse was shared by government and club officials in what appeared like a bazaar. And to cap it all, there are claims that part of the money was used to hire new players at the end of the 1977 season. This defence does not hold water because the governor of Anambra State in 1978, Col. John Atom Kpera provided all that the Flying Antelopes needed to excel and was ever willing to increase subvention to attract new players. Kpera was Camp Commandant of the Games Village during the Lagos ’73 Second All Africa Games. He loved soccer and did well for his state team. Even his wife, Ruth Ayam Kpera followed Rangers keenly during her days in Enugu. My investigations showed that when some senior players tried to call attention to the Obasanjo Award and envisaged a sharing formula that included Junior players,they were suspended. Among those sanctioned were Christian Madu, popularly called ‘Gabu’ by the junior players, Chimezie ‘Watch me’ Ngadi, Stanley ‘Englishman’ O k o r o n k w o , Okwuchukwu ‘Stone’ Anigbogu and Francis ‘ German Wall’ Nwosu. It sounded crazy that Ngadi,who was the club’s leading scorer in the African Winners Cup with five goals including a hattrick against Electric Company of Ethiopia would be suspended for fighting injustice. Madu, who was lured back from Ghanaian side, Accra Great Olympics was eventually sacked. His wife, part of Rangers’ medical team was also fired. Gabu scored against Canon Sportif, Cameroun in Lagos. Right winger, Sam Onyeaka who was bloodied in Dakar, Senegal by fans of AS Police after he laid an assist for Ngadi to score, before firing goal number two, is still in the dark about what happened to the money. Speaking with some of these stars could force tears down one’s cheeks. And we got chatting.Onyeaka, an Engineer, lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Arthur Ebunam, a Textile Engineer stays in Powder Springs, Georgia. Aloysius Atuegbu and Okey Isima are dead but their brothers spoke. Fidelis, the youngest of the Famous Five Atuegbu Brothers has a home in Livermore, California. Ndu Isima is based in Durban, South Africa. Onyeaka said : “ Emeka, this will touch some nerves, wake up the dead and weaken souls. Did any player benefit from the Uzor Maxim Uzoatu he Nobel Prize in Literature is Alfred TNobel’s dynamite gift of controversy that can blow up the world. British playwright and the 1926 Nobel Prize winner, George Bernard Shaw, said: “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” It is a prize that has turned into a yearly ritual of polemics and brickbats once a novelist or playwright or poet or lyricist as in Bob Dylan is announced as the winner of the much coveted prize. A partisan of the crowned writer can blow his vuvuzela in loud celebration thusly: “My writer is bigger than yours!” Antagonists would always damn the Swedish Academy as a secret cult whose ways can be equated with neither rhyme nor reason. Since the first award of the Nobel Prize in 1901, the entire world has been seized by the jugular without any foreseeable respite. The Nobel Prize upped the ante in surprise when none of the writers named by the bookies at Ladbrokes in Britain as possible winners of the 2021 prize could gain the diadem. It was such a shocker when the Swedish Academy anointed the unheralded Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and Where’s our money? •Rangers s ’77 7 Cup Winners s cry y out Obasanjo 25,000 naira reward, I don’t know. It is still a secret kept away from me till today. I was considered a rebel and nothing of such came my way.” I was shocked to hear this from a man nicknamed 404 by ace commentator Ernest Okonkwo and known to friends as ‘Achimota’. “Yes, Rangers supporters wouldn’t know the pains, the hardship some players endured to keep them happy. Were the players happy even after winning a match? Hell NO. “The officials ( not coaches and team managers), earned more than the players, win or lose. Wait until you hear what it took to feed Rangers players outside the country. You have to find that out by yourself”,Onyeaka added. “I got nothing, after I gave all my life, sacrificing my flesh and blood but we kept playing to satisfy our brothers and sisters. Their support was all that mattered to us. Many players were oppressed and their careers terminated for being outspoken.” Ebunam, was one of the younger players. “ I was quite young and observed a lot. We did not see the money given to us at Dodan Barracks. That was the major reason I decided to move to Standard of Jos, with Okey Isima and Humphrey Okechukwu,” he told me. “ I left for the United States in 1979 but that was after Standard defeated Rangers home and away. It was my subtle way of protesting. “ I returned to Rangers in 1983 but again, management wasn’t ready to do the right thing. So I went back to the North. I joined BCC Lions in 1984 and later El Kanemi Warriors. In the North, you get paid your Nobel Prize As Mother Of All Controversies compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Some of the outraged critics cried that Abdulrazak Gurnah is unknown while others deposed that he is obscure, even as many others exclaimed that they had never read any of his books. For me, Abdulrazak Gurnah must rank amongst the most noble of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. No serious controversy whatsoever really dogs him, and attention-seeking is definitely not his forte. It is little wonder then that not many of the literati could dwell much on his person or his writing oeuvre when he was acclaimed “in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”, as the Nobel Prize evinces. Even when he was reached on phone with the breaking news of his winning the coveted prize, he thought somebody was playing pranks on him, that it was all a joke! For a novelist who had been hard at work since 1987 when he published his first novel, Memory of Departure and has published nine other novels thus far, Abdulrazak Gurnah is definitely unafraid of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, to borrow the title of Alan Sillitoe’s long story. Abdulrazak Gurnah had earned some attention when his 1994 novel Paradise was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize. He won my attention and deep respect for being associated with Susheila Nasta’s trailblazing magazine, Wasafiri, a magazine I have written for. Incidentally, my nomination for the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing was for “Cemetery of Life”, a short story published by Wasafiri magazine. Wasafiri is family, so Abdulrazak Gurnah’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature also belongs to me. Anybody who is annoyed by this chestbeating should aspire to write for Wasafiri! It is indeed worthy of celebration that Abdulrazak Gurnah’s uncommon consistency has won for him the most coveted of prizes – the Nobel. It is neither here nor there joining the pundits in debating whether Ngugi wa Thiong’o ought to have won the prize instead. This is as unnecessary as the unending Nigerian debate on the Nobel Prize between partisans of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. The discomforting truth of course is that some eminent writers who could not win the Nobel Prize in Literature included Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, F. Scott worth and they were honest in dealing with players.” Fidelis Atuegbu would not spare the officials. He said : “ Our people need to know the complete story. As a country, we cannot continue to cover up misdeeds under the misguided notion of sparing the sensitivities of people in high places. “It is our History and it needs to be told. That way, our future generation can learn from it.” Ndu Isima said : “ Jim Nwobodo took every necessary step to bring Okey back to Rangers. I was at the Governor’s office when the final deal was struck. Okey got the money he deserved and was able to build a house in the village and got married subsequently.” Patrick Ekeji moved to Rangers after the African Winners Cup victory. Nwobodo had become Chairman of the club and facilitated the move. Ekeji was offered a Volkswagen Beetles. He settled for the cash equivalent. Sir Felix Nduka Chigbufue, a Rangers fan was at the Institute of Management and Technology Enugu in 1977 and got an Inside gist. “Firstly, from the money, management used 2,500 naira to buy a brand new Volkswagen Beetles to lure Adokiye Amiesimaka to Rangers. I had a friend who was very close to the team,” Chigbufue said. The Flying Antelopes did not defend the African Winners Cup in 1978. They went for the elite Africa Cup for Champion Clubs (today’s CAF Champions League). The players who had been denied their share of the Obasanjo Bonanza put heads together. In the semifinals against Canon Sportif, the same team they beat to lift the African Winners Cup in 1977, Rangers played dumb and dragged the match into penalty shoot out. And the Nigerians made sure their opponents won. In the FA Cup grand finale against Bendel Insurance, some of the players deliberately went drinking on the eve of the game. At 4.00 am on match day, a key member of the team lay on the floor of his hotel room dead drunk. That was how Insurance earned a 3- 0 jackpot. The Flying Antelopes decided not to win any trophy in 1978 because they feared and rightly so, that club officials would take all the credit and make more money. It was the best way to stop ‘ monkey dey work, baboon dey chop’. Former Green Eagles and Shooting Stars defender, Dr. Felix Owolabi could not spare the officials. “So, so sad and a big shame to Nigeria,” Owoblow said. For four years after 1978, Rangers did not go continental. The officials were denied estacode and ridiculous pilfering of money meant for players welfare. The equivalent of 25,000 naira donated in 1977 is over 50,000 million naira today. Enugu Rangers have not won any trophy outside Nigeria since 1978. Perhaps, there should be atonement by those officials, dead or alive. Fitzgerald etc. Remarkably each of these deathless writers were officially nominated for the prize but could not win it while some relatively unknown worthies won the Nobel Prize in Literature over these masters, namely Mommsen, Eucken, Heidenstam, Spitteler, Reymont, Karlfeldt, Jensen, Martinson etc. With the global gravitas of the Nobel nobody now reckons with the fact that it is in fine a Swedish literature prize. The worldwide attention given to the Nobel Prize in Literature has thus brewed the broth of the mother of all controversies. As the legendary wag Oscar Wilde knows, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” In winning the Nobel, Abdulrazak Gurnah is on the front burner of global discourse, and his books that people neglected earlier are now being sold for as much as $1000 per copy on Amazon. It gladdens my heart to end that Abdulrazak Gurnah has joined the esteemed class of the 118 notables awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1901 to 2021, made up of 102 men and only 16 women. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature is of course not an end in itself because the one factor that assures the classic value of a literary life is Father Time and not any prize, including the Nobel. The assurance lives in me that “my family brother” of Wasafiri magazine Abdulrazak Gurnah will go the distance of literary immortality after pocketing the $1.14million prize money!
It’s a Nigerian syndrome. A titlecraving disease. A subliminal doyou-know-who-I-am mentality that accompanies even the meekest around and leaves him one provocation away from becoming an agbero. The Nigerian big man’s penchant for perceiving slight or injury once his title is omitted in public and the recourse to petulance or vengeance to effect a correction. But frankly, nobody expected this from Lamido Sanusi, the Change Agent. Lamido Sanusi was once the Emir of Kano. He was dethroned 18 months ago. A new Emir of Kano has since been appointed. Yet, Sanusi won’t sit still and accept the fact that since he isn’t the current Emir of Kano then he is a former Emir. We can allow Sanusi to continue pretending he was once a sovereign. So that he can hang onto “once a sovereign always a sovereign.” That might help him. But Emirs of today are not sovereigns. They are well-decorated community organisers of some historical significance. If Lamido Sanusi were a sovereign, an emperor of the old Kano Empire, the consequences of any dethronement would have been different—dungeon, exile or death. Not this resurgent peacocking that is finicky about vanity and expired protocols. Well, Sanusi could say he has been exiled from Kano to Abuja, Kaduna and Lagos and left psychologically severely wounded. Then, let him know that even real sovereigns, once dethroned, are not owed any honours, let alone the modern-day antiquities called traditional rulers in a multiparty democracy, if deposed. In Nigeria, society infests everyone with the warts of the brute. The acculturation of the ogboju phenomenon. So, the creme de la By Ephraim Oseji & Cynthia Alo eorge Ayinde, also known as Nephilim is Gan investor and entrepreneur with a multidisciplinary technological, creative, and marketing background, and a long history in the crypto space. He is also the founder and Chief Executive Officer of WEMOVE DeFi, an auto-liquidity generating empowerment token focused on the African market that’s building an ecosystem for a cryptocurrency-enabled economy. In this interview, George Ayinde, talks about an innovative digital approach that will see Africa blossom economically and stand out among other continents. What is ‘Wemove? Wemove is a digital currency that can be used as a store of value or to buy goods and services anywhere in the world in seconds by using an online public ledger with strong cryptography to secure online transactions without the need for a trusted third party or centralized institution. Wemove is geared towards becoming the African internet of money. WeMove is the embodiment of what it means to carry the genesis genes of civilization. It is our way of life, our very essence embedded deep in our diverse yet similar cultures; it is the call sign for the liberation, calibration, and healing of our generation so our “tomorrows” have a solid foundation to build on. How secure is your platform and how do you intend to convince your potential investors bearing in mind that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) early this year banned trading in crypto currencies and enabling payments for crypto exchange? I understand that a centralised body banned its centralised institution banks from working with centralised crypto exchanges, and research data has shown that this only drove up investment into crypto and DeFi by Nigerians. What the CBN did was to completely alienate itself from Nigerian crypto adopters who are already traditional finance skeptics and further buttress the bitcoin narrative that people should be the custodians Oracle Lamido Sanusi, the former Emir of Kano creme sometimes tastes like the crusts from the bottom. At that ceremony in Kaduna, the man who addressed Sanusi as “former Emir of Kano” couldn’t have described him more reverently and correctly. So when Sanusi leapt up and threw a fit, he betrayed indignation, an unhealthy grudge. Though commoners like me can’t know how it feels to be a dethroned emir, Sanusi should mellow out. When Sanusi, the democrat, the advocate of integrity in governance, informed the crowd through a sly innuendo that the man’s sin would imminently cost him his position as Chief of Staff to the Kaduna State governor, many shook their heads in bemusement. In one Kaduna breath, Lamido Sanusi, the genius, left everybody astounded with a spectacular piece of It is time every African has access to the tools necessary to thrive —-George Ayinde of their own fungible assets not centralised financial institutions. The ban gave rise to P2P (peer-to-peer) platforms, the very ethos to which bitcoin was created in the first place. Africans, not just Nigerians, have a massive problem with cross border settlements and remittances. If you are Nigerian and live outside the country, you’ll realise how worthless your retail banks are and crypto solves this issue in a lightning fast manner. You can buy goods and services from another continent in seconds without having to wait on a two to three day SWIFT, caps on how much you can send-receive, and all the 21 questions and restrictions from the banks for remittance. In my world, I have never had to wait for a transaction for a day. I do not understand it; it doesn’t compute in my head and with the plethora of crypto currency out there you get remittances in seconds. Africans also put their savings into crypto as a means of avoiding inflation and this has contributed to the growing market in Africa. Everyone earning in local currency are worth a lot less at the time of this interview, thanks to inflation caused by the same institutions you revere; they made us all a lot worth-less. As for the MMM narrative, since 2009, twelve years since bitcoin was launched and all you can see is growing adoption. According to Chainalysis, Africa’s crypto market increased in value by more than 1,200% between July of 2020 and June 2021, with high adoption in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. The same CBN that banned crypto launched its own CBDC, so it begs the question: was it done to once again try to force Nigerians to use their own crypto currency? The same way Twitter was banned so some knock off platform could be forced on the masses as a form of control of free speech? If this is the case then they have a rude awakening coming their way. SATURDAY Vanguard, OCTOBER 16, 2021—35 emotional unintelligence. If it were just the addiction to big titles, many wouldn’t have minded. We are used to that. If it were just that reflexive, naked, shameless display of power in dressing down a senior government official in public, we We can allow Sanusi to continue pretending he was once a sovereign. So that he can hang onto “once a sovereign always a sovereign. wouldn’t have staggered. After all, a big masquerade who once rode in Rolls Royce and Bentley limousines while superintending the affairs of the second largest emirate in Nigeria, despite all his Ted talks, can lose his temper and squash the ego of a fry. But Sanusi is also a social critic who inundates the public with sermons against arbitrariness and vanity. He ought to be wary of his conduct in public. In every fit of fury or outburst of superciliousness, he must avoid obscenities, pronouncements that suggest that a You cannot force people to adopt your currency [laughs], it does not work that way, and besides the more educated people are about decentralised finance, the more they will ask informed questions about CBDCs like who controls the mint function of the currency? Under what set rules will new digital currency be minted? Where is the Whitepaper? Why wasn’t the Whitepaper made public? Will the ledger of said CBDC be made public? In a country that prints the Naira on end, what will be different about this so called digital currency? How are the private keys stored and most important question of it all for adopters will be do they want to use another fork of centralisation as a store of value? If African governments stopped wasting trillions on financial regulation and figuring out how to fleece its citizens at every turn and devote these resources to building and infrastructure, we would be transforming Mars already and there would be no such thing as scarce resources. As for the security question, I would refer you to the Decentralised Perpetual Liquidity protocol we are founded on. •Ayinde What made you take this step despite the level of acceptance of digital currency in Africa? Deep self-love that originates out of my profound connection to my roots. The Deep desire to see Africans on equal footing in every industry with the rest of the world is what drives this project. We have been marginalized and robbed enough, it is time every African has access to the tools necessary to thrive. What are you doing differently? We are an Africa first platform, we are leading the path for others to follow, this is not a race for medals or social anecdotes for bragging rights but one for the liberation, calibration, and healing of our generation through discourse, innovation, and financial inclusion. We are a platform base for other platforms and we hope to inspire more innovation in this space. What we have done differently is an efficient marketplace where crypto has a real-world utility. The WEMOVE DeFi protocol will provide access to financial services where individuals and businesses can access appropriate, affordable, and timely financial products and services depending on their individual use case. These include decentralized banking, loans, equity, and insurance products. WEMOVE is creating an ecosystem for e-commerce- decentralized governor, who is his childhood friend, exists to service his bloated ego. At the peak of his crisis in the Kano Emirate, a few commentators had called on Sanusi to abdicate the problematic throne and position himself for the presidency. Sanusi might not be a saint; certainly, the Kano State Anti-Corruption Commission doesn’t think he is, but he is a leading light in the national crusade for social reformation. The bane of this country isn’t a paucity of intellectuals and preachers. It is a dearth of principled folks who can preach, not with their mouths alone but, with their public and private lives. A governor can reshuffle his cabinet whimsically. And he can choose to discuss his plans with his airiest girlfriends. But If the Chief of Staff to the governor of a state can be ridiculed by a private individual and sanctioned so hastily by the state to massage the ego of a crony of the governor, then governance has gone to children. Even if the cabinet reshuffle had been written, but only published after Sanusi’s outburst, it still speaks of rot. Since the apparent sanction was announced by the aggrieved pompous friend of the governor even before the alleged offence had been understood by the presumed offender and the listening public, then naked cronyism is the menace and Governor El Rufai must take the heart of the blame. Two days after the event, Lamido Sanusi wants us to believe it was hilarious banter, an attempt by him to relax his audience. I believe him. He also said Gov El Rufai had not discussed with him the cabinet reshuffle that happened a day after his ominous joke. I believe him too. Putting all these beliefs together, let me wish Oracle Lamido Sanusi, the former Emir of Kano, a hilarious weekend. apps, a social remittance platform, Gamefi, and an African NFT platform like no other. From what you said, Wemove will reduce rise in inflation and also increase financial inclusion in Africa. So far, what is Nigeria and Africa not doing right? Nigeria including Africa’s financial inclusion challenges is a result of regulation by the same centralized institutions built to enable them. Until African politics and financial policy are mutually exclusive, the issue of financial inclusion will forever be a problem for centralized institutions. Africans prefer to keep money outside the banks and who can blame them? It is not an illiteracy issue as touted by the banks but one of bad policy, service charges, and punishing regulation on how we can spend our hardearned money, and the general population have concluded that it is costly and inefficient to keep money in a bank. The entire world is experiencing a colossal shift towards decentralization and its use cases, in the world of finance; the traditional model is no longer sustainable and will only last for as long as these institutions can lobby politicians to do their bidding. Decentralized finance has flipped the model on its head, delivering a new world of financial products, built using smart contracts that allow consumers to switch between providers in a matter of seconds, all at the click of a mouse. It is not that the WEMOVE protocol is just better — it’s simply fundamentally different. In the old world of retail banking, you have to trust the people that run banks. This trust is expensive to everyday Africans- everyday people. In the new world of decentralized finance, we trust the code that provides our financial services. Code does not care about your tribe, ethnicity, religion, or political party. A set of rules in a smart contract is all that governs. Africa has missed the industrial revolution and all its glory, that era evolved into a digital revolution that gave birth to a disruptive fourth industrial revolution, and centralized Institutions as we know them will never be the same. What do African governments stand to gain if they adopt a crypto-enabled economy? I created the Katalyst Africa platform for this purpose years before WeMove. It is going to be a biannual global gathering of all things disruptive and future tech that elected officials, tech entrepreneurs, startups and the general public from the cardinals of Africa will attend; there we will discuss the Africa agenda and how these emerging technologies can further empower the next generation of Africa. As for what the governments stand to gain, I believe they would regain some degree of trust from the same people that elected them to govern. Continues on www.vanguardngr.com
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16102021 - Southeast Gov INEC top official in trouble over $4m bribe

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