Mixed Metaphors: ‘Just Trust Me’

This article is dedicated to Dr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, who is quietly delivering a miracle as Nigeria’s Interior Minister.

No, I have never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I am happy to take this microphone and warmly applaud him.

If you have applied for a passport at any point in the past 40 years, including a renewal, or experienced the application of a relative or a friend at home or abroad, you know how horrendous an experience it is.

You need a lot of money.  And time.  And boatloads of patience.  When you are done spending each of those, you are often required to find more, sometimes even when your document is declared to be ‘ready.’

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Abroad, the situation is worse, as a quick consultation of Google and YouTube would confirm.  As our consulates often mirror the domestic civil service, those offices deliver the same kind of misery.

In each of the past four decades, leaderships of the Ministry—or Internal Affairs, as it used to be—would again and again announce that they were undertaking herculean efforts to improve the system, only to complete their terms of office with the place worse than when they arrived.

Tunji-Ojo appears to have broken the jinx, and according to Vanguard, clearing a backlog of 204,332 passports in less than one month in office.

The Minister, who gives a lot of the credit to Mrs Wura-Ola Adepoju, the Acting Comptroller General, used a mechanism in which NIS officials worked around the clock, in three shifts, including weekends.  I am sure it was more complicated than that, in terms of managing a regime to which civil servants may even have been resistant, but he got the job done.

Congratulations, sir.  Hopefully, your colleagues in the government, including Humanitarian Minister Betta Edu, learn from you about putting in the work, not the words.

“Nigerians can trust me,” she was saying on television last week.  “Not just me, the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” adding that their watchword(s) is “transparency, accountability and integrity.”

No, Ms. Edu.  The watchwords are work and service.  The dogged, sweaty stuff—just like Tunji-Ojo—not preachment.  Nigerians can recognise the two-faced and the forked-tongue miles away.

On the question of recognition, Seyi Tinubu, the Nigeria leader’s son, is reported to be enjoying life on the presidential jet, recently traveling to a polo game in one.

It must be a wonderful life to sit in one and breathe presidential air, knowing that down below or for hundreds of miles in every direction, millions of people are dying in poverty.  That’s not integrity.

But have you ever wondered, dear Nigerian, where the Nigeria Air Force (NAF) finds parking for all these machines in the air?

To go back just about 10 years: in mid-2014, the government of Mr Goodluck Jonathan ordered 40 attack and transportation helicopters for NAF from the United States and Russia, towards routing Boko Haram insurgents  in parts of the North “once and for all.”  They were all to arrive within weeks.

That was two months before a Nigerian delegation was caught trying to smuggle into South Africa, allegedly to buy arms, $9.3 million in cash.  They were also shopping for a helicopter.  In cash!

In March 2015, SaharaReporters broke the story of how Mr Jonathan awarded to his friend, the businessman Arthur Eze, a “scandalously inflated” $500 million contract for the purchase of refurbished helicopters.  Sources told the journal that, in the sheer extravagance apart, the contract had saddled the military with equipment that had limited or no combat utility.

In the middle of 2019, when fighting broke out between APC and the PDP over what APC had done with the one billion dollars it withdrew from the Excess Crude Account, presidential spokesman Garba Shehu explained that the Buhari administration paid about 490 million dollars of it for the 12 Super Tucano fighter aircraft and “various other military procurements,” with “balance of expenditure” standing at “880 million dollars or so.”  The news media was completely satisfied.

[In November 2018, the US Department of Defence had announced the contract, saying it was for an initial sum of $329 million.  Although that contract sum could be varied, it explained, it could not exceed $344.7 million.]

In March 2021, Leonardo, the Italian defence company, won a €1.2bn contract for 24 M-346 FA light attack aircraft for NAF, in continuation of what Air Cosmos called NAF’s “privileged partnership,” having previously ordered C-27J Spartan, AW109, AW139 as well another AW189 in “presidential configuration.”

“The M-346s will come between the 12 EMB 314 Super Tucano ordered in 2019 and the 3 JF-17C Thunder in service since 2016,” Air Cosmos said.  “The multi-purpose aircraft will complement the anti-guerrilla warfare conducted by the Super Tucano in the north of the country and provide air-to-air support to the Thunder for border defence. With this purchase, the NAF will have the most powerful air force in the region, especially since it also has a fleet of armed Chinese CH-3, CH-4, and Wing Loong II drones. Its most serious competitor, Chad, has only three Mig-29 SMs and six Su-25s, as well as aircraft leased from South African private military companies.”

In August 2021, according to Blogbeforeflight, Nigeria confirmed the M-346 order.

In December 2022, it was announced that President Buhari had approved the delivery of 50 “attack air assets”: six T-129 Atak helicopters, two Augusta 109 Trekker multi-role helicopters three Chinese-made Wing Loong II UAS, and (again) 24 Leonardo- M-346 equipment from 2021.

This is significant because in March this year, with just two months left on the Buhari ledger, NAF said it was seeking 50 aircraft.  They included 24 M-346s, 12 Leonardo AW109 Trekker twin-engine multirole helicopters, six Turkish Aerospace Industries T-129 ATAK attack helicopters, three Chengdu Wing Loong II uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), two Beechcraft King Air 360s and four Diamond DA-62s.

On May 27, as the government expired, spokesman Femi Adesina confirmed that orders were in place for 36 additional aircraft, comprising 12 AH-1Z Attack Helicopters and (again!) 24 M-346 Fighter Attack aircraft, and that the force had received 38 brand new aircraft since President Buhari assumed office in 2015.

NAF, evidently, has a lot of air power, but I am certain we will soon order those 24 multi-purpose M-346s again.  And again.

Sadly, as with almost everything in our governments, there is far less accountability about NAF’s mighty cache of expensive equipment as crime and insecurity run rampant from the creeks of the Delta to the Northern borders.  There was a lot of gnashing of teeth in the federal government, for instance, about the 12 Super Tucano jets, which they swore would alter the insecurity story in the North, until they arrived.

They have made no difference, and a lot more “must-have” jets continue to be bought, perhaps to be stored in the clouds.

Remember that this is just about one small area of the military, but it is the reason why sons and daughters of the mighty, should they wish to party in the sky, or shoot photos of dancing clouds or go to the toilet somewhere else, simply crook a finger.