Notes From Atlanta

17/08/2024

In today's Saturday Tribune column, I compare Tinubu's "economic reforms" to IBB's SAP and the experiences of Latin American countries that used the IMF/World Bank-backed "reforms" Tinubu is implementing. I also highlight the example of Malaysia that bucked the IMF and developed.

Tinubu’s Economic Reforms: Nightmarish Cases from Other Countries
By Farooq A. Kperogi

The President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration likes to psychologically anesthetize Nigerians who are grieving from the hurt of its economic policies (petrol price spike, electricity tariff hike, devaluation of the naira, etc.) by saying Nigerians are only undergoing transitory pains in the service of a forthcoming permanent prosperity.

I have repeatedly called this an intentional lie. I have done so from the benefit of my knowledge of the outcomes of such policies in other countries, including in Nigeria from 1986 to 1993 when Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida implemented a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) as dictated by the World Bank and the IMF, which is similar to Tinubu’s “reforms.”

I have also made recurrent references in the past to countries that have made progress precisely because they defied the economic template Tinubu is implementing now. I highlight the case of Malaysia in the late 1990s to support my point.

But let’s start with SAP in Nigeria. In 1986, self-described military president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was persuaded by the IMF and the World Bank to “restructure and diversify” Nigeria’s economy.

The restructuring and diversification led to the removal of subsidies on petrol (all past regimes called petrol price spikes “subsidy removal”), devaluation of the naira (now it’s known by the fancy term “floating of the naira”), deregulation (that is, allowing market forces to regulate the economy while the government takes the back seat), privatization (i.e., selling off of Nigeria’s national patrimony to a few moneybags), etc.

The immediate aftereffect of this IMF-endorsed “restructuring” (Tinubu calls his “reform”) of the economy was a never-before-seen inflationary conflagration, which eroded the purchasing power of the average Nigerian. It produced widespread hardship similar to what Nigerians are going through at this moment.

Petrol price spike and privatization led to job losses and a deepening of the unemployment crisis. Reduction in government spending, particularly on social services, led to declines in healthcare and education quality. Poverty rates also increased as a direct consequence of the removal of subsidies for fuel and basic services.

I distinctly remember all the rhetorical maneuvers that officials of the IBB regime used to fray nerves, and they are awfully similar to what honchos of the Tinubu regime now use: it will get worse before it gets better, there is light at the end of the tunnel, there is no gain without pain, Nigeria simply can’t afford to fund subsidies, our economy would collapse if we don’t restructure the economy, the current system is unsustainable, we’ll all smile and appreciate the wisdom of this temporary sacrifice when the gains start coming, etc.

By 1993 when IBB left power, Nigeria became firmly secured in the economic toilet. Manufacturing collapsed, social unrest rose, and brain drain (which is now called “japa”) started and blossomed, and hopelessness was democratized.

Someone very close to IBB who nonetheless opposed his IMF-backed economic “restructuring” told me he asked one of IBB’s IMF/World Bank-appointed finance ministers a few years ago what happened to the “gains” they promised would replace the “pains” people underwent between 1986 and 1993?

He reported him as saying the gains didn’t materialize because the “restructuring” wasn’t implemented faithfully. Meanwhile, thousands of people died, and millions of people were destabilized because of this “restructuring.” I can bet that Tinubu and his defenders would give the same excuse when they dig Nigeria deeper into the depths of despair at the end of their “reforms.”

In a 1995 report titled “Structural Adjustment and the Spreading Crisis In Latin America,” we see the same scenario repeated throughout the developing countries of South and Central America. Everywhere subsidies were removed, currency devalued, and so-called market forces given a free reign, the result is always the same: devastation, poverty, hopelessness, death of the middle class, etc.

The report instructively noted: “Mexico is one of many cases worldwide where adjustment and the free market have not only failed to alleviate poverty, but have further polarized the country and led to disaster, economic and social. World Bank and IMF officials continued to say -- right up to the current crisis -- that adjustment's attack on poverty would take time, but, after more than a dozen years of adjustment in Mexico, things have never been worse than they are today, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There must be a point at which these institutions acknowledge that their strategy has failed and needs to be abandoned, and that a new, more democratically determined approach to the country's development has to be taken.”

But it’s not inevitable that governments in developing countries should follow the IMF/World Bank’s ruinous prescriptions. Many countries with leaders who have guts and who care for the welfare of their people resist these institutions. And it often turns out that the only countries that are witnessing inclusive growth and development are countries that have chosen to depart from the hell-paved path created by the IMF and the World Bank.

For example, in 1997, when Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea faced economic headwinds and turned to the IMF and the World Bank for financial bailout, they were offered help with the usual conditionalities attached: budget cuts, subsidy removal, currency devaluation, etc.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed rejected the conditions. He said they would choke off economic growth, bankrupt companies, and cause massive unemployment in his country. So, he went counter to the counsel of the IMF. Instead of budget cuts, he increased government spending. Instead of currency devaluation, he defended the ringgit, Malaysia’s currency, by fixing it to the US dollar. Malaysia recovered from the economic crisis faster than its IMF-obedient neighbors.

During "A Meeting of Minds" dialogue organized by Forbes magazine in 2009, the magazine’s chief executive officer and editor-in-chief, Steve Forbes, asked Mahathir how and why he bucked the IMF and did better than countries that slavishly obeyed it.

“Fortunately, I am not a financier,” he said. “I know very little about economics, so I do things which are not quite off props. When people tell me that the right way to handle a crisis like that is to obey the IMF and the World Bank, I thought otherwise. I actually examined their prescriptions, and I found that those prescriptions would actually make matters worse, so I didn’t see why I should be following them.”

I am glad Mahathir attributed his success in standing up to the IMF to his not being a financier and knowing “very little about economics.” It’s as if he was talking about Nigeria’s gaggle of slavish, brain-dead, self-impressed, IMF-controlled know-things who pass themselves off as "economic experts” and who have popularized the aggravating idiocy that subsidies are bad and must be removed because they are supposedly bad for the economy and don’t benefit the poor.

Now we know the truth. We need more people who “know very little about economics” and a lot about commonsense to make economic decisions for Nigeria.

The questions people with lots of common sense and very little knowledge of “economics” should ask are, what does it profit a national economy if a government increases the cost of production for manufacturing companies through sharp spikes in the cost of petrol and electricity?

What benefits does a country derive from a policy that causes mass pauperization, which ensures that everyday citizens can’t afford the basic things of life, not to talk of discretionary spending? Recession kicks in when people have no money to spend.

How does a country get light at the end of the tunnel when its policies trigger inflation and a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living crisis because it devalued its currency under the instruction of far-flung economic institutions notorious for instigating mass misery in developing countries and that are concerned more for “their loans, not on growth,” as Mahathir once put it?

How can a country surrender its economic sovereignty to a foreign entity and tell its citizens to expect a bumper harvest in an undefined future?

The only benefit of the ongoing “economic reforms,” according to Tinubu and his officials, is that it is bringing in more money for the government. And what does the government do with the money? Fritter it away in frivolities while people starve and die.

Even if the money will be used to build or renew infrastructure—we all know it won’t—if this is achieved at the expense of pauperizing the great majority of our people, it is still worthless.

Only people who are alive and healthy use infrastructure. The time to know very little economics and have lots of commonsense is now because the lofty “tomorrow” Tinubu’s IMF economic policies are promising will never come. It never came for countries that implemented similar policies.

A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.

10/08/2024

On the back page of today's Saturday Tribune, I discuss the erosion of the last vestige of goodwill Tinubu has in the North and the implication of this for his 2027 reelection prospects. I offer some suggestions.

Zanga-Zanga and Tinubu’s Crumbling Northern Alliance
By Farooq A. Kperogi

The 10-day nationwide protests that end today, known by the reduplicative compound “Zanga-Zanga” in Hausaphone northern Nigeria, have ruptured the coalition that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu managed to build with a portion of the northern Nigerian Muslim political establishment since 2014, which put Muhammadu Buhari in power in 2015 and 2019 and him in 2023.

But this Zanga-Zanga-inspired rupture also reveals the initial precarity and fragility of the strange-bedfellows coalition. Buhari and Tinubu were previously fierce political adversaries who distrusted each other’s motives and undermined each other. Their alliance was more accurately a political scaffold that papered over their contradictions for a temporary gain, which was the ouster of Goodluck Jonathan from power.

Tinubu’s associates and acolytes in the Southwest, who said they protected Buhari from revolt in their region even when he bungled governance with uncommon ineptitude, are understandably miffed at the rawness, fierce intensity, and undiluted anti-Tinubu fervor of the protests in northern Nigeria.

They are wondering why Buhari, his associates, and even the APC establishment in the North didn’t return the favor. The answers are obvious, but people in power are often blind to the obvious, especially if the obvious is disquieting.

First, Buhari and his supporters know that the Tinubu group, which had a tight leash on the Southwest political space, didn’t protect Buhari from the consequences of his infernal incompetence out of any high-minded considerations. They did so because they needed power after Buhari’s term in office. It was unvarnished calculative opportunism.

Since Buhari’s people have no expectation of any kind of requital from Tinubu, like Tinubu did from them, they felt no obligation to protect or explain away Tinubu’s own hard-hearted incompetence. The chase often stops after a conquest. Men who woo women can relate to this sentiment.

Second, the misery that Tinubu’s simultaneous policies of never-before-seen astronomical petrol price increase and devaluation of the naira unleashed on the country are felt more deeply in the North than in any part of the country because of the preexisting multidimensional poverty in the region and the pervading insecurity that makes farming almost impossible.

Money is now both hard to find and worthless when it is found, and food is both hard to find and unaffordable when it is found. That is an unprecedentedly profound, not to mention unsurvivable, existential torment.

Two days after the protests started, I told someone that many people in the North have been rendered so desolate, so destitute, and so despondent by the economic crunch that they are looking to cash in on the protests to commit su***de by police bullets because Islam forbids su***de.

Islam teaches that committing su***de guarantees an unfettered passage to the hottest depths of hellfire in the hereafter. I said many people who couldn’t survive the pain and humiliation of perpetual hunger might tempt security forces to shoot them so they could end it all and not fear that they would provoke the wrath of their Creator for committing su***de.

Of course, this is twisted thinking because a famous hadith, which every Muslim who took Islamic Studies in secondary school knows, says “Actions shall be judged according to intention.”

Well, my predictions turned out to be accurate. A friend shared a video of scores of protesters in a northern city chanting, “da yunwa ta kashe mu, da ma bullet ya kashe mu" (rough translation: "Instead of dying of hunger, we would rather be killed by a bullet”) as they confronted gun-wielding military and police officers.

There is also the viral video of protesters bursting into the Zamfara State Government House in Gusau and defying, even daring, menacing, gun-toting soldiers who tried to stop them. Several such scenes have been replicated throughout the North.

The mistake the government is making is to dismiss the protests as entirely politically motivated. They are not. Even if they wanted, Buhari and his associates couldn’t stop the protests both because the shelf life of Buhari’s “magic” has expired (his own house was besieged in Daura, and he had been pelted with stones while he was in power in cities like Kano and Maiduguri where he had been idolized) and because the extent of anguish people are going through now is unappeasable.

Apart from the usual criminals of opportunity (who exploit every unrest to steal and destroy), the vast majority of protesters think their only hope of living is to risk death and push back at policies that kill them slowly but surely. You can’t persuade people who have nothing to lose by dying.

That was why American author Dan Groat pointed out in his 2014 book titled In Monarchs and Mendicants, “Not interested in scarin’ anybody, but people with good sense are afraid of a man with nothin’ to lose.” Lance Conrad echoed this in his book The Price of Nobility when he said, “Only a fool would underestimate a man with nothing to lose.”

People who weren’t exempt from the rage of protesters can’t stop protesters from protesting.

The self-inflicted attenuation of Tinubu’s political capital in the North plays into the old debate in the Southwest about the best coalitional strategy to attain and retain power for the Yoruba.

The Chief Obafemi Awolowo strategy, which Afenifere still believes in, sees the Muslim North as a competitor and not an ally. The Awo strategy for getting power is to build an alliance between the entire South and Northern Christians.

But the Chief Ladoke Akintola template sees the Muslim North as a strategic partner in light of the deep historical and cultural ties that bind Yoruba people and several linguistic, ethnic, and cultural groups in the Muslim North, such as Borgu, Nupe, Igala, and Hausa people. (Read my October 9, 2021, column titled “Arewa and Oduduwa More Alike than Unlike.”) This is hardly surprising because even though Akintola was a Christian, he was from Ogbomoso whose traditional ruler traces ancestral roots to Borgu.

Chief MKO Abiola—and now President Tinubu—subscribe to the Akintola template. Abiola was briefly vindicated when he won the June 12, 1993, presidential election with enormous support from the North, including Kano, his opponent’s home state.

But the revocation of his epochal electoral triumph by a Northern military head of state—and the decidedly ethnic and regional character the fight for and the opposition to his mandate later took—appeared to justify the distrust of the Muslim North by the Awo group, which nonetheless gave full-throated support to Abiola to reclaim his mandate.

Tinubu, undeterred by Abiola’s experience, reinvented the Akintola template. It’s as if he wanted to prove that he could tread the same path and get to the destination that Abiola couldn’t get to. That must be why he called his presidential bid “Renewed Hope.” Abiola’s was “Hope.” Like Abiola, he chose a Muslim running mate. And, like Abiola, his running mate is a Kanuri man from Borno.

With the Muslim North now souring on him only one year into his first term and the unlikelihood of his ever recovering whatever goodwill he had from the region if he continues with his economic policies that push people to the brink of the existential precipice, the Awo/Afenifere group may be having the last laugh.

So, what should he do? The best option is to discard the IMF/World Bank neoliberal policies he’s enamored with (which have never worked anywhere in the world) and embrace Awolowo’s welfarist capitalist template of governance that puts the development and wellbeing of people at the center of policies. That may restore his goodwill with the North—and even earn him more support elsewhere.

The other options are non-starters, but I’ll mention them anyway. Like Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who won his first term with the support of the Muslim North, but who later used the Awo/Afenifere template to get a second term, Tinubu can court the Christian North and galvanize the South. Goodluck Jonathan used this template in 2011 and won.

The problem is that if Peter Obi runs in 2027, and I don’t see any reason why he won’t, Tinubu won’t be able to galvanize the South into a unified voting bloc. And, although the worst fears of his Muslim-Muslim ticket among Christians haven’t materialized, northern Christians are unlikely to embrace him wholeheartedly, however hard he tries to woo them.

In other words, Tinubu is cooked, as Gen Zs say. Anything short of bringing down the cost of petrol, restoring the value of the naira, and making everyday things affordable will doom Tinubu’s first term and deny him a second term because he is now effectively a political orphan.

A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.

06/08/2024

Nigerian Military Flags, Not Russian Flags

By Farooq Kperogi

I had been distraught with deep sadness over what I thought was the unwarranted, self-denigrating, and counter-productive celebration of Russian flags by protesters in the far North until someone called my attention to the fact that it is actually the flag of the Nigerian Armed Forces that protesters display—or intend to display— in their processions.

This makes sense because the protesters always chant “(mulkin) soja muke so,” which translates as “we want military rule,” as they wave the flags. It’s instructive that they never mention Russia. Why would they fly the flag of a country and not mention its name but instead sing the praises of the military?

The Nigerian Armed Forces flag has three colored stripes: red on the top, blue in the middle, and white on the bottom.

Since presidents are also commanders-in-chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, they routinely fly the Nigerian military flag, along with the Nigerian national flag, when they deliver formal public addresses, as these photos of Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu show.

The Russian flag’s tricolor scheme is similar to but slightly different from the Nigerian Armed Force’s flag. It is white on the top, blue in the middle, and red on the bottom. Red and white are transposed but the blue in the middle is common to both flags.

A grasping but illiterate tailor eager to cash in on the sudden popularity of the Nigerian Armed Force’s flag mixed up the positions of the colors and ended up unintentionally mass-producing Russian flags. I think he has been apprehended.

It’s also possible that this unintentional error birthed a new reality that meshed with Russia’s support for the military regimes in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso.

But it’s important to acknowledge that the flags symbolize a yearning for a return to military dictatorship, not the start of Russian colonialism.

The nostalgia for military rule isn’t limited to these northern protesters, unfortunately. In the aftermath of the 2023 election, for example, calls for a military coup trended on Twitter for days.

In moments of severe existential strife people tend to develop a kind of cognitive bias called rosy retrospection, which is the propensity for people to recall past times more romantically than they actually were as they recede into distant memories.

Military rule was horrific. Those of us who came of age during military absolutist monocracies will never support a return to military rule.

05/08/2024

https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2024/08/tinubu-tyrant-in-making.html

A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.

03/08/2024

On the back page of today's Saturday Tribune, I share my perspectives on what the ongoing hunger protests have changed in the country and what Tinubu needs to do if he wants to govern Nigeria in relative peace.

Five Lessons from the Ongoing Hunger Protests
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter:

The nationwide protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests.

One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s.

These careerist agitators are now either in government, in bed with the government, or have suffered significant contraction of their symbolic and cultural capital. Most Gen Z Nigerians whose vim and vigor power the ongoing protests either don’t know them or know them but have no use for their guidance.

So, the conception, planning, and ex*****on of the protests have neither a recognizable locale nor any identifiable dramatis personae. A lot of the known names identified with the protests merely joined and amplified it. They didn’t start the revolt and can’t stop it. It’s effectively a leaderless rebellion.

It started life as anguished, discordant murmurs on social media in response to the increasingly unendurable but relentlessly unabating neoliberal, IMF/World Bank-sanctioned economic and social terror of the Tinubu administration. Many of the young people who can’t feed now and whose future is being perpetually deferred have enough education to know that the delayed gratification the government promises them from removing subsidies and from devaluing the naira has never materialized anywhere in the world.

Everywhere in the world—from South America to the Pacific and from Asia to Africa—from the 1980s (when the IMF first forced Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries) until now, there is not a single example of a country that has escaped irreversible devastation and decline as a result of subsidy removal, currency devaluation, destruction of social safety nets for the poor, abandonment of the welfare of citizens—all IMF policies that countries are forced to implement as conditions to secure World Bank loans.

The only countries that have developed outside the West are precisely the countries that have repulsed the IMF, that have strategically deployed subsidies to buoy their economies and uplift their people, and that have guarded their national currencies. Many young Nigerians now realize that the idea that the pains they are suffering are mere temporary birth pangs that will deliver a bouncing baby is a damned, soulless, conscienceless, self-centered lie. They’ve had enough.

So, they resolved to band together and fight peacefully. They chose to demand the restoration of petrol subsidies, among other demands, because they see that the people who took away petrol subsidies from them are themselves luxuriating in unimaginably opulent elite subsidies. Their cries quickly gained traction.

For the first time in a long time, northern and southern youth found common ground. Northern agitations for “zanga zanga” and southern push for protests, though gestated independent of each other, somehow converged. It’s a unity forged in diversity and adversity.

The second lesson is a derivative of the first, and that is the unexampled collapse of the cultural, political, and social power of the Northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment. Northern Nigerian clerical elites, known as the ulama, had been constituted in the region’s moral imagination as the apotheosis of probity and the unquestioned source of moral and political guidance.

They have used this power, this priceless symbolic capital, to keep the masses perpetually in a state of suspended animation. They have programmed northern Nigerian masses to not resist, protest, rebel, much less revolt, against bad governance. They socialized them into accepting their economic suffering with equanimity. The only thing the clerical elites have conditioned the masses to be implacably roused and animated over is real or perceived slight against religion.

For example, amid the inexorably intensifying breakdown of security in the region during the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the clerical establishment also intensified fraudulent theological rationalizations for the rise of kidnappings and exculpated Buhari of responsibility for this. That was why Buhari got away with murder for eight years.

However, although there was a ground swell of anti-zanga zanga sermonizing among the region’s notable clerics in the aftermath of their meeting with officials of the Tinubu administration, northern Nigeria is erupting in communal convulsions. It is also instructive that protesters in Daura took their anger to Muhammadu Buhari’s doorsteps. No one is immune now. The genie has been let out of the bottle.

The protests in 2012, which the North also actively participated in largely, some would say precisely, because of the religious and regional identity of Goodluck Jonathan, had the moral imprimatur of the clerical establishment.

This is the first major example in recent memory I am aware of in the North where the masses of the people not only bucked the impassioned counsel of their ulama but have openly labelled them as unreliable and mercenary charlatans not worthy of respect. This is a culturally seismic shift.

The third lesson is that the federal government is in more trouble than it realizes. It invited civil society leaders, traditional rulers, religious clerics, and certain audible voices in the protest movement in an effort to thwart the protest. It was inspired by the mistaken belief that these hitherto esteemed opinion molders had the capacity to use their conversational, symbolic, political, and cultural currencies to influence people to back out of the protest.

It didn’t work because the habitual order of things has shifted, and the government hasn’t come to terms with this reality. We call it decentering in humanities and social science scholarship. "Decentering" involves challenging and moving away from traditional centers of authority, meaning, or truth. It means a shift of focus from dominant cultures, narratives, or perspectives and the amplification of marginalized, peripheral, or alternative voices.

The government’s cluelessness about this social media-enabled decentering of traditional ways of seeing and knowing manifested in its mutually contradictory claims about who was sponsoring the protest—and in its counter-intuitive displays of persecution complex.

The State Security Service said it knew the “sponsors” of the protest, but the police asked the “sponsors” to identify themselves as a precondition for protection. High-profile government officials fingered foreign mercenaries as the organizers and funders of the protest. They all can’t wrap their heads around the possibility that distraught, depressed, and disgruntled young people, without prodding from anybody, can organize protests to ventilate their frustrations at foreign-inspired policies that kill their present and deny their future.

Unfortunately, the government’s response follows the same miserably familiar template: whine like over-indulged crybabies about fictive “sponsors,” induce or intimidate people thought to be behind the protests, deploy strong-arm tactics against protesters, and do nothing about the conditions that instigated the protest in the first place—until it happens again another time.

The fourth lesson is that there is a relationship between how security forces respond to protests and how they turn out. In such states as Edo, Osun, Oyo, and Ogun, the police were admirably polite and even-tempered.

I saw a video of the Edo State police commissioner addressing protesters in the kindest, most empathetic way I’ve ever seen any senior law enforcement officer addressing aggrieved people. The protesters reciprocated the police commissioner’s mild-mannered and conciliatory speech with chants of his praises. That warmed my heart. Tinubu can learn from that.

But in places where law enforcement officers treat protesters as enemies of the state and visit unprovoked violence on them, things easily escalate into violence and bloodshed. We saw that in Kaduna, Kano, Abuja, and many parts of the North.

It should be admitted, of course, that there are many criminal elements who cash in on protests to loot the properties of innocent people or destroy government properties. I saw heartrending videos of criminals stealing or destroying private and government properties in Kano and Abuja. Such outlaws deserve no mercy. It’s elements like that who justify the government’s apprehensions about protests always devolving into chaos and destruction.

Finally, although many people from the Southeast supported the protest, the region was the only place, as of the time of writing this column, where almost no protest took place. Was it the culmination of the ethnic baiting of the honchos of the Tinubu administration who said the protests were planned by the people of the region as a payback for their electoral loss in 2023? Whatever it is, it does not give a good account of our efforts at nation-building.

Well, President Tinubu has just one option left for him if he doesn’t want to govern in disabling tumult: address the nation in a solemn national broadcast, acknowledge the unprecedented hurt people are nursing, announce the restoration of petrol and electricity subsidies, and reverse the disastrous “floating” of the naira.

Tinubu’s loyalty should be to Nigeria, not the racist economic hitmen at the IMF and the World Bank.

A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.