National news platforms were abuzz last week with a rather weighty report, that a combination of three of United States of America’s prime intelligence and crimes combating agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) – filed a memorandum at a federal court at the District of Columbia, asserting, as it were, that Bola Tinubu, president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is their ‘asset’.
On the face of it, the deposition appeared impertinent. Do they know who he is? President of the most populous country in Africa! Maybe they knew.
Filing a memorandum at the federal court, opposing a civil lawsuit that sought summary judgment, to open up full information on the case of Tinubu’s drug trafficking investigation, that was a big bone of contention during the 2023 presidential election, the CIA and its sister agencies, exhibited manifest disdain and utmost lack of sensitivity, in their public assertion about their said relationship with Nigeria’s president.
For reasons best known to them, the American intelligence agencies seemed out to rub it in on Nigeria, in the course of their memo on Tinubu. Their disposition was quite bumptious. It remains unclear, for instance, what point they set out to make in the cheeky declaration that ‘while Nigerians have a right to be informed about what their government is up to, they do not have a right to know what their president is up to”. Very ungracious. They need to be reminded, possibly by the able hands at the presidency, that Nigeria is not under Britain’s colonial control anymore. Unless, the Americans were out to make a point.
Had the CIA and its colleagues, FBI and DEA consulted the diplomats at the State Department, before preparing the memo they filed at the court, they surely, would, have received some tutorial on better ways to insult a friendly country. What CIA’s audacious court papers seem to be saying, is that it is up to them to determine for Nigeria what it will know about the activities and profile of the man who presides over its affairs. In other words, President Tinubu belongs, not to everybody, as his predecessor so deceptively proclaimed, but to individuals at Langley Park.
Echoes of the CIA declaration that “Nigerians have no right to know what their president is up to”, are haunting. And to imagine that President Tinubu spoke to his colleague, not owner, President Joe Biden, barely a fortnight ago, according to a happy release from the Presidency about that time.
If Tinubu knew that CIA, FBI and DEA would put out such deflating public claim of ownership of him, he would have requested Mr. Biden to restrain the intelligence agencies, or at least ask them to show some respect. Afterall, the Nigerian president had just done them favour by setting free the Binance executive, Tigran Gambaryan, who was facing charges of economic sabotage. Biden reportedly called to express appreciation for that act. There must be a better way, after such conversation, to relay public notice of who is another’s asset or property. An asset is an asset, though, however the ownership is conveyed.
Computing assets and liabilities, whether of individuals or for corporate entities, is always a challenging assignment. Even accountants, whose professional schedule it is, to tabulate assets and liabilities, confirm that the assignment can be intricate, bitchy. CIA must have grappled for long, with how best to arrange its balance sheet.
Following the report of the CIA court memo on President Tinubu, there have been some attempts from the president’s side, to put the matter in their preferred context.
Unfortunately, those few attempts have been feeble. Indeed, they miss the point they ought to be making. The CIA and its colleague-agencies have done their worst. There is no indication that they are about to recant their claim of ownership. That being the case, the fine point that the president’s information management team should be making and robustly, is that even if Tinubu is America’s asset, as CIA and co have conveyed it, he is not a liability to Nigeria. Some expatiation is necessary here.
Who says an asset to America cannot be an asset of sorts, to Nigeria, as well? He who is down, as Nigeria obviously is, fears no fall, anymore, so why not make the best of the situation? Matters can only get compounded if an entity is an asset abroad and a liability at home.
This is the very reason why the president and all those who love and support him must prevail on him to alter the present trajectory of his economic and social policy. He needs to move quickly to relieve the pains and unprecedented sufferings that his policies have heaped on Nigerians. It is quite urgent that President Tinubu hurries up to become an asset, a real asset and not a painful liability to his compatriots. There is need for him to be as smart as the children of the world, the Bible referred to.
The celebration and back-slapping in government circles, over the weekend, about the increase in the crude production level to a decent 1.8 million barrels per day is, indeed good news. It portends a positive shift in the economic landscape, which has been marked by chaos and pain for almost all of the period the Tinubu government has been in existence.
With increased crude production level, if it holds, the country will, hopefully breath and loosen the noose on the neck of citizens and the productive sector. The Tinubu government must court and find good news by all means.That is one sure way of avoiding being a liability to the people.
Unfortunately, at the very time the positive development of increased crude production was being celebrated, virtually all other economic indicators in the country, were blinking furiously red, reminding the Tinubu government that there is yet no clear road ahead.
The National Bureau of Statistics, for instance, came out with the distressing figure of inflation rate hitting 33.8 per cent, for the month of October. That happens to be the highest inflation rate in the corresponding period over a stretch of twenty years or more. Expectedly, the high inflation rate found direct expression in the rising price of food items and general cost of living, which continue to surge, pushing millions of Nigerians further down poverty line.
Meanwhile, the Naira continues its dance of death, heading unmistakably towards N2000 to one US dollar exchange rate, a dangerously unhealthy point some experts have predicted may materialize in early 2025, if President Tinubu insists on running the course he has chosen so far. Pastor Enoch Adeboye, head of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of Tinubu’s staunch supporters, will need to redouble his praying effort.
The mathematician told the world last week that his patrioric prayer prevented the Naira from plummeting to N10,000 to $1 at the exchange market.Such is the character of elite contributions in public policy discussions in Nigeria in recent time.
With another set of statistics showing that Foreign Direct Remittance, hitherto a source of tidy inflow of fund, has declined drastically, indeed, alarmingly in the last nine months, Pastor Adeboye may need his hands to be held up on the mountain for as long as it takes for him to pray Tinubu’s policies to bear fruit.
Interestingly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one half of the Bretton Woods twins, credited with prescribing the unpleasant, unhelpful economic policy track Tinubu took, on assuming the presidency, last week, summarily dismissed the Tinubu economic policy, as off mark.
Referencing some other African countries as making progress and having better economic policies, IMF stopped short of asking Tinubu to abandon the costly journey to nowhere that he was asked to embark upon.
Note that World Bank, the twin sister of IMF, not too long ago, encouraged Tinubu to remain steadfast on the painful, indeterminate course, prescribed for him. The World Bank said at that point,that Nigeria needs at least fifteen years of painful exorcism, to see the light. IMF now says, there is no sign of light at the end of the tortuous tunnel. Such a costly play by external forces, with the fate of an otherwise sovereign country, as if some entities in USA own the entire estate, men and materials. Maybe they do.
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EZEANI is a renowned journalist and media consultant. Trained at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, he is a widely acclaimed columnist and veteran newspaper editor.
