...AND FOUR OTHER THINGS… Simon Kolawole

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BUHARI AND MTN

On Tuesday, when President Muhammadu Buhari accused MTN of “aiding” the killing of 10,000 Nigerians by Boko Haram, I shuddered a bit. The president shouldn’t be making such public statements, I told myself. MTN clearly erred by failing to register 5.1 million subscribers and many of us have condemned the telecoms giant, but such a weighty allegation coming from the president is unnecessary — in my opinion. It is good that there finally seems to be a headway in the resolution of the issue, and I hope a good lesson has been learnt by all concerned, from operators to regulators. Valuable.

NNPC CONFUSION

Kindly give me a call if you understand what Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for petroleum resources, is up to. When he became NNPC GMD last year, he reduced the directorates to four, saying we needed a “trim” organisation. Now that he is minister, he has increased them to seven “fat” units. He calls them “independent” units, meaning they are… erm… independent. Yet he says this is not “unbundling”. Independent but not unbundled? Independent? And I understand NNPC is fast becoming family business. At this rate, Diezani Alison-Madueke, former petroleum minister, may end up as a saint in record time. Nigeria!

SEAT BELTS

One lesson to be learnt from Sunday’s tragic accident that claimed the lives of James Ocholi, minister of state for labour, his wife and son, is that using seat belts is advisable no matter where you sit. Generally, only those on the front seats use belts. There is also the issue of overspeeding. Without excessive speeding, many accidents would not be fatal. Vehicles are easier to control within reasonable speeding, although our lawmakers are fighting to prevent the introduction of speed limiters by FRSC. Ocholi was such a lovely and lively man. My heartfelt condolences to his young family. Heart-rending.

MILES APART

Nigeria’s fault lines are easily magnified, as we saw yet again in the Mile 12 market crisis in Lagos. We were told a pregnant Yoruba woman was knocked down by a “Hausa” (probably not Hausa but a northerner or even Chadian) motorcyclist. In a normal society, the first thing is to get emergency treatment for the victim, not to ask of the culprit’s ethnicity. (It could well have been a Yoruba or Ibibio motorcyclist!) You then take the offender to the police for the law to take its course. But it ended up as Hausa vs Yoruba. Such a primitive pattern. Senseless.
Culled from: allafrica.com

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