Category Archives: Naija

issues, Naija, Politics

Reforming Nigeria’s Asset Privatization Approach

I came across a post on X recently that sent me back to the troubled history of Nigeria’s privatization programme.

It reminded me of the 2003 NITEL-Pentascope scandal. NITEL, Nigeria’s state-owned telecommunications company, was not just another public enterprise. It was responsible for critical national infrastructure, including Nigeria’s access to the SAT-3 undersea cable, a major artery for international connectivity.

Yet NITEL was handed over to Pentascope, a Dutch firm that was barely a year old, reportedly had only eight employees, including the janitor, and had no serious experience managing a major telecommunications company.

Within a year, NITEL moved from a ₦15 billion profit to a ₦19 billion loss. More than 250,000 homes reportedly lost their phone lines. It was not a complex failure. It was a failure hiding in plain sight.

For me, Pentascope is not just a bad chapter in our telecoms history. It is the perfect lens through which to examine many of Nigeria’s privatization heartbreaks: ALSCON, Ajaokuta, Delta Steel, and the 2013 power sector unbundling.

In that same X thread, someone argued that Nigerians should simply “move on” from these failures. It reads like an innocuous statement from a frustrated citizen, but never a good idea. Moving on without understanding what went wrong is not closure. It is willfully inflicted amnesia, acting mature. Nations that forget their policy failures do not heal from them. They repeat them, and usually at a higher cost.

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issues, Naija, Politics

Lagos State Needs a Digital Mirror to Build Its Future

I was born and baked in Lagos. My family’s Lagos story began in 1945 when my grandfather, a police officer, was transferred to Lagos. Nearly every member of my paternal family has called Campbell Street in Lagos Island, home. We’ve had front-row seats and sometimes backstage passes, to the ever-evolving drama of this megacity. One of us even became the chief of a well-known Lagos family house.

I earned my Lagos badge the gritty way: inhaled the pungent mix from clogged gutters, sang praises with scourges of mosquitoes, devoured asáró, Ewa Agayin and Agege “buredi” from street vendors, and played barefoot “monkey post” football in alleys. I watched from the sidelines at Campos Mini Stadium and witnessed the last of the “Agbepo” night-soil men on their ghostly rounds.

These lived experiences fascinated me and made me curious about how a megacity functions. What does it take to govern a place like Lagos? That curiosity deepened during my postgraduate studies when I audited a course titled “New York City Politics.” Then, I understood how cities use policy, planning, and emerging technologies to shape more livable urban environments. Courses like Leadership & Strategy by Doug Muzzio and Mapping for Policy by Deborah Balk were also central to my learning.

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Education, Health, issues, Naija, Spiritual

CONSIDER THE BIRDS

A few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, I heard a sharp tweet by my bedroom window and stood up to see what it was. At first, I could not figure out through the dusty window net where the tiny high-pitched sound was coming from. Then I heard the chirp again as if to say “I am here, check me out.” Perched vertically on my window frame, was a tiny bird, so beautiful and alluring that I was frozen by its color and the shape of its beak. I begged it not to move so I could reach for my cellphone to violate this precious moment. It agreed and allowed a few clicks before it flew off. For some reason, to date, I just cannot stop thinking about what the little creature was trying to tell me.

Recently, while in continuous mediation of that encounter, I got a Netflix recommendation for a new science documentary called Connected. As though to keep me focused on the subject matter of birds, the very first episode of the series focused on the curious intuition of a specie called the Veery, a North American thrush with a brown back and speckled breast. In the program, the ornithologist and his team are trying to understand the migration pattern of Veeries from the North Eastern forests of the US. They migrated every year in a very unpredictable pattern, sometimes even cutting short their breeding season to migrate south. 

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