As I’m talking to you, $20bn is in various domiciliary accounts of individuals. Naira is our currency, why are they keeping the foreign currency? From my experience in international finance, I have never seen a country where its nationals speculate on its currency”. The preceeding is an excerpt from the presentation of Dr. Joseph Nnana, CBN Deputy Governor (Financial Systems Surveillance) at a recent meeting with the Joint Appropriation Committee of the National Assembly.

JACOB Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, President of South Africa came visiting Nigeria last week, bearing messages of hope and African renaissance. The Zuma story is one that teaches Nigeria how to handle its citizens and the fact that human beings if given the opportunity, can excel. Zuma was five when his father died, and his poor mother, a domestic worker found it difficult to feed him. He did not go to school, and by fifteen was working; he was essentially a herd boy in the mountains of Nkandla, South Africa where he looked after the cattle and livestock of families in the area.

The operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) have been very busy in recent times. They have been “fingered” in many “developments” all over the country. One can say the agency is fighting for relevance as the operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) are daily taking the shine away from other security agencies. In this new political dispensation though, the DSS has “reformatted” and has found far wider roles than it had ever did before.

I confess: the title of my essay today is not original. It was first penned by the now late Agwu Okpanku, Classicist and journalist trained at Ibadan and Cambridge, in his column, “The Third Eye,” published in the now defunct, Enugu-based newspaper of the 1970s, Renaissance. Agwu Okpanku was a fierce critic of the post war attempts by the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, under the leadership of Yakubu Gowon, to erase all evidence of Biafra from national memory.

As I was saying last week, given the large amount of money set aside in the budget for the comfort of President Buhari, his family members and the top echelons of the presidency, he is not on a moral high ground to put pressure on members of the National Assembly to drop their silly plan. Hence, another headache for Buhari is his gradual but steady loss of the much-needed moral authority that can compel positive attitudinal change among high-ranking public officials, including legislators.