This morning, I watched with delight on Channels TV, an interview with Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, Sardaunan Kano, my former teacher and an awesomely eloquent speaker. By training, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau is a mathematician. A man who was trained to have ways with figures. But nature added to him a special endowment- the gift of fluidity in speech. And he speaks with such eloquence and fluidity, multilingually. There’s a joke out there in Kano, where Mallam was a teacher, a technocrat, a Governor, a Senator, a Minister and now a powerful political leader, that, if you are not ready to change your perspective about a position, don’t make the mistake of listening to Mallam. The ambition of the joke is to draw the attention of people to Mallam’s charismatic and persuasive power of speech, which can easily change, convince, or confuse the listener, without a pickle. And his appearance on TV this morning has not only proven this mantra but indeed shows Mallam as a demagogue.
I picked the title of this article from the response he gave Chamberlain Usoh, on why Nigeria is having difficulty addressing the myriad of challenges facing it. Garbage in, garbage out, he said. Although I failed maths, I have a good memory of my teachers, including the way they talk. I can recall how, in expressing the literal meaning of garbage in, and garbage out, I saw the same Mallam saying, in any system, computer system in particular, the quality of output is determined by the quality of the input. For example, if a mathematical equation is improperly stated, the answer is unlikely to be correct.
In computing and other fields, incorrect input will produce incorrect output. By implication, Mallam told Chamberlin where the problem in Nigeria, with a special bias to the issue of poor teacher training, poor policy constitution and consistency or continuity in implementation, as well as the lack of cooperation and coordination of curriculum between the various federating units of the country.
And that took my mind to the thorny issue of Nigeria’s constant collapse of the national grid. I’ve written a couple of articles on the embarrassment brought to Nigeria, under these endless collapses. As a supportive story, an online medium published a story today, that reads thus:
“Despite the huge investment in the power sector, the national grid collapsed about 105 times under the administrations of President Bola Tinubu and his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari. Findings on Sunday showed that Nigeria secured about 10 loans worth $4.36bn from the World Bank over the past decade to address key challenges in its power sector. Although not all 10 World Bank loans have been disbursed completely, the Federal Government and other multilateral agencies have supported the country’s power sector financially. Findings by this newspaper from data sourced from the global financial institution revealed that four loans, amounting to $2bn, have been signed but are yet to disburse any funds. These include the Sustainable Power and Irrigation Project, valued at $500m, which was signed in September 2024, and three components under the Nigeria Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up Project, totalling $750m, approved in December 2023”.
Going by the logic of garbage in garbage out, the reverse should be the result in this case, because, to whom much is given, much should be expected. If indeed that volume of money was pumped into the power sector, Nigeria ought to have no business with power failure or even the incessant cases of grid collapse. Something somewhere must be wrong to warrant the kind of embarrassment constantly coming the way of the country. Could the reason be connected with the maxim circulating on social media? The short but cynical adage reads: “National grid keeps collapsing, yet, National greed remains intact”.
If truly there are people with vested and unpatriotic interests in the Nigerian power project, the collapse of the grid would only remain constant, because of the craze to keep faith with what it takes to grease their greed. Poor sense of patriotism has deeply penetrated the psyche of some Nigerians, to the extent that, legitimizing corruption is no longer seen as a sin. Too bad! According to the ranking of Transparency International, in the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, Nigeria is placed on the scorecard of 25, where 0 is (“highly corrupt”) and 100 is (“very clean”). When ranked by score, Nigeria ranked 145th among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector.
If this is the perception of Nigeria, and some of these people are the ones charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the grid, then going by the adage, garbage in garbage out, the game of grid collapse is likely to stand intact. Because greed would remain inseparable from the grid.
