The House of Representatives is considering a Bill to prohibit and criminalize cross dressing in Nigeria. It’s astonishing that our legislators are majoring in frivolity and dissipating legislative time on the mundane.

It’s neither necessary nor expedient. I’m flummoxed by the silliness and incongruity of this Bill. It is indeed distasteful, that at a time when the country’s existence is under excruciating crisis, our so-called leaders are seeking to legislate on a dress code for Nigerians. If the Bill isn’t seeking to legislate on the dress code of Nigerians, what then is its purport?

First, it is impossible in this modern era, especially in a country that is supposed to be a secular and liberal democracy, for a law to define dressing by gender without ambiguity. Dressing in this age has become very versatile and flexible. To attempt to determine by legislation, what type of cloth a man and a woman should or should not wear, is the height of legislative misadventure and redundancy. It is not doable. The ambiguity will be too obvious.

Second, even if male and female dresses are capable of precise and definite definition and classification, can this Bill be validly brought within the legislative competence of the National Assembly? Should Nigeria have a federal law that regulates dressing for all Nigerians?

Only members of the Armed Forces and other security agencies can be made subject to a uniform national dress code. The NYSC can also do this. Likewise related agencies. Employers can also determine the dress code of their employees. Religious houses can also set their dress code.

The National Assembly cannot legally regulate dressing or prohibit cross dressing. I can’t see how this Bill qualifies under the enumerated legislative powers of the National Assembly under the Exclusive or Concurrent Lists under the Second Schedule to the 1999 Constitution.

Third, “cross dressing” is a form of artistic expression. It is a mode of dressing adopted by entertainers. Irrespective of our differing views about the likes of Bobrisky, James Brown, Denrele and others, we cannot deny the fact that they are entertainers of some sort. To therefore attempt to deprive them of their chosen career which isn’t harmful to anyone is unacceptable.

A country like Nigeria with cultural, religious and ideological diversity, should be more tolerant and accommodating of people who choose to express themselves differently.

Fourth, Section 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) guarantees the fundamental right to freedom of expression. Expression is not circumscribed to spoken or written words. People can express themselves in words, dressing and so on. This Bill if passed, will be subjected to serious constitutional challenge in court. I will not hesitate to test its validity in court in the public interest.

Fifth, this Bill is unwarranted and unnecessary. Cross dressing is still a very rare phenomenon in Nigeria.

How many cross dressers do we have in Nigeria? Can the sponsor of this Bill mention 20 known cross dressers in the country?. There is no cross dressing epidemic in the country. This Bill is seeking a cure a disease that is non-existent. Cross dressing isn’t harmful. Is it?

Sixth, this Bill is another sinister attempt to distract Nigerians from the palpable failures of this regime. We are currently witnessing the unabated slaughter of Nigerians without any serious effort by the government to address it. The economy is comatose. Inflation is rising. Our universities are currently shut. It is rather upsetting that rather than focus on these and other pressing national issues, our legislators are finding time to entertain themselves with a trivial Bill that will neither help their worsening image nor solve our problems.

I call on the sponsor(s) of this Bill to withdraw it and attend to important issues. This Bill is an attempt to introduce the primitive Taliban ideology into Nigeria. It is dead on arrival.

Effiong is a Legal Practitioner based in Lagos.

On March 26 at the Eagle Square, Abuja, the All Progressives Congress (APC), reinvented a version of consensus politics that ancient Rome and Greece would have been proud of.

After years of in-fighting and decay, and fearing that the opposition might rebound, the ruling party finally called its overdue convention. It rounded up aspirants who were jostling for its executive positions and told them, at gunpoint, that it was time to try something new: Consensus.

Different tendencies in APC had run amok. President Muhammadu Buhari had to put his foot down and cut a deal with governors, who conceded the chairmanship position to his candidate, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, without offering them anything in return.

That is what the consensus entailed – all contestants grudgingly accepting that they had agreed to give up their quest, in favour of Adamu, a one-time secretary to the Board of Trustees of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and a significant contributor to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s stillborn third term agenda.

It was a consensus that handed over the national leadership of the APC to prominent former members of the opposition PDP. They are believed to have repented and now, could go and, well, sin some more.

All other aspirants were pressed, literally at gunpoint, to submit their letters of withdrawal in the wee hours of the convention day. As you read this article, there is still a long line of broken and exhausted aspirants outside the party’s secretariat in Abuja, waiting to collect even the refunds for their nomination forms, promised nearly three weeks ago.

Whatever its shortcomings, consensus appears to be the APC’s homegrown answer to the growing calls to self-democratise. Indications are that the PDP may also be heading in the direction of a consensus presidential candidate.

For APC, a party that conducted its presidential primaries in 2014 through a delegate voting system, to resort to consensus in 2022, says a lot about how far down the road we have travelled democratically.

Of course, consensus candidacy is not a new clown in our political circus. It’s been with us a long time and Buhari was a beneficiary of this rather crooked system when he first contested as presidential candidate of the All Nigeria Progressives Party (ANPP) in 2003.

During the party’s presidential primaries in Abuja that year, Rochas Okorocha and John Nnia Nwodo, who were also aspirants for the ticket, refused to step down for Buhari. Nwodo, in fact, addressed the delegates.

He gave a speech in which he said, among other things, that, “my heart bleeds for Nigeria.” He warned delegates that their party was about to be hijacked and later staged a walk out along with Okorocha and others. In response to the protest, Buhari, the beneficiary of that “consensus arrangement”, would later describe the walk-out as “an act of indiscipline.”

But that was not even the first consensus arrangement. In 1989, the Babangida regime rejected the six political parties registered by the National Electoral Commission and in their place, created the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP).

The government not only funded these parties, it built secretariats for them in all local government headquarters across the country. It went on to influence the emergence of presidential candidates for the parties by eliminating winners of initial primaries and barring them from re-contesting. It was a brazenly militarised form of consensus, which produced MKO Abiola and Bashir Tofa as candidates for the presidency. The rest is now history.

General Sani Abacha also produced his own consensus. He registered five political parties, the United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP); Congress for National Consensus (CNC); Democratic Party of Nigeria (DPN); and the National Centre Party of Nigeria (NCPN); the famous leprous fingers of one hand.

Four of the parties later “adopted” and endorsed him as their “consensus” presidential candidate. Only the Grassroots Democratic Movement (GDM) had Alhaji Dikko Yusuf as its candidate – an obvious case of a defanged bulldog in a fight, to give the appearance of a contest.

By February 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo came through the PDP presidential primaries in Jos, winning 60 per cent, while his closest rival, Alex Ekwueme, got 20 per cent of the vote, with the remaining split among the other aspirants.

In opposition to PDP, the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and All Peoples Party (APP) merged and conceded their ticket to Olu Falae. Whatever the outcome of the PDP primaries, the military had decided that Obasanjo would become president. Everything, including the primaries, was pressed to achieve that outcome.

In 2003 Obasanjo won the PDP presidential primaries by a landslide, polling 75 per cent. Rejecting the outcome as a “charade”, the first runner-up, Alex Ekwueme, who polled 17 per cent of the vote, said the voting system was not in accordance with the regulations of the PDP; his protest was futile because, again, the party had “adopted” Obasanjo.

On his reluctant way out of office in 2007, Obasanjo had stopped all pretence at internal party democracy. He bullied all aspirants and forced all PDP governors to accept Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as consensus candidate during the party’s presidential primaries.

But then came 2014, when APC, advertised as the party of change, came on the scene. In spite of pressures for a consensus candidate during the party’s primaries, voting by delegates went ahead. Even though there was more money than ballots to be counted at the convention venue in Lagos, the event retained a veneer of competition. That pretence has vanished.

PDP is heading towards finding a consensus candidate at its May 28 presidential primary; and I’m told by people who should know that that is what Buhari wants for the APC, too.

I don’t know how it would be achieved in APC. With a slew of candidates that has openly declared interest, including the party’s national leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu; Governors Yahaya Bello and Umahi David; and potential aspirants like Vice President Yemi Osinbajo; Governor Kayode Fayemi; Ogbonnaya Onu; CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, and Rotimi Amaechi, how will consensus work?

Tinubu will step down for Osinbajo and the others? Or all candidates, including Bello who is already being likened to Abiola, will step down for Tinubu?

Except it is consensus for him, what does consensus mean for a man like Tinubu, for example, who has literally sacrificed himself for Buhari and the party? Or Osinbajo who believes that having been Number two for eight years, he should get the right of first refusal?

For its part, PDP, the curator of consensus in Nigeria’s modern politics, is in turmoil, threatened by its self-made monster. And who knows? When all is said and done, both the opposition and the ruling party may, against the run of expectations, produce Northern presidential candidates, as the fruit of “consensus”.

One leading aspirant told me on Tuesday that, “The country is on a knife-edge. If we settle for consensus without the benefit of articulating a vision of how to get the country out of its current circumstances, and allowing party members to judge, we might as well settle for a national unity government and not waste money on elections. A contest is preferable to any hallelujah chorus consensus manipulated from the Villa.” Aso Rock laughed in response.

Of course, it’s entirely up to the political parties to decide how they wish to select their flag bearers. Bystanders who don’t like the process can wait to use their vote at the polls.

Yet, if this is a democracy as I think it is, and the political parties still pretend to be essential actors in the democratic space, it is absurd for them to improvise excuses to dodge open and transparent contests within their ranks.

Poorly run parties weaken and deplete themselves. They open the door to needless litigations, complicate the job of the election monitoring agency, and increase the cost of managing the electoral system. In the end, even bystanders bear the cost.

How the parties handle the primaries may be their internal affair, but there is clearly evidence that the shambolic way they have carried on – and insist on carrying on – is partly responsible for voter alienation and apathy at elections. If they have decided to fix their primaries, they may as well finish the job by voting for themselves at elections.

And the APC, in particular, should be concerned, if not ashamed. If Adamu and other PDP returnees thought their former party was the home of poor habits, they would find that their present house has borrowed and perfected the worst examples from the opposition.

Everything PDP was notorious for, from corruption to incompetence and from fixing elections to fixing party primaries, have now become a part of the APC’s DNA.

The party is crumbling without even making an effort. That is why it cannot recognise the basic fact that consensus in a party primary to produce the country’s number one citizen, is an error of taste.

Ishiekwene is Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP.

All countries have a vital role and interest in avoiding catastrophic climate impacts and safeguarding a livable planet. Like the citizens of most developing countries, Ghanaians are increasingly affected by climate change, despite bearing little responsibility for the emissions that are causing it.

At the COP26 climate conference last year, governments reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Achieving this will require a colossal and unprecedented shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar — as well as the provision of clean, affordable and reliable energy for the nearly one billion people currently living without it.

The wealthiest countries that have polluted the most should hold the primary responsibility for tackling climate change, both in cutting their emissions first and fastest, and in providing climate finance and support to countries like Ghana. Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo emphasised this responsibility during COP26 when he called for a fair and equitable solution that “recognises the historical imbalances between the high emitters and low emitters.”

To date, however, wealthy countries have under-promised and underdelivered. They have yet to reduce emissions to the extent necessary to avoid warming beyond 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. And, as President Akufo-Addo also mentioned, they have failed to honour their 2010 promise of $100 billion per year to support developing countries’ responses to climate change. Tragically, the consequences will be felt by all for decades to come.

Ghana’s agency in the energy transition

Despite this compound injustice and these broken promises, Ghana’s future ultimately depends on its own leadership and effective planning. Ghana is still a resource-dependent country, with more than a quarter of its export earnings coming from oil and gas alone. Over the past decade, the oil sector has contributed around $6.5 billion of direct revenue to Ghana’s budget. Without a plan to respond to the global energy transition, a significant decline in oil revenues could plunge Ghana into a deep crisis.

At a minimum, the government should avoid making bad decisions — those that threaten the country’s economic and fiscal outlook. But Ghana’s record does not inspire confidence. In the last decade, the government has allocated $2 billion to the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC). These investments have financed equity stakes in exploration, development and general operations in oil-producing fields. NRGI’s Risky Bet report shows that, globally, oil and gas projects currently in the pipeline and worth an estimated $400 billion, run the risk of not breaking even. Against the backdrop of the global energy transition, GNPC’s ambitions of becoming an operator are risky.

In July 2021, Ghana’s Ministry of Energy and GNPC declared their intention to sink an additional $1.65 billion of public money into shares of Aker Energy’s oil project — yet another “risky bet” given the increasing pace of the global energy transition, which would result in poor returns on such a large-scale investment. Furthermore, such a decision would divert precious capital that the government could invest in more socially beneficial programmes, such as education or cheaper and more diverse energy sources, that could power development in Ghana. Thankfully, after severe criticism from civil society organisations, the public and industry oversight bodies in Ghana, the government paused its investment plans in the Aker shares.

No doubt, Ghana’s economic and fiscal outlook is uncertain. The 2018/19 oil licensing round remains unconcluded and oil production is projected to decline. International companies are redirecting their investments, and projects have been delayed. State oil revenues peaked in 2018, at 10 per cent of total government revenue, and dropped to seven per cent in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the related global energy crisis now present huge uncertainties for the oil sector, including the prospect of a global recession.

The good news is that Ghana now has a golden opportunity to develop a comprehensive and context-specific plan for navigating the global energy transition. In response to COP26 and Ghanaian CSOs’ demands for a national energy transition policy, the government launched the National Energy Transition Committee (NETC) in December 2021. The committee is tasked with developing a national policy document on steps the country can take to successfully navigate the global energy transition. The NETC is also tasked with conducting a nationwide consultation on Ghana’s energy transition. At the first regional forum organised by the Ministry of Energy on behalf of the NETC, Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia said the NETC’s nationwide consultations are key to success: “We need to develop plans and implement options that people can relate to.” He also stressed the importance of equal opportunities for all citizens to enjoy the benefits of the energy transition and ensure social justice in the process.

Essential elements for Ghana’s approach

The establishment of the NETC is an important and valuable first step. The following recommendations, if adopted, would put the committee on track to deliver a successful energy transition plan:

• Include all voices. Ghana’s plan should be inclusive and leave no citizen behind. The plan should address how government will support local economies with relevant training, technology and finances to take advantage of the new opportunities in the transition;
• Enlist experts. The NETC should engage sector experts working on the energy transition to help ensure that the plan is informed by data and technical analysis;
• Promote open dialogue. Open and honest engagement between all relevant stakeholders will help build consensus and ownership around a transition pathway that is widely considered by citizens as viable and necessary. A shared understanding of the risks and opportunities of the energy transition is critical to agree on a shared strategy;
• Plan in harmony and coordination with existing policies. The energy transition plan should harmonise existing policy objectives and remedy the systemic inefficiencies in existing policy implementation;
• Improve governance of climate finance. The Ministry of Finance should spell out the role of international climate finance in energy transition planning and interrelate the energy transition plan with Ghana’s (conditional) nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Across the board, this requires building the state’s capacity to receive and deploy international climate finance;
• Take a critical and dynamic approach to energy options. The transition plans must address Ghana’s growing energy needs. Decisions about energy sources and related services should be based on analysing different solutions over the long term, mindful of the likelihood that many factors (such as the competitiveness of renewables and gas) may change quickly over the coming decade. Accordingly, the NETC should review the role of fossil gas over the course of the transition — not assume from the outset that gas will be a constant;
• Assess implications for existing institutions. Ghana’s energy transition plan should consider the role of existing institutions such as GNPC in light of the long-term, macro pathway, rather than starting with assumptions about their purpose and role. Making the right investment decisions will require transparency and robust risk assessment.

Chinery is the West Africa (Anglophone) regional manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).

PDP does not deserve the votes of Nigerians in 2023 and there are at least three reasons why.

The last ten days have been bad for Nigeria. Actually, the headlines have been no more depressing and scarier than over the last few years, when it comes to murder and the loss of lives, but the audacity of terrorists is escalating. First, the attack on the Kaduna airport on March 25, which accounts suggest were aimed at hijacking planes, with passengers still on the tarmac. Then the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train three days later, with at least eight dead, 26 injured and 21 missing persons reported. Unfortunately, that is not the full picture, because we might never know the complete number of people kidnapped or how many were actually on the train that night. Why? Although the train has a capacity for 840 passengers, only 362 tickets were validly sold and there might have been as many as 970 people on it. Only another day in the mindless theft of public resources, with serious implications for accountability.

Yet, our leading opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is unable to be the type of opposition we need – vocal, clear on recommendations and leading the charge to empathise with those who are suffering. This is the first reason why the party should be boycotted. Despite the consistency of the onslaught on Nigerians, socially, economically and politically, as a result of APC’s unthinking policies and unbridled state capture, asides from a few statements, PDP has not engaged the public half as well as APC did when it was Nigeria’s leading opposition party. PDP’s comatose posture might be a testament to the care that APC has taken to close the civic space and muzzle dissent, but it is also an indication that PDP has learnt nothing from its 2015 defeat: the party and its members were out of touch with Nigerians.

Another reason to boycott PDP in 2023 is that 11 months to an election with promise, where the incumbent in Aso Rock is not on the ballot, PDP is still undecided what zone its presidential candidate is going to come from. Section 7(3)(c) of PDP’s constitution provides that in furtherance of the party’s objectives it will ‘adhere to the policy of rotation and zoning of party and public elective offices’. There are at least three permutations that contribute to the difficulty the party faces: One, that PDP’s last president (2011-2015) was from the South and as such the presidency should be zoned to the North. Another is that President Jonathan, as the party’s presidential candidate in 2011, created a break with zoning and third, that since Nigerians have endured eight years of a president from the North (regardless of party), PDP’s presidential candidate should be from the South.

For onlookers, this situation that PDP is grappling with has been inevitable since the 2019 presidential election results were announced. This means PDP has had seven years to determine this question. However, instead of resolving the question of zoning early and definitively, to give its presidential candidate time enough to win the hearts and minds of Nigerians and convince sceptics who see no difference between the PDP and APC, we have, at the last count, at least 13 contenders – five from the North and eight from the South, with only one woman so far. A party that boasted, at the height of its reign, that it would stay in power for 60 years, should have learnt from the last two election cycles and worked hard to preempt this situation. The inability to be focused and think strategically about the internal workings of the party, indicates a lack of political will to tackle Nigeria’s challenges, as we have witnessed over 16 years of the PDP presidency. PDP’s avoidance of their zoning question also signals that the ruling members have no sense of justice and equity and are prepared to ignore rules, even theirs, to get what they want; the same way they indulge themselves at the expense of the public, when it comes to managing public resources.

Finally, those who represent PDP have no sense of rectitude. During a week of ASUU strike, no-end-in-sight fuel scarcity and nationwide power outage, Governors Wike and Obaseki took the edge off our pain with distracting drama. The trade in words was a show that should induce shame but Nigerians, from impoverishment of the soul and the pocket, no longer think much of shame; it has no purchasing power and it is not required to capture and wield political power. Again, like the attempted coup within the APC’s national executive team in the run up to the APC convention, the squabble between the two governors is about control of the party and how the PDP primaries will be determined. Nothing to do with us and the trials of Nigerians.

APC and PDP do not deserve our votes in 2023 and there are logical reasons why. However, it will be near impossible to shake them up and out with our votes, without massive concerted effort. This is not only because Nigeria has been evolving towards a two-party system (represented now by these two platforms) but in addition, there are deep subliminal and popular beliefs about not wasting votes on outliers and candidates that do not fit the profile of abusive use of power, and then there are those invested in strengthening narratives about the inevitability of the victory of the APC and PDP at the polls.

We are not doomed to a non-choice between these parties that are not even two sides of a coin but a cheat coin with the same sides. There are elements of what it can take to win from a non-mainstream party, with a review of Soludo’s win of the Anambra gubernatorial election last year – albeit through a party with some track record at the State and national levels. Emmanuel Macron’s win in 2017 also gives us a study of what a combination of luck (acts of God or in our case the man-made incompetence of the APC administration and the history of PDP’s governance, which when used strategically could be a tsunami of disadvantage), focused partnerships, consistent messaging and an energised electorate can achieve.

There are no examples of oppressive systems reforming themselves without a demand – how we vote in 2023 will signal our determination that we deserve and want better. If we vote for either party in 2023, we will be rewarding ineffectiveness and entrenching the sense of entitlement – unless and this is a big exception, the parties give us candidates who are a deviation from the norm.

A lot of work is required but voting in candidates not from the two main parties is not impossible. The louder the voices telling us we have no choice, except those two, the more determined we should be to prove them wrong because there are enough ethical, competent Nigerians to fill all the elective and appointive positions in Nigeria – we need to keep repeating this until it sinks in and becomes our reality.

Osori, author of Love Does Not Win Elections, will be writing for the Nigeria Decides 2023 series every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month.