Atiku, Northern Senators, House, Kano Govt Condemn Edo Killings, Seek Prosecution of Perpetrators

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March 30, 2025
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*Police debunk rumour of attack on Igbo passengers in Kano

Chuks Okocha, Juliet Akoje in Abuja, Adibe Emenyonu in Benin-City, Onuminya Innocent in Sokoto and Ahmad Sorondinki in Kano

A former vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 general election, Atiku Abubukar; the Northern Senators Forum and the House of Representatives have condemned the killing of 16 travellers, said to be hunters, at Udune Efandion in Uromi, Edo State.

However, the Kano State Police Command has dispelled a rumour circulating on social media platforms alleging an attack on an 18-seater bus carrying Igbo passengers in the state.
The Kano State Government and the Edo community leaders living in Kano, including Sarki Edo in Kano, Fred Akhigbe, and the Chairman of the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON), Professor Abdullahi Sale, have condemned the Edo killings.

The former Governor of Sokoto State, Senator Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, has also described the incident as “shocking and disheartening.”
The tragic incident, which occurred last Thursday along the Uromi/Ubiaja Road, has sparked calls for justice.
The Edo State Police Command’s Public Relations Officer (PRO), Moses Yamu, had on Friday announced the arrest of 14 suspects in connection with the killing.

According to the police, a truck transporting 25 travellers from Elele, Rivers State, was intercepted by a vigilante group in Uromi.
“During the stop, some travellers were found with locally made dane guns, which raised suspicion among the vigilante members,” Yamu explained.
He said tensions escalated when some vigilante members raised the alarm, accusing the travellers of being suspected kidnappers.

According to him, the claim quickly fuelled mob action as enraged community members and passers-by attacked and lynched 16 of the occupants.
“The truck conveying them was also set on fire,” Yamu added.
He explained that police operatives from the Uromi Division rescued 10 of the travellers, two of whom had sustained injuries.

In his reaction, Atiku, who condemned the killings through his media office, also sent his condolences to the families of the victims.
He said justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done to restore public confidence in the country’s security institutions.

Similarly, in a statement issued in Abuja by the Chairman of Northern Senators Forum, Senator Abdul’aziz Yari, the lawmakers described the incident as “deeply disturbing and saddening.”
He said, “These individuals, who were travelling to the Northern part of Nigeria, were tragically stereotyped as Fulani kidnappers and brutally murdered in a despicable manner.

“We strongly condemn this heinous act, which is a clear violation of the fundamental human rights of the victims.
“We urge the Edo State Government to take immediate action to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of this gruesome murder,” Yari explained.

In a separate statement released on his social media handle, Tambuwal expressed deep sorrow over the tragic loss of lives, extending his heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims.
Tambuwal, who represents Sokoto South senatorial zone in the Senate, urged security agencies and relevant authorities to launch a comprehensive and impartial investigation into the incident, calling for swift justice for the victims.

On its part, the House of Representatives, in a statement issued yesterday by its spokesman, Akin Rotimi, described the killing as a grave violation of human rights and the rule of law.
The lawmakers acknowledged the directives of President Tinubu and Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State, instructing security agencies to conduct an urgent investigation.

Meanwhile, the Kano State Government, in a press statement signed by the Commissioner for Information and Internal Affairs, Ibrahim Waiya, said the killing of the travellers must be met with an unwavering response from security and judicial institutions.

“The Uromi tragedy, sadly, is not an isolated event but part of a broader and alarming trend of vigilante violence across the nation. This culture of impunity can only be countered by decisive action—both punitive and preventive—to reestablish the rule of law,” the commissioner added.

Also speaking at a press conference yesterday in Kano, the Chairman of the Edo Community in the state, Mr Phillip Tomoh, alongside Akhigbe, described the attack as unlawful and unwarranted.
“We strongly condemned the incident that occurred in Uromi, Edo State, where travellers (hunters) were attacked and killed”
Similarly, the state Chairman of NAHCON, Professor Abdullahi Sale, has expressed sadness over the killing, insisting that Nigerians must embrace one another as brothers and sisters for national development.

In a similar development, the Kano State Police Command has dispelled a rumour circulating on social media platforms alleging an attack on an 18-seater bus carrying Igbo passengers in the state.

In a statement, the Police Public Relations Officer (PRO), SP Haruna Kiyawa, promised that an investigation has commenced into the source of the fake news, to bring those responsible to justice.

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Sokoto Gov Seeks Collective Effort to Combat Banditry

Sokoto State Governor, Ahmed Aliyu, has called for a collective effort to combat banditry in the state, emphasising the need for all segments of society to work together to address this challenge.

The governor made the call during a Sallah homage to the Sultan, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, at his palace.

He highlighted the progress made by his administration in the fight against insecurity, attributing the successes to the fervent prayers of the people, as well as the renewed commitment of the state government and security agencies.

Aliyu noted that the Sokoto State Community Guard Corps, established by his government, has been instrumental to assisting conventional security forces in securing the state, and commended traditional institutions for their role in curbing banditry and called for sustained efforts.

The governor reiterated his administration’s unwavering support for Islamic propagation in the state, as part of the governor’s efforts to strengthen security and promote peace in Sokoto State.

Aliyu further praised the Sultan for his contributions to Da’awah (Islamic propagation), and called for continued support and advice from the revered traditional ruler.

Responding, Sultan Abubakar commended Aliyu for his various intervention programmes, particularly his support for orphans, the needy, the physically challenged, and Islamic scholars in the state.

He government’s ongoing infrastructure development and urged the governor to sustain the initiatives for the benefit of the people.

Sokoto State Governor, Ahmed Aliyu, has called for a collective effort to combat banditry in the state, emphasising the need for all segments of society to work together to address

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April 1, 2025
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Why Nigerian Governments Pay Lip Service to Civil Service Reforms

By Tunji Olaopa

In all functional democracies across the world, from the OECD countries to the continent of Africa, the successes and failures of democratic governance are directly proportional to the readiness of the governments to pursue institutional and governance reforms. These reforms prioritize the public service first as the inevitable complement of democracy (to paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter), and second, as the mechanism for implementing good public policy. Democratic governance, in other words, depends on how optimal and efficient the public service is as the powerhouse of government’s policy commitment to its citizens. This is the reason why the difference between a prosperous democracy and a failing one is the commitment to institutional reforms.
However, complementing democracy is a task that would not come automatically. The political and bureaucratic leadership must make a conscious effort to make reform an enabling framework that achieve the capability readiness of the public service. It is only within this context that we can start talking of a democratic order that is founded on the responsiveness of the public service to the aspirations of the citizenry. The struggle to initiate reform designs and blueprints, and follow through with their implementation does not often come easy as the trajectories of reforms in Africa often reveal.
But we only need to look at comparative efforts across the world to see why the capability readiness of the public service is key especially in a developing country like Nigeria. The experience of Japan after the disastrous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War is a significant example of how a country could leverage policy and institutional reform to get back on its feet. The establishment and efficiency of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and its operational philosophy mirrors the significance of the governance policies that brought the Asian Tigers into reckoning. Apart from a strict governance regulation, including protectionism, that influenced the market in specific regulatory manner; as well as the deployment of sociocultural principle, like the Keiretsu principle that organized the private sector into a cooperative economic structure, the public service was also organized around the idea of technocratic and meritocratic “embedded autonomy” which implies that the bureaucracy was insulated from political exigencies and eternal pressures. Now, the governance resolve of post-war Japan and the Asian Tigers has become a governance and reform lesson no country can ignore.
The inauguration of any democratic government is always interesting. Electioneering campaigns regal the citizens with promises of good policies. This comes from the recognition that governance and institutional reforms form the bedrock of development planning that articulate government programs, especially for effective and efficient service delivery to the people. Once electioneering is done with, the move from election victory to governance articulation is meant to concretize clear development performance and outcomes that bear significant impact on the lives of the generality of people. What is rather interesting, from a Nigerian perspective, at least, is the heightened attention that public service institutional reforms received in the early years of a government’s administration which all too gradually get sidelined in a way that undermine the progressive transformation of the public service into a formidable complement of democratic governance.
Inevitably, government is then constrained into an arbitrary engagement with governance and administrative matters and problems that leads to setting up ad hoc committees and task force structures which elevate the already burdensome cost of governance problem. This is further aggravated by the penchant for administrative discontinuity that insists, quite illogically, that a government must reinvent the reform wheel rather than deepening and consolidating the reform agenda of the previous administration, or at best incorporating some of its elements into a new framework. The reformer in me worries about the danger that reform complacence or the trade-off of solid reform measures for short-term political gains poses for Nigeria’s transformation trajectory.
The administrative history of institutional reforms in Nigeria is laced with cogent examples of what I am saying. Let us start with the Gowon administration and the Udoji Commission report of 1974. It was the keen awareness of the significance of the public service in the context of enhanced, expanded and deepened role of the state, and what it could contribute to the development planning and management in Nigeria needed as a post-independent country, that led the constitution of the Commission to recommend a way to get the public service capability ready for the objective of national development. And yet, the administration turned deaf ears to the fundamental implications that the recommendations of the creative managerial disruption of the system the Udoji Commission proposed. Those recommendations were meant to take the Weberian “I-am-directed” public service beyond its post-golden age era into the future that demands some critical reforms to withstand modern administrative and national exigencies of a newly independent country. At a critical moment when political will was required to take the recommendation beyond the pages of the report, the government faltered.
The government’s political will was not lacking in the need to implement the Dotun Phillips report of 1988, initiated by the Buhari administration and carried through by the Babangida administration. The study group was given the objective of a professionalized civil service circumscribed by a managerial philosophy into the institutional context of presidentialism. However, there was an underlying conception-reality gap that disrupted the significance of the report and its recommendation, and this was further aggravated by the inflexibility of the administration’s endorsement of Decree 43 as a legal instrument for the implementation of the recommendations. When some aspects like the politicization of the office of the permanent secretary who ceased being accounting officer and whose tenure was coterminous with that of Ministers therefore failed in the face of reality, and in a governance context of command and control, the system chose to throw away the baby with the bathwater rather than getting back to the drawing board and initiating amendment to the legal instrument as part of a learning journey.
Unfortunately, the succeeding reform commission—the Ayida Panel—got the marching order to simply reverse the trajectory that was already leading away from the traditional model for doing government business to a managerial reform blueprint. This was a foolhardy attempt at rescuing the form of the golden era of public administration of the 1960s and 1970s without the full benefits of the new managerial revolution that demands professionalism and performance management. By the time we arrived at the Obasanjo administration, and the commencement of the democratic experiment in 1999, Nigeria has sufficiently learnt some administrative and reform lessons that led to the inauguration of the National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR), the most comprehensive reform blueprint ever in Nigeria’s reform history. The approval and opportunity for the civil servants to reform the system led to the establishment of the Bureau of Public Service Reform as the lead agency and engine room for continuous learning, change management and the incremental institutional improvement of the public service. Implementing the NSPSR raised lots of fundamental issues, like whether or not the civil service can reform itself; whether or not to policy choices should be made based on selectivity or comprehensiveness, and the issue of getting the basics and details of institutional reform right so as to be able to manage the sequencing of the reform around building new systems and models on the restructured Weberian bureaucracy.
In a 2005 study of the administrative trajectories of twenty-nine African countries, Ladipo Adamolekun introduced a useful typology for reckoning with the administrative progress of African states. He characterized the 29 African states into four different categories: the advanced, committed, hesitant and beginning reformers. Nigeria fell into the ‘hesitant’ reforming African state. Unlike the committed and advanced reforming states, the hesitant reformers, like Nigeria, manifest the symptoms of not always seeing through reform designs, innovation and ideas, just like we saw with the Udoji reform. To be hesitant is to be enthusiastic about reform ideas, commit to seeing them through, but stopping short of implementing the key reform innovation in ways that impact the efficient service delivery capability of the public service.
The perfect example that articulates Nigeria’s reform hesitancy is the failure of successive Nigerian governments to deal with the cost of governance issues that has been limiting Nigeria’s institutional coordination and functional capacity. Nigeria operates one of the most expensive governance systems in the world. This derives from the multiplication of structural and institutional processes and dynamics that not only burden budgetary allocations through the large chunk of money spent on recurrent expenditure, but also undermine functional efficiency due to wastage and redundancies. This phenomenon was consequent on the breakdown of the internal establishment control mechanism built around the control tool of organization and method (O&M) and the treasury control of establishment that regulates the capital and recurrent ratio of the budget. The core elements of this controls were the manpower forecasting and planning system of identifying, planning and acting upon human resource requirements and problems related to the conceptualization of the role of the state in the running of the national economy, as well as the trend analysis of service’s growth in size and expansion of the scope of responsibilities.
The Oronsaye Report—or, the Presidential Committee on the Rationalization and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions, and Agencies—was meant to first articulate a rationalization framework that reduces all parallel, ad hoc and redundant structures; and second, achieve governance accountability that will instigate more efficiency in the conduct of government business. The overall objective was to get the MDAs to achieve more with less. The Committee was guided by five fundamental principles: (a) the economic challenges and the need for Government to make more efficient use of its resources to achieve its development objectives and goals; (b) the fact that Nigeria had undertaken reforms in the past; (c) it was imperative to reform to meet the challenges of a better socio-political and economic society; (d) there was no need to create another body to perform the functions of an already existing statutory entity. The fact that an institution was inefficient and ineffective should not warrant the creation of a new one; and (e) the reform would ensure efficient and effective management of Government structures and functionaries to guarantee better service delivery and good governance.
And yet, given the fundamental significance of the Report of the Committee, no government from the Jonathan administration to date has been unlock the binding constraints nor muster the audacity to fully implement the recommendations of the Committee. Several reasons can be adduced for this. The first is that the long-term demands of reforms are counteracted by the short-term tenures of many administrations. Second, since there is no making an omelet without breaking eggs, reform implementation requires offending vested interests that would be affected by the hard-political decision these reforms require. Third, reforms possess deep and expensive psychological implication due to the trauma that would attend, for instance, the rationalization and consequent rightsizing of the MDAs will demand in terms of specific downsizing and severance compensations.
However, since institutional reforms are inevitable, it becomes imperative that the Tinubu government has to facilitate specific systemic and structural changes in order to get the basic rights. These include the following: (i) elimination of the dysfunctional non-value adding processes including silos operations which create red tapes and operational bottlenecks; (ii) the efficient activation of the performance bond that MDAs signed with the President as the means of instituting the performance management system; (iii) strengthening of MDAs’ programme and project management capabilities; (iv) the recalibration of research and policy analysis functions of MDAs through the re-professionalization of their Department of Planning, Research and Statistics (DPRS); (v) the identification of core skills requirements of the MDAs that touch on the implementation of the Renewed Hope Agenda, and their sourcing and deployment through retraining, fresh recruitment, contract appointment, staff exchange, sabbatical, donor technical assistance, etc.; (vi) strengthening the merit system through more rigorous entry-level assessment and induction system to mitigate the extent to which the service inherits low-quality education and deficits from the tertiary institutions; (vii) reprofiling of public service institutional capacity to better optimize the potentials of PPPs to boost service delivery; and (viii) the imperative of launching a national waste reduction strategy that involves (a) the unbundling of the expenditure structure of government; (b) productivity audit of the MDAs, (c) getting MDAs to articulate their productivity and waste reduction plans based on agreed national benchmark, (d) launching of the productivity metrics and tools for holding MDAs accountable to national productivity targets, and (e) launching of the new national assets and facility management and national maintenance system.
However, and preparatory to institutionalizing the above, it is logical and expedient that the Tinubu administration establish the Program Management Office (PMO) in the short term to act as the MDAs’ institutional life support model. This becomes functional, for instance, in generating project management ideas which can then be mainstreamed to activate performance-managed operations in the MDAs. This will serve to reinforce the MDAs with required skills and competency upgrade needed to deliver high performance that urgently backstops the Renewed Hope Agenda. This involves, among other things, a backend review of the capability readiness of the MDAs (or at least carefully selected ones based on criteria that are aligned with the eight national policy objectives and priorities of the federal government). There is also, following on this, the need to activate the performance management system components of the Federal Civil Service Implementation Strategy. This demand that the federal government institutionally insist, through the support of key players provided by a consortium of experts and firms, that the MDA deliver on the performance bonds signed with the government.
The Tinubu administration has what it takes, in terms of extant reform blueprints and designs, professional expertise and technocratic know-how, and the political will to break the jinx that has bedeviled other administrations in terms of passing on reform ideas that could have turned the tide of efficient service delivery to Nigerians. All that is required is taking the first step, say, by going full throttle with the implementation of the Oronsaye Report, and dealing a final blow to the cost ofd governance problem in Nigeria’s governance framework.

*Olaopa, a Professor of Public Administration, is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission

By Tunji Olaopa In all functional democracies across the world, from the OECD countries to the continent of Africa, the successes and failures of democratic governance are directly proportional to