Beer summit - Sam Omatseye
In Touch, The Nation newspaper, 13/09/2021

It is a conference of an original flavour. Tongues may differ but the taste is the same. It is sour to some, haram to some others, but sweet-sour to many. It is where alcohol meets democracy.
It froths but no bottle is uncorked. It is about liquor but no liquid fills a glass. The conferees disagree with fury but no alcoholic is in sight. No drunken stagger, no supercilious swagger, no drooling lips, no slobbering cadences, no inverted sentences.
Yet, there seems to be woe, contentions and redness of eyes, apologies to Solomon in the Holy Bible. It is a beer summit.

The event is not bottled in a roadside bukka, or beer parlour, or an adobe tavern in the entrails of Kano or Katsina. Big-name makers like Guinness or Nigerian Breweries are not organising it and neither are they invited.
They are fighting like battering rams. They weaponise pens and documents. They spar over law, split airs over technicalities, and spleens suffer. But it is an unlikely venue for an alcoholic brawl: the courts.

So this is a new version of the national conference. They say no to the big halls of the day. No rent for the marquee hotels or conferences centres, especially for the shylocks of Abuja. The rent is paid to lawyers. Judges preside but not the retired old men of magistracy whose hairs have either disappeared or are streaked with grey.

We saw the first chapter. Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike chided a nation where those who give get less than those who drone. Why should his state give tens of billions a month and get in return a paltry N4.7 billion, while Kano gives what it gets? He asked. He goes to court to fight. It is about alcohol but it is about others. But alcohol is the touchstone product of contention, a hint of what is now the hypocrisy of the north. The northern states are comfortable with sin money. They punish alcohol, jail alcoholics but embrace drunken money and smile to the bank and from FAAC.

Have we not seen the righteous spectacle of crushed beer bottles? In Kano, in Katsina and others, no one is allowed to sell drinks or market it. It is haram, but the money is hailed. It is hallelujah.

Just as Wike was winning in the Port Harcourt court, the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was engineering a similar drama as he signed VAT law. Now Lagos and Port Harcourt have brought VAT into the front burner of the fight for fiscal federalism. It is the fight that the parts have to undertake to prune the centre of its bloated belly of entitlement. Lagos has been the beachhead of fiscal federalism and has won quite a few battles as Barrister Femi Falana (SAN) has highlighted. Though Wike began the VAT affair, Lagos will eventually be its Gatling gun.

Ordinarily, one would have dismissed the necessity of such a fight. After all, this is supposed to be a nation of cooperative parts, where the weak leans on the strong, the poor on the rich, and a republic of love upends a temperament of tribalism. This essayist supported sukuk loan against those who wailed over Islamisation. But VAT is different.
That accounted for why the Niger Delta for many years accepted to feed the national palate and glamour with its crude oil. But that republic of love is an illusion so far. It is not following Shakespeare’s appeal in the play King Lear, that says, “So distribution undo excess and each man have enough.” Some preen while others are prey. The Niger Delta, for instance, is not having near enough. World class physicist and old boy of Government College Ughelli, Professor Omagbemi Omatete, visited his home village in Ugborodo a few years ago, and he saw the whole area reduced to a shell of human settlement, no schools, no hospitals, etc., a ghost of its past prosperity, what novelist Joseph Conrad calls “a distorted echo of its past elegancies.”
The restiveness of the Niger Delta may have diminished but not the suffering. Many cannot go to school. The late Chief Hope Harriman told me that in his young days, crayfish was so abundant that in the area that women ploughed river’s edge with basket and filled them. They sold them to the eastern region. Now there is no crayfish. Former Governor Uduaghan of Delta State once said when he was growing up his grandmother would ask him to go pick fish in the river. All he did was dip his fingers and fish or fishes of his choice were dancing in his hands and soup was ready.

Lagos makes a lot of money and gives over N50 billion to the national pool each month and gets a pittance and competes with states that give next to nothing. Lagos is the quietest state in the federation because it has saved the centre with good governance. Everyone comes here. It is the counterfoil to national inefficiency.

All of this will be fine, if there is a sense of justice in the land. But when a state gives and it sees that the benefits of justice belongs to one section, it has to ask questions about what happened to the value of equity. Those who are coming to equity have blood on their hands. A few years ago, I attended the NIMASA award ceremony for longstanding employees. NIMASA is about marine wealth and security. But over an overwhelming 80 percent of the awardees were not from maritime areas. Is that a nation of cooperative living, or parasitism? Or even cynicism? That would be fine if those in maritime areas are even able to enjoy their environment now keeled over with pollution where farmer cannot see his farm but crude oil and the fisherman sees fish bobbing dead-eyed on water surface.

When Charles Dickens writes his A tale of Two Cities, he dramatises a scene where everyone leaves their trade and drinks to stupor from a broken wine cask from a wine shop. Someone spells blood on a wall with his wine. It is a forestate of the French Revolution. The owner of the wine shop looks on as his possession is taken over while he and his wife do nothing.
The VAT is an example of the monkey not wanting to play spectator as the baboons fatten on their wealth.

It is within the FIRS to appeal. While the courts are the venues of the fight over what fiscal federalism entails, we should not forget that the rage is on the streets, real beer parlours and homes, where a man who knows he works sees another take what belongs to him.
Until we have a nation where suspicion collapses for equality, and people are glad to call themselves Nigerians rather than Ibibio or Ijaw, we kid ourselves that we are running a federalism.

Justice and fairness are the ever-flowing springs of a federal system.

The first beer summit took place in the United States when President Barrack Obama invited a well-known black Professor Louis Gates Jnr, and a white police officer to the White House to resolve a racial incident over beer. The media called it “the beer summit.”

I hope our beer summit ends without Charles Dickens’ inebriates.

Source: https://thenationonlineng.net/beer-summit/

Yes.

You nor dey eat snail, but you dey drink the water.

Okay

Shikena!

Ofcourse it is haram.

Let us have full autonomous finding and funding economic Resourcing Security for all our constitutional states.

Let the States contribute uniformly to run FG ON SPECIFIC DUTIES necessarily allocable to FG.

Let us stop Bokoharam, iswa and FUNAM FURY INVADING NIGERIA.

Let us stop Macban and Buhari's "I WILL MAKE NIGERIA UNGOVERNABLE".

GOD BLESS NIGERIA.

If cow is not allowed in South East, eating of cow meat should not be allowed too, but you see a fulani is wise and igbo is wiser but Yoruba keep getting deceived by the two of them. We want regional government.

I concur

Sin money

This story will not end so easily

Very simple that way
Nonsense hypocrites
Will always want to link everything to religion
If you don’t eat something, don’t touch anything from that

It should be like blood money to them na.

This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

Have we not seen the righteous spectacle of crushed beer bottles? In Kano, in Katsina and others, no one is allowed to sell drinks or market it. It is haram, but the money is hailed. It is hallelujah.

Southerners mumu never do, take it or leave it Northerners own this country.

If not why should VAT gotten from tobacco, beers etc from southern states be shared with northern states.

Southerners continue to deceive yourself, northerners own Nigeria.

Mystic216:
Very simple that way
Nonsense hypocrites
Will always want to link everything to religion
If you don’t eat something, don’t touch anything from that

HausaFulani ethnic culture has been substituted with Islamic laws. The whole of North practice only Islam with no regard to earlier culture.

Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

Your mumu never do. E remain small.

Anuohia!

THE VOICE OF SAM OMATSEYE IS THE VOICE OF LAMIDI AMOUDA SANGODELE AKA TINUBU

CC

MONOGAMY
BUCKEYEMEDIA1
SEUNMSG
VAUGHANLANREWAJ


THIS


THE MAI GIDAS MENTIONED ABOVE NEVER SEE ANYTHING

CC BOBOWAJA

Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

Your elites (Northern oligarchy) are wise, so they can retain power for as long they want it.

Southerners mumu never do, so continue to maintain the status quo. As for the VAT northerners can continue to get the lion share of it pending when southerners mumu will end.

This is the best way to stop some of this madness going on in the north. You destroy beers, close down hotels and brothels and ran to Abuja to share VAT money generated by another state from the sales of alcohol. Thank you Wike for this bold step.

Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

AND SOME IJIOTS WILL TELL ME THAT WE DON’T HAVE BOOK HARAM SYMPATHIZERS ON NAIRALAND

CC BUCKEYEMEDIA1

Their teaching teaches you to hate the infidels and tax them then use the tax the buy the weapon to destroy them

It doesn't say hate the infidels and everything that comes from them

Pls Northerners destroying beer in the north is it not affecting your economy? Yet you kept doing it why are you crippling your economy

Why are you destroying Igbo's business yet you love them so much to analysis the future impact of their sit at home to their economy

Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

power can't be retain in the North, we used to be enslaved to Northern oligarchy because here was no cooperation between the South West and the remaining South south/ south East, now that the yorubas that hold the unity of this country are now wise. The end of Northern oligarchy is here. Remember North Central is in agreement with the south.

Flexherbal:
You nor dey eat snail, but you dey drink the water.

u no Dey eat fish but u use teeth Dey share am

walex2:
power can't be retain in the North, we used to be enslaved to Northern oligarchy because here was no cooperation between the South West and the remaining South south/ south East, now that the yorubas that hold the unity of this country are now wise. The end of Northern oligarchy is here. Remember North Central is in agreement with the south.

Which means behind the scene there was never a disunity among you 2faced like you wanted us to believe on social media like NL,
Which unity are you talking about?? Anyways come 2023 we will know who hold the ace



North2023

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Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keeper destroying it, that is the status quo

what the Almighty cannot do and undo does not exist. This arongancy and born to rule mentality will definitely drive you people insane. What have you achieved with this current northern useless administration apart from ravaging banditry, kidnapping,iswap,bokoharam, Sharia laws, illiteracy, poverty capital and a globally recognised collapsed economy.

What is naira equivalent to a dolla again today self?

Blackfire:
This is the reason we are retaining the power in the North, once this power goes to the south we know you will tear everything apart, we also know that the online beef you southerners do among yaself is to confuse us, but know this power stays in the North2023

As for the VAT , we will keep collecting it, and as for the haram of a beer , we will keep destroying it, that is the status quo

And also know that in event of war,the north can never win a united south . It is impossible for a northern president to succeed buhari. We will rather die than see that happen.

Very Simple.