At the ongoing trial of the former pension chairman, Abdulrasheed Maina, in Abuja, there was a sudden halt in the proceedings, orchestrated by the defense counsel’s complain that his client is bleeding.

The defense counsel said that Maina cannot continue with his trial with his health under serious question before the court. He asked for adjournment to receive a report from Nigerian correctional services concerning the health status of his client.

The Nigerian correctional service has asked for a week to turn in Maina health report, and his advocate prayed the court to adjourn the hearing until the report is served. It was a dramatic situation that put the proceedings to a halt, and it was not the first time something like that is happening in a court hearing involving corruption.

On the 7th of November, Maina was brought to court on a wheelchair, after he couldn’t make a court appearance scheduled for the 5th of November. According to the medical report presented to the court, he was seriously ill, and his condition was pitiable even to the confession of the presiding judge. But he is not the only one who has fallen critically ill owing to his graft case.

In 2016, the former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chairman, Bello Haliru Mohammed, appeared in court on a wheelchair. Mohammed was on trial for his role in the alleged $2 billion the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki swindled through arms deal.

Another political figure who was notably brought to court on wheelchair is Olisa Metuh, the former PDP National Publicity Secretary, who was also accused of receiving N400 million from the embattled Sambo Dasuki in 2014, appeared critically ill on a wheelchair.

His case got more dramatic, in his recent court appearance; he came lying motionless on a stretcher.

There is a whole number of them; the former presidential adviser on Niger-Delta, Kingsley Kuku, former Adamawa state governor, Bala Ngilari, former minister of petroleum resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, former minister of aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, and the list goes on.

One question people keep asking in all these instances is: Why do Nigerian public office holders get sick as soon as they are put on trial for corruption?

The answer many have offered is that they do that to incur the sympathy of judges and the general public. While that is true, there is more to it. It takes a lot of lies, manipulations, cynicism and hardheartedness to loot public fund. And the looters go through all these because they believe that the end will justify the means. So when it turned out otherwise, it becomes a heart wrenching problem they didn’t include in the plan in the beginning, and therefore, will find it difficult to handle.

For instance, there’s a list of 23 landed property linked to Maina that the court has ordered its forfeiture. And millions of naira traced to him has also been confiscated by the Economic Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), and the hunt for more goes on.

That has been the case with many of them who were caught up in the act of looting. The (aku na esi obi ike) wealth gives confidence stance is no longer in play because there is nothing to hold on to. The reverberating effect wrecks through the heart and bones of the perpetrator, rendering him incapacitated in a short time, and his survival may depend on what he is able to hide from the government after all, from the proceeds of his loots.

The former governor of Bayelsa State, late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, is a noteworthy case. He embezzled as much as $55 million of public fund and used the proceeds to acquire assets around the world. He acquired luxury houses in California, London, and South Africa, and owned an oil refinery in Ecuador.

It was the kind of wealth his six years as a governor gave him the opportunity to amass, and he was happy and healthy swimming through it until 2005, when he was charged with money laundering in London and the police discovered that he had $3.2 million in cash and in the banks and $15 million real estate holdings there.

That was the beginning of the troubles that would later lead him to his early grave. Two years after his impeachment in 2005, Alamieyeseigha pleaded guilty to failing to declare his assets. The whole corruption saga got him only two years in prison.

In 2013, after he got out of prison, former president Goodluck Jonathan granted him presidential pardon, and once again, he became active in political activities. But he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. Alamieyeseigha died in 2015 as a man who no longer had anything to be afraid of, apart from the fact that there is nothing left to hold on to from the wealth he illegally acquired. Not even his new political roles could assuage the emptiness that he feels for losing it all.

So it is with the rest of them, the fear of lying, intimidating, manipulating protocols only to lose it all in the end is the deadly disease that suddenly renders corrupt political office holders incapacitated during trials.

In 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari flagged off the dry season farming campaign in Kebbi State. The initiative was supported by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s N20 billion Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP). Before 2015, Nigerian farmers were at the mercy of weather. Most needed crops became scarce in dry seasons due to the lack of technique to cultivate them when the weather condition becomes harsh.

Ever since then, the CBN has supported hundreds of farmers through the ABP, providing them with loans to initiate dry season farming after they must have learned the practice.

In 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) visited Northern Nigeria with the dry season farming technique, the aim was to foster a new approach for farming in Nigeria that will boost food production and alleviate hunger.

Food security has been paramount among the issues that the UN is looking for their solutions, and Nigeria’s inability to cultivate enough food has played a big role in the crisis. The factors contributing to the hunger and malnutrition that it has yielded as a result beckons help from beyond borders.

In the aim to curtail the escalating brunt of hunger emanating from poor agricultural produce, the FAO embarked on distribution of crops and grains, to the tune of 247 tons. And there was also fertilizer distribution, 25-kg bag of 1, 966 tons.

The distribution took place between November and December of 2018, as at February 2019, farmers were able to harvest their crops. An estimated 198, 099 tons of vegetables, 825 tons of maize and 9 402 tons of rice were harvested.

The dry season farming technique and the enabling supply that defy the tradition of waiting on the rain gradually became popular, especially among individual farmers in northern Nigeria.

Dry season farming utilizes greenhouses, drip irrigation and fertigation, with reduced pesticides. Greenhouses are waterproof but solar netted structures that produce regulated conditions for vegetable cultivation. In fertigation systems, soluble fertilizer and other essential plant micronutrients and insecticides are mixed with water at intervals for growth enhancement and crop protection.

In the cases where greenhouses are used, vegetable related crops are mainly cultivated. They are used with drip irrigation facilities and vegetables grown in them require minimum pesticides because the nets in the greenhouses protect crops from pests. Drip irrigation is sometimes used in the open farmland. The holes are perforated at the calibrated spacing and water drops into the base of each plant.

It has been recognized as the most efficient use of water for agricultural purposes if juxtaposed with flood, boom or sprinkling irrigation system.

Recently, the tradition of dry season farming using greenhouses or open farming has been gaining ground as more farmers are embracing the practice. But the local farmers need to be guided in crop plantations so that it could be profitable. Earlier in the year, the Brands and Marketing Manager at Dizengolff West Africa, Nigeria’s office, Humphrey Otalor, Advised farmers:

“You can plant all kinds of vegetables but it is better to take advantage of what is not planted off rainy seasons. For example, if everybody is growing tomatoes, if I am a greenhouse farmer, I will grow pepper because a few people are growing it.

“Farmers can grow bell peppers, sweet melons, spicy peppers, cucumbers, and with the drip irrigation on the open field, you can grow watermelons. The small-scale greenhouse occupies a space of 8m x 24m and it is sold for about N1.7 million. It includes the irrigation kits, seeds, bags of soluble fertilizer, a sprayer and installation to enable a farmer to start production immediately. This however, does not include the source of water, for a farmer should dig a well of borehole as a source of regular water supply,” he said.

Last week, 9, 000 farmers enrolled for the 2019/2020 dry season farming in Bauchi State, under the Fadama III project, an initiative supported by the Nigeria Incentive Risk Sharing and Lending (NIRSAL) of CBN. The goal has been to make rice production an unseasonal activity in Nigeria, by closing the intervals of unproductivity that have always resulted in the scarcity of farm produce.

However, the growing embrace of dry season farming in Nigeria has not come without its challenges. For farmers who cultivate perishable crops like tomatoes, watermelon and other fruits, the loss of a huge amount of the produce can be discouraging. For instance, tomato farmers in northern Nigeria report losses of over 40 percent of their yield due to poor storage and processing facilities.

For those among the farmers whose farms were financed under the ABP, it is a misfortune that will affect their relationship with the apex bank. The introduction of dry season farming in Nigeria is a development that its yield will result in food security and employment. However, preservation of crops and farm produce is necessary in sustaining the idea. A provision of sustainable storage system or subsidy of farm yields will alleviate the vulnerability of individual farmers who lack the capacity to preserve their crops.

There’s a viral picture that showed two “young” corps members during their passing out parade. I’m sure these corpers are like 40 years old or more; but they still participated in the NYSC programme. I laughed so hard when I saw this picture because it reminded me of “the adult corpers” we had during our NYSC days. One of those adult corpers was our CLO and we used to address him as “Pa James”. No one dared call him by his name because he was like a papa to us.

If you come to the labour force, you will see a lot of people that are getting younger instead of growing older. For example, you can find someone that was 35 years old three or four years ago that is 30 years old today. You can imagine the confusion such a thing can cause.

The greatest of them all is the magic performed by some civil servants, which makes the Guinness World Records seem like child play. For example, I have seen someone that wrote her first school leaving certificate at the age of 6 months. And I have heard of people that wrote and passed theirs before their mothers conceived them. Isn’t that something magical? And these records are officially documented and stored in their files.

Why do people have to lie about their age? It has become a tradition for people to doctor their ages before going for new jobs, especially if it is for the public sector. Why should age be allowed to decide who should be recruited and who shouldn’t?

Ageism isn’t a problem facing Nigeria alone; it’s a global thing. I was prompted to write this after reading a foreign newsletter that addressed the issue. I was actually surprised that something like this exists in other parts of the world.

Ageism may be as old as man because it has been in existence long before I was born. People have been discriminated because of their age – the young are treated as unwise, while the aged are treated as slow-witted. In those days, women were expected to marry within a particular age bracket. Those that missed their opportunities at that age were branded “old maids” and men were discouraged by their relatives – both male and female – from marrying them. The reasons for discriminating these ladies bordered around reproduction related matters and the fact that their husbands may not be able to “control” them at that age. Men also faced theirs because if a man fails to marry or become wealthy at a particular age, especially when his age mates had “acquired” both wealth and wives, he will be seen as irresponsible.

Today, the world is gradually turning its face away from the expected age for marriage (people can now marry in their 80’s and no one judges them). Even some tribes in Nigeria are beginning to relax their grips on the tradition of early marriage for both men and women. But then, as attention is shifting from marriage age, it is focusing on employment age.

Employers no longer want to recruit people with ages that indicate they have spent many years on earth, unless they are seeking their wealth of on-the-job experiences. As the day breaks, so does the age for entry level into employment reduces. Earlier, the required age for entry level or trainee jobs into most establishments was “not more than 30 years old.” Later, it came down to “not more than 25 years old as at the last birthday.” Now, some employers want graduates that are “21 years old as at the time of application.” Who knows if in the next ten years it will be “graduates with ten years experience but are not more than 20 years old before the date of the application”?

Someone once asked me why employers want more of young people in their team than their older counterparts. For an answer, I told my questioner that companies look for very young people because they want those they could comfortably micromanage as well as those that can work tirelessly because of their youthful exuberance. I also told her that these establishments know that these young people do not have many financial obligations, so they are ok with whatever they are paid. Put differently, the establishments that discriminate the ages of their applicants want young people they can pay peanuts and still get the most out of them.

Well, I might not be completely right but I know I’m far from the truth. I know there are advantages to having young people in a team. For example, they may bring in fresh and extraordinary ideas to the table and they are easier to train. Besides, they have the energy to make things happen, if they are given the opportunity. But I know a lot of employers seek younger employees for very wrong reasons.

The reason someone gave me some years ago for not employing a woman in her late 40’s was that she knows the woman, if employed, will undermine her (the employer’s) authority. She said she is biased with working with subordinates that are older than her because they hardly take instructions from her and some of them go as far as questioning her authorities. For that, she employs only younger people in her establishment.

This sort of situation is witnessed daily in different establishments, even among our domestic staff. For example, that papa that is your gardener may express his dissatisfaction with the way you talk to him even if you pay him salary. He may continue to remind you to show some respect to him because he’s your “father’s age mate.” Good managers have learnt to overlook certain behaviours from people like this so long as they deliver on their jobs.

Employers also have to bear in mind that there are individual differences. That one person misbehaved doesn’t mean that others will follow suit. The easiest way employers can look at older applicants is to see their wealth of knowledge which they must have gathered from life experiences. They should give this sort of people a chance and learn how to manage them so that they don’t have employer-employee face-off.

To reduce the rate of unemployment and poverty in the country, the problem of ageism needs to be tackled, and tackled very soon. A lot of fresh graduates leave school at the age which no longer fits into the prerequisite for most employments. This means that either they doctor their age or find other ways of surviving. I can bet you that those ones that can’t start off their own businesses will only end up doctoring their ages, which is quite improper.

In as much as I advocate for change of mindset towards the age of employment, I still believe that older employees and job seekers need to understand that they shouldn’t use their age to intimidate their younger bosses and colleagues because it only lands them into trouble. They should also be ready to embrace changes and not question every instruction given out by their superiors because they believe they should be consulted first (as par the papas in the house). Furthermore, they need to work hard so as to meet up with their work demands, if not they will have themselves to blame when they are kicked out.