Seated on the dais behind the lectern at the Capitol Rotunda where Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th American President on Monday were the wealthiest men in the world: CEO of Meta (parent company of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram), Mark Zuckerberg, Apple boss, Tim Cook, CEO of Alphabeta Inc and Google, Sundar Pichai, and Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos. Others included Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, CEO of TikTok (the social network at the centre of a banning controversy), Shou Zi Chew, former executive chairman of Fox Corp., the legendary Rupert Murdoch and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, who also owns X (formerly Twitter). Placed a row behind members of Trump’s immediate family but one row ahead of members of his in-coming cabinet, these powerful men also joined Trump at St. John’s Episcopal Church across the White House shortly before the swearing-in ceremony. There was nothing accidental about their presence at these events and the placement of their seats.

Due to a mild cold, I decided not to go to the office on Monday. So, from noon till 7pm, I was glued to the television, watching the CNN coverage of the inauguration of the 45th American President and now its 47th. In many ways, the proceedings were like the opening scenes in the movie, ‘The Godfather’, where Don Vito Coleone (acted by Marlon Brando) was giving out the hands of his daughter in marriage. The movie was based on the novel of same title by Mario Puzo. On that ‘glorious’ day, all that Don Coleone sought of the high and mighty who gathered for his daughter’s wedding was their ‘friendship’ which, of course, was not cost-free as we saw in the dialogue with a central character called Bonasera. By telling Bonasera who sought revenge for the fate that befell his daughter that he had to join the community of ‘friends’, the Don was demanding fealty, and he made that clear enough: “You never wanted my friendship. And you were afraid to be in my debt.” As the Don would later say after the deal was consummated “Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.’’

Both the scene in the movie and the one at the American Congress on Monday centred essentially around family, friendship, loyalty, wealth and power. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort last month as powerful men and women from across the globe visited one after another to ‘kiss the ring’ of a man to whom family, ‘friendship’, loyalty, wealth and power are indeed everything.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, 82-year American biographer, historian and author of ‘No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt-—The Home Front in World War II’ which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History, was one of the commentators on CNN. Like others, Goodwin conceded that Trump’s return to the White House is quite remarkable, but she also expressed reservations about the influence of the ‘tech oligarchs’ who have now become part of the presidential inner circle. That reservation is shared by no less a personality than Senator Bernie Sanders. “When the three wealthiest men in America sit behind Trump at his inauguration, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our government,” Sanders posted on social media.

Instructively, Trump was inaugurated on the day the 2024 Oxfam International report revealed that the wealth of global billionaires rose by $2 trillion to $15 trillion within one year. Titled, ‘Takers Not Makers,’ the report stated that there were 2,769 billionaires worldwide in 2024, an increase of 204 over the previous year, while three-fifths of this wealth came from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections. “The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated—by three times—but so too has their power,” Oxfam International Executive Director, Amitabh Behar, said. “We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few.”

In the immediate case of the American ‘tech oligarchs’, the real concern is not about their bank balances but rather in the control that they have over the information we all consume and how Trump could leverage on that to reshape our world in the coming months and years. Besides, the rise of AI as a new force in the use of technology for the advancement of human progress means that Trump, as an aspirant to ultimate world power, needs the ‘friendship’ of these tech oligarchs, just as they need him for their businesses. But the overriding lesson is perhaps that Trump has made his personal interests to become synonymous with America’s national interest. To offend Trump is to annoy America which he is positioning as the ‘Godfather of nations’. To be the enemy of one is to court the ire of both. “For now, folks are estimating that it is better to be on his good side than not—the problem for them is that his good side changes frequently,” Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University, reportedly told AFP.

Nothing perhaps demonstrates that better than the fact that among the several executive orders Trump signed on Monday was halting the law banning TikTok for 75 days “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action.” Not many remember but three months before the 2020 presidential election which he lost, Trump had issued an executive order that the spread of mobile apps developed and owned by Chinese firms “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States”. Targeting TikTok and WeChat, he said both “capture vast swaths of information from its users” and “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information” for the purpose of tracking US government employees and gathering information for blackmail, or to carry out corporate espionage.

That marked the beginning of the problem for Tik Tok, eventually culminating in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Bill overwhelmingly passed by Congress in a bi-partisan manner and signed into law last April by President Biden. ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent company, was to divest its interest in TikTok by 19 January 2025 or face a nationwide ban. Without divestiture, penalties would prevent updates or distribution of TikTok via platforms such as Apple and Google. And in a unanimous decision last Friday, the US Supreme Court affirmed the law.

Now, Trump is singing a new tune because, as he has publicly admitted, the app helped him to win over many young voters during the election, even though the future of the company remains unclear. “This is one of those things where the domestic politics has become so upside down and crazy that it turns out there’s only upside for Trump now,” Bill Bishop, a China expert told the Associated Press (AP). If the ban ends up being enforced, according to Bishop, Trump will put the blame on Biden. “And if it does come back, then Trump is a savior. And he will be rewarded both by users” as well as the company, which is now “beholden to Trump”.

Indeed, the fear of Trump is now the beginning of wisdom in Washington DC and may be also in several capital cities across the world. Essentially due to that fear, President Biden’s last decision in the White House was one that tarnishes his reputation and further diminishes him in the eyes of many Americans. He issued blanket (and anticipatory) pardons to his brother, James Biden, James’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; his younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Valerie’s husband, John T Owens; and his younger brother, Francis W Biden. “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” stated Biden who had last month also issued “a full and unconditional” pardon to his son, Hunter Biden. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me – the worst kind of partisan politics. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these

There may be justification for Biden’s fear about retribution from his successor. Shortly after his inauguration on Monday, the official portrait of retired General Mark Milley was taken down from the Pentagon hallway where the paintings of all previous chairmen Joint Chiefs of Staff are located. In September 2023, Trump had written on his social-media network, Truth Social, that Milley’s two phone calls to China on 6 January 2021 in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Yet, all Milley did was to assure his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, that the US is “100 percent steady” even though “things may look unsteady” as revealed in ‘Peril,’ the 2021 book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The phone calls, which riled Trump when he learnt about them, were said to have been authorized by top-level officials in his government. It is just as well that Milley also secured one of the pre-emptive presidential pardons.

Several books have been written about Trump in the past years. I have read quite a few. Many more will be written about him in the years and decades to come. But for now, it is safe to conclude that with him back at the White House, Americans are effectively under the ancient Chinese curse: They are now living in interesting times. We can say the same for the rest of the world.

Following the publication last Thursday of my column, ‘The GDP of Sex, Drugs, Rituals’, I got a message from the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) Chief Executive Officer, Tayo Aduloju, that the Statistician General of the Federation, Adeyemi Adeniran, would want to meet with me for a discussion on the issue. I found the idea refreshing. Since we inhabit a country where people judge others by their own standards, I would not have been surprised if I had received an intrepid rejoinder laden with abuse and allegations of how I was being “sponsored” to knock the exercise. I am delighted Adeniran didn’t go through that route. Last Friday, I was at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) head office in Abuja where he was waiting for me, along with all his directors and eminent professors, who were working on the rebasing exercise. Aduloju also joined in the discussion.

It turned out that the current exercise to rebase the economy started in 2018, and Adeniran and his team took me through the rigorous processes of recent years. They also explained the conversations that brought about whether to include proceeds of the ‘Shadow economy’ in the rebased economy and the whole essence of the exercise. At the end of an interesting conversation that lasted about 40 minutes, I was assured that even when there will be a comprehensive report on the proceeds of illicit flows based on data collected from the relevant government enforcement agencies involved, they will not be accounted for as economic activities and would be decoupled from the total computation of the new GDP of Nigeria. That way, people are left to do their arithmetic. I was also told the report will be released by the end of the month, which suggests it is ready.

I left the NBS fully satisfied that the Statistician General of the Federation and his team know what they are doing. I also appreciate their decision to engage me on the issue. But, as I told them, I will await their report before I make my judgment call. Meanwhile, I have also received some messages from readers who disagree with my position on the issue. Below is one of them:

The Nigerian illicit economy straddles formal and informal sectors, and its opaque nature makes estimation difficult. Nonetheless, the outputs buy goods and services alongside legitimately derived monies, and have therefore been considered by many as a simmering explosive weapon placed visibly in the room, whilst many economic planners at the tables of deliberation and decisioning stoically ignore the deadly presence in their midst

One of the more disturbing aspects has been the exponential growth of the sex industry, which has since evolved from whistling street sellers, to sugar girls, and then a retail and technology enabled ‘hook up’ economy, to what we have now: a normative transactional sex environment where money is expected to change hands for sex and where sex has increasingly become weaponized and prostitution brazenly peddled. This industry, when some extrapolation is done, may be as big as N10 trillion Naira or even more, specifically in terms of amounts that change hands between buyers and sellers of sexual services, howsoever packaged. (If only ten in a hundred between the ages of 17 and 29 within the 26 million demographic that falls in that range collect N100k per month for sex, that is already an annual sector GDP of N3.38 trillion).

Some observers have concerns about giving illicit activities such as sex, drugs and other unsavoury criminal trades more prominence and visibility by attributing economic numbers of heft to them. It is indeed true that some jurisdictions have refused to capture same within their GDP computations, underscoring support for this philosophy. However, others have taken a pragmatic view of reflecting them, as they are integral aspects of the economy. The drug dealer or prostitute also buys provisions in the supermarket. In 2014, the UK for example estimated that sex and drugs added £10 billion to its economy, and as such could not be ignored any longer in economic computation. Many EU nations have since followed suit. The Dutch in 2021 attributed over 4 billion Euros to drugs and prostitution representing 0.5 % of total GDP.

Whilst the timing in the Nigerian case may have political undertones, given our recent GDP position decline, there is a strong argument for transparency about what we have become, if we are truly to solve our myriad problems. We simply can’t continue to indulge in ‘brand protection’ when that brand is already badly damaged. The normative nature and breadth of availability of sex for sale and drug use can no longer be minimized or ignored. They are issues requiring mainstreaming and declaration of National emergencies in the view of many. Deemphasizing focus on them arguably led us to this pass. Recognizing and dimensioning a disease are prerequisites to finding a cure.

Furthermore, denial of the impact of illicit activities in economic make up simply robs us of timely responses to curb what we perceive as unsavoury pathways to wealth, making them attractive as time goes on, until they become normative. We are all witnesses to the desperation for riches as rituals, yahoo, pillage of government resources, political gangsterism, and other ills have marched steadily and brazenly with the passage of time, whilst we have chosen to deny the evident reality of looting development resources to the extent that it is now a ‘Tsunami’ that threatens to submerge the nation. Rather than confess our sins and act, we have often tethered to abstracts like restructuring, military written constitution, sponsored demarketing; and all sorts of excuses that helps us avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror, and seeing the issues for what they are.

The overall lack of rigorous introspection has denied us insights into why such practices have become prevalent, and the appropriate responses to deploy. For example, the justification arguments about lack of job opportunities and economic conditions are one dimensional. There are other dimensions including drug addiction funding, simple greed, a history of sexual abuse, collapse of the family structure, cross cultural infiltration, failure of religious institutions and government to set a moral agenda, human trafficking, and many others. Understanding these dimensions provide insights for solutioning. Denying them simply affords more time for the illicit activities to grow to uncontrollable proportions. Many argue we are already there, despite the best efforts of government agencies and well-meaning entities within society.

The economic insights are also critical, though difficult to unravel. Where does the money actually go? If a portion goes into the local economy, and a huge chunk pursues vanities and unsustainable lifestyles -that are now magnified by social media- what are the economic implications considering alcohol, clothing, fake nails and lashes, clothing, hair, drugs, and all sorts sought by these ‘practitioners’ are largely imported and consume billions of dollars? Could this mean that our young women and men are serving as a conduit for transferring wealth to other climes and draining society of its moral stock at the same time?

Finally, we must develop a culture of data driven societal management and governance. We need to quantify things to make appropriate remedial decisions. I point to the petrol subsidy issue as an example. Did the statisticians provide leadership with how many litres of PMS are consumed by petrol generators used by millions of small businesses, and the GDP contribution of those users? Did they provide details on the various engine car sizes to explore other approaches like carbon tax imposition to support the subsidy scheme? Did anyone actually disentangle the scheme to identify what was GDP supportive, what was smuggled, what was wasteful petrol burning, and what was likely fraud? If so, this is not in the public domain and ought to be. The outcomes may still point to a decision to scrap the regime, but a scientific base would have been established to ensure broader support.

Too many of our young ones are now making porn at scale, normalizing half- naked dressing, routinely selling their bodies at every turn, using and dealing hard drugs, and ready to kill – at least so it seems – once money is to be made. These are facts and we can’t exculpate the adults and leaders who failed to shape the culture of society. What one can safely say is that the device in the room has pretty much exploded, and part of the containment strategy has to be transparency and solutioning before we lose more young people to the powerful magnet that the culture of illicit activities has become.

To this extent, the NBS ought to be supported and mandated to provide detailed explanations on how it arrives at whatever numbers it eventually presents in its rebasing exercise so that credibility isn’t lost. Transparency, and truthfulness signpost a societies intent to deal with a problem, and we can no longer deny or ignore what the entire world now knows about Nigeria. Continuing to do so simply means that the fabric of society will be so torn that a thousand stitches will be needed one day, instead of a hundred. (THISDAY)

•You can follow Segun Adeniyi on his X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and onwww.olusegunadeniyi.com