The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sentry

  • Limping DAWN secretariat in Ibadan

    IT started as one of the brightest ideas conceivable by man when it was launched in 2013. With its basic objective as spelling out what the six states that constitute the Southwest should do to make them buoyant and self-sustaining with a view to fast-tracking the development of the entire zone, the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) became an instant hit in progressive circles.

    So impressed were some egg heads in the North with the agenda that they met with some of the brains behind the DAWN initiative to see how it could be adapted for the development of their region. They were obliged and they silently swung into action. A secretariat to push the agenda for the North was set up and has been working behind the scene.

    But in an instance of great irony, the secretariat of the northern version of DAWN today has more than N700 million in the kitty while that of the Southwest in lbadan is limping. Why? Southwest governors now simply perceive it as a burden.

  • Yari’s many dashed hopes

    MOST Nigerians were aware of the recent judgment of the Supreme Court nullifying the victories of all the candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Zamfara State in the recently conducted elections. They knew that all the party’s candidates from the governorship to the National Assembly and House of Assembly elections had their mandates revoked by the apex court because it declared the party primaries from which they emerged as candidates null and void.

    Among those who lost their mandates was the immediate past governor of the state who had won the senatorial election for Zamfara West. But not known to many is the fact that the former governor’s losses from the landmark judgment were more than the nullification of his senatorial mandate. Not only his hope of becoming a senator was dashed; also dashed was his hope of installing his successor as governor.

    Added to the foregoing is the former governor’s dashed hope of becoming the Deputy Senate President. While his plot to become the Deputy Senate President was not known to many, many of the senators-elect in both the APC and the Peoples Democratic Party were aware of his scheming. Although he endorsed Senator Ahmed Lawan’s candidacy for Senate President, he believed that he was more qualified than any other person to be Deputy Senate President, based on his years as a member of the House of Representatives and eight years as governor.

    While many of his colleagues in APC were unhappy that he was disregarding the party’s zoning of the office to the South-south, none could call his bluff because of his perceived deep pocket. But as fate would have it, the Supreme Court halted the aspiration.

  • Popular church battles sit-tight spiritual leader

    A POPULAR church with headquarters in Lagos, which emphasises its African roots, is at daggers drawn with its spiritual leader for refusing to quit the position after surpassing the new mandatory retirement age set by the church.

    Ironically, the clergyman was said to have been part of the body which some years ago took the decision that made it mandatory for the spiritual leader of the church to quit once he clocks the age set for retirement.

    But he was said to have protested when he was reminded recently that his time was up. He made it clear that he would not step down because he was yet to hear from God that he should do so. He said he was appointed by God and that only the one who appointed him can tell him that his time is up. SENTRY recalls a popular minister of God who took on the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) in the wake of the controversy that church leaders, whether founders or inheritors, who have spent 10 years in the supreme bodies of their churches should resign. “What nonsense. How can you ask a man you did not employ to resign? It doesn’t make sense.”

    To some other leaders of this popular church, their request to their spiritual leader makes sense. It was a collective decision of everybody, including the spiritual leader some years ago. The matter is said to be tearing the leaders of the church apart as they are now divided into two camps: those in support of the continued stay of the spiritual head and those who are against it.

    Pastor Enoch Adeboye caused a stir in the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in 2017 when he stepped down as head of the church in Nigeria in line with the nation’s Corporate Governance Code. The code, proposed in May 2015, limits the number of years heads of corporate organisations can stay in office, with churches falling under the non-profit making category.

  • Atiku, Fela Durotoye win in their own ways

    THOSE who think that President Muhammadu Buhari, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was the only winner in the just concluded presidential election missed the point. One or two other candidates can boast of victory in the election in their own ways.

    For instance, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, may have lost the ballot, but he recorded two great victories in the sense that he and his erstwhile sworn enemy and former boss, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, are now the best of friends on account of the election and he was able to visit the United States of America after more than a decade of trying in vain to do so.

    In Lagos, the candidate of Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN), Fela Durotoye, was wildly celebrated by the congregation at the House on the Rock Church where he had gone to worship the Sunday before the election in which he polled a paltry 16,799 votes. Buhari polled more than 15 million votes and Atiku, the runner-up, polled more than 11 million.

    The church had barely settled down for service when the presiding pastor, Paul Adefarasin, who is never an admirer of Buhari, and like many pentecostal preachers wanted him to lose, noticed the presence of Durotoye. He drew the congregation’s attention to the candidate and commended him for his courage and for running a brilliant campaign. You are a candidate of the future, Adefarasin, SENTRY learnt, declared. Durotoye got a thunderous applause

    The accolade Durotoye could not get from Nigerians, he certainly got from the pastor and the church members. But whether they voted for him six days after is a different kettle of fish because many members of the church were believed to be ‘Atikulated.’

  • Party chief on AWOL with millions of naira

    THE 2019 presidential and National Assembly elections have come and gone. But while many politicians are counting their losses, others are counting their gains.

    Among the politicians whose accounts are on the positive side of the balance sheet is a party chief whose party was said to have given hundreds of millions of naira for the presidential election initially scheduled for February 16.

    Upon learning on the eve of the election that it had been postponed by one week, party leaders instructed him to stay action on the disbursement of the funds. He complied.

    Then came the rescheduled election and time to spread the largesse, the party chief was incommunicado. All the efforts made by party chieftains to reach him physically or even on the phone, as they say, ‘proved abortive.’ The election held nonetheless, “any how, any how,” apology to our Niger Deltans. Suddenly the next day, the party chief showed up.

    Asked what happened, he said he had been busy working for the party and reaching out to people that mattered. But as it turned out, the result of the election showed that there was no work done by the party chief.

  • Disquiet in Abuja church over pastor’s extramarital affair

    THE survival of a popular Abuja church is under threat after a confession made by the presiding pastor that he had a child outside wedlock and had divorced his wife because she was determined to make the incident public.

    The popular pastor had tried to justify his action by saying that his wife was the first to engage in an extramarital affair from which she bore a child. He argued that while he protected his wife from public embarrassment by keeping the matter secret, his wife was not willing to reciprocate the gesture when his turn came.

    He told the congregation that he had to tell them about it as a sign of remorse expected of a man of God who had erred, adding that he should not be condemned but commended for his forthrightness in bringing the matter to their knowledge.

    But many of the church members are said not to be impressed with both the pastor’s confession and the erotic mess in which his family is enmeshed. Many of them are said to be threatening to quit the church, having lost confidence in the man of God.

  • Young Nigerian shocks Obasanjo in UK

    FORMER Nigerian President and self-appointed supervisor of Nigerian leaders, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, made his first public comment at his Abeokuta hill-top home on Tuesday since the conclusion of the presidential election in which his candidate and former deputy, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, was roundly beaten by President Muhammadu Buhari to secure his second term.

    The former president found the occasion of his 82nd birthday celebration where his usual crowd of friends and political associates were gathered a momentous one to break his long silence after the painful loss suffered by him and his candidate in the election.

    Responding to an appeal by the Alake of Egba, Oba Michael Adedotun Gbadebo, that the former president should stop attacking President Buhari, Obasanjo, in his usual bravura, boasted that he remains Buhari’s boss and vowed to continue attacking the sitting president until he heeds his series of advice. Many had thought that he would comment on the election, its outcome, conduct and developments thereafter, but he chose not.

    Days earlier in the United Kingdom, the former president skillfully parried a question on Atiku’s defeat in a dramatic encounter he had with a young Nigerian based in the UK. The young man was said to have set Obasanjo’s head swollen by prostrating for him in the full glare of hundreds of Britons who were gathered at the airport where they met.

    Moved by the young Nigerian’s show of cultural discipline, Obasanjo dragged him up, hugged him and wasted no time yielding to the young man’s request for a photograph.

    Apparently taking advantage of the former President’s happy mood, the young man proceeded to ask him his opinion about the just concluded presidential election in which Atiku lost against Buhari in spite of the open support Obasanjo canvassed for the former.

    The question apparently caught Obasanjo unaware as he was said to look away from his interlocutor, hissed and declared in a calm, subdued voice: “Nigeria will be good.”

  • Saraki and the ghost of Southwest

    OVERWHELMED by the “O to ge”(Enough is Enough) wildfire, the embattled President of the Senate, Dr. Bukola Saraki, flagged off the PDP campaign in the state by whipping up sentiments against APC. He said a vote for APC would be like excising Kwara  State from the North and integrating it with the Southwest.

    But he spoke without recourse to history because no one has affinity with the Southwest than him. Take a look at his antecedents: His paternal grandmother was from Iseyin in Oyo State; his mother hails from Owo in Ondo State; and his wife is from the famous royal Ojora family in Lagos State. He gave his daughter out to a Prince from Ijebuland in the Southwest with a prospect of being a princess.

    If he catches cold in Kwara State, he seeks relief in his posh mansion in Lagos, which is more of a second home to him. What affinity does Saraki Dynasty have with Abeokuta when it became an issue in the second and third republic? There is no record of the Senate President either fluent in Hausa or Fulfulde. He also does not have any mansion in Kaduna or anywhere else in the North. Let him prove his Northern character.

  • Good news from Audu Ogbeh

    THE highly respected Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, on Wednesday made a stunning revelation that the ruling All Progressives Congress(APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) are broke. He told a national daily that “the parties are hopelessly broke. This will be the quietest elections in our history, and it may help turn attention to issues, not cash, because we cannot go and buy people. There is no cash, both APC and PDP are broke, and the president is in no hurry to go and look for money for anything. So, it is ‘Change’. We hope it would last long so that in future people have something to talk about, not that they have a big war chest to bribe INEC and win by all means.”

    If there is any Nigerian who should know better, it is Ogbeh who was a minister in the Second Republic (1983) during the reign of the defunct National Party of Nigeria(NPN). He was also a former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) before he was removed. Both NPN and PDP came from the same spendthrift family. Remember the N23.29bn allegedly blown on poll bribery during the 2015 general elections alone by PDP.

  • 53 suitcases haunt Atiku in Kebbi

    THE anger against the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), Atiku Abubakar, in Kebbi State knows no bound for despising the 18th Emir of Gwandu, Alh. Haruna Rasheed, over the controversial 53 suitcases said to have been brought into the country during the tenure of Muhammadu Buhari as a military head of state. The suitcases,  flown into the country  when there was a change in national currency,  were reportedly cleared by his Aide-De-Camp (ADC),  Major Mustapha Jokolo, who was a son to the emir.

    But Atiku recently stoked the fire  in a statement issued by his spokesman, Paul Ibe. He said: “Our attention has been drawn to a statement by President Muhammadu Buhari accusing the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP, Atiku Abubakar, of planning to smuggle in looted funds into the country just before the February 2019 elections. This new accusation, like their previous allegations, is another infantile outburst that tells more about the accuser than Atiku Abubakar. For the avoidance of doubt, history shows that rather than smuggle in looted cash, Waziri Atiku Abubakar has a record of preventing looted funds from being smuggled into Nigeria. In 1984, it was Atiku Abubakar, as head of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport Command of the Nigerian Customs and Excise Department, that stopped the ADC of the then Military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari, from smuggling in 53 suitcases of looted money into the country.”

    The late emir, in the eyes of his subjects, ruled Gwandu Emirate with impeccable records for 42 years, but Atiku poured tar on the deceased as if he committed a sacrilege.  Sources tell Sentry that many emirs in the North and most indigenes of Kebbi State were miffed by the fact that Alhaji Atiku ignored a court pronouncement to play politics with the 53 suitcases and cast aspersions on the late traditional ruler, who was the only indigenous president of the Northern House of Chiefs and a former acting governor of the defunct Northern Region.

    Emir Mustapha Jokolo, who was then the  ADC to Buhari, had sued Africa Independent Television (AIT) over the documentary, “The Real Buhari”,  on the  same 53 suitcases and won the libel matter.  Candidate Atiku, it was thought, ought to have taken notice of the judicial pronouncement, but failed to do that. It is feared that Candidate Atiku, on account of the controversial statement, may have  lost the sympathy of many voters in the state. Alhaji Jokolo was more forthcoming when he sarcastically suggested: “All said and done, Atiku should not lose hope of being the President in 2023.” But what of 2019?