The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • Truth shreds a lie of twenty years in one day (a Yoruba proverb)

    Truth shreds a lie of twenty years in one day (a Yoruba proverb)

    For me, Dr Ayo Fayose can now be Ekiti governor for the next century; it will mean nothing to me because I have been vindicated beyond my wildest dreams on photocromism

    For seven straight months – 22 June, 2014 until news of Ekitigate broke, I almost shouted myself hoarse saying, repeating and re- emphasising, the fact that there was no way Ayo Fayose could ever have defeated Governor Kayode Fayemi in a free and fair election, talk less of defeating him in all the 16 Local Government Areas of Ekiti.

    But if falsehood takes off a thousand years, truth will overcome it in a single day. So has it been with what the Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, described as the mystery of the Ekiti governorship election.

    Departing the Ekiti state house and heading back to Lagos the day after, having listened to the experiences of several party members during the election , I knew I have heard enough of similarities with how Nikuv International Projects Ltd, allegedly rigged the 2013 Zimbabwean presidential election for President Mugabe. Nikuv prides itself as experts which “time and time again, gets chosen for strategic national projects due to its expertise, professionalism …”

    Nikuv’s rigging allegations were worsened by reports by a private South African-based intelligence outfit, Nasini Projects, to the effect that the Israeli firm supplied a special water marked ballot paper used to give Mugabe a resounding victory. “From our findings so far, we are 99.9% convinced the election was rigged via a ballot paper; a special watermarked ballot paper was used to give President Mugabe a resounding victory,” Nasini CEO Lucia Mordi said. “The ballot paper had a water x against Mugabe’s name such that if any ink is placed on the paper the substance on the paper will react and remove the ink and activate the water marked x into print.” I must hasten to say, however, that there has been no evidence linking Nikuv to Ekitigate.

    What tallied the most with the Zimbabwean electoral heist  was the unimpeachable testimony of the highly regarded wife of a former Central Bank Director who, after thumb printing thrice, still did not leave any mark on the ballot paper upon which she sought help from the electoral assistants who then poured water on the ink pad. This happened because it was a photocromic ballot paper and the ink supplied by INEC was disappearing ink rather than the indelible ink prescribed by the Electoral Law thus proving INEC collusion. The ballot papers, according to the Ekitigate tape, were ferried into Ekiti by Chris Uba who then had the audacity to come to Yoruba land to arrest APC leaders, giving orders to soldiers who had been turned by army higher authorities, to playthings of this bloody civilian. It cannot get more insulting to the Yoruba nation but mute has been the word from those “defenders of Yoruba interest” who have, instead, become endorsers, aggressively spreading the cocktail of lies concocted by that ‘son of his father;’ demanding that Professor Jega be sacked and arrested.

    As I wrote on these pages on Sunday, 9 June, 2014, I believe, without the slightest doubt, that the Zimbabwean model is what played out in the Ekiti election. The PDP must have been specially watermarked to give a man, who was recently trounced in a senatorial election, a totally undeserved victory.

    This, for me, is the only rational way to explain the abracadabra of the Ekiti governorship election. Therefore, every lover of this country must insist on this electoral coup being exhaustively investigated and whoever funded this manipulation of our electoral system must be run out of town. Whoever has a hand in this electoral heist certainly does not deserve to live among decent human beings.

    Interestingly, Ekitigate has now led to totally unexpected collateral damage to sundry individuals and institutions of state. The allegations in the tape have tarnished, not only the presidency which was copiously mentioned as the very fountain of this grievous moral depravity, the Nigerian Army, the National Assembly, and some Yoruba ministers who obviously know next to nothing about the Yoruba concept of Omoluabi, must be made to say all they know about this national shame. In the tape which is still trending on the World Wide Web, both Fayose and Obanikoro severally referred to the president as the one whose assignment they were executing and therefore cannot afford to fail. Fayose actually threatened to call the president during his condescending put down of the Brigadier-General -‘ I was governor here 12 years ago when you were probably only a captain’, he thundered at a point and the general indicated his willingness to weep if that would assuage his traducers and convince them about his fidelity to an assignment personally entrusted to him by the Chief of Army staff.

    This government must convince Nigerians that a worse PDP/Army arrangement -Fela lives on – is not already in the works again to rig the coming elections. I could remember the president once promising some ambassadors that the 2015 elections would be the easiest, ever, of Nigerian elections and, by the way, I have heard about synthetic digital ballot papers just as the First Lady’s manipulations in Rivers and Bayelsa speak to what they could do to have their way in opposition states. Nigerians beware; eternal vigilance is the price of freedom!

    Just as Obanikoro was threatening non promotion for the beleaguered officer, a whole Brigadier -General, if he flunks the presidential assignment, so was Fayose sabre rattling, repeatedly saying he would report the officer to both the president and the Army Chief of Staff. If only the Army would realise that Captain Koli went to all this length just to save the Army from its compromised top echelon.

    According to the national hero, operation CAPTURE EKITI had a total of 1006 soldiers who could have been better deployed to Sambisa forest. They also had about 500 operational vehicles. It certainly would not be good for the image of the Nigerian Army to wait until it is summoned before the National Assembly. The Army just must speak up now. As for President Jonathan, he has no option than to respect Nigerians and say all he knows if we are not to take his current promises of a free and fair 2015 elections as mere hollow rituals. References to him are too many to be happenstance. He it is who must personally speak up, not his voluble and loquacious spokespersons for whom he remains the object of their obsequious adulation. President Clinton made a personal deposition in the Monica Lewinsky case so Jonathan is not being asked to re-invent the wheel. And talk he must because most Nigerians see the election postponement as only a ruse to enable their rogue scientists devise another rigging method.

    Nor can Chris Uba, the Uga Secondary School alumnus, who is fingered as the man who supplied the smoking gun, aka, pre- programmed ballot papers, remain incommunicado. If he has any integrity left after the Ngige affair, and does not want to tarnish the prodigious Uba dynasty, he must, tell Nigerians all he knows. The National Assembly has already been besmirched by a certain Abdul Kareem who was uproariously flaunting his membership of the House of Representatives. If, after these disclosures Obanikoro still successfully gets cleared by the senate to be re-appointed minister, it will mean we have nothing but a senate of anything goes. He is reported to have rushed to court hoping that

    would prevent any reference to this matter of urgent national interest. Nigerians are waiting to see the senate in its true colours. To continue to retain Jelili Adesiyan as minister can only be an additional blight on the federal executive council.

    Happily, however, the tape has, for all time, successfully bailed out Ekiti people from being described as the stomach worshippers of the universe. For these many months, we have been the butt of cruel jokes. Nobody can any longer correctly brandish stomach infrastructure as his victory’s ‘deu ex machina’ when we know he stole our mandate. And for us Ekiti, Fayose’s sated conscience is enough punishment; one he is bound to carry to his last days. And that is, if APC refuses to head to court. For me, Dr Ayo Fayose can now be Ekiti governor for the next century; it will mean nothing to me because I have been vindicated beyond my wildest dreams on photocromism.

  • 2015: Buhari, Yoruba and the burden of history

    I sincerely apologise for the absence of this column last Sunday. It was due to an unfortunate mix up which is deeply regretted. The column, the last before the presidential election, is today being turned over to Adewale Adeoye, a CNN African journalist award winner and alumnus of the United Nations (UN) Institute of Training and
    Research (UNITAR).

    A nation becomes a dungeon, when the people’s history no longer matters.  But history is not static. The South West, (SW), with 14 million voters, is a sexy bride in the coming elections.  What determines electoral victory varies in each region.  Yoruba land is unique. Politicians have failed to bring into sharp focus, critical issues that matter most. They deploy bitter campaigns, insults and abuses. President Goodluck Jonathan fired salvos during his visit to Lagos. He did not promise any single project for Yoruba nation in all his campaigns in the SW so far. He spoke as if jittery. He was fidgety, wobbly, edgy and squirmy. In war, as in politics, those are signs of weakness, a pointer to camp disarray and retreat. Gen Mohammadu Buhari hinges his campaign on three planks: Jobs, Security and Anti-corruption. But there is the need to take the edge off primordial fears which, to a large extent, will determine the attitude of many voters, at least in the South West.

    Politicians often bask in the rapture of illusion, expressed mostly in the media, in rallies and walk-outs. Often, they confuse public enthusiasm with deep-rooted blood-bound alliances. It is a big farce to think that the February 14 elections will not be determined by history and ethnicity, that will be dealing with appearances, leaving behind the timeless reality of a country acutely divided, and which history is dotted by deadly clashes of civilisations. Buhari is Fulani. Two centuries ago, architects of the thriving Yoruba Empire would not have contemplated Yoruba would be asked to vote for a Fulani candidate in an election, no matter how dignified.  The Fulani and the Yoruba, in truth, have been arch rivals in the contest for land, values, power and state resources. We neglect this to our own peril.

    The rivalry is agelong. In the spring of 1804, Uthman Dan Fodio had led a revolution that cut across today’s Northern hemisphere. The revolt led to millions of deaths, including women and children. The Yoruba nation painfully lost some ancestral territories. The last scuffle being the 1842 combat to reclaim most of the lost grounds, until Britain came, leaving bitter memories in the sub consciousness of generations that followed. In the elections of 1950s and 1960s, the echoes of the acrimony did not abate. These reflect in all Yoruba voting patterns.

    To many Yoruba, given my interactions at a recent Pan-Yoruba meeting held in Ibadan which I chaired, the Hausa-Fulani is still seen as millstone. Many recollect that the late Premier of Northern Region, the late Ahmadu Bello, taunted the region that he would dip the Holy Quaran into the sea, the euphemism for atrocious conquest. In the 60s, about 29 Yoruba leaders, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo, were hauled into detention at the instance of the Hausa-Fulani-dominated political class. In subsequent years, the rivalry of times past defined the political momentum. In 1993, a different pattern was etched only because Afenifere, the Yoruba traditional political institution, was prevented by the military from leading the Yoruba political processes, leaving Yoruba with restricted two-party choice. However, the annulment of the 1993 election, the assassinations of Yoruba icons, deliberate plots that scuttled the economic mainstay of the Yoruba people only rekindled the primordial sentiments against the Hausa-Fulani. The June 12 1993 annulment led to the birth of several self determination groups, which, today, and I am in a vantage position to know, remain the most potent political force in Yorubaland. These groups, like most Yoruba people, are anxious to know the content and form of the negotiation with Buhari by the APC leadership, which they think, hold them in contempt. Contrary to assumptions, the fact is that many Yoruba, especially at the lower ranks, are conscious of the history of rivalry with the Hausa-Fulani.

    The emergence of Boko Haram, irrespective of its vagaries, has further deepened the Yoruba suspicion against the Hausa-Fulani. It is even more dangerous for anyone to hinge on ‘power must return to the north,’ as a campaign grundnorm. For the average Yoruba person, true federalism and self determination are key issues. The Hausa-Fulani stood against these pillars, until now that Buhari has brought some rays of hope. It is important that the Hausa-Fulani should see this new alliance as a rare spirit of reconciliation on the part of the Yoruba people. It shows Yoruba liberal sense of fairness and adherence to the tradition of decent politics. It is also important to dissuade the assumption in the South East and among ethnic minorities that it represents a realignment of the same forces that prosecuted the civil war, a gang-up of the big nationalities against ethnic minorities. An inroad into the South-South will be difficult, unless campaigns build confidence among a people that have suffered marginalisation and misery for too long especially as it regards what happens to their oil resources. It is reasonable for APC to enter into constructive assurance of fear-driven Ijaw and oil-producing communities.

    Certainly, President Jonathan offers no succour to the Yoruba demand. He has failed in all ramifications. He, in fact, has no solutions to the pile of harms, meaning that for many Yoruba, the choice still remains tough.  But the average Yoruba is not lost to the ruinous policies of the PDP and its impact on the emasculation of the Yoruba heritage, and the fact that the APC has brought hope to a despairing population.

    Yet, for reasons of grief memories gone by, it is easier for the APC state governors to win the South West than to ensure the overwhelming victory of Buhari. But as it is,  Buhari’s victory has become a necessary uplift from the squelching mud. The new equation has proven the maxim that solutions to a people’s aspirations could come from unlikely quarters. It has asserted the dialectics in Yoruba philosophy that “ninu ikoko dudu l’eko funfun ti n jade – The snow-white maize porridge is, nevertheless, a product of the burnt, gritty black pot.

    Will Buhari save the Yoruba nation? For one, PDP has proved that it cannot allay the fears neither can it meet the aspiration of the Yoruba. For six years, Yoruba have been so kind to a president that has paid back with vicious neglect. So, for me, hacking down the PDP remains an historical task for every Yoruba person. The party has brought disgrace and shame to the values and traditions held dear. The PDP has created a crestfallen nation in its own image. The party has ruined the potential of the SW. The party is led by an uninspiring president, who has neither produced a book nor an epic statesmanship on his understanding of how to build a great country. The PDP candidate lacks the capacity, the will and the knowledge to uplift Nigeria from her current state of trance, depression and hopelessness.

    The Yoruba believes in federalism, it is inspiring that the APC has brought this up as a critical campaign element. The content and form must be broadly defined and popularized in the South West. It is on this note that one would expect a shift in the paradigm of the APC campaign in the SW. Campaigns should have national appeal, but must also be subjective, being region-specific. The major challenge facing Nigeria is how to create a new foundation; it is whether we want to stay together as one and on what terms. It is whether Lagos will take control of revenue from her sea port and if Ijaw nation will control her oil or not. It is obvious that President Jonathan will not address these issues, having used the national conference he ordered as a mere electoral gimmick. The APC seems likely to be trusted with the will to take the lid off a boiling saucepan. Before February 14, APC needs to deconstruct the mindset of the Yoruba people, assuage old fears with a new tonic that offers to put an end to affliction, mourning and gnashing of teeth.

     

  • 2015: Railways ‘transformation’ as a mirror into President Jonathan’s transformation agenda

    Whereas in places like China, high speed trains do about 300 kilometres per hour it takes Nigeria’s modern railway  two whole hours to arrive Agbado from  Lagos -a journey of  less than 50km

    Since the campaign season started, Buhari has been PDP’s perfidious recurring decimal. He is their daytime nightmare and night-time wrath. They have practically abandoned the marketing of their own candidate for the reactionary task of discrediting Buhari.  Ask them what their manifesto is because you want to assess their plans for Nigeria, or inquire about the content of the “continuity” agenda they proclaim on roof tops, you can be sure they will go to sleep only for them to awaken to another Buhari chant”. –  Abimbola Adelakun.

    The  over-hyped  transformation of the Nigerian Railway Corporation meant nothing to me until I saw  everybody that is anybody on the  PDP Presidential campaign team, at every stop, touting  the  transformation they  claim President Jonathan has  chalked up in the  sector.  By the time I read  Idowu Akinlotan, in Palladium, dismiss it, saying  that  the task  before Nigeria  next month is to put a man in office that best approximates the archetypal leader with character and not one who cites antediluvian projects like narrow gauge railway as trophy,  I knew it was time to go read the eye witness  account of The Nation’s Adeyinka  Aderibigbe, whose  intended  3-day,  eye witness trip from Lagos to Kano on the ‘new’ train, became a totally unexpected 5-day odyssey. It was  after reading  the well written piece I discovered  that  like the  ‘statistical agricultural revolution’ Nigerians have been  inundated  with  these  past  four  years,  the one in the  railway sector  is also  nothing  but  a chimera.  That the over-blown agricultural revolution  is only a  make-belief  is indicated, not only by the high prices Nigerians still  pay for  food items  or by the fact of  licences still being given for rice importation,  it is rather,  much  more poignantly,  illustrated  by the fact that the beneficiaries  are  so  uncertain  about  the Jonathan rice  project  that they  flagrantly  overshot  their  approved limits.  It must be mentioned too, that as has become routine with the Jonathan government, the import quota were allegedly skewed in favour of some people who have no  demonstrable interest in rice production.

    With that, there hardly  needs be any further evidence of the emptiness  of TAN’s  sundry  claims  of a Jonathan transformation; a transformation that leaves large swathes of the country  in darkness with residents  asking  electricity companies to  withdraw their services because of their  ineffectiveness,  as  we saw in Benin-city  and  Egbe-Idimu LCDA in Lagos, massive  insecurity, not to talk of  life itself becoming  short and  brutish.

    Back then to Aderibigbe’s narration of his hellish Lagos-Kano journey on NRC’s ‘new’ trains.

    After indicating that the take off was unfortunately delayed for hours as a result of an accident somewhere on the rail line which had to be fixed,  he went into a description of the facilities: ‘the entire space in the arrival/departure hall was filled up with all manner of luggage, with people fighting for a leg room.  What went for ticket was a small piece of letter press printed on cardboard indicating that the corporation is far behind in modern rail system comparable to what obtains the world over. Also baffling was that those tickets still bore old rates despite the fact that fares have been revised twice since the arrival of the modern coaches’.  You can only imagine how corrupt that  would be giving the number of persons that will be out to take advantage of such lapses.

    He then discussed a passable First Class compartment but the Second Class compartment should be of greater interest to readers. Wrote our reporter:  “The more popular second class zone, already nicknamed ‘Ajegunle  Molue’,  is a  90-seater  specified contraption with six overhead orbit fans and slit windows in each cabin. Here, there is no limit to the number of passengers. Indeed, while the manufacturers specified 90 passengers, no trip has taken less than 180 passengers on the Lagos -Kano journey since the service started.” The class, he said, was likened by an official of the corporation to a ‘lizard sliding through an opening on the wall’,  and at many of the stations, you find passengers entering the coaches through windows when access  through  the doors proved  impossible as a result of the sheer number of people fighting to  enter”.  He actually had the great fortune of seeing a woman, a passenger,  who had  prepared  a pot of stew for the long journey, empty it all on the heads  of other passengers as she struggled to board to Kano.

    He was not done on this otherwise good project which, if done right, could have been a blessing to Nigerians as it is much safer and cheaper than most other means of transport.  He therefore continued: “Because the second class cabin windows are permanently open, it is usually heavily dusty.  Here you find all manner of people – beggars, in different degrees   of tattered clothes, with their bowls, the poor, the aged, babies with different sizes of  rotund stomachs, students, low income workers, frail looking males and females co-habiting etc. One thing associated with the second class is the putrid smell, oozing not only from the body odours, but as a result of the absence of functioning lavatories. Ideally, he wrote, the coaches should have two toilets and two bathrooms at each wing. The toilets have, indeed, been converted to luggage rooms.

    Pray, what manner of transformation, to be celebrated on political campaigns, is this?

    The reporter was told that in the last 10 years, none of the drivers in the corporation has gone on leave nor are they paid leave bonus nor travel allowance. These are the people  in charge of these trains to far flung places who,  but for meals in the kitchen, and music blaring from what the reporter  described  as a  creaky, speaker box  juxtaposed  with  the din of all night long noise emanating from the  train would have seen their  workplace  no  better than a prison.

    And what manner of transformation is this that PDP’s exuberant campaigners must burst our ear drums just to listen to them rehash? As I read through the report, I couldn’t help thanking God that the Liberian, Mr Sawyer, did not have to head straight to any of our train stations to make even the shortest journey during his ill-fated visit to Nigeria. May his soul and those of others we lost to Ebola, by the mercy of God, rest in perfect peace. Amen.  Can Nigerians  therefore be surprised at the  level of  panel beating  our economy and over all well-being have  been subjected to this last six years, but which some jokers -the keepers of whatever they call themselves – use as template to dress our president in  borrowed robes, comparing him to world leaders?.

    It becomes totally befuddling that billions of Sure-P funds have gone into a project which is beginning to look more like a sink hole. It is clearly indicative of the level of seriousness the PDP government attaches to this extremely important sector that it considered the corporation the equivalent of a political Siberia to banish a floundering party chairman to when he was yanked off his giddy seat.  Whereas in places like China, high speed trains do about 300 kilometres per hour it takes Nigeria’s modern railway  two whole hours to arrive Agbado from  Lagos -a journey of  less than 50km.

    I urge Nigerians to ponder all these as they vote on 14 February, 2015.

    FEMI FANI -KAYODE SPEAKS

    The level of discontentment for this government of the PDP in this country is unprecedented. Not only do I know that, I also know that in terms of the quality of leadership …, if you compare the leadership of today’s PDP to APC leadership, there is absolutely no comparison. It is time for change in this country … as far as I am concerned they present a far more credible leadership than we have in the PDP today. What Nigerians need now is to join hands with the APC leaders, Major General Muhammadu Buhari and Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu to move the nation forward –  Mr Femi Fani-Kayode, Director of Media and Publicity, PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation

  • The sham peace accord

    The Peace Accord signed by the candidates is nothing but a decoy as PDP will rig mercilessly

    On Thursday 15 January, 2015,  Feyisara  Falana wrote as follows on  the Face book wall of Comrade Adeboye  Adebayo: “JUST BE INFORMED: URGENT: “I just discovered a secret being planned by Campaign for Goodluck Jonathan Group. They are giving forms out for masses to fill telling them that they will get benefit from the president. The secret behind this is when you fill this form you have to include your voter’s card number on it. How are we going to use this voter’s card? We will insert the voter’s card into a machine that will read the card. Once anyone has sold his card unknowingly for the Goodluck campaign, the machine will reject his/her card on Election Day. It will show that you have voted already, because the number must have been used to vote before the election for Goodluck. Please spread this news before our ignorant people sell their votes for peanut. This is my contribution to save this honourable country from sinking to another FOUR years. Good morning Nigeria”- Feyisara Falana.

    Let me quickly add that I would not be surprised if all the signatories TAN coyly  obtained  from the youth of  every  geo-political zone  allegedly endorsing the president have also inserted their voters cards number and will be treated accordingly. In which case, the presidential election has already been won well ahead of 14 February, 2015. Therefore, like the peaceful, but scientifically rigged Ekiti election, the presidential election, in particular, will be peaceful only on the surface.

    On the same day that Feyisara Falana was doing that yeoman’s patriotic duty, I wrote as follows on the ekitipanupo web portal concerning the boast by the Senate President, David Mark, that PDP will not only win the presidential and other elective positions in the 2015 general election, but will do so transparently in a free and fair contest, such that it will be acceptable to the opposition, the APC: “I sincerely thank David Mark for this since it appears APC has learnt nothing from Ekiti. The Peace Accord signed by the candidates is nothing but a decoy as PDP will rig mercilessly. They have too much to lose not to rig in addition to using security agencies to protect and cover their tracks. Kofie Anan and Anyaoku, two highly regarded international diplomats, should help Nigerians further by telling us how they got involved in this. Since when have they been thinking about intervening? Was it before or after Prof Bolaji Akinyemi flew the kite of a MOU? Is this diplomacy or duplicity? Nobody wants violence but how has PDP shown they won’t rig? Will the president deploy soldiers, policemen, militants in masks or not? Why did the diplomats not emphasise transparency and integrity of the electoral process? Left to me, this accord is a carte blanche to the PDP to rig to their hearts’ content and so they will in which case the CHANGE being celebrated all over the place will be a chimera. APC should immediately seek legal ways of making rigging impossible. February 15 will be too late.  It is not too late. With this PDP, huge campaign crowds for APC is no guarantee of victory. They showed us that in Ekiti. Having been once beaten, therefore, APC in my view, should be TEN times shy. I have seen nothing to that effect.”

    In “It Will Be Most Unlike PDP Not To Rig The 2015 Election”, 4 January 2015 , I had written as follows about Musliu Obanikoro: “In an interview, published in the Punch of Sunday, 28 December, 2015, Obanikoro declared assuredly: “Ogunlewe said in his interview with Sunday Punch that he doesn’t know whether the PDP will win in the Southwest. He said it is not yet time for him to talk about that. But it is time for me to talk about it. I can tell you that we are going to win. The president is going to win BIG; we are going to clear the Southwest. You can Mark today’s date and quote me.”

    Also, in:  “Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s History Of Electoral Apostasy”, 28th December, 2014,  I wrote: “He  recently wrote a letter to  both President Goodluck Jonathan and General  Muhammadu Buhari which, in my view, was either misplaced, or failed to lay emphasis on the appropriate issue thus indicating that he failed to reflect deeply on the ill-consequences of  his 1993 letter to General  Abacha, also at a time of considerable anxiety in the country. In the letter, he suggested that the two presidential candidates of Nigeria’s two foremost political parties should sign a Memorandum of Undertaking to have peaceful campaigns as well as having their supporters ACCEPT WHATEVER THE RESULT(caps mine) of the 2015 presidential election. Not a few see this suggestion as anything other than offering a carte blanche to a rig-prone party like the PDP to rig the 2015 election to its heart’s content  since such an understanding would have completely tied  APC’s ‘hands’ behind its back. Recent elections during which President Jonathan turned the concerned states into virtual garrisons with all manner of ‘security operatives’, some of them masked, and who in turn manacled the opposition, more than justify this conclusion. It could only be a shame that many believe that Professor Akinyemi is probably only the messenger here, given his well known capacity for original thinking, and that he most probably knows more than he volunteers given his well known chummy relationship with the government.”

    I am sure something preposterous is afoot and APC had better wake up.  There is no doubt whatever, in my mind, that, unknown to these distinguished international diplomats, they are again being used to hoodwink Nigerians like they did in the MKO Abiola case in 1998. I am not certain their involvement is a happenstance nor is it altruistic. If anything surprises me in all these, it is the failure of the  astute and  experienced politicians as  well as the  egg heads in the APC  to see how they are walking into a trap with their eyes open because not a single one of the five terms of the accord talked to a fair and transparent election. None.  I repeat again: I do not want any violence before, during or after any of the elections.  But, for Christ’s sake, what assurances do Nigerians have that the PDP, with the connivance of INEC and some rogue international scientists will not rig the election from source and through the use of soldiers, kill and go police men, as well as members of the Niger-Delta Volunteer Force who are usually masked as they did in Ekiti or scientifically as we also saw there. I had never seen a more peaceful election than that of Ekiti but that was because the ballot papers had been pre-programmed and rather than supply Indelible ink, INEC deliberately supplied Ekiti voters vanishing ink.

    I am also quite aware that hundreds of thousands of the forms referred to by Feyisara Falana have been distributed all over the Southwest by a chieftain of the PDP under the pretence that he was going to offer all manner of employments, loans, etc to these  youth. If APC is suffering from an unimaginable failure of intelligence, let me tell them that hundreds of thousands of this form have been distributed from the Ijebu Igbo axis of Ogun State. APC just must stop this or forget everything about victory. It would thus have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

    It was former Governor Segun Oni of Ekiti who first drew our attention to this evil form during his maiden outing with the APC, warning Ekiti people not to sell their souls to the devil, picking forms from those who would take them through rituals. Back in Lagos, a top official of the Bus Conductors Union  came to my office to show me a copy of the form and I saw with my very eyes where applicants were being asked for their voters’ card numbers as well as their mothers’ names; the latter for ritual purposes.

    I think the way out is for the APC to quickly go to court to obtain a ruling outlawing the use of Card Readers in the 2015 election on the grounds that its integrity is already compromised.

    A stitch in time will safe more than nine.

  • It will be most unlike PDP not to rig the 2015 election

    It will be most unlike PDP not to rig the 2015 election

    Why would Fayemi lose? he asked, and the soldier simply told him that even if Ekiti people voted from then till the next morning, PDP had already won, having pre-programmed the ballot papers

    General Buhari and Professor Osinbajo are not by any means men without fault. But they are our men for the job in the presidency at this point of our national history. The Buhari-Osinbajo presidency will not be an accidental or a reluctant presidency. These are two individuals with convictions of great possibilities for the nation. These are two men of courage: courage to follow through with great ideas; courage to take sides with the poor and the vulnerable; courage to do the right thing in the interest of the nation. The Buhari-Osinbajo presidency might be the beginning of our true democratic experience -the era where government is beholden to the people’ -Gbemi Jaiyebo, New York.

    The more popular Buhari gets, and he is catching on like wild fire, the more desperate to rig, PDP gets. Chief Olu Falae has not stopped bemoaning his 1999 loss to Obasanjo, claiming the election was rigged.  Many were killed in 2003 as thugs ensured that election results were declared for the PDP. It was worst in the Southwest where, anxious to outdo Awo, Obasanjo completely outmaneuvered the AD governors, except in Lagos. Suffice for the 2007 election to say that the late President Yar’ Adua was scandalised enough to publicly confess that he was rigged into office. Unfortunately, such  sense of shame has since departed the PDP; otherwise  they would not be  grandstanding, celebrating a non-existent transparency in the 2011 elections during which fake ballot papers, printed at an Abuja press named in General Buhari’s pleadings at the Presidential Election Tribunal, were flying  all around.  Ditto Ogun and Akwa Ibom, two PDP states. In more recent elections, Governor Adams Oshiomhole was close to tears describing to press men the shameless rigging and brigandage witnessed in an election in the Local Government Area of a top PDP chieftain in Edo State. Readers of this column are by now familiar with my take on the ’16:0 defeat’ of a sitting governor by now Governor Ayo Fayose of the PDP in Ekiti.

    Circumstances surrounding the Ekiti election which Professor Wole Soyinka aptly described as a mystery, and the call by Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, for a Memorandum of Undertaking which would see Jonathan and Buhari order/direct their supporters to accept the result of the presidential election, willy nilly, irrespective of the integrity of the process, in order to avoid any post electoral crisis, are the very reasons for this article at a time we should still be singing ‘Silent night’.

    Musliu Obanikoro, former, as well as, incoming State Minister for Defence, has been gloating and boasting concerning the 2015 election. The gentleman has been fouling the air around since he lost the governorship primary election to Mr Jimi Agbaje, believed by party leaders to have better electoral value. But having now successfully got back his ministerial position, which many believe was the reason for all the noise, he has headed to press interviews in celebration.  In the interview, published in the Punch of Sunday, 28 December, 2015, Obanikoro declared assuredly:

    “Ogunlewe said in his interview with Sunday Punch that he doesn’t know whether the PDP will win in the Southwest. He said it is not yet time for him to talk about that. But it is time for me to talk about it. I can tell you that we are going to win. The president is going to win BIG; WE ARE GOING TO CLEAR THE SOUTHWEST. YOU CAN MARK TODAY’S DATE AND QUOTE ME’.   Obanikoro may be everything Bode George and Seye called him but, they cannot contest the fact that this man knows much more than they do about PDP’s behind the scene escapades.  For instance, while it is doubtful if any of George or Seye knows anything about how the Ekiti election was won and lost, Obanikoro can beat his chest and claim he was one of  the high priests of that  strange election.  It is for that reason that, like Wike in Rivers State, Obanikoro almost fought to the death to be the PDP candidate in Lagos State, in the sure knowledge that he will win BIG. For Obanikoro to successfully controvert any of these, he must explain to Nigerians what exactly he was doing in Ekiti during the election. This is somebody who is neither from Ekiti nor is he an official of INEC and he cannot claim to have been performing any official duties since the military high command had earlier warned him against politicising the military.  While Jonathan’s goons were stopping and  detaining governors right on the highway to Ado-Ekiti, and stopping planes from landing anywhere near Ekiti, Obanikoro not only flew into Akure with an evil luggage which was later ferried into Ekiti in a bullion van as was  copiously reported by newspapers, he joined other non-Ekiti PDP busy bodies, among them a self-confessed Igbo serial  election rigger, all of who then worked the magic of  21 June, 2014,  that night when the police declared a totally unnecessary curfew. At this point, I must narrate a story told me by the very person to whom it happened. When one of the APC leaders detained before the election asked why they were being detained, he was told by the soldier guarding them that it was because they were the ones who could rouse people to riot after Fayemi had lost. Why would Fayemi lose? he asked, and the soldier simply told him that even if Ekiti people voted from then till  the next morning, PDP had  already won, having pre-programmed the ballot papers. He almost collapsed. The gentleman is alive and kicking.

    Only a fool would claim not to know that Obanikoro and Adesiyan were deliberately planted ahead of the elections as junior ministers in the armour-bearing ministries of Defence and Police Affairs for the sole purpose of intimidating and pacifying Yoruba land.  Obanikoro’s boasts, quoted above,  are very reminiscent of Fayose’s boasts before the Ekiti election. Fayose told everybody at his campaigns stops that he had already won. He even said he would defeat Fayemi in his ward which he, however, failed to do. But so certain of victory was he that he said publicly that Fayemi should not bother painting the new state house because he doesn’t know his preferred colours.  The Obanikoro boasts, also  a replica of  that of the president who  has already sent ambassadors to their heads of state as to  how seamless the 2015 election would be, are no phony boasts at all. Ekiti has more than shown that these people get serious when the business at hand concerns rigging and I just hope APC is not sleeping. INEC must be compelled to conduct the election strictly according to the provisions of the Electoral Law which, among other things, prescribes ONLY INDELIBLE INK. Rogue elements within INEC rigged the Ekiti election for PDP simply by supplying VANISHING INK in place of indelible ink.  I have once written on these pages  that when you see a seemingly powerful governor, as in Akwa Ibom, or a presidency- supported candidate like Wike , insisting on a particular candidate, or being the candidate himself, to the total chagrin of majority of  party members, many of who are therefore defecting to other parties, and  the PDP  is unconcerned, it is because they are not  depending  on legitimate votes for victory.

    The purpose of this article is to ask Nigerians to plead with the PDP – being the party with the history and the material capacity to rig on an industrial scale, to spare Nigeria the consequences of a probable post-election crisis. Unfortunately for the Southwest, most of those who traditionally perform this function – a check on governments – have already been sucked in by, and at, the National Conference and now love Jonathan more than an Asari Dokubo with books getting written and published in under two weeks and with Obasanjo getting serially thrashed by an amalgam of deliberately selected Yoruba National conferees. I cannot wonder enough as to where they will disappear to when Asari Dokubo levels their territory as he has promised, and, by the way, we are yet to hear these acclaimed Yoruba leaders comment on that threat by the President’s Ijaw compatriot.  Luckily for Nigeria, there are still enough men of integrity to do the needful.

    I wish my readers a happy and wonderful New Year.

  • Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s history of electoral apostasy

    Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s history of electoral apostasy

    One would not but wonder what facilities the professor thinks the opposition has to start a crisis knowing how unencumbered the Nigeria police and other security agencies are in turning their offensive weapons on its members

    Since I can, with considerable justification, claim some close affinity with Professor Bolaji Akinyemi who I had actually celebrated on this very page before – see TWO OF A KIND – Sunday, April 29, 2012 – this article should qualify as the archetypical Yoruba’s ‘oro to so sini lenu to bu’yo si -words that foul up the mouth but simultaneously sweetened it by adding salt  because  I ordinarily should not be seen controverting Professor Akinyemi on a public forum like this. Unfortunately, these are not ordinary times.  Our last  mutual engagement, together with some distinguished Yoruba icons, was the  effort , not only  to position the Southwest  appropriately within the Nigerian mix but, in particular, to birth a Socio-Cultural Pan-Yoruba Organisation where all Yoruba, irrespective of  political party affiliation, can sit amicably together to collectively interrogate  the way forward for the Yoruba  nation’. The story of AGBAJO YORUBA AGBAYE, under the distinguished interim Chairmanship of Lt. Gen. Alani Akinrinade, but which was mummified by then Southwest PDP governors during those days of the locust, is for another day.

    In our own respective corners, however seemingly significant or insignificant, we make history every day. So not many are likely to forget  Professor  Bolaji  Akinyemi in a hurry having served, not only as Director-General, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs,  but also as the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister during, arguably, the most winsome period in the history of our external affairs relations as a country. To that period must be credited his worthy attempt to establish a CONCERT OF MEDIUM POWERS. I would not know now, if he still considers that as his greatest achievement in public service given his recent, more than seminal role, in the National Conference which the president recently confessed was a ‘Yoruba’ initiative.

    He  recently wrote a letter to  both President Goodluck Jonathan and General  Muhammadu Buhari which, in my view was either  misplaced, or failed to lay emphasis on the appropriate thus indicating that he failed to reflect  deeply on the ill-consequences of  his  1993 letter  to  General  Abacha, also at a time of considerable anxiety in the country. In the letter, he  suggested  that the two presidential candidates  of Nigeria’s two foremost political parties should  sign a Memorandum of Undertaking to have peaceful campaigns as well as having their supporters ACCEPT WHATEVER THE RESULT(caps mine) of the 2015 presidential election. Not a few see this suggestion as anything other than offering a carte blanche to a rig-prone party like the PDP  to rig the 2015 election to its heart’s content  since such an understanding would have completely tied  APC’s ‘hands’ behind its back. Recent elections during which President Jonathan turned the concerned states into virtual garrisons with all manner of ‘security operatives’, some of them masked, and who in turn manacled the opposition, more than justify this conclusion. It could only be a shame that many believe that Professor Akinyemi is probably only the messenger here, given his well known capacity for original thinking, and that he most probably knows more than he volunteers given his well known chummy relationship with the government.

    For instance, in a text message  to me a few hours after his WAY FORWARD went public, a literally infuriated Olumide Ayeni, PhD, a top class legal practitioner and celebrated Omoluabi, not given to easily  losing his cool, shot it down writing as follows: ” Good evening uncle and seasons compliments Sir. I thought Professor Bolaji Akinyemi is supposed to be an eminent political scientist and statesman.  Why is he preaching to the converted and playing the ostrich?  If he is to be taken seriously, let him stand up to the truth as there can be no violence next year if the elections are free, fair and transparent.  JFK it was, he wrote, who once said that ‘those who make peaceful change impossible make violent ones inevitable. How on earth did he think that even a fool would not see through his red herring dressed up in statesmanlike pronouncement? This is hubris of the highest order and I am so disappointed’.

    The respected OODUA PATHFINDER was more scathing in its editorial on the subject.  Paraphrasing the paper, it is of the opinion that Professor Akinyemi  is being clever by half by pretending  he  is ignorant of the nature of the current Nigerian presidency  thereby leading him to suggest that  both parties would  jointly be  responsible for President Jonathan’s anti-democratic actions. Writing further, it said ‘there is only one person to be held responsible for any violence and that is the president. The reason it wrote, is simple because he has never held anyone accountable for any high crimes, even as he himself is an active participant. Violence, it says,  does not occur in a vacuum; so  when  security forces embark on illegalities, hiding under “orders from above,  when state institutions are used to maul the opposition,  it is no rocket science – as the professor himself would say – to know that its purveyors are setting the stage for violence. So, Akinyemi’s warning, the paper concluded, would make sense only if the president had been acting within the Constitution he swore to uphold”.

    This government has committed and has not stopped committing serial illegalities thus confirming the truism that the president really doesn’t care a hoot as he personally once told Nigerians. It harassed and tear-gassed elected representatives of the people, and recently led sundry beneficiaries of its ill-digested economic policies to donate sums of money far in excess of the campaign funds allowed by law. Try go to court to challenge this affront on the citizenry and you see Nigerian courts find in favour of a government that has succeeded in compromising every institution of state.

    Also, rumours already have it that like it happened in the Ekiti election where NYSC members used were trained in far away Akure, those to be deployed in 2015 are already being ‘bent’, preparatory to assist in rigging the election, a situation which, if true, can completely endanger the lives of these young Nigerians. Parents are therefore put on this long notice to warn their children or wards who might be carried away by amounts which to, a 21billion-plus rich PDP will be nothing more than a pittance.

    With some of these illegalities not unknown to Professor Akinyemi, it is a surprise he could opine that the two parties should be held responsible for any election-related crisis. Worse is the fact that though most Nigerians are aware of  PDP’s history of electoral apostasy -apostasy used  here loosely to describe  the party’s serial electoral malfeasance – it accounted for  a self-confessed rigged-in president- the highly regarded professor still found  it difficult to be a honest broker. PDP has graduated far and beyond traditional rigging tactics and had gone scientific as we saw in the Ekiti election. The inability to prove it at the Ekiti Election Tribunal was due to its technicality but I believe that Nigerian lawyers will soon get round it. I have no doubt that its success in Ekiti would spur PDP to its further deployment in the 2015 elections. It is therefore the responsibility, not of a complicit INEC, but of opposition political

    parties to negate that possibility. One would not but wonder what facilities the professor thinks the opposition has to start a crisis knowing how unencumbered the Nigeria police and other security agencies are in turning their offensive weapons on its members. Comparisons can be  odious as what is generally forgotten  when  some misguided people attribute the 2011 post election crises to General Buhari is the fact that his oft-quoted statement  had a  condition precedent which is: IF ELECTIONS ARE RIGGED, there would be crisis.  Last Sunday on this page I mentioned how the first day’s  election was  allegedly cancelled just  to ascertain the general’s area of strength to which fake papers were then allegedly ferried on subsequent  days; something they did successfully because of the general’s lean manpower resources on ground but which today, is no longer the case.

    In concluding, I wish to respectfully say that had Professor Akinyemi, in his letter, laid the requisite and appropriate emphasis on the critical need for a genuinely transparent election, – something ONLY President Jonathan can guarantee, he would have found me standing ramrod behind him.

  • 2015 Presidential election and the southwest vote

    2015 Presidential election and the southwest vote

    Even though the Yoruba had never benefited, in a collective sense, from any PDP government, its current, undeniable strangulation under the Jonathan administration, has been as total as it is unprecedented

    Dr Doyin Okupe, my  dear brother  and  the gregarious spokesman of  President Goodluck Jonathan, could not have done  more harm to the  president’s  cause  than  epoch ally  dividing this campaign  and making it  one of  old Vs new,  good Vs  evil, of  a squeaky clean  past  Vs a filthy now,  a  past  of pristine morality and national discipline Vs a now of serial scandals, of  over 200 chibok  girls  stolen and  the consequent  crippling paralysis etc.  Okupe had beautifully pidgeon-holed his boss as the ‘now’, and GMB, the APC Presidential candidate, as the past, in a curious effort to present the latter as being archaic; forgetting what the present represents for millions of Nigerians who do not know where the next meal would come from or had been turned to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in their own country due to no fault of theirs except you want to hold them vicariously responsible by voting Jonathan in 2011. Before  telling  Doyin how much Nigerians have come to regret that vote, let me ask if he would, in all good conscience and with God as his witness, choose to have something like the present Nigerian circumstances instead of  the past, in his personal affairs? However, I expect that nobody is surprised that he listlessly categorised the candidates into a glorious past of a GMB-inspired order, discipline and anti -corruption and a Jonathanian present of unmitigated corruption, insufferable insecurity and total lack in which life has become extremely short and brutish.  The lacuna here, as in most of the  administration’s flip flops, is the failure to think through policy actions, even something as simple as properly categorising a campaign.

    While these thoughts should now concentrate his mind, let us quickly go to today’s subject matter – that is, the place of the Southwest vote in the forthcoming presidential election; an issue which, happily, President Jonathan’s crying neglect of the geo-political zone, and his unkind treatment of his Southwest party members to whom he doles out miserable preferments, have helped to shape in no small measure. Even though the Yoruba had never benefited, in a collective sense, from any PDP government, its current, undeniable strangulation under the Jonathan administration, has been as total as it is unprecedented.

    The president personally confirmed that much in Ekiti last June when he belatedly apologised to the people.

    Dr Olusegun Mimiko, the Ondo State governor, was quoted this past week, as saying that the Southwest will vote massively for President Jonathan. He was so sure he even suggested that it wouldn’t matter at all if the APC chose it’s Vice Presidential candidate from the zone. How he came to that conclusion, despite saying, in the same breath, that the Southwest has a long history of progressive political engagement, can only be attributable to a momentary loss of attention. Or how does President Jonathan or the PDP remotely represent anything progressive unless that word has lost its meaning?

    Although the governor was quoted in The Nation of Wednesday, 17 December, 2014, I had, a whole 48 hours earlier, reacted as follows to discussions on the Ekitipanupo web portal on the same issue: ‘are we by these predictions saying Yoruba do not know what is good for them – their collective interest? Haven’t we seen enough of President Jonathan in close on six years to keep deceiving ourselves? Are we saying that because one Lagos boy will be made a Minister of State for Defence or even an Ekiti a full blown Minister of Police Affairs, we Yorubas will forget what is in our collective interest? Are we saying Ekiti or any other part of Yoruba land must have a PDP government before President Jonathan promises to develop that state as he said in Ekiti during the governorship campaigns? And since that ‘victory what has changed? Because of the importance I attach to this matter, and, especially to remind my Yoruba compatriots that collective interest is ingrained on us and underpinned all of Awo’s polices, it will be my topic for the week in The Nation on Sunday’.

    The above was my reaction to some speculative allocation of Southwest 2015 votes which would see Jonathan win in Lagos, Ogun, Ondo and share the votes in Ekiti and Oyo. All these because of a rather uncritical reliance on Jonathan winning in those states in 2011, conveniently forgetting the massive happenings in these states and in Nigeria in general on top of which is  the horrifying conditions pervading the entire Nigerian landscape, from the swamps in the Niger-Delta to the grasslands, if not, the desert of the north.

    In my view, an unbiased evaluation of the extant condition and circumstances of the average Nigerian today would never arrive at such projections but I must say I perfectly understand the pundit’s reasons which I shall now proceed to discuss at some length.

    The first is his reliance on the 2011 presidential election. But it  is now well known that the president won in the Southwest in 2011 for two reasons: The first was Yoruba’s well-known empathy for equity and the underdog syndrome – candidate Jonathan was coming from a beleaguered Niger Delta whose oil sustains the economy, and two, that  picture of a seemingly penitent president, kneeling before a highly regarded man of God who happens to be of Yoruba extraction when, in reality, it was a premeditated political scam to deceive the Yoruba. Today, all those pious shibboleths have been completely blown to smithereens by the president himself. Witness, for instance, the peoples’ representatives having to scale the fence into the hallowed grounds of the National Assembly. I hope they know that Nigerians did not buy into that funny attempt to hang it on the Inspector General of Police. I am equally aware that the projections arose, in part, from the historic Yoruba Omoluabi respect for elders which led the author to completely exaggerate the electoral worth of some Yoruba leaders; leaders  who, though have paid their dues, but have failed dismally at elections in which their parties participated. Even though in six years the president has done nothing for the region which gave them their acclaim, they have nonetheless  become such fans of the president that they now eagerly endorse every of his policy and had, in fact, became the architects of some thus further eroding their electoral worth in Yoruba land. More amazing is the fact that even when the military high command says election 2015 will hold all over Nigeria, some of them are preaching a deferment of the  elections since it became obvious that the real reason for the convocation of the national conference was no longer achievable. For over a decade now, beginning from Pa Ganiyu Dawodu, these elders have formed political parties, many of them still existing as fringe political parties, they are yet to win a single House of Assembly election in any Yoruba state.  Any electoral analysis, therefore, based on the aforementioned assumptions which inspired the  projections, will only maximally hurt the president as it would encourage him to throw good money after bad as such effort will yield no  dividends in a Southwest where the serving APC governors have demonstrated uncommon acumen in ensuring a gargantuan, multi-sectoral development.  Concerning these developments, you need go no further than the ramifying infrastructural and other socio-economic developments going on, pari pasu, in all the APC-controlled states in the zone as well as the massive, all round development Ekiti witnessed under Governor Kayode Fayemi.

    The only way President Jonathan could attempt to make any impact in Yoruba land will be through rigging because, as my teacher recently put it,  ‘each Nigerian president believes it is his right to go and rig elections in any part of the country whatever the consequences’.

    I just hope they won’t dare this time around, no matter the level of militarisation.

  • 2015: APC and the battle to come

    2015: APC and the battle to come

    APC must insist on the use of electronic card reader as PVCs currently being hoarded are destined to be cloned by the PDP

    “The flow of handing over a mini bag of rice with cash to every voter on the queue in turn had been smooth until it got to the victim of the brutality; a staunch APC faithful I presume, well known to the distributor. I think the distributor had offered him his own with a wink of tease he did not find amusing. ‘Get out of my sight or…” the APC man was still saying when a hard slap from the civil defense man, from behind, cut him short of further words. This instantly ignited in me a pity for the miserable life these Ekiti people have just been deceived into, endorsing with these PDP’s callous bait for a deeper wretched living in their land”.  – From the diary of  a self-confessed  member of the  militarisation team  that locked down  Ekiti from 19th- 21st, June 2014.

    In a 4-part article titled “PERISCOPING APC’s IDEAL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE” on these pages, I recently showcased why, in the interest of not only the APC but Nigeria at large, General Muhammadu Buhari should be the party’s presidential candidate.  I, indeed, opined that given Nigeria’s current circumstances, the country needed the general much more than he needs her.  I should not delay with a rehash of those self-evident realities; a situation so galling a naturally taciturn Dr Christopher Kolade could not hold back from saying that Nigeria never had it so bad. The loud mouths have since replied, lecturing the 80-year plus senior citizen.  Let me therefore quickly congratulate the party for proving us right. I must,  however, specially  thank Dr Kayode Fayemi, the Chief Retuning Officer and his  election planning team for  organising such a first- in- Nigeria congress, so transparent a blind could see.

    For the party, however, the time for backslapping is not yet here because for the very first time in its chequered history, the ‘biggest rally’ in Africa -PDP – is going to have an electoral contest, properly so called. In place of those  small, usually  feuding  political  parties,  PDP would, this time around , be facing a proper, well heeled  opposition  party.   For a party which thinks nothing of manipulating an election which it should ordinarily win, this cannot be a joking matter for PDP at all.  It will therefore stop at nothing to rig the presidential election in the vain hope that victory at that would trigger a bandwagon effect as if Nigerians are fools.

    For the APC, therefore, the words of former President Obasanjo to the effect that “In politics, just as in war, what matters is not just your plan, but knowledge of your opponent’s plan” become relevant and germane.  For it, therefore, the point of departure must be the clear understanding that for PDP, nothing, however reprehensible, is off limits. In other words, PDP would fight bare knuckles.  Fortunately, in Ekiti and Osun the APC saw, in its utmost brazenness, what the party can do.  The bestiality of the militarisation team, described in the intro to this article, is a clear manifestation of one of the problems with rulers of resource rich countries, particularly in the Third World.  They always want to be rulers for life.  APC must therefore be prepared: not for war nor for a recourse to AK47  but, it must, as a matter of urgency,  head to the courts to ask that INEC be legally compelled to conduct the 2015 elections strictly according to the Electoral Law instead of, as usual,  pandering to the ruling party and helping it to rig elections.  Two examples will suffice to show INEC as nothing more than PDP’s rigging partner.  First,  it has been shown  that the  sudden  postponement of the April 6, 2011 election long after  voting had commenced  nationwide,  on the grounds  that  voting materials did not arrive, was a ploy  to  enable the PDP ascertain where General Buhari was strongest to enable PDP ferry fake ballot papers, being  printed in a well known, local printing press in Abuja, to shore up Dr  Jonathan’s votes in those places. It was to cover this infamy that Justice Ayo Salami was rapidly suspended from office, and, ipso facto, from his chairmanship of the Presidential Election Tribunal where he had already granted General Buhari leave to inspect the ballot papers. That leave was promptly reversed at the first sitting of the reconstituted Presidential Election panel. Second, is the use of vanishing ink instead of the prescribed indelible ink as we saw in the Ekiti election. Last week in the column, I demonstrated how the vanishing ink was programmed to impregnate a  mark already affixed to the PDP column turning it to the voted party and how that accounted for their so-called victory in all of Ekiti’s 16 Local Government Areas. APC just must stop this unholy PDP/INEC mala fidi. It will be its greatest battle because on its record of performance, PDP has already failed and fallen.

    The Obasanjo regime -1999 -2007- showed conclusively that PDP is a rigging machine. However, if rigging was then analogue, and in-your face, under President Jonathan, it has become industrial and scientific. It comes in various ways. In 2011, for instance, fake ballot papers played a major part in PDP’s ‘victory’. In an affidavit before the Presidential Election Tribunal, CPC alleged that fake ballot papers printed by at a press whose name it gave the tribunal, were used in the entire north.  In confirmation, the party gave the names of two individuals who were arrested by the police in Abuja with 100,000 fake ballot papers. Similarly, there were reports of arrests for fake ballot papers in Akwa Ibom, which is already notorious for election rigging, and in Ogun State the driver of a sitting PDP senator, seeking re election, was arrested with a vehicle loaded with fake ballot papers. In all of these, mum had been the case with the complicit Nigeria police.

    Equally, some INEC staff, especially of the ICT department, are busy at work for the PDP. Their duty is to crutch data to ensure that PVC collection becomes as difficult as studying robotic science in areas of the country believed by PDP strategists to be APC-leaning. Therefore, at the mere touch of a button, they could maximally reduce the number of voters in such places. Like Governor Fashola, APC must do everything to hold INEC accountable. Where it fails to give out PVCs, it must, willy nilly, approve the use of temporary cards. The party must also insist on the use of electronic card reader as I suspect that most of the PVCs currently being hoarded are destined to be cloned for PDP use.

    However, as indicated earlier, of all these rigging methods, about the most difficult  to  guide against will be  scientific rigging which was deployed in Ekiti but  they could not use in Osun because their cover had been blown and it was too late to  use another variant. A South African intelligence outfit, NASENI, which did extensive work on the Zimbabwean 2013 presidential election believed to have been scientifically rigged, concluded that the technology involves the development and use of a special water marked ballot paper, which is designed to give majority of the votes cast to a pre-determined party. Once the ballot papers are supplied by its complicit suppliers, all that INEC does is provide vanishing ink in place of the indelible type. I am  persuaded  that  in the  2015 elections,  PDP would like to deploy this rogue technology  in some given states as boasts, reminiscent of those  we saw in Ekiti before the governorship election are  already being repeated  by PDP leaders in such states.  For example, in spite of the defection of the former Secretary to the Government of Akwa Ibom, Mr Umana Umana, with his teeming supporters which include very senior party elders who, though didn’t defect but are deeply rooting for him, the state governor continues to boast that PDP will score nothing less than 99 percent in both the presidential and governorship elections. Ditto in Rivers State where Wike keeps repeating the same boasts despite the fact that the primaries have shredded the PDP there.

    In conclusion, the APC, in particular, and Nigerians in general, must be prepared to stop PDP in its tracks.  Enough of the national decline on all fronts.

  • Ife Summit: The smart alecks are back

    Ife Summit: The smart alecks are back

    Why now would President Jonathan treat the Southwest differently when he would never ever come back seeking our votes?

    As it is now well known, PDP both as party and government, is like a con artist. More intriguing, though, is the fact that its Southwest leaders are by far worse. After six years of the president  being in the saddle, appointing  them to  nothing higher than miserable preferments like board  chairmanship of  polytechnics  in as far away as Damaturu while allotting to tiny Bayelsa powerful agencies like NIMASSA, he has suddenly woken up to how his government has thus far treated the Yoruba like Christmas chicken. But truth be told, we can hardly blame him because, after many years of interaction with his Southwest party men, he must have come to know that they think only of self.  But if President Jonathan claims he still pities the Yoruba for the loss of the House Speakership, we should ask what in his opinion constitutes the gains of the Southwest from the tenures of Patricia Etteh and Dimeji Bankole? Or what one single thing can the Yoruba point to as benefits of those better forgotten days other than the fact that both ex-speakers significantly helped themselves?  Therefore, if PDP politicians could not, I expect our respected Obas, who were present in numbers at the Ife summit, to easily see the vacuity of the president’s jeremiad. Or how, in four whole years, has this very sympathetic president attempted to assuage that loss or mitigate its supposed effects? How many Yoruba has he appointed to key positions outside of constitutional prescriptions? Which of our many highly educated Yoruba compatriots has he appointed to the headship of key agencies or departments?  How convenient  for him now, two months to his next election, to come sympathise with us even though the Mulika -not Southwest – loss,  was at the very beginning of this administration?  The president, I think, should be told that we know crocodile tears when we see one. The Yoruba nation has come a long way, with a history dating back thousands of years even if some nouveau rich misrepresent us as a hungry people.

    And, it is not as if we had ever benefitted in any significant way from a PDP government.  During the Obasanjo era, the Agbajo Yoruba Agbaiye, a budding Pan-Yoruba cultural organisation under the sterling leadership of Lt. General Alani Akinrinade, was so peeved and  scandalised,  it had to set up a rapid response team to react to the total neglect of the Southwest when, after every Federal Executive Council meeting, huge water/irrigation projects were being announced as approved for the north and some other parts of the country when Muktar Shagari was minister of Water Resources but with hardly any ever going to the Southwest. The team had as members, Prof Jide Osuntokun, Dr Dele Shobowale, Mrs Tola Adenle and yours truly.

    The situation actually got worse as the entire Southwest road infrastructure collapsed as exemplified by the Ibadan -Benin Road which broke in two at Igbara-Oke.  So if  we were treated  that  nonchalantly under a president we called our own, what right do we have now to expect any better under the current administration which, in any case, the South – South has succeeded in annexing? This 11th hour presidential romance should naturally collapse, even before it gets under way.

    These are some of the reasons Yoruba should easily see through this joke. Candidate Jonathan was hugely voted for in the West in 2011 – thanks largely to that penitent kneeling by the candidate, in front of a highly regarded Man of God who happens to be of Yoruba extraction – but to what good?  Besides two of our young, gifted  professionals sitting in pretty offices in the presidency throwing darts and barbs at just about anybody- the last being the Nobel Laureate – what in truth can we point to as dividends accruing from that massive Yoruba vote?  Not even any of those oil pipeline security contracts which were generously awarded to the president’s kinsmen, and yet subsisting, even as oil thefts peak. Why now would President Jonathan treat  the Southwest differently when he would never ever come back seeking our votes?

    The Ife summit is nothing but a trap, dredged up by the Southwest crowd of the PDP and executed by the president who used the respect for his office to coral our royalties into attendance.  Luckily, our people have shown conclusively in Osun on 9 August, 2014, that never again shall the Yoruba be rail-roaded against their best interests or be sold on the cheap. Of course, we would be nothing better than fools if we fail to correctly interpret the complete military lock-down the world saw in both Ekiti and Osun during the governorship elections. If we were not clear-eyed enough to see where President Jonathan was going when he appointed our compatriots as junior ministers of Defence and Police Affairs, we can now appreciate that we were being set up for self immolation. And how mightily they succeeded in my dear Ekiti! But it is the same Yoruba who say you can only defile a woman once using deceit. We now know the president like the back of our palms.

    For instance, whereas our infrastructure collapsed under Obasanjo and his PDP Southwest governors, even the blind would now see what development is afoot in each of the states of the Southwest being governed by the APC. Whereas, not once did the PDP governors of that era  mention anything about  regional economic cooperation, it is now the driving force of economic development in the Southwest with the Ibadan-based DAWN COMMISSION under the lead of  Dipo Famakinwa, a brilliant management consultant.  Of course, should the PDP make any further in-road in the Southwest, the Commission will certainly be one of its very first casualties because it is beyond their ken to know its essence or relevance.

    And talking about PDP making no further inroad in the Southwest, we need to be reminded that we are dealing with an opponent for whom nothing is off limits as we saw in Ekiti  on 21 June, 2014 when a seemingly extra-ordinarily peaceful election -no ballot box snatching, no illegal thumb printing etc -was albeit,  scientifically rigged.   If we, Ekiti, could plead guilty to a failure of intelligence on that occasion, Nigerians no longer have that luxury.  Our point of departure, as a people who want our votes to count, should therefore be vigilance. We must all be very vigilant. The APC, as the main opposing political party, however, has a much bigger responsibility on its hands.  It  must, as urgently as it can, get the courts to compel  INEC to use ONLY the constitutionally prescribed INDELLIBLE ink as opposed to the VANISHING ink which it deployed to help in the scientific rigging we saw in Ekiti, at all the elections.

    A single event will illustrate this. Where she voted, a highly regarded spouse of an equally respected retired banker, thumb printed her allotted ballot paper thrice but without the slightest mark showing.  More annoyed than disappointed, she called on one of the NYSC members present who after listening to her complaint poured water on the ink pad. With this, she was able to get an almost unrecognisable mark left in front of her preferred party. But that is all the rogue scientists, purveyors of this immoral technology, need as that infinitesimal mark would subsequently migrate to impregnate a pre-programmed spot which is, of course, the PDP’s.  At the end of voting, that little ink now presents in very bold relief -in one colour, though blue and black inks were used by INEC – and all in one size. That is the mystery Professor Soyinka referred to in the Ekiti election but thanks to what happened in 2013 at the Zimbabwean presidential election, which has been handsomely reported on the internet, the world has come to unlock that mystery. Of course, PDP will most probably come with other variants of that.

    APC should now appreciate what a herculean task it has on its hands because courts which can rule that there is no division in the PDP even when the entire world saw members of the New PDP walk out of its Abuja convention, can conveniently rule that INEC is not obliged to follow in toto, the provisions of the electoral law as long as that will accord with the wishes of the PDP.

    In concluding this piece, let me humbly say that if we are truly our fathers’ children, a thousand Ife Summits by President Jonathan should not succeed in deceiving the Yoruba again.

  • Nigerian football is symptomatic of our famed corruption

    Nigerian football is symptomatic of our famed corruption

    Knowing now what we do about our football and its guardian angels, the crisis-ridden Football Federation, is it a surprise that Nigerians were treated to the macabre picture of a ‘scratch my back, I scratch yours’:

    Writing under the title: ‘How Nigeria Destroys’, a distinguished columnist with The Nation, this past week set me thinking; running my mind over the  entire Nigerian canvass to see if there were still any oasis of integrity left in this whirlpool of corruption. I knew quite well that the Jonathan government has taken corruption to a new high in our country, not just by its romanticisation of the corrupt, but more by the introduction of scientific rigging into our electoral process as we saw in the 21 June, 2014 election in Ekiti.  Former President Olusegun Obasanjo had started that journey into the abyss when he superintended over elections that were worse than those in Myanmar and the student had merely emerged smarter and a lot more prolific. Obasanjo’s bastardisation of elections in Nigeria was such that a sitting president could not run away from confessing, shame-faced, that the election that brought him into office was rigged. It doesn’t get more bizarre. Nonetheless, I went searching. After all, a time was in this self same country when you could beat your chest and claim that our universities were nothing but citadels of learning and integrity.  Both the columnist I am quoting and this writer were proud members of the Nigerian university system while that era lasted. Today, learning, yes, if you could take what now passes muster on those cult-infested campuses as impartation of knowledge, but integrity, certainly not, as no sane person would so affirm or bet a dime.

    The referenced columnist wrote as follows: “The great danger of being part of Nigeria today is that Nigeria tends massively to corrupt everything and everybody. There is hardly anything to look up to in Nigeria. In most directions that one may look, the beckoning is perpetually and relentlessly towards the low, the ignoble and the graceless. Most of the privileged and influential seek nothing but their own. In the reckoning of the typical powerful and influential Nigerian, the masses of ordinary Nigerians are, at best, cannon fodder for the reaching of his warped goals – and at worst, just despicable beings deserving to be ignored in their poverty, their ignorance and their hopelessness”.

    In affirmation of the above, not only the just retired Chief Justice of Nigeria, Hon. Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar, but legal luminaries like the late Justice Esho and others are on record  as saying that the Nigerian judiciary is reeking of massive corruption. This past week, although he just might be the most inappropriate person to so allege, former President Olusegun Obasanjo only stopped short of calling the National Assembly a den of robbers although they  have since angrily denied such claims, but to credulous Nigerians who, most probably, think worse of them and earnestly hope that they would turn patriotic for once and give up their  immoral,  absolutely unsustainable allowances in the wake of our new economic realities. I am sure Nigerians cannot wait to hear the Breaking News!

    Of course, the least said about the executive branch the better and so we need not do a rehash of all the scams it has conveniently glossed over: the Pension and Oil subsidy scams, the unremitted oil funds, the Malabu oil scam in which a whooping U.S. $1.1 was allegedly shared, not forgetting the tens of billions burnt by a minister of the Federal Republic on luxury ‘air birds’. So all consuming is corruption in the executive branch that many have concluded that corruption is the lubricator of the Nigerian system.

    It was at this point my mind went to sports, in particular the Nigerian football scene. And how fortuitous this turned out to be! Since I was writing this on a Wednesday, I naturally turned to the day’s edition of Mumuni  Alao’s beautiful effort -Complete Sports – a copy of  which I buy daily and, voila,  Sunday Oliseh, about the most professionally (soccer-wise)  educated Nigerian ex-international, who scored that wonderful goal that  retired  Andoni Zubizarreta , the incomparable Spanish goal keeper and captain at the 1998 FIFA World Cup, had an article culled from his Blog titled: THE SAD STATE OF NIGERIAN FOOTBALL. I have always enjoyed listening to Oliseh commentating on the Super Sports African football programme because you will never see him call a spade by any other name. And by the way, this is one Nigerian, I know, can take our football to where those of us Nigerians to whom football is no business, want it; not where these jesters have taken us.

    For my purpose, Oliseh’s very first paragraph would suffice. He wrote” For some people in Nigeria, football is no longer a sport, but rather it is all about money, nepotism and politics. The state of Nigerian football today is unprecedented and the worst it has ever been. Forget that we won AFCON 2013, we mean the situations of the national teams, football federation and local league! When as defending champions you fail to qualify for the African Cup of Nations from a weak group, your football federation is in disarray, you have a disputed coaching and no quality coach is interested in applying for the job, then you have a great dilemma on your hands. Nigerian football structure is a joke and has been ridiculed for scandals unlike any other federation in the world. Officials are in and out of courts instead of carrying out their duties of football development”. He continues: “I wish to God there was a situation where there was no free flowing unaccountable money involved with the federation. That would take away the fanatical interest it attracts to some today…”

    That is the Football Federation TAN was eagerly waiting to profit from had the team qualified for AFCON 2015.

    The quintessential patriot Oliseh is, he did not permit his utter disappointment to debar him from suggesting ways out of our corruption-ridden inefficiency. He therefore proffered as follows: “The government has to privatise club sides but own the infrastructure they play on in return for a rental fee that is just cosmetic. This, he says, will provoke investment, creativity, competition and renew the development of the local league. The government, he went on, should sponsor real technical education of the coaches as opposed to three-week coaching seminars”. And because he knows the level of corruption in the system, he was not particularly optimistic these suggestions would see the light of day. He therefore concluded: ‘I expect some people won’t agree with my point of view mainly because such progressive changes might affect their ‘pocket’ but if things don’t change, fanatical football-loving Nigerians will continue to stay glued to the English Premier League and other European leagues instead of our local league and national team”.

    Knowing now what we do about our football and its guardian angels, the crisis-ridden Football Federation, is it a surprise that Nigerians were treated to the macabre picture of a ‘scratch my back, I scratch yours’: of a newly appointed interim coach pleading that the sacked be reinstated? Or are we stupefied that the ubiquitous TAN was out there waiting to profit from a most unlikely qualification for AFCON 2015? This is how low, in all ramifications, the PDP has taken Nigeria in its unholy 16-year strangulation of an otherwise blessed country.

    So where do Nigerians turn for integrity and transparency? The Church? Perish the thought.