The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Nasir el-Rufai’s vitriol, logic

There is little any one can do to expunge former vice president Atiku Abubakar and former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai from the front pages of newspapers or deny them prime mention on social media platforms. As the opening stages of the next election cycle get heated, they will say or do things that will get them good coverage, even if that coverage ends up undermining their political goals. While the former vice president has found it difficult to cobble together the coalition of his dream, Mallam el-Rufai has blissfully rolled out verbal incendiaries guaranteed to get him good mention in the dailies. And while both politicians now try to anchor their hopes on the underperforming Social Democratic Party (SDP), they have had little success in reining in the wild broncos of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP). So far, few notable politicians have openly associated with them, preferring to be tentative about the idea of a coalition, and averse to the brinkmanship that typifies Alhaji Atiku’s and Mallam el-Rufai’s unappeasable, self-centred politics.

Meanwhile, the former Kaduna governor has developed a unique kind of politics, one that sees him oscillating between fawning and self-abnegation on the one hand and displaying meanness and dispensing vitriol on the other hand. He does not have many political leaders to fawn over at the moment, particularly in the opposition, except perhaps Alhaji Atiku; but there are dozens of hard and soft targets in the Bola Tinubu presidency, particularly the president, at whom to take potshots. And he will shoot without scruples, for he is a wounded lion. In the past few weeks, he has ladled out vitriol, copiously and remorselessly. Backed by the famous abjurer, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who was until recently a special adviser to the president, Mallam el-Rufai is a keen verbal marksman. Unprincipled like Alhaji Atiku, but more profligate with words, it matters little to him what side of the divide he is at any time: he will defend or excoriate either side with equal venom and plausibility, unconcerned with how his constant groveling or contradistinctive iconoclasm is interpreted.

But Mallam el-Rufai has his head in the clouds. Speaking in Kano days ago, he referenced his consultations with SDP leaders amidst efforts to build a party that would not be owned or dominated by one man, such as the All Progressives Congress (APC) has done, or the PDP that had, in his words, become a spent force. Ignoring his own atrocious record in Kaduna State, where he denounced, alienated and oppressed dissenters, he spoke glibly about ensuring internal democracy in the SDP and eliminating ‘godfatherism’, his bogeyman. Alluding to the Delta State defections which have riled many politicians like him, he averred that sitting governors have one vote and can lose elections, citing his own example in the last presidential election when as APC governor he lost Kaduna to the PDP. He also cited the example of the president who lost Lagos, partly because, as he put it, ‘Lagosians don’t vote.’ Full of theory, disconnected from reality, including his own mordant reality, the domineering and meddlesome Mallam el-Rufai spoke of the SDP appeal as a party that geared towards resisting domination from anyone. He is of course untruthful.

Fortunately for the country, the newsmen who interviewed him in Kano also asked him what kind of zoning arrangement the SDP would adopt in view of the present political realities of Nigeria. The party had not reached that bridge yet, let alone crossed it, he said. When they get to that point, the party would take a decision, insisting that they were looking for members at this point, people with which they could build the party, not ambitious politicians. Seriously? From Mallam el-Rufai, his imperial majesty and ambitious and grandiloquent politician? But he could never restrain himself for long; that is why he is a reporter’s delight. Sooner or later, regardless of his irreverence, he revealed where he stood. He is often too frank to dissemble. He, therefore, expatiated on the zoning thing; and here is what he said: “This country is facing an existential crisis. We may not have a country for you to contest for president if we continue the way we are going or if things get worse. So for me, I don’t care where the person comes from. But I want a candidate and a ticket that will do two things: that will offer solutions to Nigeria’s problems. Number two, who will excite Nigerians enough to come out and vote and defeat the APC government that is taking Nigeria backwards. So I don’t care if that person is you or anyone, I will support it. I don’t care. I can say it because we championed power shift. But where did the power shift take us? Should we stick to that even though the whole country is falling apart and things are not going well and the people in government are not listening and everyone is struggling other than those in government? I will no longer stand for the ‘president-must-come-from-here’ syndrome.”

Put simply, Mallam el-Rufai, the closet Fulani exceptionalist, has no patience with propping up a southern candidate. This time, he wants a northern candidate, obviously because he anticipates that the SDP would mostly likely appeal to northern politicians and members at this point. Yes, they will do their best to expand both the base and reach of the party, but given the mood of the country and the suspicions convulsing the body politic, not many southerners of influence would stake their future on the SDP or Mallam el-Rufai’s theories, especially not after former Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa spoke ruefully about zoning and the mistakes that undid the PDP. Whether Mallam el-Rufai likes it or not, even if they manage to build the SDP to a fairly noticeable height, the party will come to grief on the Golgotha of presidential ambitions and zoning. Established parties had found it difficult to transcend the zoning crisis, and the APC barely managed to overcome it in 2023, while the PDP came unstuck. Even if they find the money, the SDP is unlikely to find the magic wand to placate its members when the ambitions of their leaders confront them.

Read Also: El-Rufai: SDP not interested in merger, high profile politicians

It is inescapable that campaign 2027 will be downright nasty. It will be brutal, tangled, ethnic, and bigoted. While the SDP will struggle to reach the critical mass its leaders intend for it, the party will not lack waspish defenders unafraid to plumb the depths of bitter and corrosive abuse to incite, inflame, and provoke conflagrations. Alhaji Atiku is implacable; he will do his damndest to portray his opponents in putrid light, but his efforts will probably be smothered by his unfulfilled desire to get a platform on which to run. Neither the PDP nor the SDP would avail him half the chance. But the wily, pretentious and equally ambitious Mallam el-Rufai will at the right time demonstrate that the former vice president is dispensable. He will go into alliances within the party and instigate revolts, if necessary, to position himself for rich pickings. He does not possess half as much altruism as he ascribes to himself and his politics. But if the defections the former Kaduna governor scorns continue to advantage the APC, Mallam el-Rufai will be left with the grim and daunting exercise of testing his theory about how many votes a governor can really command. However, in 2027, the governors’ influence will be consequential to the outcomes of the polls, regardless of how bitter and regional the campaigns turn out to be.

May 4, 2025
Delta eruptions: Rethinking Atiku’s 2023 defeat

The massive defections enacted in Delta State by elected Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) officials on April 23 have inadvertently triggered the rethinking of former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s 2023 presidential election loss. Immediately after President Bola Tinubu was declared winner of the election, the PDP candidate and many of his supporters cried foul, swearing that their party lost unfairly by an indeterminate stratagem orchestrated by the APC candidate and his supporters. The PDP candidate, not to say the Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi, anchored the loss on the APC candidate’s alleged lack of integrity and academic qualifications. Ignoring the argument that pre-election matters could not vitiate an election victory, the PDP went ahead to spend inordinate amount of resources and devoted huge social media, advertisement, and legal campaigns within and outside the country to prove that the APC lost. They pilloried the judiciary, stridently called for a coup d’état, while protesters and labour unions orchestrated industrial unrest and intensified a massive movement for unconstitutional change.

For more than 15 or 16 months, there was no let up in the effort to stir up a national revolt. Despite the clear statistical import of the voting outcomes, in which the PDP and LP split the votes, not to say the PDP which was split into three factions going into the election, the exponents of the protests appeared convinced that there was no way the APC candidate could have won. They simply ignored statistics, and even tried to rewrite constitutional provisions undergirding the polls. Unperturbed by, or perhaps unaware of, the eerie danger of reenacting the 1993 presidential election with all its unpredictable and attendant tragic consequences, former president Olusegun Obasanjo weighed in by calling for the abortion of ballot collation. But shortly after the electoral umpire declared the winner, he called for mass action. He was also convinced that the APC did not win. However, nearly two years later, the same Chief Obasanjo began calling for a coalition of political parties to defeat the APC, suggesting that the balkanisation of the PDP led to its loss, and a merger or coalition of parties would do the magic.

The man at the centre of the massive legal and social media challenge to the poll outcome, Alhaji Atiku, also recanted and began to campaign for a coalition to unseat the APC at the presidential level. The former PDP candidate’s pursuit of a powerful or mega coalition presupposes that he has finally succumbed to the logic that his loss was a result of the factionalisation of the party on which platform he contested the poll. He has not openly admitted that reality, but his actions indicate it. If he thought his loss was unrelated to the size and unity of his party, which he is projected to abandon soon for giving him cold shoulder on the coalition subject, he would not be advocating for coalition partners to unseat the APC. His search for a coalition, which he is pursuing without getting a consensus from the PDP, has, however, put him at cross-purposes with his party. His fellow party men, including many of the party’s governors, had whispered but are now saying it openly that they lost the 2023 poll, not because of any rigging by the APC, but because over the years, and unknown to their standard-bearer, he had become jaded and unelectable. They decry the idea of a coalition, and insist that had they reformed their party and respected their own zoning arrangement, they could have won. It has taken the Delta defections to welcome some of these reappraisals.

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No one voices this new reality so powerfully like former running mate to Alhaji Atiku in the 2023 poll, Ifeanyi Okowa, a former Delta State governor. In a remark last week, he asserted that Alhaji Atiku lost the poll because the party violated its own zoning arrangement, a violation he claimed he now regretted because he did not realise it was so overwhelming during the poll. According to him, “Even when we were campaigning, I realised our people were not interested in having another northerner come into power. But the decision had already been taken at the federal level by the party, and I had been nominated. Still, in retrospect, I now believe I should have gone with the will of my people.” He attributed this alienation to the loss of his state during the presidential election and the regaining of the same during the governorship poll.

Senate minority leader Abba Moro did not dispute the PDP’s loss of the election in his response to Dr Okowa’s recrimination. Reflecting on the new reality suffusing his party, the PDP, from top to bottom, Sen. Moro instead argued that it was in fact the selection of the former Delta State governor that caused the loss of the party’s presidential bid. He was unsparing: “It’s unfortunate today that at his level, having been a senator and governor before on the platform of the PDP, I think it’s uncharitable for him to be expressing regret about being the party’s running mate. He was not forced. He asked for it, and he was given…With the hindsight that we have now, some of us think that the party would have won the election if another candidate — other than Okowa — had been picked as the vice-presidential candidate from the South…I think there was an error of judgment on the part of everybody that was involved in the choice of Okowa as the candidate.”

It has taken nearly two years of massive shifts in the polity, including defections and factionalisation, and the final realisation that no amount of threats to the republic would cause the collapse of the government, to compel opposition party leaders to accept their loss, whether they like President Tinubu or not. They have also slowly begun to accept the need to re-examine their methods and tactics, which failed them in 2023. It has taken the Delta defections to unearth uncomfortable truths many PDP leaders knew but were reluctant to voice out. But more than 15 or 16 months of living in denial, not to talk of the rebellion they irresponsibly tried to foment, the PDP thankfully failed to provoke anarchy, fracture the country, and orchestrate the collapse of the country in a replay of the 1993 tragedies that cost hundreds of life, birthed two dictatorships, and set the democratic clock back by decades.

May 4, 2025
Burkin Faso’s malevolent propaganda

Of the three military officers who forcefully took over the reins of office in the West African countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger Republic, Ibrahim Traore, an army captain, has run the most effective propaganda machine built on what his supporters describe as Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist ideology. At bottom, however, he has merely substituted Western hegemony with Russian hegemony. The latter is operated by Russian Africa Corps, a rechristening of the notorious Wagner Forces. Banded together in the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), the three countries kicked out France and the United States, and delinked from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which had denounced the sacking of democracy in those countries.

Capt. Traore’s propaganda exaggerates or fabricates economic development and social conditions in Burkina Faso, with most of the country’s economic indicators showing no sign of improvements. Even the main coup goals of solving the refugee crisis caused by insurgency, rebuilding the economy, and curbing the jihadist insurgency that has tripled death toll since the coup, have remained intractable. Instead, civil rights have been abridged, and democracy, suspended in 2022 after the coup, has been put on the backburner. Last Wednesday, less than one week after Capt. Traore claimed to have exposed a coup plot, thousands of demonstrators observing a ‘global day of support for Capt. Traore’ marched on Western embassies in London, Paris, Accra, Ouagadougou, Kingston, and other African cities to compel ‘imperialist powers’ to hands off Burkina Faso and the AES states. Some of them even threatened to burn down London should Capt. Traore die of natural causes. Let them try that with President Donald Trump.

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The demonstrations, like the propaganda support for Capt. Traore, were reportedly inspired and funded by Russia which has sought to expand its turf wars with the West to the African continent. They have been effective, even if conditions on the ground in the AES have deteriorated. It is a mark of the specious reasoning assailing Africans, their love for showmanship, and their inability to take the long-term view of their future that they have once again embraced dictatorship and submitted and committed to an even more reactionary Russian tyrant. It is a sign of the poverty of thinking that Capt. Traore’s oppressive rule and malevolent and Russian-inspired propaganda have drawn applause from some Nigerians.

May 4, 2025
Between apotheosis and Apoti Osi

As the wave of defection from sinking parties and upended dugouts approached the scale of a furious tsunami, there is a feeling that the APC has arrived at its apotheosis, a moment of divine beautification when everything seems possible, when a political party carries all before it, and when every potential opposition appears to have crumbled. Its leading lights are wearing a smirk of self-satisfaction. They are justified. Never in the history of the nation has a party capitalized so mercilessly and benefited so profitably from the structural and ideological debilities of its rivals. And never has a single party become so dominant that it looms so large in the horizon. The only remote comparison one can think of is the PDP at the height of its glory when the party became a Leviathan sweeping all before it and brooking no opposition in the ordinary sense of that word. Its hierarchs boasted of a sixty-year Reich during which it would rule the roost uninterrupted and unchallenged.

As things stand, the APC has bested its most formidable rival in all its hegemonic possibilities. The entire country has been reeling with shock and surprise. It is purely uncharted territory. Never in the history of the country have the citizens had to contend with a one-party state. As if to underscore the scary portents, a group of leading civil rights campaigners came out during the week, vowing to oppose every inch of the way any attempt to foist a one-party state on the nation because of its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious polarities. It was like drawing a line in the sand. Dear readers, there are moments when the analyst feels that history repeats itself with such a wounding acuity and that truly the more things change the more they remain the same.

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Exactly ten years ago after its historic triumph over the PDP, this column issued a travel advisory to the APC asking it to immediately put certain things in place if it were to avoid the dismal fate of its most formidable rival. This is what we are republishing this morning and even to the writer himself, it reads chillingly like the chronicle of an overreaching boa constrictor foretold, with the horns of an impala it had ingested sticking out of its own ruptured abdomen. But before we go, it is appropriate to leave with a delightful vignette from the nation’s history.

After a historic rally in a notorious enemy territory, the late premier of the old Western region, the urbane, witty, mentally alert and most perspicacious Samuel Ladoke Akintola was hailed by many as having achieved an impossible political feat. A leading pro-government columnist of the time called it the apotheosis of SLA and his party the NNDP as the liberator of the Yoruba race. When his confidant, personal assistant and troubleshooter Adewale Kassim, an Ijesha prince who was later to become a notable sovereign in his rural idyllic domain, drew Akintola’s attention to this and signposted it as a sign of a major shift in political fortune, the master word-juggler and exemplary verbal duelist chuckled and then noted with wry cynicism: “ ‘Dewale, apotheosis ko, apoti osi ni.”

May 4, 2025
Fallout from Delta defections

The ripple effects of the defections that upended political calculations in Delta State and the country as a whole will continue to manifest for some time until and after the 2027 poll. Any analysis of the ripple effects will, however, be done piecemeal until the next election is done and perhaps forgotten. As most commentators have noted, the Delta defections, which involved nearly everyone that mattered in the PDP, were unprecedented and cataclysmic. The governor defected, his predecessor defected, their estranged mentor is rumoured to be preparing to defect, and it is a shame that, going by the fever burning the state, traditional rulers could not follow suit because they are culturally and constitutionally insulated from politics.

Two or three fallout present themselves boldly to the analyst, not necessarily because they are the most impactful or volcanic, but because they simply seem remarkable in the way they have presented to the public. Much more than Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, who pulled the whole edifice down on his former party, former governor Ifeanyi Okowa gave what seemed to be the most colourful, robust and enthusiastic account of the defections, including their justifications and future outcomes. Not only did he second-guess the political intentions of former vice president Atiku Abubakar, who was the PDP presidential candidate in the 2023 poll, he also denounced his motives and political judgement. Alhaji Atiku, Dr Okowa groaned, regrettably vied for the presidency when the mood of the country was for a southern candidate in line with the party’s informal rotational policy. He also scoffed his association with that deviant step against the wishes of Deltans. He did not say whether if the ticket had won the presidential poll he would entertain any doubt or remorse – in short whether he was not just being wise after the event.

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And to add insult to injury, Dr Okowa predicted that that the former vice president was also probably on his way out of the PDP, making it difficult for the serial presidential contender to cavil at his former running mate’s joyous leap into the embrace of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Were the feelings of Alhaji Atiku injured by the apostasy of his former comrade-in-arms? He was actually sanguine about his former comrade’s defection, perhaps because his own fateful leap was pending. It turned out, though it was not initially clear, that Dr Okowa had alerted the former vice president of his plan to jettison the PDP. He did not say whether he told his former leader that he was headed for the hated APC. Nor was it clear at first whether Alhaji Atiku grasped the seismic import of the defections, and how insanely speculative and scurrilous a section of the public would be once the news got out. Now, if the former vice president planned to leap into a chasm of his own making, it would certainly be impolitic to begin castigating those who do, especially seeing that he had been a serial and enthusiastic defector, the leaping cat of the Federal Republic.

Summing up why he was remorseless about defecting, Dr Okowa suggested that once it was clear that the PDP Governors’ Forum had rebuffed Alhaji Atiku’s newfangled coalition, he knew that the game was up. Whatever other motives a skeptical public had read into Dr Okowa’s defection, once the PDP governors made short shrift of the plot to assemble a coalition to face the APC, it would amount to tilting at the windmill to continue hoping for a miracle mediated by the leading opposition party. Everyone, except perhaps the former presidential candidate himself, knew that 2023 was his best chance to win the presidency. But characteristic of his poor judgement and consistent poor calls, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He stood pat on the issue of rejigging the party’s zoning arrangement, remained intransigent on the subject of pacifying the G-5 PDP governors who broke ranks with him over his decision on the party’s zoning arrangement, trusted the wrong journeymen in the presidency who promised him support, and reposed unalloyed faith in the marabouts who promised him a rosy and glorious future on the throne.

Who could have predicted also that in his response to the Delta defections, former senate president Bukola Saraki would sanctimoniously condemn Mr Oborevwori and his retinue for abandoning the PDP ship in the middle of the ocean? But he did, and piquantly for that matter, on his X handle two Thursdays ago. Sneering at the defectors, he said, “Yes, it is unbecoming and shocking for the running mate to the standard-bearer of a leading party to abandon ship to join the ruling party. This is unprecedented and nobody should try to justify such an act with the talk of being put under pressure. It is simply a sign of how low we have sunk as a polity.” He concluded with innuendoes by admonishing party faithful to stay the course. “The PDP is better with fewer members who are loyal, sincere, determined, dedicated, and committed to its ideals than with many who lack conviction,” he exhaled. He made no reference to his own past defections and political indiscretions, preferring instead to interpret the Delta defections from his episodic view of history, viewing them almost as a series of discontinuities.

PDP chieftains, at least such among them as remained in the party, will buoy up themselves by exaggerating their capacity to reinvent their party. But they have had more than a decade to reform and reinvent their party, and they had before and after every electoral defeat spurned the need to engage in the customary and ineluctable introspection needed to reposition their party. Suddenly, the politically nomadic Dr Saraki has begun to believe that a reformation appears possible, and has glowingly spoken of that possibility in the context of the principles and nuances of democracy. He said with flourish: “Let the rest of us who want to stay concentrate on rebuilding the party and refocusing it to play the role of a viable opposition…Our democracy can only thrive with a strong opposition capable of holding the ruling party accountable and providing credible alternatives to the electorate.” Some people think it is a little too late for the PDP, which has now yielded so much space to the APC thereby strangulating itself. With double the number of states to the PDP’s, however, the APC must caution itself against any kind of exuberance. Today’s ruling party was once nearly down and out in their various legacy parties’ redoubts, as the PDP controlled about 28 governorship seats. The mill of justice grinds slowly, it is said, but it grinds finely. Nothing must ever be ruled out completely, not even when the polity is visited with volcanic eruptions of the kind that has sent Delta and the country reeling.

May 4, 2025
After the biggest party

(The rise and fall of the PDP)

It was a messy and dismal end. There are some deaths that are dignified and ennobling in their calm fortitude and heroic defiance. But not this one. The PDP has died as it lived: beyond its means and probably beyond the means of the country as well. A presidential capitulation quickly snowballed into an anarchic retreat and a rout ending in an electoral massacre on the scale of a Homeric battlefield.

We will be counting the principal political casualties for many years to come. State orphans abound. The sixty year Reich has become the sixteen year wreck. There are no mourners in this Sambisa forest of the quick and the wounded; only rotund vultures and pot-bellied hyenas having a field day. It is an Eliotsian wasteland, and April is the cruelest month.

Not even the greatest political soothsayer could have foreseen this distressing disintegration and death of the greatest party in Africa. One of its shrewd and astute founding fathers, in a moment of embattled lucidity, had cautioned that this was not a political party but a rally. A rally is just a collection of different mobs on parade. If there is food, the mob will stay quiet. But if there is no food, the mob will quickly dissolve into its component units, all heading in different directions.

   After the greatest party comes the great hangover and headache. An army founded on the principles and ideology of loot can never survive the removal of its feeding bottle. The same fate also awaits any political party founded on such nefarious axioms. But we cannot afford to gloat too much on the horrid demise of the Nigerian behemoth. Like a festering corpse abandoned by even close relations, the PDP has become a national and public health hazard.

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   The methods, means, principalities and instrumentalities by which this maladroit mammoth met its timely end will be studied and analyzed by students of politics in multi-ethnic societies with self-cancelling pluralities of power fulcrums for years and generations to come. They are beyond the standard fares of conventional post-colonial Political Science. But it is also important for the Nigerian intelligentsia both at home and in the Diaspora to study and analyze what went wrong as a guide to the future in all its gripping immediacy. We are not out of the wood yet.

   In the long run, the PDP was a child and victim of the circumstances of its provenance and progeny. It was an army arrangement. It was never conceived as a genuine and organic political party or mass movement. You cannot give what you don’t have. The army does not do mass movements, except in battle formations. That is a contradiction in terms and offensively pejorative of its constituting ethos. The army thrives on hierarchy and rigid differentiation. All animals are not equal, and some are even more unequal than others. This is the pecking order of nature itself. Democracy is a product of human evolution away from the state of nature, but even then for democracy to thrive there are certain undemocratic institutions that must be permanently in place.

   Like its NPN forebear which met the same fate in a military putsch, the PDP was not conceived as a conventional political party, but as a gargantuan coalition of big people and power brokers whose influence and authority would be so all-encompassing as to guarantee national stability and ward off the centrifugal forces which have hobbled Nigeria since independence. In the event, the PDP was just a variation of an old theme by very much the same military aristocracy.

On the face of it, it was a patriotic and nationalistic move. You cannot blame the military for being unable to envision a society beyond its own regimental and ideological purview. The Babangida political experimentation with a two-party system threw up a wildcat and a political maverick that could not be relied upon to guarantee military interests which under the long gestation of despotic rule had become national interests. In an attempt to forcibly liquidate the contrary forces, Abacha almost ended up liquidating the whole country.

   Under clever guidance and astute remote control, his successors were not about to make the same mistake. It is easy to forget that General Abubakar Abdulsalaam, in his first broadcast to the nation after General Sani Abacha’s demise, promised solemnly to see the Abacha transition programme to its speedy conclusion. But after being swiftly countermanded by those who put him there, a contrite general announced a new transition programme.

But just as you cannot step into the same river twice, no two historical conjunctures can be completely alike whatever their outward similarities. 1998 was not 1993. If the military hierarchy had bothered to take a peep into the political horoscope, they would have noticed that population-wise, Nigeria was becoming a much younger country and the demographic condition was about to change forever. The relentless forces of globalization had led to a radical democratization of the means of violence as well as the methods of mass enlightenment.

   In the event, the logic that led the military to an Obasanjo also led to the eventual disintegration of the ruling party. Having exhausted its historical and political possibilities, the military hierarchy had to look for a safe pair of hands and a bluff retired general to cover its retreat to the barracks. The PDP opening convention was a classic case of a textbook military operation as the founding fathers of the party were muscled out by sheer military might. Obasanjo famously took his delegates to the convention in a sealed train and tellingly bivouacked outside the city.

   In the circumstances, the organic growth of party and the deepening of the democratic process were left in the hands of a man who by training and temperament is an authoritarian autocrat who had no truck with democratic niceties. When the retired general famously asked the Turaki of Adamawa whether he could obey simple instructions, many thought it was an eccentric joke. Atiku himself would later find out to his political peril that the Owu warlord meant every word.

As for the deluded remaining founding fathers of the PDP, they soon found out that military khaki is not civilian brocade. As Obasanjo went for their political jugular, they began deserting the temple, one by one and two by two as the occasion demanded. The fiery autocrat next turned his caressing attention to the main opposition parties, engineering such momentous fissures that none of them survived the thunderous implosion.

   If the PDP ever had a soul it fled at the Jos convention. In other words, the party died in vitro. It was a mere vehicle for demilitarization which quickly transformed into a fascist terror machine for maintaining a hegemonic stranglehold on the nation. As Obasanjo has brilliantly demonstrated, it takes two to play at the fascist game of hegemonic domination. The same logic of the despotic suborning of a nation which made it possible for a military cabal to impose Obasanjo on the polity also made it possible for Obasanjo himself to impose two successors on the nation without heavens falling.

The game could have gone on for quite some time, but for the dramatic intervention of hubris so overweening that it is beyond the ken of human comprehension. Yet it was a matter of time, with the PDP becoming a stalled behemoth unable to move itself or the country forward and with its monstrous proboscis sucking life out of the nation.

   But only the bold and deeply cunning can call to the bold and deeply cunning. It took an inchoate and incongruous alliance to have the measure of the PDP in the remarkable political plot that brought the unflappable and wonderfully poker-faced Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership of the House of Representatives

At that point in time, political neophytes, particularly the traditional carrion feeders of the South West otherwise known as mainstreamers who did not know where the game was heading ,thought that the ACN had thrown away their pot of amala. But the PDP had been pole-axed and it was only a question of time before the mammoth would crash on the canvas with a resounding thud. As the end approached, even the wily patriarch openly tore his membership card.

There are great lessons to be learnt from the rise and fall of a party that constituted itself into a nuisance and menace to the Nigerian polity. Despite the national euphoria that greeted the dethronement of the ruling party, the future is full of dark forebodings. Unfortunately if care is not taken, the same fate awaits the now dominant party. This is what should concern all patriotic Nigerians.

As it was in the beginning, so it seems at the end of the beginning. Like the PDP, the APC remains an inchoate and incongruous alliance; a mere vehicle to capture power teeming with contrary characters and mutually contradictory elements all in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity. In trying to outsmart and outwit the PDP, it has had to be like the PDP; or at best its veritable doppelganger. In other words, there is no qualitative difference or deep ideological divergence between the two parties.

This is a veritable source of a coming anarchy. The ranking APC hierarchs must now find within themselves the deep reserves of strength and character to give the party a soul and a capacity for organic growth which will drive change and accelerated development for the country as a whole.

   Luckily, they don’t have to look very far for a driving template. The APC already has their two leading chieftains as shining exemplars of the power of a missionary envisioning of a new society. The APC should fuse the pragmatic Democratic Welfarism of a Bola Tinubu with the instinctive messianic populism of a Mohammadu Buhari to evolve a left of centre party whose developmental strides will resonate with Nigerians and the Black Race for generations to come. This is the only way to avoid the fate of the PDP.

First published in April, 2015

May 4, 2025
Shifting cultivation among the Nigerian political class

Oh boy, oh boy, Nigerian politicians are something else. Whilst we are still on the subject of the death and disintegration, has anybody noticed the epic migration going on among the Nigerian political class since the PDP gave up the ghost? We do not know whether this is an attempt to evade death duties or the fear of imminent hunger which has induced the disease known in Northern Nigeria as Sokugo or wandering psychosis among Nigeria’s dissolute and irresponsible political class.

What we know is that since the death of the PDP was announced, there has been a Gadarene rush to jump ship or to flee the sinking hulk of the biggest party in Africa. Hordes of internally displaced political prostitutes, homeless ideological destitute, rank-shifted renegades, politically homeless vagrants and other hobos and yobos of reactionary politics have taken to the road to Bourdillon as if it is a new highway to Babylon. In Yoruba folk parlance, it is known as eni ori ba yo odile. (If you survive, we shall meet at home)

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Among these wastrel wayfarers is a notorious political scoundrel from the old Adamawa province who has betrayed just about anybody in contemporary Nigerian politics including the illustrious MKO even while mouthing meaningless Marxist mumbo-jumbo about pending and impending class conflagration. Another is a fugitive from American justice who seemed to be permanently encamped at the gate of the Lion of Bourdillon. Thrice he had attempted to gain forcible entry and thrice the fat fool has been driven away.

Snooper has a political theory for these unprincipled gyrations and shameless gallivanting. It is taken from soil science. When native farmers exhaust the nutrients of a particular plot of land due to incessant and relentless cultivation, they simply abandon it and move on to the next plot of land until the entire farming space is crying for mercy. We are looking for a worthy son of the soil to marry soil science with political science in a compelling treatise on the habits and habitats of the Nigerian post-colonial political class. So long then for shifting cultivation among contemporary Nigerian politicos.

• First published in April, 2015

May 4, 2025
For FCCPC, another ‘haul’

A barely-known commission floors another tech giant, Meta Platforms; parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram

Even if you are just returning to the country from wherever and you hear the name, Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), you would not be scratching your head trying to figure out what the hell they are talking about. Not anymore.

At least not after the commission’s victories over two giants, MTN Nigeria and Meta Platforms.

Let’s begin with the latter which just lost an appeal it filed against the commission’s $220million fine over discriminatory data practices against Nigerian users at the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) Tribunal.

The FCCPC, according to a statement by its director for corporate affairs, Ondaje Ijagwu, imposed the fine on Meta Platforms, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.

The three-member tribunal panel led by Thomas Okosun, which reviewed the FCCPC ruling not only reaffirmed the fine, it also ordered the tech giant to reimburse the commission the sum of $35,000, being the cost of investigation into the alleged abuses.

Coming less than three months after the commission secured its landmark legal victory against MTN Nigeria, following the Federal High Court, Lagos’s, reaffirmation of its authority to regulate competition and consumer protection across all sectors, including telecommunications, the decisions on the two cases have come to reinforce the importance of the FCCPC in consumer protection and competition matters.

A shareholder in MTN Nigeria, and a legal practitioner, Emeka Nnubia, had dragged the commission to court over its power on telecom matters.

But the court disagreed with his view

saying that Section 90 of the Nigerian Communications Act (NCA) 2003 which grants the NCC jurisdiction over competition matters in the telecom industry cannot be taken in isolation of Section 104 of the FCCPC Act (FCCPA) 2018. Being a more recent law, that, in fact, supersedes any conflicting provisions in the NCA 2003. This means both the FCCPC and NCC share concurrent authority, allowing for a coordinated regulatory approach that prioritises fair competition and consumer protection in the telecoms sector.

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Furthermore, the court reinforced Section 105 of the FCCPA 2018, which mandates collaboration between FCCPC and sector regulators, including the NCC; it said this aligns with global best practices, which allow consumer protection agencies to work alongside industry-specific regulators for comprehensive oversight.

Additionally, the court said that the FCCPC does not need to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with sector regulators before carrying out its own statutory functions but rather, it is the obligation of sector regulators to engage with FCCPC to define how they are to collaborate.

The ruling said the FCCPC had the power to issue a Summons and Request to Produce to MTN Nigeria as part of its ongoing investigation into potential anti-competitive practices, and finally that the FCCPC’s actions were lawful and did not violate any data protection laws, as no personal data was requested.

This was a landmark judgment that was enough to send the appropriate message to any institution about the extent or limits of the FCCPC’s powers.

But it would seem Meta Platforms did not take adequate cognisance of this ruling; otherwise, it would have guided it in its own case against the FCCPC. Although it may be argued that the Meta matter had come up long before the court judgment on the question of the commission’s powers, it still tells us that many institutions, including giants in the land, were either truly oblivious that the commission had such enormous powers or Meta just decided to try its luck for some different result.

According to Ijagwu, “The tribunal resolved Issues 1 to 7 largely in favour of the FCCPC, dismissing the appellants’ objections to the commission’s findings, orders, and legal competence.

“One of the central issues (Issue 3), which alleged a breach of fair hearing, was decided in favour of the commission, with the tribunal affirming that the FCCPC fully discharged its quasi-judicial responsibilities by affording the appellants ample opportunity to respond. The tribunal found no violation of constitutional due process.’’

As a matter of fact, the tribunal pointed out that Meta’s privacy laws were in conflict with Nigerian law, among others.

Many organisations and individuals that had known next-to-nothing about the commission would now be waking up to the reality, not just of its existence but also its raison detre. Indeed, it is good that these giants are the ones involved in the infractions. If they could get the comeuppance that they got, then lesser organisations should know they have no hiding place if they get on the wrong side of the law bothering on consumer protection.

But Nigeria would not be the first place where Meta Platforms would be fined such a huge amount. The European Commission had cause to fine Meta €797.72 million as recently as last year, for breaching EU antitrust rules.

Hear Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy, on the fine: ‘’Today we fine Meta €797.72 million for abusing its dominant positions in the markets for personal social network services and for online display advertising on social media platforms. Meta tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers. It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. Meta must now stop this behaviour.’’

Before this, specifically in May 2023, Meta was fined a record 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States, in a major ruling against the social media company for violating European Union data protection rules.

So, the fines are usually hefty; it’s not only about Nigeria, because Meta is also a heavy revenue spinner. A company that wants to operate in another country must be ready to abide by the laws of the host country instead of wanting to impose its own laws on others.

So, rather than worry about the ‘huge’ fine, we should worry about how it would be spent in case Meta appealed and lost.

Of course, as in the Nigerian experience, Meta has always defended its actions. It, for instance, described the EU punishment thus: “This isn’t just about a fine,” said Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan. “The commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service.”

If all of these are happening in countries that are well structured, some with their anti-trust laws, we can only pity the consumer in Nigeria that has been robbed of his own crown a long time ago and is, in fact, still existing at the mercy of all manner of producers. From telecommunication to banking, digital broadcasting, air travels, products and services in virtually all sectors, Nigerian consumers face daily exploitation. What makes it very disturbing is the fact that it appears as if the practice has official stamp on it, in spite of complaints from the exploited consumers.

But the government is not unaware of this. That was what informed its setting up of regulatory agencies in every sector. Thus we have

NCC for telecoms, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission Forum (NERC Forum) for the electricity distribution companies (DisCos), the Central Bank of Nigeria regulates the banking sector, etc.

But more often than not, their effects are hardly felt, sometimes due to corruption and often because they lack the capacity to carry out their onerous responsibilities.

For instance, no matter how determined NERC Forum is, it cannot handle 30 per cent of the complaints in the power sector for the simple fact that most of the players there are too steeped in iniquities or unfair practices, to repent. The result is that the forum is overwhelmed. The same applies to the telecoms and other sectors.

This is where the intervention of an organisation like the FCCPC is important.

Mercifully the commission now has a tested technocrat with the will to succeed at the helm.

It is often said that a tree cannot make a forest. In other words, a single individual might not be able to single-handedly turn things around in an establishment. But an individual with focus, determination and the requisite idea showing the way can make a lot of difference. We have that in an Ishaq Oloyede who has opened our eyes to the fact that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that he heads is not the desert that we thought it was before he got there. Today, the Federal Government smiles to the bank every year, with the billions remitted by Oloyede’s JAMB.

Since July, last year, that Bello came on board as executive vice chairman/ chief executive officer, he has similarly been trying to reposition the FCCPC that many people and institutions should know like the lines on their palms, but do not know. If ever they knew, we would not be having giants like MTN and Meta Platforms seeing it as a meddlesome interloper in a matter that it has primary jurisdiction.

True, the two major cases recently resolved in the commission’s favour predate Bello’s appointment. But then, that the commission continued to pursue them to the very end symbolised his commitment to the cause of ensuring fair competition and consumer protection.

The matters were concluded in his time because he supported the cause. We have had many instances where similar matters were surreptitiously swept under the carpet by some bosses in his shoes. We have had instances where even when such matters had already opened in court, the people expected to bring them to conclusion entered “nolle prosecui”. And that would be the end of the story. This is especially so with mega establishments like MTN and Meta Platforms that have the money to fight or play with.

Not only has Bello supported the cases since his assumption of duties, he has also held workshops, road shows, etc. to publicise the commission’s activities, enlighten both producers and consumers on their rights and privileges as well as register the FCCPC in the consciousness of Nigerians.

But there is still room for improvement. Consumers should be encouraged to continue reporting instances of poor service delivery or exploitative practices through the FCCPC’s official channels. But these channels should be well publicised for effectiveness.

Nigerian consumers have since lost their crown. The way things are, they do not even have caps on their heads. Ask electricity consumers without meters; they will tell you the DisCos do not respect any such caps on billing issued by the regulatory agency!

There is no doubt that a well-funded and equipped FCCPC will facilitate result that would gladden the hearts of Nigeria’s hapless consumers who are perpetually in the firm grips of shylocks who behave like pigs that you can hardly differentiate the first from the last born, as they all play in the mud.

I commend the FCCPC’s teams responsible for these victories for diligently prosecuting the cases.

May 4, 2025
The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (XVIII)

For the last hundred years, at least from the end of the First World War, the country that has flown the flag of capitalism from the highest mast has been without question, the USA. Some would even argue that the US had ruled the capitalist world for much longer than that. Right until the outbreak of the Great War, the case for which country set the pace for capitalism could very well be made for Britain and not only because all that business of the industrial production of commodities started in Britain. It could also be for the evidence provided by the British empire to which 40% of the global population at the time owed some form of alliance. Britain at that time was clearly the leader in terms of her imperialistic credentials. And as you know, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Putting all those aside, the leading capitalist nation in the period after the war in terms of the sheer value of goods produced was the USA. That position has not been seriously challenged by any other capitalist country or society up till now.

The colonisation of North America from Britain started rather inauspiciously towards the end of the sixteenth century. The first of the colonies that were planted in America was set up in 1607 but they really did not show much promise. Indeed, they were failures when judged purely on economic terms. They however contrived to survive the harsh conditions of their new environment on the eastern seaboard of North America. These colonies obtained charters from the English crown which made them the foundation colonies of what was to become the massive British empire from which they were only detached after an eight year war which the Americans call the Revolutionary war.

Those early colonies depended solely on agriculture for their subsistence and they were hardly surviving. The only colony that seemed to have an economic future was Virginia which was able to get by through the cultivation of tobacco. It is through this exercise that the world was introduced to the filthy and enormously unhealthy habit of smoking or chewing tobacco. Thus the rise of capitalism cannot be disassociated from drug use as was the case with opium which the Chinese were forced to adopt to their detriment at the point of bayonets and bombardment from warships. The first drug lords in the world were acting on behalf of capitalism.

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Virginia and indeed other colonies eventually came good but not before slaves were introduced from Africa. The point needs to be made that the first Africans to be landed in Jamestown in 1619 were not slaves. Tobacco is a labour intensive crop and before 1619 indentured servants were imported from Europe to work on tobacco fields. These servants were contracted to work for a defined length of time before being set free to become equal members of the society with their former masters. It was natural therefore that the first Africans to land in Jamestown were treated as indentured servants. They worked side by side on the basis of equality with white indentured servants with whom they must have produced some chocolate coloured offspring later on. However, as the demand for labour increased, the status of Africans was changed through legislation and by 1650, to be black in America was to be a slave, to be owned as property by other people. Furthermore, it was an inheritable condition to be passed down from one generation to another in perpetuity if possible. That arrangement became the foundation upon which all future American prosperity was built. Slavery was to last for more than two hundred years and given the experience of black people in America today, a case can be be made that there are still vestiges of slavery that must be removed from contemporary American society. Without giving black Americans what is theirs by right, that society will forever be one in crisis.

By the time that the Revolutionary war broke out in 1775, there were thirteen colonies on the Atlantic eastern seaboard of North America. Before the rebellion which led to war, the colonies were governed from London and the colonised people had no voice in their own governance leading them to question the justification for that arrangement. Eventually, the contrasting attitudes of the two sides in this argument precipitated the war which the British lost. Very early on in the war, representatives from each of the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia in June 1776 to draw up the instrument of separation from Britain and the declaration of independence of the country they agreed to call the United States of America. Although a committee was set up to produce the desired document, it was decided that the draft was to be solely written by Thomas Jefferson representing the State of Virginia. The draft, which can only be described as the result of exalted inspiration, was ratified by Congress on the fourth of July 1776. As soon as that declaration was signed, a new nation was born even though the war of independence was not won until 1783. As a footnote to this discussion the bravery shown by all the signers of that declaration must be acknowledged. Had their side lost the war, every last one of them would have been hunted down, tried, tortured and then hanged for treason. They held their collective breath for the next seven years as the war which decided their fate dragged on. They were all men who were willing to risk everything including their very lives for freedom. Ironically, many of them including Thomas Jefferson were holding thousands of human beings as slaves. To compound his perfidy, Jefferson fathered no less than six children with Sally Heming, a slave he took into his bed when she was fourteen years old. All those children were slaves on their father’s plantation. And they retained their status as slaves until they turned twenty -one. They were then freed according to the pact which their mother extracted from Jefferson before the beginning of their sexual relationship.

At the time of independence, the USA was no more than a rural backwater, a typical shit-hole country powered by slaves who were rated somewhat higher than mules. They were not even regarded as being remotely human by the framers of the constitution. They, who confidently asserted that all men are born equal and imbued with certain inalienable rights. All those rights which were brutally denied to black folk. That republic did not start off on the right note and has been singing off key since then, at least as far as fundamental human rights for blacks are concerned.

The USA was not a rich country and quite probably would have remained so for a very long time. In 1803 however, fortune smiled on her when her geographical size was doubled practically overnight through the Louisiana purchase from France. This purchase, which has been described, and quite rightly so, as the biggest real estate deal the world has ever seen can be regarded as having set the USA on the path of prosperity. If anything, it allowed the people who occupied the original thirteen states to spread out and occupy a continent, conquering the earth in every which way as they went along. To create a country which was bound on either side by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, they seized what are now the states of California, Texas and New Mexico after a war with Mexico together with the payment of nearly 20 million dollars to Mexico thus securing the present-day external borders of the USA. What went on next within this vast territory was to secure the internal borders through a systematic purge of the remnants of indigenous Indian tribes who were labouring under the misconception that the land and the fullness of it belonged to them. Today, they are herded into scattered arid portions of land into which they were pushed by a relentless US Army. This was the model for South Africa when they created the so called Bantustans into which the majority blacks were to be squeezed.

The Industrial revolution was brought from Britain to America in the head of Samuel Slater in the closing years of the eighteenth century. It was illegal for any Brish citizen to facilitate the transfer of technology from Britain at the time. But the intrepid Mr. Slater simply memorised the entire blueprint of a textile factory and brought it in his head to the USA. Capitalism arrived in America as a crime. That crime has been compounded over and over again since then.

The American landscape has turned out to be especially fertile for the growth of industrialisation. It stretches across four time zones from east to west and from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico to the south. Virtually all the raw material requirement for the industrial production of any commodity can be found somewhere in the USA. From around the middle of the nineteenth century, immigrants poured in from Europe in a seemingly unending stream to occupy the huge expanse of land which was being opened up for human occupation and exploitation. European immigrants poured in from across the Atlantic Ocean whilst the Chinese and Japanese immigrants landed from across the Pacific. Following the end of slavery in 1865, the immigrants from Asia provided the cheap labour with which the country was built. For example the labourers who built the first transcontinental railroad tracks from the west were mainly Chinese whilst predominantly Irish gangs laid down the lines from the east. The Irish, being Catholic and escaping starvation from their own country were regarded as only just racially superior to Asians. The immigrants came to America to make a new life for themselves and were prepared to work very hard to enhance their status within the country both social and economic. They were therefore a ready work force as well as providing a ready market for the products of their industry. This made the USA a capitalist paradise which did not need to get herself entangled in imperialistic adventures, at least initially. But, as early as 1823, the infant USA had attempted to lay down the foundation of an empire in her backyard.

May 4, 2025
Taking the wind out of Benjamin Kalu’s indigeneship bill

It is not the intention of the columnist to stoke any ethnic particularities in the essay below. On the contrary, I will be exposing the very underpinnings of Hon Benjamin Kalu’s Indigeneship Bill, a bill he coyly presented as one to unite Nigeria. Nigerians must simply open their eyes.

Hon. Benjamin Okezie Kalu, CON, of the All Progressive Congress(APC), is an Igbo politician and current Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives.

He represents the Bende federal constituency of Abia State.

It is, therefore, not surprising that he is the sponsor of the Indigeneship Bill now before the House of Representatives.

The Bill seeks to grant indigene status to individuals who have resided in a state for 10 years or married a native for the same length of time.

It is deftly proposed as a progressive bill intended to cohere the country like the National Youth Corps which mandates Nigerian University graduates, below a certain age, to serve for one year in a part of the country other than theirs as a way of fostering inter – ethnic unity in the country. But nothing can be further from the truth.

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Given Igbo’s rather tiny piece of territory which, besides its miniscule size is landlocked, and thus impedes their truly industrious proclivities, they are spread so thin all over the country that there is hardly a community in the entire country where you will not find an Igbo community. Such is their gregariousness!

While this in itself is not bad, Igbo’s inexplanable, and totally uncontrolled, desire to own things which belong to others, especially land, is the elephant in the room.

This abhorrent Igbo characteristic tend to make others dislike them because they demonstrate it wherever they sojourn. But do not take my word alone for that allegation.

Instead, see below, its typical and vivid demonstration in a WhatsApp dialogue involving some Igbos and moderated by one Okonkwo. It is only one of several, concerning how they must expropriate Yoruba land, especially Lagos, which they see as a ‘No Man’s Land’, and for which they would kill without batting an eyelid.

THEIR BOAST.

Ndigbo Will Conquer and Rule Oduduwa Republic:

“We must take Lagos. We must. Those who want to keep it are fighting themselves.Those of us who want to take it must fight harder.

The people who want to keep it are threatening. We that want to take it must be prepared for that threat.

There”s no new thing they are going to do now in Lagos. We already know what they will do. Therefore, we must prepare ourselves in large numbers …

Because if we do not take Lagos, I do not know if you can still stay in Lagos.

To stay in Lagos, you have to take Lagos, to remain there we must win Lagos; to do that your business, for your parents to go to that church, for you to enter that estate, to enter that bus (Marwa) we just must take Lagos – (Mind you, they don”t even want to win, but TAKE Lagos).

… the only way is to defeat them; so we can lock them up.

The only way to defeat them is to send them to jail”.

Who will believe these are the words, and plans, of TOTAL STRANGERS IN YORUBALAND, a totally foreign land?

Not only that, the speaker was hectoring in a stentorian voice reminiscent only of Ojukwu’s effete boasts before he led millions of them to their early graves in the Biafran war, and promptly fled abroad.

But that is not all to their plan to consummate which Hon Benjamin Kalu is now ferociously at work in the Peoples’ House.

So they went on:

“We will join Afenifere and soon be part of the powerhouses that will be eligible to be crowned Obas.

We will get married to the daughters of Oduduwa , build mansions in their towns and villages and only visit our country home in the land of the rising sun, once a year, as usual.

Gradually we will turn Oduduwa Republic into one of the most ethnically mixed countries in the world”.

Can a war plan be more detailed?

What Igbos are saying, put simply, is that they would do anything to TAKE Lagos state – rig, burn, kill etc, come the next election.

This is where, and why members of the National Assembly must be extremely careful, and not permit themselves be hoodwinked by any seeming dogooder/s.

They already have their job cut out for them in the matter of the Indigeneship Bill.

What all these poignantly remind me of is my article of 16 February, ’25 which, for lack of space, I shall only briefly summarise below.

Titled: Non – Indigenes Should Be Barred From Contesting Governorship, Senate, House Of Representatives and State House Elections, I wrote:

If for the sake of equity amongst Nigerian states, representation in the senate is set at 3 members per state, and constituency,

based on population is the basis for allocating the number of Reps seats a state can have, why are non- indigenes allowed to contest for these positions outside their state of origin or geo political zone?

I consider this practice grossly unfair in a country where, for instance, some states in the Southeast geo- political zone would not accept a cleric, even of the same Igbo ethnic stock, as their parish clergy – where so appointed by the Pope himself – if he comes from outside their state.This we have seen severally.

It could, in fact, be worse as happened when the entire indigenous peoples of Aba Ngwa not only rose, like one man, to reject a non- indgene as the Aba Mayor, but dared their governor, Alex Otti, to dare try – see Vanguard October 19, 2023.

These are the same people who come loaded with money, from all kind of sources, to try everything to contest elections in Lagos.

I could barely hold myself when this past week, on television, Muiz Banire,a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, glibly described this practice as signifying political freedom.

What manner of political freedom? Why should this freedom, applicable to the geese, not also apply equally to the gander? Or where in Igbo land can a Yoruba man contest a senate seat?

Whoever likes may call me an ethnic bigot but where, in all honesty, has this been allowed to happen in the East?

During the 2023 elections Peter Obi, not only ensured that Igbos predominated his party executives in both the North and the West, many of the party’s candidates for election, all over Nigeria, were Igbo.

You can only imagine where a politician from Aboh Mbaise LGA (Imo state), representing Amuwo -Odofin(Lagos state) in the House of Representatives, would consider first for a project between his Imo state and Lagos?

If this is truly freedom, as Banire put it, then it should apply equally everywhere in the country.

The National Assembly must move, with all speed, therefore, to abrogate the misnomer.

It could, in future, be reversed when all Nigerians consider themselves brothers and sisters enough to jettison primordial considerations, the type these Igbos wanting to capture Lagos, and jail its citizens have abundantly shown us in their dialogue.

In Nigeria, unlike in the U.S, the UK or the West in general, primary loyalty is to one’s place of birth as well as to one’s people, while scant attention is paid, if at all, to people from far fetched areas regardless of any domicile status.

Kalu’s bill should nicely be returned to him while the National Assembly proceeds, proactively, to make laws prohibiting non – indigenes of geo-political zones from contesting elections, in states where they are merely domiciled, but neither know well nor love.

Igbos should be encouraged to go and develop their land of the rising sun and vote, and be voted for, there.

As Gloria Adebajo – Frazer put in a well written piece on the subject:”The bill poses a serious threat to Nigeria’s federal structure, and inter-ethnic coexistence.

It reopens ideological wounds from the past, threatens ancestral sovereignty, and risks sparking political and ethnic conflict under the guise of inclusion.

Nigeria’s identity as a federation is rooted in the recognition of its diverse ethnic nationalities. Indigeneity is not a matter of administrative convenience—it is a sacred cultural and historical bond between people and land.

Granting this status based on mere length of stay or marriage undermines this bond and sets the stage for future conflict.

This bill will not bring harmony. Instead, it will pit communities against one another.

Allowing non-indigenes to vote or run for office in states where they are not ancestrally connected would lead to serious political complications. Non-indigenes should vote in their states of origin, where their cultural and historical identity lie. To do otherwise is to create a situation where outsiders may legislate or govern communities they neither fully understand nor belong to, leading to resentment, unrest, and even violence”.

A word should be enough for our wise men and women of the National Assembly as Nigeria already has far too many challenges for them to allow one Kalu, cladenstinely fighting a primordial ethnic cause, to add more.

May 4, 2025