Category: Lawal Ogienagbon

IT WAS a problem waiting for him even before he assumed office on May 29. One way or the other, he has to address the matter, especially as the governors are speaking with one voice on it. Many of the governors are hard pressed; their states are facing a cash crunch never before experienced. They cannot pay salaries – in a state or two, workers have not been paid for 11 months. It sounds incredible, but it is true. This is the new face of the Civil Service, a sector where many scramble for job because of the security..

Last Tuesday, the governors poured their hearts out to President Muhammadu Buhari on what they have been going through. As chief executives of their states, they have to make provisions for capital and recurrent expenditure. For now, many of the states do not have the wherewithal to execute capital projects. Is it a state that cannot pay salary – a recurrent expenditure – that will think of embarking on capital projects, such as  building roads and hospitals? Where will the money come from in these lean times?

Didn’t the Federal and state governments have a contingency plan for a day like this? They did. In order to avoid this kind of problem, both tiers of government resolved to establish the Excess Crude Account (ECA). The ECA was created to hold the excess from the price of crude oil, which is the benchmark for our budget.  For instance, if the budget is based on $65 per barrel and the price of oil in the international market is $80 or $90, the excess, which will be either $15 or $25, will automatically go to the ECA. It was tagged by our economic experts as saving for the ‘’rainy day’’.

Ironically, it is raining today in many states, but the cash in the ECA cannot save them. They cannot draw on the ECA because the account is overdrawn. There is virtually nothing left in the account to bail out the distressed states. $2.078 billion is said to be left in the ECA. Because he was on his way out, former President Goodluck Jonathan chose to ignore the states’ cries for help. Was it that he ignored them or that he could not do anything in the circumstance because his administration was in the same morass? Under him, the government was borrowing to pay workers, because unlike the states, it had the facilities for obtaining such loans.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost. The Federal and state governments are in dire straits. Though the Federal Government’s case may be a bit better because it has what it takes to weather the storm, but the same cannot be said of the states, many of which are today seeking a bail out from Buhari to meet their obligations. Did the states find themselves in this quagmire because of their  financial recklessness? How come the states cannot today find succour in the ECA, which we were made to believe would be the cure-all for such financial distress?

The problem is the ECA was killed before the states ran into trouble. It was killed instalmentally by the Federal and state governments through ad-hoc withdrawals. Whenever they ran short of cash, they ran to the ECA for bail out. See where that has led the states. Since ECA is a political arrangement, the Federal and state governments should have been more prudent in utilising the funds; they weren’t because they saw it as  free money. What did they use the cash for? Did they not use the money to plan for their states’ future?

Does it not defeat the purpose of ECA if states cannot draw on it when in dire need? Yet, the ECA’s mandate is to act as a stabilisation fund, close budget deficits that are products of oil price volatility and to potentially fund domestic infrastructure investments. The falling oil price exposed the ECA’s Achilles’ heels. If oil price had continued to rise, the Federal and state governments would have continued to live a false life, believing that the good times will continue to roll. Where did all the money collected from the ECA go? The Federal and state governments should be able to tell us what they did with the billions of dollars they shared before the distressed states can ask for bail out.

Where do they want Buhari to get money from? The same ECA, which Jonathan and his Minister of Finance Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said was empty because everything had been shared? As the saying goes, you cannot have your cake and eat it. Having exhausted the ECA, the states should devise means of generating funds instead of running to the Federal Government cap in hand, begging for a life-line. I pity the states, but honestly, they cannot be absolved from the misspending of the ECA by the Jonathan administration. They cannot; they are as guilty as that government.

The states should not burden Buhari with their cash crisis early in the life of his administration. They should allow the administration to settle down and face the huge task ahead. The president has his own problems, which he inherited from Jonathan; so we should let him face squarely the task of revamping the economy and not tie him down with the mess the states created for themselves. ‘’With a virtually empty treasury’’, which Buhari said he inherited from his predecessor, where do the states expect him to get money to give them? Ask the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to print money and cause hyper-inflation?

The lesson in all of this is that we should not lend ourselves to illegality. Was there any need for ECA? The answer is no because the Constitution in Section 80 (1) provides for a Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) as a special purpose vehicle for keeping excess funds. And the CRF could only be drawn from with the National Assembly’s approval. This provision may have been made to avoid an abuse of the fund. But the Federal and state governments found a way to beat the provision by creating ECA, which they could draw from at will. But see who is crying today! Unfortunately, our poor workers are being made to pay the price for their leaders’ profligacy.

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari has been busy in the past few weeks, attending to urgent business outside the country. Few days after returning from the G7 Summit in Germany, he left for the African Union Summit in South Africa. As he concluded his visit to South Africa on Tuesday, the President spoke again on his determination to turn things round back home. He vowed to kill corruption because ‘’some articulate writers have said if we do not kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria. This APC administration intends to kill corruption in Nigeria. We will do our best, I assure you’’. He spoke from the heart. He touched on the touchy allegation of jailing people arbitrarily when he was military Head of State between 1983 and 1985. He had shied away from speaking on the issue during his campaign. In South Africa, he dumped politics to address the matter frontally.

‘’As Head of State, I went straight to detention for three-and-a-half years; so those who accused me of locking them up, I too have been locked up, so what?’’ Knowing that governance is serious business, Buhari said: ‘’How I wished I became Head of State when I was a governor, just a few years as a young man. Now at 72, there is a limit to what I can do. But what brought me… I think mainly is because I love this country…’’ How I wish the President will speak more from the heart. It is by so doing that the real Buhari that we know will remain true to himself and the country.

POLITICIANS can do anything for power; some of them can sell an arm and a leg to achieve their ambition. It is good to be ambitious, but when the ambition becomes inordinate it turns to another thing. This is what we saw play out in the National Assembly on Tuesday during the inauguration of the Senate and House of Representatives following the proclamation of President Muhammadu Buhari in line with Section 64 (3) of the Constitution.

It was an event many Nigerians had looked forward to because of the acrimony among All Progressives Congress (APC) Senators- and members of House of Representatives (MoHR)-elect on who should be the presiding officers in both chambers. Among the Senators-elect, the choice was between Ahmed Lawan and Bukola Saraki and among the MoHR-elect, it was a straight fight between Femi Gbajabiamila and Yakubu Dogara. The battle for the Senate Presideny and House Speaker was thrown open when Buhari said he had no preferred candidates. Then the party also said it had not zoned the posts to any part of the country.

Perhaps, it would have been better if the posts were zoned. This would have saved the party the drama witnessed on the floors of both chambers on Tuesday as the Saraki and Dogara loyalists defied it to ensure that their candidates became Senate President and House Speaker. Of all the strange things in the world, the Senate, in connivance with the Saraki group, voted Senator Ike Ekweremadu, a member of the minority Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as Deputy Senate President – an absurdity that never happened in the 16 years PDP was in the majority in the National Assembly.

By returning Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President, a post he held for eight years, between 2007 and 2015, the Saraki-led senators not only played bad politics, but also sold their party’s  birthright, so to say, to occupy that post. Even when PDP MoHR courted the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in 2011 to get Aminu Tambuwal elected as Speaker of the 7th Assembly, they never sold their right to take the seat of Deputy Speaker to ACN and CPC, so why should the reverse be the case for Saraki to become Senate President? With only 12 APC members to PDP’s 45 in the Senate when it was inaugurated, the minority might have picked the Senate Presidency, if it so wished if not for its understanding with the Saraki group.

Having had their way, the Saraki and Dogara groups now have their party, which has condemned their actions, to contend with, except if they are saying they no longer belong to APC. The Constitution highly esteems parties, especially in the contest for power. No candidate can contest election if he is not fielded by a party; so the party  serves as a platform for contestants to achieve their dreams. The 1999 Constitution specifically states that anyone interested in elective office must be ‘’a member of a political party and sponsored by that party’’. What this means is that all those holding elective offices today whether  as president, governor, senator, MoHR, et al were sponsored by parties.

They are, therefore, bound by the rules of their parties. They cannot be above their parties; whatever their interests may be, such must be subsumed under the parties’.

Being the vehicles in which elected officers rode into offices, parties owe it a duty  to oversee their activities because as the saying goes, the party is supreme.

Before the inauguration of the National Assembly, APC tried to put its house in order by holding a straw poll to pick its candidates for Senate Presidency and House Speakership. Senators Lawan and George Akume emerged Senate President and Deputy Senate President candidates. Gbajabiamila and Mohammed Monguno were elected Speaker and Deputy Speaker candidates. Saraki and Dogara  kicked, insisting that National Assembly members have the sole right to choose those to lead them.

They may have a point there since that is a settled matter in the Constitution. But should they have gone against their party on which crest they got to power?

The answer is no. They should not have brought their party to ridicule like that on the floors of both chambers. There is nothing wrong in standing up to your party, but where the party has made a pronouncement on an issue, it should become binding on all members. A true member is known by his willingness to abide by party rules and pronouncements, no matter how bitter they may be  So, it is a clear case of affront for those members to have colluded with their PDP friends to elect  Saraki and Dogara as Senate President and House Speaker in defiance of their party’s directive.

Is there any joy for the recalcitrant APC senators and  House members;  and their party in what happened on the floors of both chambers on Tuesday? There is nothing to gloat about it because give or take APC is the loser. Sadly, the only beneficiaries are its members who became Senate President, Speaker and Deputy Speaker.

APC is not hiding its displeasure with these people whose actions it described as unacceptable and the highest level of indiscipline and treachery. ‘’Senator Saraki and Hon. Dogara are not the candidates of the APC and a majority of its National Assembly members-elect for the positions of Senate President and House Speaker.

‘’The party is supreme and its interest is superior to that of its individual members.There can be no higher level of treachery, disloyalty and insincerity within any party’’, its spokesman, Alhaji Lai Mohammed said. Where did the Saraki and Dogara groups get the courage to do what they did? Did they do it because they see themselves as untouchables? What do their actions portend for the party? Will the development not also  set other members against the party, if they are allowed to get away with their actions? Were they emboldened by the president’s statement that he would not interfere in the selection of National Assembly leaders and would work with whoever emerges?

In a statement after Saraki’s and Dogara’s emergence, he reiterated his position, saying he would have wished that the process followed the dictates of the party. To the president, ‘’a constitutional process has somewhat occurred’’ , whether or not the party’s directive was followed. And the president, it appears, is ready to live with it. Where then does this leave the party, which has threatened to sanction the ‘offending’ lawmakers? Should it go ahead and sanction them? Or will it take a cue from Buhari and let sleeping dogs lie?

What has happened has happened. I pray that APC will handle the fallout of the National Assembly’s inauguration with care to avoid a major internal schism, which could cost it a lot. Otherwise, it will create the impression that it cannot manage its electoral success.

WHAT a time to come to power! Some will say that it is a wrong time; others will contend otherwise and argue that you knew what was at stake before you sought the highest office in the land. No matter which side of the divide one is, the truth is that not many will pray to be in your shoes, at least under the present circumstance. I do not envy you for the cross you will carry from May 29 when you formally take office. I call it a cross because you are coming to power at a time that nothing works in our country.

Things are so bad that many are wondering where you will start from. There is a lot to be done and considering the legendary impatience of your compatriots, you will have your hands full from day one. Permit me to say that a nation as blessed as ours should not be where it is today. Our country should be at the top, considering our natural endowments, but painfully the reverse is the case. We are on the lowest rung of the Human Development Index (HDI).

The question is: how well have we managed our God given wealth? Rather than use these resources for the development of our common patrimony, our leaders have been diverting them to personal use.

I will be putting it mildly to say that you will be inheriting a mess.  Our people know that you are one president that will be coming to power with the odds so stacked against you. No president in our history ever came to power with things so bad like this. Even in 1983 when you took over power from President Shehu Shagari, things were not as bad as they are now. Compared to what we are seeing now, things were far, far better then, even with the profligacy of the Shagari administration. We said the Shagari administration was corrupt. Ha-ha! Nigerians will eat their word with what is happening right before their eyes now.

Everything points to a hard time for you in office; not the kind of hard time outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan predicted for himself and his aides after their exit. Yours will be the hard time of meeting the expectations of our long suffering people, who through thick and thin, absorbed all that was thrown at them by the government. They were asked to tighten their belts; they did. But those in government slackened theirs to have more room to stash away their loot. This is why today nothing is working. Security has collapsed. The economy is in tatters; electricity has gone kaput; fuel, especially petrol and kerosine, is scarce despite the billions of naira spent on subsidy; education is in a shambles. The real sector, the economic live wire of a nation, is comatose; agriculture is ensnared in the politics of waivers.

These, indeed, are not the best of times for anybody, not even a lion heart like you,  to take power. The picture of the economy painted by All Progressives Congress (APC) governors  when they met with you last May 5 is scary. We knew all along that things were bad; we didn’t know that they were that bad until the governors spoke. Outgoing Minister of Finance/Coordinating Minister of the Economy Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who had all along rated the economy high, also finally came clean with us by stating the obvious : the economy is in doldrums. Why did it take her this long to confirm that ‘’Nigeria is facing a serious cash crunch’’.

Because of the severity of the problem, she said, the country was forced to borrow N473 billion to finance recurrent expenditure. Such borrowings, as even a lay man would know, is not expected to yield any returns. Rather, the government will offset the debts at a very high interest rate. It is simple economics that you do not borrow to pay salaries. But that is what the federal and state governments have been doing, to prevent a collapse of the public/civil service because of the non-payment of salaries. Despite these huge borrowings, the Federal Government and many of the states are still owing workers’ salaries.

So, you can understand where the governors were coming from when they appealed to you to come to their aid when you resume duty next week. ‘’One of the issues of concern to all of us’’, said APC Governorship Forum Chairman and Imo State Governor Rochas Okorocha, ‘’is the state of the economy, which is already in a bad shape and we have come to notify the incoming president of the challenges ahead of him. As it stands today, most states of the federation have not been able to pay salaries and even the Federal Government has not paid April salaries”.

To Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria got into this financial mess because of the falling oil price. She forgot to add that government’s inefficiency is also a contributory factor. The solution, Okonjo-Iweala claims, is for Nigeria to sell off some of its assets or use them to borrow money to manage the economy. Knowing how Nigerians will react to such a move, Okonjo-Iweala said the decision has been left to you to take. So, if you decide to take her advice, you may take off on the note of borrowing to sustain the government and then run into trouble with Nigerians, who will not applaud such move at all.

If the economy is bad, as you well know, everything is bad about a country. A country is as good as its economy. For rebasing our gross domestic product (GDP), which merely enhanced the basket of goods and services in the economy without any attendant benefit to the people, Okonjo-Iweala attempted to pass it off  as an economic masterstroke when she knew it was not. If the rebasing actually amounted to anything, we will not be complaining that we are broke today, while  a whole Federal Government cannot pay salaries. So, where is the gain of their much vaunted rebasing?

It is clear that what you are going to inherit is a debased and not a rebased economy. The importance of the economy to any nation cannot be overemphasised. But it is sad that you are being handed a weak economy. Even though Nigerians know that, what they are interested in is how you will grow it and make life better for them after all these years of waste. They are not ready for excuses on why things cannot be made better within a short time of your assuming office.

It is just unfortunate that you are coming to power when the people’s  patience has been so taxed by those who did not mean well for our country. Please, do not see their impatience (which should be expected though) as antagonism; it is not. It is an expression of their frustrations with the system over the years.

You do not have anything to fear because once you start well, you can be sure of winning over the people, who have for long being taken for granted.  We look up to you to make the difference in our lives  and bring the much desired change to our country. May God help you.

WHEN WE do well, we are ready to shout it to high heavens. We are only being human by doing so. No man excels in what he does and wants to hide it, the same way that we light a candle and put it on a stand and not under a bushel. But when we are wrong, we look for all manner of excuses to keep the blame away from ourselves. In such a situation, we start to look for scape-goats. We are never in the wrong; it is the other person that is always wrong.

Our politicians know  how to play the blame game, especially after losing elections. Without batting an eyelid, they can reel out over one million reasons why they lost; who is responsible for that loss and how the loss was planned before the election. We have seen that happening in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) since its woeful loss in the last elections. Its national leader, President Goodluck Jonathan, too has not been able to restrain himself from bellyaching over the outcome of the elections.

Despite being hailed for conceding defeat to President-elect Muhammadu Buhari and calling to congratulate him, it is becoming clearer by the day that he may not have been that sincere after all. The outgoing president did what he did to fulfil all righteousness and be seen by the world as a true democrat. Dr Jonathan would have passed the test if he had stayed the course and remained loyal to self and country. You cannot be a true democrat by words only, it must also reflect in your deeds.

The president’s actions in the past few weeks leave much to be desired. He has been behaving like someone who is afraid. It all started after the president-elect said he would revisit the alleged $20 billion missing oil money for  which the accounting firm of PricewaterCoopers (PwC) probed the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). After receiving the probe report, the Jonathan administration told the nation that the firm found that no money was missing. PwC, it said, directed that NNPC should pay $1.4 billion into public coffers.

This was all we were told until Buhari said he would revisit the matter. As soon as he spoke, Jonathan ordered that the report be released. What Nigerians saw in that report showed that the government was not honest when it initially briefed them about the report. The government then told us what it felt we should know and did not give us the entire gamut of the report in which the firm complained, among others, of not being allowed access to certain documents vital to its assignment. So, from the beginning, PwC was hamstrung in carrying out the task because the government only availed it of documents that will not incriminate the administration or those close to it.

In such a situation, what was there for PwC to probe? Nothing because those who ordered the probe knew what the outcome would be even before the exercise, which as it were, has turned out to be a waste of time and scarce public resources. All hope is not lost, with Buhari’s promise to revisit the issue. The president is, however,  yet to overcome his fears of what the future holds for him. At every opportunity, he involuntarily states his fears, letting us into his mind. The president and his men need not be afraid if they have done well. Let them take a critical look at themselves and tell Nigerians in all honesty and sincerity that they served us wholeheartedly.

They cannot do that because they had other motives for coming to power. This is why they are jittery on the eve of their exit. The President and his men cannot dictate the terms on which they should be judged after their exit. That is not possible. It is left for the incoming government to decide how to look at the outgoing administration based on what it claims to have done. If it has served the Nigerian people well, then it has nothing to fear, but if otherwise, it has questions to answer. Let Jonathan for one minute put himself in the position of the incoming President Buhari, will he be happy if his outgoing predecessor were to be talking the way he is now doing?

If Jonathan truly wishes his incoming successor to succeed as he has been telling the world, he would mind his language. There are things best left unsaid during a transition like to avoid drawing  attention to one’s self.

I do not understand why Dr Jonathan spoke the way he did at last  Sunday’s farewell service for him at the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), Cathedral Church of Advent, Life Camp, Gwarimpa, Abuja. He said he would be persecuted. By who and for what? He did not say. He was merely specious in his submissions while trying to win the public sympathy he does not deserve. ”For ministers and aides who served with me, I sympathise with them; they will be persecuted. And they must be ready for that persecution. To my ministers, I wish you what I wish myself. They will have hard times; and we will all have hard times. Our ways will be rough”, the president said.

Just as he has been doing in the past few weeks, he is just being preemptive of what may happen to him after he leaves office. What he seems to prefer  is for Buhari to take over from him on May 29 and keep quiet as if all is well, but Nigerians know that all is not well. If Buhari does not ask Jonathan  questions after coming to power, then he should be prepared to face the wrath of Nigerians, who are eagerly waiting to see many in this outgoing administration pay for the harm they have done to our country. Whether Jonathan likes it or not, the matter is beyond Buhari. It is between him and the Nigerian people, who are interested in the record of his administration. Since they cannot get it from him, their only hope is Buhari, who cannot afford to fail them.

What this tells us is that no matter the position we hold, there is always a day of reckoning. Today,  for those in this administration, that day is at hand, but we should not mock them; we should sympathise with them.  Let us  learn from what they are going through so that we do not find ourselves in their position in future. They will not be persecuted, but whether they like it or not, they will be asked questions. It is not too much for us to ask how they governed us in the last four years. Since the president spoke in the church last Sunday, let us also refer him to the Bible by asking this question :”If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?”.

If the president and his men feel that they have done well, they have nothing to fear; but if otherwise, they should be ready to pay the price and they cannot tie the hand of the incoming government from taking action through their resort to cheap blackmail and base sentiment.

UNTIL it suffered a huge loss in the last general elections,  the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) prided itself as the biggest party in Africa. It may be so, but its size was and is still not a measure of its popularity. It is only big in name and not in ideology. PDP is a party of anything goes, with members more interested in themselves than in the country. The problem of PDP is leadership, which it brought upon itself. The party was founded by some great minds, even though they did not share the same ideology.

The circumstances of the time brought these political tacticians together long before 1998 when former Head of State Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar threw the political space open. Years before Abdulsalami came to power, the late Gen Sani Abacha, who he succeeded,  had held the country in a vice-grip. The late Abacha was a mean dictator, who did everything to make life miserable for Nigerians. Rather than challenge him, many of our politicians went to bed with him.

Those who challenged him were few and far between. They were the lone voices in the wilderness. It was a costly venture challenging the late Abacha; so it was better, those lily-livered politicians thought  to dine with him with a long spoon. So, when the late Abacha lifted the ban on politics after crudely shoving the late Chief M.K.O Abiola into jail, our politicians began to dance tango instead of coming out boldly to participate in the process.

Except for one or two politicians – the late M.D.Yusufu and Lawan Gambo – no other came out to challenge the late Abacha, who was rumoured to be harbouring plans of transmuting to civilian president. The action of the then parties lent credence to this claim. They all adopted the late Abacha as their presidential candidate. He would have emerged unopposed for the exalted post if he had not died suddenly.  The late Abacha and those politicians would have had their way if not for divine intervention. They had everything going for them until the unexpected happened and their plan fell flat on its face.

Abacha’s death on June 7, 1998 loosened the mouths of those politicians, who never saw anything bad in him when he was alive. We know those politicians and their roles then. They are still playing this role of going with any government in power no matter how bad that government may be. But the politicians with the love of their country at heart, who took on the late Abacha and envisaged a better future for Nigeria beyond him, never for once allowed him to rest. The late Abacha too gave it back to these politicians, but they were undeterred.

These politicians were the brains behind today’s PDP; they went through hell in the hands of the late Abacha and his security goons for daring to stand up to the dictator and provide an alternative voice for the people. As far  back as 1997, these politicians had seen that the ship of state was tottering and so came together to salvage it. It all began with the All Politicians’ Summit convened in 1997 by former Vice President Alex Ekwueme. The summit was disrupted by security men.

Ekwueme and his associates were not deterred; they saw that as a temporary setback. In no time, the group of 18 (G18) emerged, with Ekwueme as its leader. Members of the group did not share political ideologies. Some were progressives and some were conservatives, but they had a common cause – to form a party that will meet the yearnings of the people. Following further consultations, the group increased to 34 (G34). On August 13, 1998, it formed the Peoples Democratic Party. With the exception of the late Solomon Lar, Chief Audu Ogbeh and Senator Barnabas Gemade, who were PDP chairman at one time or the other, no other member of the original G34 ever held that position in the party.

The founding fathers of the party have since been  sidelined, leaving it in the hands of those, who know next to nothing about its ideals. The party’s loss in the last elections exposed so many things about PDP, which incidentally was founded by great minds. The PDP has only been  PDP in the past 16 years because it is in power. It is not being run as a party, which should evolve policies, plans and programmes for the government. The party’s founders never expected that things would  turn out this way. Their plan was to make the party the envy of others in the country and on the continent.

Those that hijacked the party from them do not seem to share this ideal. This is why PDP is where it is today. With its loss has come the blame game. The party is blaming the Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) of causing President Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat in the election because of the hate campaign spearheaded by his wife Dame Patience, the rabble rousing Femi Fani-Kayode, the garrulous Ayo Fayose and the loud mouthed Doyin Okupe, among others. Where was the party when they were doing this? What did it do to stop them? If it had won the elections, would it be whining like this? What all this shows that PDP is not organised. If it is, the PCC would not have seized the presidential campaign from the party.

The PCC should have taken directives from the party and not the other way round. If the party left the initiative to PCC for fear of offending the president, that is its cup of tea. It should bury its head in shame for not living up to being a party in the true sense of the word. A party which dances to the tune of any of  its organs is not a party and that is not the kind of party that should lead  our country. What the PDP should do now is to return to the drawing table and see how it can revive the dream of its founding fathers because therein lies the way to its being that great party, which those running it now so much wish it would become.

But with the squabbling in the party over its loss in the last elections, can PDP bounce back and redeem itself? Time will tell.

IT has been one long dark night for our country. The abduction of the Chibok girls from their school in the wee hours of April 15 last year threw us into darkness. Their abduction was a slap on the face of constituted authority because the kidnappers – the Boko Haram insurgents – went too far. Before it struck in Chibok, a sleepy community in Borno State,  Boko Haram had tested our will as a nation severally and got away with it.

So, the group was ever ready to do the unthinkable since it knew the government will not lift a finger against it. The Jonathan administration never felt that anything was amiss with the girls’ abduction. Its stance informed  its lackadaisical approach to the handling of the girls’ case.

No government treats matters concerning its nationals with laxity the way the present administration did with its initial handling of the Chibok girls’ case. Where a citizen’s life is involved, the government is expected to be proactive to ensure that such citizen does not come to grief. Here, we are talking about over 200 lives. By their nature, girls are fragile and as such should be treated gingerly. This is why the world is outraged over the Chibok girls abduction. The message it has been sending across to us is that the feminine gender is not supposed to be treated like that. The world expects Nigeria’s leaders to rise promptly and rescue the girls. It is still waiting to see that happen. Little wonder that many were praying on Tuesday night that the Chibok girls would be among the 293 rescued by the military in Sambisa Forest.

It is understandable why the girls’ case generates excitement all the time. There is this feeling that any of the girls could be our daughter or sister. So imagining our daughter or sister in the position that these girls have found themselves in the past one year is torturous to many families. To those in power, the girls can rot in captivity for all they care.

Recall that by the time government raised a panel to go to Chibok and ascertain the veracity of the abduction, the girls and their abductors were far, far gone. Because it had all the time in the world to disappear to wherever it wanted with the girls, Boko Haram started boasting about what it would do with them.

Calling on Allah’s name, its leader, Abubakar Shekau, claimed that the Supreme Being had directed him to marry off the girls. He added that the girls have converted to Islam. To buttress his claim, he released a video footage, showing the girls dressed in hijab and flowing gown.

The girls’ abduction remains to date, Boko Haram’s biggest catch; so it is ready to do anything to protect its gain. It knows that as long as the girls are in its custody, it can always get the government to do its bidding. The group has used proxies to collect millions of dollars from the government under the guise of a cease fire. It ploughed the money into buying more arms to unleash terror on Nigerians. By the time the government resolved to fight Boko Haram things had gone bad, real bad.

What is more. It made its move because of the then approaching elections. Although the elections have been won and lost, the government cannot, at this stage, stop its ongoing onslaught against Boko Haram to avoid comments, such as, ‘’we knew all along that it was all because of the elections’’. So, the battle must be fought to the end until the incoming administration takes over on May 29. People held on to the cheery news from Sambisa Forest, with the hope that the Chibok girls will be among the rescued.

Although the military said it was still profiling those rescued, hope was high that the Chibok girls might be among them. They were not. We beg to ask: when will they be rescued considering that time is no longer on the Jonathan administration’s side to clear this mess before it leaves?

Kofi Nene

THE way the Daily Times newsroom was structured, it was easy to spot some people at a glance because of their vantage position in the large hall. The news editor was in charge and his desk showed that. Flanking him were his two deputies. In that set up were others close to the power base that made the newsroom tick. These were the rewrite men, who were always at the beck and call of the news editor, to clean up badly written stories. The rewrite men were panel beaters of sorts. They panel beat stories to make them readable and publishable. Among those on the rewrite desk in the early and mid-90s was Coffie Ammuako-Annan. Kofi, as we called him, was an expert. Patient and unassuming, he went through reporters’ scripts with care. He was painstaking and thorough. Never one to shout at you no matter how bad your script was, Kofi worked as if his life depended on the job. He was so loved by our bosses – Solomon Odemwingie and Tunde Ipinmisho (a master rewrite man) – for his thoroughness. Kofi whose mother hailed from Ogbomoso in Oyo State was everybody’s man because he hardly got angry, no matter what anybody did to him. In the wee hours of April 13, I got a text message from Mr  Ipinmisho that  Kofi, a gentleman to the core, is dead. He died in Ghana; he was 65. I doff my hat to a thoroughbred professional and master of the game. May you find rest in the Lord’s bosom.

Triple author

JOURNALISM has a way of killing talents without knowing it. Many good writers are often sent to where we call Siberia (the old timers will know what I mean) where they cannot display their skills. They are either made sub editors or proof readers, where they do the job, while others take the glory. A few  lucky ones break out of the mould to make their mark in the writing world. One of such persons is my friend, Ebere Wabara. Ebere had done virtually everything in Daily Times as a behind-the-scene man on the production sub desk before he got his break, which came when he started writing Wordsworth, a column which spots and corrects newspapers’ grammatical errors.  Since then, there has been no stopping Ebere. It was while handling Wordsworth that former Daily TimesAdministrator Mr Peter Enahoro spotted him and made him front page editor. He left that seat to edit The Post Express and do other great things. Ebere is the author of Wordsworth & Essays (2001) and My Country, The Media (2005). His third book: Media Gaffes & Essays will be presented on Tuesday at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos. May your pen never go dry, my brother.