The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Buhari at the United Nations plenary

    I have been travelling through Europe and North America for the past few weeks so it was with pleasure that I watched our president deliver his speech at this year’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). I have some sentimental memories of my being a member of Nigeria’s delegation to UNGA beginning from 1988 to 1993 and again in 2005 before finally bowing out.

    I remember those years we spent under our foreign minister, General Ike Nwachukwu (retired) crafting our statements at the United Nations. When the late General Joseph Garba was our our ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, we used to debate every word in the president’s speech before a final text was given to the president, vice president or foreign minister for delivery at the podium of the UN. It was usually a lively scene of arguments sometimes deteriorating into rude retorts before we settled down to a clean text. Even after that, someone close to the leader of the delegation may sneak in a sentence or two even after the advance copy had gone to the UN secretariat. This was why every UN speech had at the back – “check against delivery”.

    By the time I stopped going to the UN, it was no longer customary for speeches to be printed since this was made available on UN website. It was also customary for the president to host a reception for other delegates on the day of the national statement at the UN. The Nigerian delegation was always bloated. No amount of effort made by the ministry of foreign affairs to control the size of the delegation worked.  People came from every ministry tangentially related to UN affairs wanting to be delegates. The people in the ministry of finance who had to provide the money for the operations and their colleagues in the Central Bank would insist on attending. The various line ministries, cabinet office or the presidency as it is now called would have its own list. The ministry of foreign affairs always had a long list. The media also had to be invited so that one would have adequate coverage.

    During civilian administrations of Shehu Shagari and since 1999 post-military civilian regime, members of parliament and even state governors showed up as delegates in what had by then become a charade. The effect of this was that Nigeria’s delegation was usually embarrassingly large. But the work was done by only a few who were the best brains available or shall I say, who were invited. I hope Nigeria under Buhari will ensure that the size of its delegation is not too large and that people will not continue to show up until Christmas carrying letters from home to the permanent mission wanting to be registered as delegates.

    One also hopes that the Nigeria House in New York will continue to be maintained so that several of its floors can be rented out to service our diplomatic operations in North America and elsewhere. That was the purpose of building the imposing edifice in the first place. I say so because I was involved.

    President Muhammadu Buhari acquitted himself well in his performance at the UN. He was confident and had poise in his carriage and delivered a well crafted speech clearly. He covered all areas of the world where there are problems such as the Middle East particularly Palestine and Israel. He called for a just settlement of the Palestinian problem on the basis of a two states solution and according to the innumerable UN resolutions going back decades. Any one waiting for condemnation of the USA’s movement of its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would be disappointed. Nigeria cannot be expected to face an approaching train of Trump’s America. The president spoke sympathetically on Syria calling for peaceful solution to the civil war while praising Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Germany for taking in Syrian refugees. He also called for peace in Yemen without getting involved in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. He then spent an unnecessarily long time on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar praising Bangladesh for its humanitarian assistance to the refugees.  One wonders whether the time spent on the perennial problems of the Middle East could not have been better spent on African and Nigerian problems while just mentioning the Middle East in one or two sentences.

    The president paid adequate and encouraging tribute to Eritrea and Ethiopia for signing a peace treaty between the two countries and ending the state of belligerency which had unhappily existed between the two countries for decades. He said South Sudan and Djibouti had also resolved their internal problems that have led to the loss of lives and displacement of their people. He said no problem was too deep-rooted that it cannot be solved. He mentioned the situation in the Sahel and the threat posed by terrorists to West Africa following the collapse of Libya. He linked the proliferation of weapons and light arms in our sub region with the collapse of Libya but said nothing about those who killed Ghadafi to contribute to the solution.

    His call on the international community to help us restore the waters of Lake Chad and thereby the livelihood to 45 million people is likely to fall on deaf ears. His acknowledgement of the help of France, Germany, the USA and Norway in this regard is spot on. Boko Haram and the rehabilitation of our people in the northeast of Nigeria can only be resolved within bilateral relations with friendly nations. I will like discrete moves made to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the states in the Gulf where our rich people carry our money to for assistance in our situation of desperation. The president also linked the desiccation of Lake Chad to climate change and its deleterious effect in the bitter and deadly struggle for land between farmers and herders in Nigeria indirectly calling for all countries including the United States to take the issue of climate change seriously. He did not say this but it is implied. He finally called for international effort to stamp out corruption and illegal transfer of billions of dollars by nationals of under developed countries to the developed countries. He added that without repatriation of such funds, resources available to government will be considerably reduced. He said we will not have the resources to provide employment for our youths at home instead of their dying miserably in the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

    The president should have mentioned what his government was doing to tackle all these problems.

    On the whole it was a good speech which also was well delivered. Unfortunately it was delivered to a virtually empty chamber. Nigeria has no control who listens to its president’s speech at the UN. Thank God, we were not laughed at. But the lack of audience is a manifestation of how far down Africa and Nigeria has sunk in international reckoning. Our continent has become a synonym for disease, poverty underdevelopment and civil strife and there is no glimmer of hope that our continent will soon join the rest of humanity in the march for development. This is the challenge before all of us and particularly before Nigeria’s leaders ruling over a country that the UN says by 2050 will harbour 40% of the poorest people in the world.

  • Buhari at the United Nations plenary

    I have been travelling through Europe and North America for the past few weeks so it was with pleasure that I watched our president deliver his speech at this year’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). I have some sentimental memories of my being a member of Nigeria’s delegation to UNGA beginning from 1988 to 1993 and again in 2005 before finally bowing out.

    I remember those years we spent under our foreign minister, General Ike Nwachukwu (retired) crafting our statements at the United Nations. When the late General Joseph Garba was our our ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, we used to debate every word in the president’s speech before a final text was given to the president, vice president or foreign minister for delivery at the podium of the UN. It was usually a lively scene of arguments sometimes deteriorating into rude retorts before we settled down to a clean text. Even after that, someone close to the leader of the delegation may sneak in a sentence or two even after the advance copy had gone to the UN secretariat. This was why every UN speech had at the back – “check against delivery”.

    By the time I stopped going to the UN, it was no longer customary for speeches to be printed since this was made available on UN website. It was also customary for the president to host a reception for other delegates on the day of the national statement at the UN. The Nigerian delegation was always bloated. No amount of effort made by the ministry of foreign affairs to control the size of the delegation worked.  People came from every ministry tangentially related to UN affairs wanting to be delegates. The people in the ministry of finance who had to provide the money for the operations and their colleagues in the Central Bank would insist on attending. The various line ministries, cabinet office or the presidency as it is now called would have its own list. The ministry of foreign affairs always had a long list. The media also had to be invited so that one would have adequate coverage.

    During civilian administrations of Shehu Shagari and since 1999 post-military civilian regime, members of parliament and even state governors showed up as delegates in what had by then become a charade. The effect of this was that Nigeria’s delegation was usually embarrassingly large. But the work was done by only a few who were the best brains available or shall I say, who were invited. I hope Nigeria under Buhari will ensure that the size of its delegation is not too large and that people will not continue to show up until Christmas carrying letters from home to the permanent mission wanting to be registered as delegates.

    One also hopes that the Nigeria House in New York will continue to be maintained so that several of its floors can be rented out to service our diplomatic operations in North America and elsewhere. That was the purpose of building the imposing edifice in the first place. I say so because I was involved.

    President Muhammadu Buhari acquitted himself well in his performance at the UN. He was confident and had poise in his carriage and delivered a well crafted speech clearly. He covered all areas of the world where there are problems such as the Middle East particularly Palestine and Israel. He called for a just settlement of the Palestinian problem on the basis of a two states solution and according to the innumerable UN resolutions going back decades. Any one waiting for condemnation of the USA’s movement of its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would be disappointed. Nigeria cannot be expected to face an approaching train of Trump’s America. The president spoke sympathetically on Syria calling for peaceful solution to the civil war while praising Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Germany for taking in Syrian refugees. He also called for peace in Yemen without getting involved in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. He then spent an unnecessarily long time on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar praising Bangladesh for its humanitarian assistance to the refugees.  One wonders whether the time spent on the perennial problems of the Middle East could not have been better spent on African and Nigerian problems while just mentioning the Middle East in one or two sentences.

    The president paid adequate and encouraging tribute to Eritrea and Ethiopia for signing a peace treaty between the two countries and ending the state of belligerency which had unhappily existed between the two countries for decades. He said South Sudan and Djibouti had also resolved their internal problems that have led to the loss of lives and displacement of their people. He said no problem was too deep-rooted that it cannot be solved. He mentioned the situation in the Sahel and the threat posed by terrorists to West Africa following the collapse of Libya. He linked the proliferation of weapons and light arms in our sub region with the collapse of Libya but said nothing about those who killed Ghadafi to contribute to the solution.

    His call on the international community to help us restore the waters of Lake Chad and thereby the livelihood to 45 million people is likely to fall on deaf ears. His acknowledgement of the help of France, Germany, the USA and Norway in this regard is spot on. Boko Haram and the rehabilitation of our people in the northeast of Nigeria can only be resolved within bilateral relations with friendly nations. I will like discrete moves made to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the states in the Gulf where our rich people carry our money to for assistance in our situation of desperation. The president also linked the desiccation of Lake Chad to climate change and its deleterious effect in the bitter and deadly struggle for land between farmers and herders in Nigeria indirectly calling for all countries including the United States to take the issue of climate change seriously. He did not say this but it is implied. He finally called for international effort to stamp out corruption and illegal transfer of billions of dollars by nationals of under developed countries to the developed countries. He added that without repatriation of such funds, resources available to government will be considerably reduced. He said we will not have the resources to provide employment for our youths at home instead of their dying miserably in the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

    The president should have mentioned what his government was doing to tackle all these problems.

    On the whole it was a good speech which also was well delivered. Unfortunately it was delivered to a virtually empty chamber. Nigeria has no control who listens to its president’s speech at the UN. Thank God, we were not laughed at. But the lack of audience is a manifestation of how far down Africa and Nigeria has sunk in international reckoning. Our continent has become a synonym for disease, poverty underdevelopment and civil strife and there is no glimmer of hope that our continent will soon join the rest of humanity in the march for development. This is the challenge before all of us and particularly before Nigeria’s leaders ruling over a country that the UN says by 2050 will harbour 40% of the poorest people in the world.

  • As Obasanjo forgives Atiku

    IT was meant to be a solemn event. A purgatorial session between two people in a room with the door firmly shut. Each side was to state its case. One would accept to have erred and the other would forgive him, saying: “Thy sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.”

    A man of God was to come into the room and seal it all with a prayer.

    That, at any rate, was the plot.

    But that was not how the meeting between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar played out. The expiatory event reverberated thousands of miles away from the Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta where it all happened. It shed its religious import and took on a life of its own.

    The main actors are frontline politicians. One is running for president; the other is a former president who renounced his political credentials by tearing his party card in public and announcing a final bye to politics. Rather than run his expansive library in peace, Obasanjo, the theologian and master of subterfuge and obfuscation, has shed the toga of elder statesman and dug his political trench deeper,  playing politics more than any other of his status.

    The men of God at the meeting were to be mere witnesses. Accused of being more than that, they have been battling to fend off attacks from various quarters, including their followers and ordinary Nigerians who viewed them as apolitical.

    Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah issued a tedious explanation of how he got entangled in the matter, saying all he did was to make peace between two prominent Nigerians. “Blessed are the peace makers…”   Bishop David Oyedepo of the Living Faith Church denied backing Atiku. He was merely called to witness the Abeokuta Accord, he said.

    Rev. Kukah said it was a reconciliation and not an endorsement.  That sparked a huge row on the semantics and the politics of the historic meeting. Was it an endorsement of a reconciliation or a reconciliation with an endorsement? Was it an endorsement of politics or the politics of a reconciliation as an endorsement? Or politics with scriptural colouration?

    Sheik Gumi has kept quiet.  Unusually so. He seems to owe no one an explanation on his mission to Abeokuta.

    Obasanjo and Atiku have a common enemy in President Muhammadu Buhari. The peace accord was inevitable. Whether it will have the required punch they expect it to have remains to be seen. The Buhari camp has scoffed it off as a gang-up that will fail.

    It is not yet clear how Obasanjo has been taking the criticisms of the reconciliation. An unconfirmed source told of how he called a meeting with his aides to review the fallout of the reconciliation. “It was frank and brief,” said another source, also unconfirmed, who swore to have met a friend of his maternal uncle who claimed to have seen one of the persons whose cousin was at the meeting. His unconfirmed report:

    Obasanjo saunters in, a file in his hand. His aides stand up as he makes his way to a seat behind a big table in the small hall that looks like a chapel.

    “Sit down, gentlemen. I’m sure you must have heard some of the comments – I actually consider many of them stupid – on my meeting with Atiku. Did I do anything wrong? Should I fight Atiku for ever?”

    One of the aides stood up to speak after raising his hand. Thank you, Your Excellency sir. What people are saying is that you settled with Atiku to fight Buhari and that you actually pronounced Atiku the next president, arrogating to yourself the sole right to appoint a president for Nigerians.

    Obasanjo raises his right hand, clears his throat (hmmm,hmmm, hmmm). “Please, stop there. With due respect, don’t I have the right to advise on the way forward for this country? If I back Atiku, don’t I have the right to my own opinion? Am I forcing anybody?

    “As for fighting Buhari or no Buhari, I don’t bloody care. I fight nobody, except anybody who says Nigeria will not move forward. I’m ready to go konko bilo with that person, no matter how highly placed. I, Olusegun Aremu Okikiolakan Obasanjo, will not compromise that stand. Nigeria first.”

    Another aide stands up as Obasanjo stops talking, his face wearing a familiar frown and his lips firmly closed. He seems to be angry.

    “They also said with all you said about Atiku – that God will not forgive you if you back Atiku and …”

    “Please, please, please. With due respect, are they serious? Didn’t I elect to fight Atiku on my own, based on some fundamental differences between us? If he now says he has changed and he has confessed to me. If he asks for forgiveness and he says ‘I beg; I won’t do it again’, is it not logical for me to just say, ‘go in peace; thy sins are forgiven?’ In any case, who are those talking that rubbish.”

    “Yes, Your Excellency, they seem to be APC people and their sympathisers?”

    “APC my foot. Where were they when I was backing Buhari? If I now say because of some reasons I don’t want Buhari, who are they to question that? And if the truth is too bitter a pill for them to swallow, dat na dem toro.”

    “They are even quoting from your book, My Watch, what you wrote about Atiku, that since his marabout predicted that he would take over from you, he had begun to supplant you. They said you accused him of being corrupt and unfaithful and…”

    “Okay. I did. And I owe nobody no apology. The truth must be told, That was Atiku then. He says he has repented and I forgave him. Chikena. If anybody has any problem with that, let him take his case to God, the one who says we should forgive all those who trespass against us. That was why I brought in those men of God – to witness Atiku renounce his bad ways.”

    “Sir, some are even saying that you were angry with Atiku because he stopped your third term agenda and that…”

    Obasanjo raises his right hand, fuming: “Stop, oga, whatever you call your name. Open your ears and hear now. How many times will I have to tell you that the God that I worship has never refused me anything?   If I had wanted a third term, I would have prayed for it and God would have answered my prayer and I would have stayed on as president. No Jupiter could have stopped me. How many presidents do you want to make of me? So, all that jagbajantics about third term and all that, I am not moved. Tell them that I, Obasanjo, I dey kampe.No shaking.”

    Another aide stood up. Obasanjo raises his hand to signal that he can talk.

    “On the social media, sir, some are saying you, Baba Obasanjo, have no moral platform to claim being upright. In fact, they say you should go and reconcile with Gbenga, your son and Aunty Iyabo, your daughter and …”.

    Obasanjo cuts in furiously, raising his right hand in the manner of a traffic warden stopping a vehicle.

    “Please, please, please, I won’t take that. If you don’t know how to report a matter, why don’t you just keep quiet. If my children decide to stay away from me, whose headache is that? They are adults; not so? If anybody thinks he or she can use that to embarrass me, they have failed. Nobody can embarrass me.

    “Thank you all. And have a nice day.”

    The meeting closes. They all stand up for Obasanjo to leave.  

     

    Hauwa and our dead conscience

    THEY threatened to kill her. The world was watching and praying. Our hearts were pounding amid the tick tack tick tack sound of the clock. In 24 hours, our nightmare became a grim reality.  Blood-thirsty Boko Haram terrorists murdered aid worker Hauwa Liman, 24.

    Gradually, we are losing our humanity. No more shocks here; it is a sea of sharks tearing at our souls in a desperate battle to return us to the dark age.

    Hauwa
    Hauwa

    Shame to all collaborators in this crime against humanity. Shame to all those who sabotage our efforts to stop this bloodletting. Shame to those who leak information to the killers. Shame to all those arming the madmen. Shame to all those who see this as another business, a bloody venture oiled by the blood of innocent men and women. Shame.

    May Hauwa’s soul find peace with her Maker.

     

    Fayose at EFCC

    I WON’T condemn former Governor Ayo Fayose for Tuesday’s free show at the EFCC office in Abuja. Gone are the days when a mere invitation by the police elicited some foreboding and going to jail was a life stigma. Not anymore.

    Fayose... on Tuesday
    Fayose… on Tuesday

    Now lawyers fight to turn a serious fraud allegation into a human rights matter, mount pressure on the judge, deploy all manner of tricks, including bringing the accused to court on a stretcher, and ensure that it all drags on for years.

    Fayose showed up at the EFCC dressed like an amateur mountaineer – a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘EFCC I’M HERE”, a jeans fez cap, a pair of dark glasses and a backpack, which he carried like a schoolboy. He was in good company – Rivers Governor Nyesom Wike, Femi Fani-Kayode, Mike Ozekhome, the lawyer.

    It was an attempt to ridicule the system.  Shouldn’t buffoonery have a limit?

  • Obasanjo and canonisation of Atiku

    As it is often said, a week in politics is a long time. In just one week, Atiku Abubakar transformed from Saul to Paul. He was also canonized as Saint Atiku. He owes this change of fortune to the trinity of Catholic Church’s Arch-Bishop Mathew Kukah, David Oyedepo of the Living Faith Church and a leading prosperity prophet, and Abubakar Gumi, the Zaria based Islamic scholar and cleric, supported by Pa Ayo Adebanjo of Afenifere, all working for the imperial Obasanjo.

    It all started with Atiku Abubakar clinching the PDP ticket for the 2019 presidential contest at the expense of Bukola Saraki and Aminu Tambuwal in what some have described as the battle of dollars. Immediately the victory was secured, their lords spiritual, who have never hidden their sympathy for PDP, posing as peace makers, took Atiku to his former boss, ex-President  Obasanjo who had shortly before then said: “If I support Atiku for anything, God will not forgive me. If I do not know, yes. But once I know, Atiku can never enjoy my support”.  He went on to document in his “My Watch” what he knew about Atiku, i.e., his “propensity to corruption, his tendency to disloyalty, his inability to say and stick to the truth all the time, a propensity for poor judgment, his belief and reliance on marabouts”.

    With the intervention of their lords spiritual and Pa Adebanjo however, that became ancient history. Obasanjo who  likes playing god (Shagari, 1979, Yar’Adua, 2007, Jonathan, 2011 and Buhari 2015) after canonising Atiku a saint started referring to him as ‘the president to be’.

    Obasanjo who has also been described by his daughter as someone “who sees himself at the epicentre of the Nigerian nation, whose destiny, he literally cages in his pocket and nurtures to feed his whims”, does not believe he owes Nigeria any explanation for his Atiku volte-face. With an overbearing haughtiness, he went on to declare: “We have reviewed what went wrong on the side of Atiku. And in all honesty, my former vice-president has rediscovered and repositioned himself”. The ‘we’, is assumed, refers to the politicking lords spiritual who have all along engaged Buhari in silent war over his anti-corruption crusade, his alleged Islamisation agenda and his handling of the herdsmen’s mindless killings.

    And admonishing Atiku thereafter, imperial Obasanjo, the “ father of the nation” courtesy of PDP, declared: “And when you become Nigerian President which, insha-Allah, you will be, remember what we did together in government – we ran an administration by Nigerians for all Nigerians where merit and performance count more than blood relationship, friendship or kith and kin.”

    But first, what are those things they did together? We have it on record that in 2000, some elected PDP legislators said they needed to recoup their election expenses having sold their houses to raise funds. They created artificial fuel scarcity with queues at filling stations. Within three months, the PPPRA bill became law. A House probe later showed this was the instrument PDP stalwarts and their siblings used to defraud the country to the tune of about N1.7trillion under the fuel subsidy scam.

    It is also on record that Obasanjo delegated Atiku Abubakar to oversee the National Council on Privatisation that presided over the sales of the so-called dysfunctional federal assets between 1999 and 2003. A House probe later showed that what accrued to Nigeria from investment of about $100b between 1957 and 1997 after the exercise was about $1.5b.

    And when there was nothing left to share, they came up with ingenious government policy thrust called monetization policy. It was through this that inherited national structures dating back to the colonial period scattered across the nation including lawmakers and senate president mansions were shared among PDP stalwarts, their sympathisers and civil servants.

    Of course Atiku also secured the contract ‘for the monitoring and supervision of pilotage districts in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Nigeria on terms that permits Intels to receive revenue generated in each pilotage district from service boat operations in consideration for 28 per cent of total revenue as commission to Intels”, a contract which was illegal as it contravened the “express provisions of Sections 80(1) and 162(1) and (10) of the 1999 Constitution.

    Now let us also examine Obasanjo’s claim of merit and performance as the criteria for appointments during his administration.

    Again records show Obasanjo’s appointments from 1999-2007 were driven more by political consideration than merit or performance. For instance, many of those he handpicked and imposed as governors through the massive election fraud of 2003 were found to have exhibited serious character flaws. Many of them are currently in court trying to defend their honour. It is also on record that many of his former ministers have been fingered by various probes as being behind the derailment of many of the infrastructural projects his administration initiated. Their names featured prominently in the current Travel Ban list.

    Even where Obasanjo’s appointees were eminently qualified, their appointments were not often without a tinge of mischief.  For instance, in the run up to the 1999 election, Obasanjo had said, Chief Bola Ige, the Afenifere deputy leader was the only Yoruba leader he feared. Obasanjo was to later exploit Ige’s dispute with his Afenifere colleagues over the emergence of Chief Olu Falae’s as AD presidential candidate. He lured him to PDP as minister for power and later Attorney General. He was assassinated in his room in 2001 by yet to be identified assailants.

    Then Obasanjo, who admitted visiting NADECO and Afenifere leader, Pa Abraham Adesanya three times to seek Yoruba support for his 1999 presidential ambition with the old man insisting on each occasion that Obasanjo would not get Yoruba support because ‘he is not one of us”, after winning the election without Yoruba support, decided to appoint his daughter a minister despite Pa Adesanya’s protest. Then Obasanjo went after Awolowo, the sage himself. After working against him during the 1979 election and after claiming in his “Not My Will” that he achieved on a platter of gold what Awo had been fighting for when he Obasanjo was a bare-footed school boy”, he went on to appoint his daughter as Nigeria  ambassador to Holland.

    All the above appointments were but a celebration of Obasanjo’s victory to spite Yoruba voters who rejected him even in his ward in 1999 and their leaders who had told him to his face “he is not one of us”, for refusing to identify with Yoruba aspirations.

    One of the things John Campbell recommended as a way forward for Nigeria during his last book launch besides funding of primary school and women education in the north is bringing back the manufacturing sector. Obasanjo/Atiku and PDP are responsible for the collapse of our once thriving pharmaceutical, ceramics, furniture, textile, shoe, automobile, battery and other industries. They are responsible for the collapse of the health sector when PDP stalwarts without expertise cornered teaching hospital contracts. They also presided over the near collapse of some of Nigeria high flying institutions that produced the likes of Awojobis, Osuntokuns, Chinua Achebes, Soyinkas, Ishaya Audus, etc. through under-funding while they set up their own high fees paying private secondary schools and universities.

    But a people deserve the government they get. Nigerians therefore reserve the right to vote out Buhari if they think he has not met their expectations. But as Campbell has warned, we must be sure his replacement is someone who can outperform Buhari. Definitely such a person cannot be Obasanjo/Atiku who in an era of money without sweat turned our nation to importer of labour of other societies leaving Buhari to now cope with massive unemployment of our youths, hunger  and poverty across the nation.

    Obasanjo/Atiku era of debauchery is no substitute for Buhari’s well-advertised failings such as nepotism, disregard for public opinion and ineffective leadership.

  • A poison of freedom and fiscal flowers

    There is a joke in contemporary circuits that the battle for Nigeria’s freedom would be fought and won in social space and by the cudgels and blades of ‘woke’ youth. This notion sprouts from ideological fields at home and abroad, where pasture, copse and tributary of thought, flourish from sickly seeds of violence and death.

    Being ‘woke’ is next to being a deity in contemporary youth circuits. It confers on the ‘woke’ a colossal ego, an exaggerated sense of awareness and idolatry of fawning peer. Hence the revolutionary chants wielded to inflame the polity via Facebook, Twitter, and shades of mainstream and manipulable media.

    Beneath the radical chants, however, subsists an immoderate hankering for money, fast cars and other material things. This translates to a morbid race against time, to acquire wealth by ‘woke’ young assassins, internet scammers (Yahoo Boys), and prostitutes.

    Lest we forget the gangs of ‘woke’ political thugs, human rights activists, ‘youth leaders,’ public officers, pen robbers, armed robbers and thieves comprising the nation’s youth.

    Due to perceived trashiness and philosophical harlotry of the journalist, this band of youths do not leave the battle for their freedom from Nigeria’s predatory ruling class to the press.

    However, several youths find their freedom in money and yet lose it to the legal tender, every day. Money changes everything. Every hour, it turns thousands who could have overcome its darkness into eternal addicts to the base and inane.

    For the love of the naira, thousands lose their souls and their lives every day. Man and woman, father and mother, son and daughter, privileged and pauper, engage in the pursuit of money to conquer poverty and be free.

    Cowardice is what we should conquer. Cowardice enslaves all to mean and murderous politicians. It cripples the rage of impoverished youth to the wiles of vicious political parties and public officers.

    While it is appreciable that the incumbent ruling class’s failings stem from its mental, ethical tuberculosis, it becomes worrisome to see the youth bound to its leash.

    An inordinate lust for money enslaves the youth, and cowardice sustains their allegiance to tormentors in the political class.

    A man is either free or not. There can be no apprenticeship for freedom, argues Amiri Baraka, U.S. author and political activist. But Baraka’s wisdom strikes no chord with Nigeria’s ‘woke’ cowardly youth.

    The lure of absolute cowardice cannot be spurned, because it comes wrapped in bouquets of freedoms and fiscal flowers. Hence the youths embrace it.

    Absolute cowardice is their door to freedom. From its thresholds, they seek glimpses of proverbial Eden. Vistas of ancient paradise illumine their world, from modern perversions like DSTV/Multichoice’s Big Brother Naija (BBN) amorality show, private parties and basement orgies, political hooliganism to mention a few.

    In the living theatre of their world, there is no lull between dreams and realisation, toil and rewards; morbid fantasies mutate into instant visibility.

    The afflictions of contemporary youth are akin to medieval Rome’s imperial masques: charades, gruesome sensuality, horseplay and inquisition.

    But while Roman emperors made sexual personae an artistic medium, Nigerian public officers go several steps further; they elevate murderous lust, carnal and ethical perversions to a religion. Touting these as modern forms of freedom, they urge the youth to assemble for worship in their temples of filth.

    The youth, of course, become enthusiastic worshippers in their tormentors’ holy place: think ‘card-carrying’ members of Nigeria’s doctrinal brothels, or political parties if you like. Too many youths have given their souls for shackled forms of freedom.

    In Nigeria, the youth are stage machinery, mannequins, minor actors and decor, in the ruling class’s theatre of the absurd. Considering the antics of BBN inmates, southern cultists, Boko Haram insurgents and murderous herdsmen/terrorists of the north, the lives contemporary youth demonstrate the inadequacies of our modern myth of freedom.

    Nigeria suffers the affliction purportedly free, ‘woke’ youths, who are flummoxed and sickened by their alleged freedom. Sexual liberation, political irresponsibility, financial independence, our deceitful mirage, ends in lassitude inertness.

    Freedom and responsibility are utopian to the Nigerian youth. It does not matter if he is a presiding governor, a legislator, civil society thug, press hooligan or ‘woke’ social media warrior; his afflictions are homogeneous to his roots and pop culture.

    With money, he assumes the integrity of gnomes and adopts the random metamorphosis of greed. Without money, he resists the evolution of worldly experience. He embraces multiplicity of wile, theatrical guise and becomes anarchic, often in tandem with the whims of the ruling class’s wildest bunch.

    Theatrical mutation and excessive self-love, seductive principles of modern youth, can never be reconciled with growth and morality. Contemporary performances of the youth in social and political theatres emphasise Nigeria’s descent from a moral cloud into dissolute fenland.

    Freedom of persona is magical but often destabilising. If married to an excessive lust for money, it becomes very frightening and overwhelming. Ultimately it destroys.

    Like Okwudiba Nnoli notes, it uplifts and crushes, enhances and debases, exhilarates and disenchants, dignifies and dehumanizes, enlightens and blinds, unites and divides. Thus under the influence of money, humaneness and the quest for the collective good are ferociously smothered by disruptive and selfish considerations.

    Consequently, justice, freedom, equality, dignity and other human rights, are sacrificed on the altar of the perennial rat-race for the accumulation of money.

    More worrisome is the reality of presumably ‘woke’ youth being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. Their loyalty and sympathies are often hawked to tyrants who treat them like dogs on a leash.

    This is emblematic of Gustave Le Bon’s philosophy of ‘The Crowd,’ which was valued not only by Pareto, Freud, Mussolini, and de Gaulle, but even by Horkheimer and Adorno. Le Bon contends that the type of  ”hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”

     

     

  • Buhari, Atiku, others and the road to 2019

    WERE you surprised that Atiku Abubakar snatched away the trophy at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convention in Port Harcourt?

    I wasn’t.

    Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike raised hell when the party’s Board of Trustees (BoT) advised that the show be moved elsewhere. He vowed to “deal” with the party should that advice be taken. In fact, he viewed the advisory as a declaration of enmity against the Niger Delta. Apparently not willing to incur the wrath of His Excellency, the party agreed to go to Port Harcourt. The popular thinking was that with Port Harcourt as venue, Wike’s candidate just needed to be present to carry the day – by fair or foul means; by hook or crook; or by all means. Whatever.

    He was believed to be backing Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal. Tambuwal came a distant second, scoring 693 votes. Atiku got 1,532 votes.

    As I was saying, Atiku’s victory didn’t surprise me.. The former Vice President started early, moving from one state to the other. He is more experienced than the others, some of whom thought it was a town union election. An old war horse, a master of ambush –ask former President Olusegun Obasanjo; he reportedly knelt down for Atiku in a desperate bid for a second term –and a pragmatist who is well connected with the high and mighty even as he never disdains the humble company of the poor, Atiku is also a strategist of considerable weight.

    Since he got the ticket, the race has grown more exciting. Brickbats have been flying. Nobody is talking about the other candidates. Nor are they pushing any profound idea to lift our spirits. Just abuses. Political vitriol. There are scores of other candidates, products of the laissez faire that rules party formation.

    With remarkable glee, Atiku told Nigerians that they now have a choice. That sparked a fire in the Buhari camp. It shot back: “The Nigerian electorate deserves to be given a choice of decency, integrity and honour and not dirt, corruption and infamy. The choice between Buhari and Atiku is one between light and darkness; between positive change and business as usual; between transparency and under the table deals.”

    The Atiku camp rejoined: “The APC primary was a study in dictatorship and corruption. The sole candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, scored 15million votes. How could that occur without rigging or manufacturing of faceless votes?”

    Besides, the Atiku camp accused the Buhari Campaign of being confused. Really? There have been insinuations that Atiku may have had some integrity deficit. Is this the right time to push such arguments?

    In the shark-infested ocean that is our politics, does decency count for anything? Haven’t ideas been elbowed out by cheap populism and slandering? There are enough issues to convince Nigerians which party to fall in love with. Boko Haram, the economy, poverty alleviation, the anti-corruption war and more.

    It is not yet clear if the ceasefire ordered by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will be respected. The electoral agency has said it is not yet time for campaigns.

    Ordinary Nigerians who take advantage of the social media to laugh at our leaders are having fun. The rumour that the PDP ticket went to the highest bidder  became the subject of derisive jokes. Atiku was said to have, of course without proof, shelled out an incredible $5,000 per delegate.

    Before he could tell the world it is “a lie from the pit of hell”, the purveyors of that rumour, some of who swore that they were at the convention, claimed by their own arithmetic that the former Vice President must have spent N42billion. They did not stop at that; the Yoruba among them played on the PDP candidate’s name, Atiku, which when separated as “A ti ku” means “we are dead”. The clumsy logic, according to them, is that should Atiku becomes president,” we are all dead”..

    There were reports that Port Harcourt currency changers had their hands full, their offices flooded by crowds of emergency customers battling to change their dollar to naira. This sparked another joke couched around the slogans of the two major parties: “APC – Change; PDP – Bureau de Change.”

    The Buhari Campaign believes that with Atiku as PDP’s candidate its job has been made “easier”. I disagree – with due respect. Atiku is a formidable opponent, who you underrate at your own peril.

    Leaders of Afenifere – yes; they insist on their relevance – visited former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday. The visit sparked many speculations, chief of which was that they went pleading with Obasanjo to forgive Atiku and back him for president. Atiku won their heart with his promise to restructure Nigeria – in six months (that will be a global record in such matters).

    Obasanjo, you may wish to recall, had scoffed at an Atiku presidency as a joke. “I dey laugh o,” he said in 2015. And recently he swore that God would not forgive him if he backed Atiku. Atiku replied dismissively, saying if Obasanjo had any issue to settle with his God, he should go ahead and settle it without dragging his name into it.

    As I was saying, little attention has been paid to the other candidates, who are  eminent Nigerians in their own right. Take, for instance, His Excellency Donald “fine boy” Duke who won the Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket. He deserves a chance. Although he shares the same first name with the United States President, he has none of his eccentricities. Affable, young and humorous, he will make a good leader.

    His critics claim that the former Cross River governor planted many white elephant projects; they failed to hail the vision that gave birth to those projects. I am sure that with Duke as president, every kid will get a free saxophone and music – love songs, street carnivals and all – will take its pride of place . Imagine your president jamming on Fridays and television stations beaming it all live.  “The Villa Show.”

    Mrs Oby Ezekwesili is also in the race – for the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN). Her candidature has elicited so much more excitement than many are willing to acknowledge. A pastor, critic, activist and former minister, Ezekwesili will no doubt make a good president. Her critics scorn her as “madam know-all”, perhaps on account of her vociferous bashing of the Buhari administration.

    All I know is that should Ezekwesili become president, the Chibok girls – are they still girls? – and their Dapchi counterparts will return within 100 days of the new administration and Boko Haram will become history,

    After the Labour Party (LP) denied him of its platform, former Ondo State Governor Olusegun Mimiko simply went to pick up, without breaking a sweat, the ticket of the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP). Those who lack a proper understanding of the workings of party formation and politics are asking: “ZLP; which one is so called?” “Is Iroko not running for Senate?”

    With a Mimiko presidency, no doubt, local fabric (adire) makers will reap a bounteous harvest for their toil as patronage will hit an all-time high.

    There are many others. Olapade Agoro (remember him?), the chairman of the National Action Council (NAC) who declared his ambition in February in the ancient city of Ibadan. So popular is he that till date nobody has contested the ticket with him.

    Lagos televangelist Kris Okotie is also in the race (he never misses it). He is the sole candidate of his Fresh Democratic Party (FRESH). He keeps running in the hope that one day, Nigerians will realise that salvation is not only a message for the pulpit; politics and politicians can also do with it.

    In the All Blending Party (ABP), there is a storm in a teacup. The BoT and the National Executive Council (NEC) are up in arms against the chairman, Moses Shipi, for declaring himself the party’s candidate. The party surely needs a blender.

    Ex-detainee and murder suspect Hamza Al-Mustapha, the late Gen. Sani Abacha’s torturer-in-chief before whom Gen. Oladipo Diya was said to be grovelling, saying, “save my life” after he had been roped into the phantom coup that sent Obasanjo to jail, is also on the ballot – courtesy of the Peoples Party of Nigeria (PPN).

    Candidates all: Omowole Sowore ,African Action Congress (AAC), John Ogbor, All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Yabagi Sani, Action  Democratic Party (ADP), Habu Aninchi, Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), Chuks Nwachukwu, All Grassroots Alliance (AGA), Fela Durotoye, Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN), Kingsley Moghalu, Young Progressive Party (YPP), Prof Peter Nwangwu, We the People of Nigeria (WTPN) and Alistair Soyode, Yes Electorate Solidarity(YES).

    Ahmed Buhari, Sustainable National Party (SNP), Mrs Eunice Atuejide,National Interest Party (NIP), Alhaji Ibrahim Usman, National Rescue Movement of  Nigeria (NRM), Tope Kolade Fasuan, Abundance Nigeria Renewal Party (ANRP) and Edozie  Madu, Independent Democrats  (ID).

    Never has the Nigerian political landscape been this rich and exciting.

  • President Trump at UN General Assembly plenary

    Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his annual report before the plenary session of the General Assembly on September 25, painted a sombre and dangerous picture of the world in which unilateralism is being preferred over the post-Second World War multilateral diplomacy and multinational institutions which have secured the world after a bitterly fought world war and an unstable post war peace. The Secretary General said the idea of each country building a fortress around itself was what led to the Second World War. He identified climate change and the danger of wrong application of robotics and artificial intelligence as posing challenge to mankind’s survival. The melting of arctic ice in places like Greenland and other areas, in the polar regions of the world, if evidence are still needed, is a clear indication of the challenge of a deluge to the world apart from the unseasonable heavy rains and high temperatures.

    On the technology front, he felt the use of machines to wage war and to kill people may get out of hands where machines take independent and automatic actions in killing human beings. He called on all humanity to come together and save the world from destruction.  He emphasized that security cannot be secured individually but by the collective effort of the world. He may have had an advance copy of President Donald Trump’s speech and felt he needed to respond to it in advance.

    President Trump’s speech called on individual states to embrace “patriotism, pride and prosperity”  over globalism which before the First World War was in consonant with traditional American isolationism rooted in the Monroe Doctrine which the president made an allusion to. He began by saying no administration in the history of the United States has achieved as much as his administration. This attracted the laughter of the assembled delegates from all over the world which felt the American president mistook the audience for an American campaign rally. The president was visibly shaken but he brushed off the embarrassment by jokingly saying he was surprised by the reaction of the audience.

    Then he continued by saying all the “wonderful” things he had achieved since he last spoke at the United Nations. He said he has built an American economy in which unemployment has virtually disappeared. He emphasized the fact that millions of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos have never had it so good in terms of employment. He mentioned how America was economically strong and had gotten a budget over $700 billion for its military in 2017 and a further increase on this budget for the current year. He then called on every member state of the United Nations to be prepared to defend itself and clearly said any country that wants America to defend it must be prepared to bear the cost.

    He also mentioned how last year, he had been preoccupied with the danger posed to the USA and the world by nuclear weapons-armed North Korea but which through his effort following meeting with Kim Jon Un its leader, he has gotten a commitment towards denuclearization.  This time, the “little rocket man “has become his dear friend chairman Kim Jon Un. The president said his Secretary of State was following up efforts at further talks with the authorities in North Korea to ensure meeting the target of complete denuclearization. He said he had just signed a bilateral trade agreement in a win-win relation with South Korea. He said he had also done the same with Mexico but was quiet about Canada its northern neighbour which forms the third leg of the triangular trade relations called NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area). Surprisingly he went after China whose leader Xi Jinping he describes as his friend. He claimed that over the years China had ripped off the United States up to trillions of dollars in unfair trade and intellectual property theft. He said he was determined to reverse the situation and had imposed series of tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States and would continue until there was equilibrium in China- American trade relations.

    He singled out some countries for praise and approbation. He then mentioned a country like Saudi Arabia which was witnessing an era of reforms under its young crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud .He also singled out Poland as a country determined to consolidate not only its political but more importantly its economic freedom by building a gas pipeline from the Baltic Sea apparently bye-passing previous Russian gas supply. He used the opportunity to lambast Germany, which these days has become his whipping boy, for its total dependence on Russia for energy supply. He praised India for seeing millions of people out of the poverty trap. He said nothing negative about Russia not even when he was talking about Syria except indirectly when he said America would not stand idly by if Syria uses chemical weapons in its civil war which had led to displacement of millions of Syrians and the death of more than half a million Syrians.

    President Trump had the harshest and undiplomatic words for Iran whose leader, Hassan Rouhani, described him as suffering from intellectual deficit. Trump said the Iranian regime was robbing its own people and that all the billions of dollars that it had earned under the 2015 nuclear agreement it signed with the P5+1 i.e. the USA, Great Britain, France, Russia and China (five permanent members of the UN Security Council) and. Germany had either been embezzled or wasted on destabilizing its neighbours and sponsoring terrorism. He said America was determined to stop Iran from harming American allies in the region. He said he was a realist and to this end he has moved American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the interest of peace. He said he was elected to defend American interest and was not ashamed to do this and he called on other nations to defend their own interest. He did not say or perhaps does not care about what may happen when there is a clash of interest. He carried on with his jingoism and attacked President Maduro of Venezuela for economically destroying his country and said those who are still deluded about the efficacy of socialism should see what it had done to one of the richest countries in the world which has now been reduced to absolute poverty.

    He said nothing about climate change rather boasted about how the USA is now the largest producer of energy including “clean coal” which it was ready to export to willing buyers. On the whole, this was a rather distressing speech which brought bad taste to the mouths of all who believe in the United Nations which Trump had dismissed during his campaign for the presidency as a useless and hostile body working against American interest. He said the USA will reduce to 25% its contribution to UN peace keeping operations and that this will be on voluntary basis and not as an assessed contribution. He said America had withdrawn from UN human rights commission, UNESCO and had no good words for the WTO and that America will not participate in UN sponsored international conference on migration saying control of any country’s borders is not the business of the UN. He made it clear America will determine who comes to the country and would not welcome large numbers of refugees as it used to do and that everyone was on its own .It will not surprise any one if next year, America withdraws from the UN especially after the delegates had laughed at Trump who does not take personal attack lying down.

    Needless to say virtually every head of state or leader of a country’s delegation including President Muhammadu Buhari spoke diametrically against Trump’s position.

     

  •  Their date with history

    OF the many presidential candidates that emerged last weekend after their parties’ conventions, two names stick out. President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hold the ace against the other candidates. The reason for this is obvious. Buhari and Atiku have a lot going for them politically. They have the name, the clout and the reach to swing any political contest in their favour.

    In a society where everything boils down to who you know and how deep your pocket is, both men have successfully reduced the election to a two-horse race even before it begins. The way bookmakers have been reacting since Buhari and Atiku picked their parties’ tickets show that either of them will win the February 16, 2019 election. The other contestants have been sidelined, so to say, in the analysis of who becomes the next president.

    What the pundits did not say speaks volume about the chances of the other candidates than what they have said. They have mainly focused on Buhari and Atiku as if they are the only ones in the race. Indeed, the race is not for small fries nor is it for idealists. We need men and women who will rise to the challenges of our time. Those who can do and and who would not engage in platitude.

    The office of president  calls for serious work. It is not a position for the unprepared; a president who does not know what to do or what the duties of the office entail. Since Sunday, we have been hearing of, and  from, only Buharii and Atiku, which shows that they are set for the arduous task of leading the country. Though, pundits do not reckon with the other candidates, what I do not understand is why they have not been talking since they became their parties’ standard bearers. Is it that they have conceded the race to Buhari and Atiku already?

    I doubt that, but their silence is ominous. They should show Nigerians the stuff they are made of. They should let the world know that they are not in the race for the fun of it, but because they have something to offer. So far, Buhari and Atiku have reduced it to a two-man show, as they take pot shot at each other. Interestingly, they have not told us what they will do for the country. They are more interested in shooting themselves down. But, we, the people, are more interested in knowing about their plans and programmes for the country

    If we cannot get that from them, at least the other candidates, who know what they are up against in both men, should tell us what they have to offer. It is not yet time for campaign, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), that, we submit,  should not preclude them from telling the nation what they have up their sleeves. Talking to the nation is not a campaign; it is showing the people, who do not believe that they can do the job that they have what it takes to run the country, if given the chance.

    How can they get such chance when the people do not know what they are capable of doing? We have Donald Duke of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Olusegun Mimiko,  Zenith Labour Party (ZLP), Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), Rabia Gengiz, National Action Council (NAC), Isaac Ositelu, Accord Party (AP) and Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, Peoples Party of Nigeria (PPN), among others, as the other  candidates. Many Nigerians will not take some of them serious but it is their duty to sell their candidature and convince the electorate to vote for them next year.

    First, they should do some soul-searching. The first question they should ask themselves is compared to Buhari and  Atiku, what are their chances in next year’s election? They should not try to rake up mud against their fellow contestants. This is not the essence of the contest. Rather, they should be concerned more with what they can offer. They should leave Buhari and Atiku alone to fight their dirty war. Being new in the presidential race, they should not go the way of the veterans, who have been tearing themselves apart on the pages of newspapers.

    Buhari and Atiku are coming into the race as the oldest candidates ever featured in a presidential contest in the country’s history. By the time of the election next year, Buhari will be 76 and Atiku, 72. Age is not on their side, but do they have what it takes to deliver if either of them is elected? In this wise, we should be more concerned with their competence and not their age. Will their age be an advantage or an albatross? To them, their age is not an albatross and that may be why they are still seeking to run the country as septuagenarians.

    It will be interesting to see them take on each other on how they will govern the country. The issues are clear : the economy, education, security, health and of course, the matter of the moment, restructuring. Ever before his emergence as his party’s candidate, Atiku had engaged in verbal warfare with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on the vexed issue of restructuring.

    Atiku has consistently maintained that he is for restructuring. Do not forget that the APC also promised us restructuring in 2015. Three-and-a-half-years down the line, it has yet to fulfil that promise. Will Atiku keep his promise to restructure Nigeria if he wins or is it just a campaign gimmick? We are more interested in what they have for us if they win and not the abuses spewing forth from their camps.

    The other candidates too should speak out  and not resort to regaling us with tales about how corrupt a candidate is. Our ears are tingling from such stories. We want to know their vision and mission for Nigeria. If they do not have anything for the country, they do not have any business been in the race.

  • Osun election and Yoruba quest for self-actualisation

    In a democracy, the masses are limited by the choices of their political leaders – a few powerful people who decide ‘who gets what when and how’ – (Thomas Dye and Harmon Ziegler ‘The Irony of democracy’). Of course intra-elite rivalry is a common feature of the ruling elite but one area of elite consensus is in the imposition of their preferred candidate. This is a fact that was lost on Ademola Adeleke’s PDP party men who, in an attempt to stop him, went to court  alleging  he  was ill-equipped to contest  for the office a governor having allegedly failed the only school certificate paper he attempted or those who defected from APC over  alleged breaching of zoning arrangement. But as it has turned out for both the PDP and APC, the final outcome of the election had very little to do with their candidates.

    What was at stake before the re-run election was the future of Yoruba, a great nation that according to Professor Banji Akintoye, has allowed smaller nations to run over it because ‘it has chosen to stand still as a result of its bad politics’. But after the Osun near-debacle, the Yoruba political elite, for the first time in several decades, rose to the occasion by going into an alliance with Iyiola Omisore, the strong man of Ife.  The prompt response of governor of Oyo and governor-elect of Ekiti to Senator Bukola Saraki’s visit to Omisore was a reminder of the defeat of Ilorin-led Jihad against Yoruba land by Ibadan in Osogbo and the deployment of 25,000 soldiers by Ekiti to defend Ife against any threat during the 19th century war. (Akintoye)

    But come to think of it, is it not first, immoral for PDP to attempt to reap where it did not sow? For rejecting him and his PDP in 1999, Obasanjo persecuted Yoruba all through his presidency (1999-2007). In pursuance of his doomed ‘mainstreaming’ agenda, he deployed military tactics to outwit the Afenifere leaders in 2003 and went on to rig all southwest governorship elections except Lagos State. For out-foxing him, he decided to punish Lagos by illegally sitting on Lagos State’s local council allocations for two years in defiance of court orders. His government rejected calls for the repair of Lagos International Airport road, Apapa Tin-can Island Port Road, Ibadan-Ilorin road, Lagos Otta road, Sagamu-Benin road and the rehabilitation of the Third Mainland Bridge.

    The marginalization of Yoruba by Obasanjo’s PDP was not a myth. Speaking during the selection exercise of the current Ooni, he said “I was here in this palace 10 days before the demise of kabiyesi and he told me how the Yoruba race is marginalised in the scheme of things. He also told me to ensure that the Yoruba race got its own share of things in the country.” That never happened. Before then the Alaafin of Oyo had also accused him of “paying lip service to issues that could assist the cause of the Yoruba’.Jonathan continued with his godfather’s legacies.

    Then in December 2017, the leading Yoruba contenders for the chairmanship of PDP were outwitted by Nyesom Wike who drafted Raymond Dokpesi and Uche Secondus very late into the race. While withdrawing from the race in protest, Bode George had said “”Since the ancient days when the Yoruba people began their historical challenges on the plains and the hills of Ile-Ife, we have always been defined by our instinctive integrity, our methodical industry, our consistent loyalty and our steadfastness in protecting and defending the truth.”He then went on to lament that PDP’s, “legitimate and morally sound micro-zoning principle has now been trashed, dumped in the waste bin, flung into the gutter by very little men who have compromised the pivotal moral anchor of civilised engagement for temporary selfish gains”.

    Chief Bode George also said: “PDP has lost its soul, lost its principled beginning and the predications of righteousness. It has traded the finer principles of democratic guidance and equity for the squalid, dirty and shameful resort to mercenary agenda where nothing matters save the putrid, oafish gains of the moment”. He lamented:”The Yoruba people have been openly maligned. The Yoruba have been savaged, tormented, treated with contempt, scurried, scoffed at, humiliated and denigrated by little men whose sun will soon set”. He then demanded that “Governor Nyesom Wike must as a matter of priority and ethical importance tender unreserved apology to the people of Yoruba land for his unguarded utterances on national television”.

    Except perhaps for Chief Olu Falae and perhaps Pa Ayo Adebanjo, who not too long ago praised Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu for liberating Yoruba land from Obasanjo and his PDP but today appears to have misgivings about the battle for self-actualisation he and his other Afenifere leaders had waged for over 60 years, I am sure Bode George who today understands the challenge before the Yoruba nation will have inner satisfaction that Wike’s PDP was prevented from reaping where it has not sowed.

    The historic action also has effect on the Yoruba renewed struggle for self-actualisation within the greater Nigerian nation. Yoruba want a more egalitarian society for themselves and for other ethnic groups in the country. For that task, Awo in early 50s assembled Yoruba educated elite of solid character, to fashion out a vision for his people. These young visionaries  set up the Western Regional Marketing Board in 1954 which  developed the cash crop industry in the West and together with other regional boards “became the dominant economic system in the Nigerian economy controlling 63% of the foreign exchange earned by the country in 1961”. They also set up banks and housing estates.

    Under the military, the promulgation of “Commodity Boards Decree in 1977” by Obasanjo destroyed the Western Region’s economy. As PDP’s elected president  between 1999-2007, some of the PDP governors he personally imposed on Yoruba states under his failed ‘mainstreaming agenda’ behaved like outlaws sharing government estates and haggling over who was to buy government banks and other industries they inherited.

    It was not until 2016 during Yoruba governors’ parley initiated by the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria, DAWN that it was agreed that “the key to leveraging our uniqueness is the regional approach to dealing with our afflictions, overcoming our difficulties, as well as creating sustainable pathway to progress together”.

    Wike’s PDP foothold in Yoruba land would have threatened this new reawakening.

  • Through the looking-glass (1)

    Today, we stand on the bight of history to salvage or waste whatever hope survives, again. For all our rant of progress and our clamour for change, see what politics we advocate. See what candidates we celebrate.

    Like a mixed economy, men of mixed politics touting philosophies of mixed premises, assault our psyche with debilitating mathematic and skill. They have led us from the epoch of gloomy realities, to the point where geometry of military vigour and feeble rebellion dissipates in our ruined world.

    It’s about time we exercised tact and meticulousness, in casting our vote at the forthcoming general elections.

    I ask that we be wary of everybody and everything. I ask that we watch out for certain questions which we will frequently hear and certain apologies that may resound as philosophical query or rhetoric. They are in truth, psychological confessions and expositions of the treachery and chaos constituted by our preferred candidates and their apologists.

    If we pay good mind to their politics, we would find that every touted good by some candidates, masks a damning evil, like the extent to which altruism erodes a man’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights, or the actual value of human life. And the extent to which his conscience and humaneness has being wiped out.

    I ask that we be wary of the extremely humble and patronising candidate, who is desperate to serve as the means to the end of others; such character will ultimately regard others as disposable means to achieving his ends, often at very expensive cost.

    The more neurotic and ‘conscientious’ he gets in his practice of altruism, the more he will devise schemes “for the love of the collective good,” “for the love of the common man,” or “posterity” and “leaders of tomorrow.”

    Every effort of such candidate will be geared at reinforcing all manners of sentiments and sound bites – he would claim to seek the fulfilment of “the people’s needs” except the actual needs of electorate, like you and I.

    Among other measures, shall we institutionalise the debate as a platform for scrutinising our candidates? I moot a discuss, where the crucial, dreaded questions get asked.

    Let us wield it as a looking glass by which we view and analyse the politics, antecedents and soul of each candidate. Let us not be deceived by their politics of unblemished altruism.

    The advocates of such selflessness often promise automatic and wholly magical solutions to problems of poverty, security, sub-standard education and healthcare to mention a few.

    They promise success and survival to anyone and everyone but what they ultimately offer are “life-boat” solutions – fleeting lifelines by which short-term benefits are derived. Such philosophy of governance and moral conduct conflict with our social realities. It’s akin to applying menthol on a bullet wound.

    Let us not be deceived by their promises of restructuring, modern and affordable housing, true federalism, fiscal prudence, quality education and so on regurgitated by our preferred candidates.

    Let us begin to ask how they would pay for these things and at what cost to you and I.

    Thus the beauty of a platform by which we would make each candidate define his philosophy of social reform, welfare governance and the psychology of his noble experiments in the interest of our most basic necessities.

    The appalling recklessness by which our candidates propose, justify and project “government with a human face” may be discernible, measured and disclaimed through the looking-glass of well organised political debates and frank-talk.

    Thus we could begin to identify and abstain from such candidates and their philosophy of bogus realities.

    Who knows? We may discover, in the nick of time, that the hallmark of their “humanitarian” mentalities is the advocacy of some limitless grand scale public goal or initiative, without regard to context, costs or means of achieving it.

    Eventually, we would understand, that, for such a goal or initiative to be desirable to you and I, it has to be made public and glamorised because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to enshroud such vital issues as the means of achieving it.

    This is because the means are to be human lives. Human lives like yours and mine; battered, bruised, browbeaten and easy to fleece.

    Healthcare appropriately illustrates a modicum of their life-boat ventures. “Isn’t it desirable that the government subsidises treatment of compatriots living with HIV/AIDS?” clamours an average citizen. The preferable answer would be “Yes, it is desirable.” Who would have a reason to say no anyway?

    It is at this point that both mental and moral processes of a collectivised brain are wholly cut off. The rest is fog. Only the desire remains in sight of our “altruistic” candidate.

    “It’s for the greater good. It’s hardly in my interest but the interest of others. It’s for the public, a helpless, ailing public,” rants the familiar candidate. Consequently, the fog hides such facts as the embezzlement of public fund, unbridled looting of the public till, compromise and sacrifice of medical science, professional integrity and the careers and happiness of those who are to administer such care, the nurses and medical doctors; and those who are to enjoy it, the patients.

    The examples of such projects are innumerable as daily, our favoured candidates, whip up more altruistic hogwash to bait us, draw us in and confuse us.

    Therefore, be wary of the candidate promising to clean up our slums while avoiding questions about what happens to the victims of such cleansing and those in the next income bracket.

    Be wary of the candidate who seeks to “educate the shanty kid” while avoiding crucial issues as the quality and welfare of staff to anchor such educational project. What will be taught, and what back-up measures are to be adopted in the event that the initiative fails.

    Be wary of the candidate who seeks that Nigeria too gets to do the moonwalk and conquer space even as he avoids the crucial issues of government and private sector neglect, Nigeria’s white elephant space technology and discrimination against the nation’s polytechnics and technological training schools.

    Be conscious of their unreality – their blind, savage, ghastly fantasies that inspires them to prevaricate and if possible, avoid the usually unanswered and unanswerable question to all their “popular” and “altruistic” goals: “Who really gets to enjoy the benefits?”