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Tag: Thatcher

  • Margaret Hilda Thatcher: Lest we forget

    Margaret Hilda Thatcher: Lest we forget

    Baroness Thatcher, the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 20th century had been laid to rest at the age of 87. She was better remembered as The “The Iron Lady” – a paradox indeed for the first woman to be British Prime Minister. Rabidly anti-communist, her globally “uncompromising politics and leadership style” made a Soviet journalist to so nickname her, Iron Lady.

    In Africa, we dare not speak ill of the dead. Certainly nobody would ever recommend a Thatcher Death party the type which before her burial reportedly attracted some hundreds in London, who had fun rather than shedding tears for a Prime Minister, whose poverty -inducing policies in Britain are known as Thatcherism.

    But while we are enjoined to miss a departed soul, some of the post mortem exaggerated tributes from Africa are too good to be believed about the Iron Lady. Indeed some tributes by their factual untruths amount to speaking ill of the dead. During her reign (without royal entitlement!) the no-no woman never gave in to flattery and praise singing. I recall that in 1988, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher visited Nigeria. The tour was greeted by NLC-led mass anti-apartheid protest. She actually declined to take along her BARB horse gift given to her by the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero. Definitely I bet that Maggie who rejected a royal horse gift would dismiss posthumous, unsolicited and certainly undeserved, attributions.

    President Goodluck Jonathan while condoling the government and people of Britain on the death of its former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in a statement signed by the President’s spokesman Reuben Abati, that; “The late Baroness Thatcher will always be remembered by the world for her very unique, distinctive and purposeful leadership which restored pride and respect to her country and made a resurgent Great Britain a force to be reckoned with on the global stage.” These tributes were mere words without historic justifications. What made Thatcher’s leadership “unique”, “purposeful” for our continent?

    The bane of contemporary African leadership is lack of memory and accountability. The generous posthumous assessment of Margaret Thatcher once again shows that some African leaders are eager to impress outside powers rather than being accountable to their peoples.

    True to her divisive character, Thatcher while in office made two rancorous visits to Africa characterised by protests and condemnations against her notorious racist support for the discredited apartheid terror-regime. A woman who in defiance of the world and unapologetically saw Nelson Mandela as “a terrorist” deserving no freedom from Robben Island maximum prison (instead of a freedom fighter Madiba is) offered no purposeful leadership neither for Africa nor for Britain where anti-apartheid feeling was rooted in spite of her obstinacy. Undoubtedly, the sudden resignation of Thatcher as British Prime Minister on November 22, 1990 after her humiliation by her conservative party was one big relief for Africa. Long before the war in the gulf in 1990, her African policy passed for political and economic equivalent of war(s) against a continent. Thanks to the scores of her doctrinaire policies (read: missiles) for which the continent lacked the capacity (read: patriots) to repel.

    Apartheid South Africa thrived on Thatcher’s ‘no-sanctions’ policy. The popular belief was that both the liberation efforts and sanctions by the international community would bring the racist Boers to reason and negotiation table. For her, sanctions campaign was ‘absurd’ and commonwealth-after-commonwealth, she could not conceal her annoyance about the fact that sanctions would not set out ‘to relive the poverty and starvation’ in South Africa. She single handedly subverted reasoned positions of the of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) on apartheid and guaranteed British security for the most inhuman system on the globe.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo commendably unmasked Thatcher’s outlook in a personal letter, sent to her published in an edition of British Financial Times, when he told her thus: “Many people around the world view your continued opposition to sanctions as founded in instinct, not logic and as displaying a misguided tribal loyalty and myopic political vision…”

    She mischievously taunted the repeal of the so-called Mixed Marriage Act by Pik Botha as evidence of her romance with apartheid. General Obasanjo reportedly asked Thatcher if all 25 million blacks were fighting for was to “marry or have sex with five million whites” adding that the “mental laager of the Boer seem to be mirrored” in Thatcher’s “own attitudes”.

    Thatcher’s UK did not promote any decolonisation policy or initiative on Namibia. On the contrary, Cold war perspective beclouded the policy perception of the legitimate efforts of SWAPO to restore the usurped rights of black men and women. The struggle for independence was reduced to a ‘regional ideological conflict’ according to which a ‘linkage’ existed between the withdrawal of the Cuban troops in Angola and the independence of Namibia. Indeed, with the unscheduled visit of Mrs. Thatcher to Windhoek in September, 1989, the world nearly had a caricature of UN Resolution 435 on Namibian independence as she displayed colonial bias and wrongly accused SWAPO of ‘disrupting’ decolonisation process, she never believed in the first instance. Africa problem-solving was never her specialisation in office.

    Her worst footprint was on the global economy. Obviously not by accident, her tenure coincided with the worst economic crisis in Africa: balance of payment crisis, collapse of primary goods’ prices, poverty and unemployment. These crises were in themselves attributable to the debt crisis. Maggie was ruthlessly committed to debt collection and the better if the structural ‘adjustment’ programme lacked a human face. Britain was the home of the ‘Club of private creditors’. The Prime Minister was committed to neo- liberal free enterprise at home, never hesitated to export same abroad with the support for IMF and World Bank reforms. Thus the continent became a showcase of mutually exclusive competitive policies of devaluation, liberalisation, privatisation and cuts in public spending.

    The results: unemployment, brain drain, decline in income, and ‘perverse flow of resources’ through debt repayment. Her tenure was the same as SAP-military imposed regimes in Africa. She suffered no democracy rhetoric in Africa; she administered UK at a time constitutionalism was trampled upon by corrupt military adventurers in notable commonwealth states of Nigeria and Ghana. As recent as 2004, Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of Lady Thatcher, was arrested and charged over claims that he was involved in a plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.

    Let’s forgive but we dare not forget her dubious African legacy. The defunct West Africa Weekly summed up Mrs. Thatcher’s tenure thus: ‘Mrs. Thatcher never developed a coherent policy that remotely took account of the genuine interests of African people…’

    • Aremu mni, is Vice President of Nigeria Labour Congress

  • Lady Thatcher and Africa

    Lady Thatcher and Africa

    SIR: The late Lady Margaret Hilda Thatcher who died last week in Britain at the age of 87 years will be remembered for a very long time in British political history. From a humble background as a grocer’s daughter, she became the first female Prime Minister in Britain. Added to this unique achievement, she had the distinction of being the longest serving British Prime Minister in the twentieth century. Although not known to be a political tactician in the mode of leaders like Wilson Churchill and Harold Wilson, she achieved what these two leaders cold not achieve by wining three consecutive general elections.

    The actions of the late Lady Thatcher when she was in power were felt not only in her country but throughout the world. Her domestic policies were based on her rabid disdain for socialism. She revived the comatose British economy and many of her admirers said that she put ‘Great’ back into Great Britain. She led Britain against all odds to regain Falkland Island from Argentina and won the hearts of many people by pruning the power of the unruly British Trade Unions. On the other side of the coin she created inequality and polarized people of Great Britain.

    On the world stage, she earned the title of ‘Iron Lady’ from the Russians because of her bellicose stand on many international issues. She was unapologetically pro-America and supported Ronald Reagan on many international issues. In Europe she was an irritant to many of her fellow heads of government because she liked to force her views down the throats of others.

    Despite the adulations and praises heaped on her after her demise, many people especially in her own country had nothing but odium for her memory. There were jubilations in many towns in Britain when her death was announced. This is the first time the death of any leader in Britain is celebrated. This is reminiscent of the jubilations that followed the death of Sani Abacha in Nigeria in1998.

    In Africa, although there were no open celebrations of her death but many people will no doubt have a sour memory of her because of her unhelpful policies on Africa when she was in power. When she became Prime Minister in 1979, the independence of Southern Rhodesia and the liquidation of the heinous apartheid regime in South Africa were the intractable problems facing African leaders.

    She showed unbiased sympathy towards the minority white settlers. Instead of recognizing the genuine nationalists, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, she aligned herself and her government with Ian Smith/Muzorewa scheme in which the puppet Muzorewa would be the Prime Minister while the real power would still remain with white minority.

    To her eternal shame, she did everything within her power to prevent the dismantling of the heinous apartheid regime in South Africa. She considered the genuine leaders of South Africa including the revered Nelson Mandela as terrorists. Her greatest damage to the struggle against apartheid was her persistent and vocal opposition to the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa. In 1985 she vetoed the proposed European Community sanctions against South Africa.

    Like her stand on Southern Rhodesia, she was isolated from the rest of the world because of her romance with apartheid regime of South Africa. Despite her support of the heinous apartheid regime, the regime collapsed like a pack of card even when she was still the Prime Minister of Britain

    Most writers on the political life of the late Lady Thatcher agreed that her defining characteristics as a politician was a need for enemies. She chose these enemies and demolished them as she did to Ted Heath her former boss, Arthur Scargill the leaders of the Miners Union and the woolly form of socialism practiced in the sixties by the British Labour party, The late Lady Thatcher tried to have her way on Southern Rhodesia and South Africa but she was flatly defeated as a result of the concerted efforts of the rest of the world

     

    • Prof. Olabode Lucas

    Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti

  • Thatcher for burial next Wednesday

    Thatcher for burial next Wednesday

    •Body to be cremated

    Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the most distinctive and divisive British politician since the second World War, will be buried next Wednesday.

    Britain said the late Mrs Thatcher would receive a ceremonial funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral with military honors – a step short of a state funeral – in accordance with the wishes of her family. It said a private cremation would follow later.

    Baroness Thatcher died Monday morning following a stroke in her suite in the Ritz Hotel in London, where she had been staying since leaving hospital in December after a bladder operation. She was 87.

    Tributes flowed in from around the world, with British prime minister David Cameron saying she “didn’t just lead our country – she saved our country” and was “Britain’s greatest peace-time prime minister”.

    As prime minister from 1979 until 1990, she was the first woman to hold that office and stridently pursued a transformative policy which pared back the role of the state and opened up new areas of the economy to private business.

    She went to war with Argentina over its invasion of the Falkland Islands and, though wedded to Europe’s internal market, was a staunch opponent of the federalist notion of a “European superstate”.

    The late Mrs Thatcher held power as the Troubles in Northern Ireland escalated in the wake of the IRA hunger strikes and was uncompromising in the face of persistent Irish demands for a new approach to the conflict.

    In 1985, however, she gave Dublin a say in the administration of the North for the first time by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement with then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

    Although Taoiseach Enda Kenny noted strains in relations between Dublin and London in the late Mrs Thatcher era, he said the Anglo-Irish accord helped lay the ground for peace.

    “While her period of office came at a challenging time for British-Irish relations, when the violent conflict in Northern Ireland was at its peak, the late Mrs Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement which laid the foundation for improved North-South co-operation and ultimately the Good Friday agreement,” Mr Kenny said.

    President Michael D Higgins, a strident critic in the past of the late Mrs Thatcher’s contentious dictum that there was no such thing as society, said her place in history was secure and noted that her policies in relation to Northern Ireland gave rise to considerable debate.

    “However, her key role in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement will be recalled as a valuable early contribution to the search for peace and political stability.

    “She will be remembered as one of the most conviction-driven British prime ministers who drew on a scholarship that demanded markets without regulation,” Mr Higgins said.

    Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose own economic policies bore the imprint of the late Thatcher’s philosophy, said she was “a towering political figure” who had changed the world. In Washington, US president Barack Obama said “the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend”.

    The late Mrs Thatcher was politically close to then US president Ronald Reagan and was his staunchest ally in the latter years of the cold war.

    In Moscow, former Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev said she had been a leader of “considerable weight”.

    But there was enmity, too, from those still bitter over her role in the year-long miners strike of the mid-1980s, in which she faced down the powerful National Union of Mineworkers. One retired union leader said yesterday that her death was “the best birthday present”.

    In protocol terms, the funeral will be of the same standard as that accorded to Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, although her coffin will not be put on display in Westminster Hall for public tribute as happened in the latter case.

    She left Number 10 Downing Street in 1990 after losing the support of leading figures within her party, which led to bitter internal divisions and played no small role in the Conservatives’ loss of power to Labour seven years later.

    Nevertheless, close friends visited frequently to share a whiskey, where on her good days Mrs Thatcher was not slow about expressing her opinions about the Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition.

     

  • Thatcher: 1925-2013 or 1979-1990

    Thatcher: 1925-2013 or 1979-1990

    When the curtain goes down on a play,” remarked former United States president Richard Milhous Nixon, “members of the audience file out of the theatre and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.” Few epitomised Nixon’s pithy remark as poignantly as Baroness Thatcher, former British Prime Minister who passed away at 87 on Monday. She had been hospitalised last December to remove a growth on her bladder, and had suffered from dementia since 2005. Considering her age, the speculation was not on how many more years she had to live. What overwhelmed commentators was a feeling of weariness about her impending departure, and the difficult obituaries to be crafted by writers to capture what she represented to Britain and the world.

    In the end, she fooled everyone by departing suddenly, just when many were beginning to think she would stay for a little longer. That she was a divisive figure nationally and globally is not in doubt. What with the bitter war she waged on equally intransigent trade unions which had both paralysed British economy and subverted parliamentary rule. Her economic policies, which came to be dubbed Thatcherism, also proved deeply contentious even up till today, and were blamed for the impoverishment of many and the enthronement of an unfeeling variant of modern capitalism. Nor was a large part of Africa enamoured of her foreign policy, especially because it exhibited either a tinge of racism or indefensible sentiment in its support for apartheid and for the Khmer Rouge, and constituted an undertow to her vaunted campaign for democracy and freedom both in the Falklands and Soviet Union.

    Thatcher’s leadership might have been divisive; but whether you admired her or detested her, you could not deny she was an iconic leader, a strong leader with an intuitive grasp of the nuances of public policy and the dynamics of international strategic imperatives. No matter how much reviled she was, few doubt that she was both a trailblazer and an enigmatic leader, the likes of which are getting increasingly fewer in the world. Enlightened opinion of her leadership will ineluctably zero in on her iron will, political sagacity, supreme confidence both as a person and on behalf of her country, and charismatic understanding of what leadership should ideally be.

    Her place is secure in the annals of Great Britain. But much more than that, the world will remember her not simply for her firsts, such as winning three consecutive elections, or being the first and only woman Prime Minister, nor for her ripe old age, nor yet for some of her questionable and controversial economic policies which left many Britons and even Irish poor and bitter, but for being one of the 20th century’s great leaders, quite in the mould of Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Conrad Adenauer of Germany, and Shigeru Yoshida of Japan, among others. After she left office, no British Prime Minister has been quite like her, especially considering how difficult it is for a leader to make a huge mark in peacetime. Indeed, it will take quite a while to find someone who would replicate the massive impact she left on the world in the closing decades of the 20th century.

     

     

  • Margaret Thatcher: In every sense a leader

    Margaret Thatcher: In every sense a leader

    Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.” Margaret Thatcher, never given to understatement, presented that grim vision for Britain in 1979, the year she became prime minister.

    Then, for the next 11 ½ years — almost as long as three U.S. presidential terms — she worked with fierce determination and unrelenting stubbornness to dispel it. By the time she left office, reluctantly, in 1990, there was not much talk anymore of Britain’s inexorable decline. Lady Thatcher had changed not only her country’s direction but also its standing in the world. She continued to be passionately detested by some and admired and respected by others long after she left office, and her record will be debated for decades, or centuries. What is hardly debatable is the proposition that she was, in every sense of the word, a leader.

    Margaret Thatcher was a new kind of Conservative in British politics, a true-believing, Friedrich von Hayek-quoting enemy of what she saw as the excesses of the welfare state, of the unions that seemed to run it and of the mass of socialist encrustations that had formed on the Labor Party’s left wing in the years after World War II. She thought that statism was crushing the nation’s economy, destroying the morale of its people and rapidly diminishing its standing in the world. Apparently a good many Britons agreed with her, though not necessarily with her fervent embrace of the total conservative ideology. The country was ready for a break with the postwar past, and Mrs. Thatcher’s party had the good sense to see in her the forcefulness, conviction and eloquence that could bring it off.

    Mrs. Thatcher’s great domestic battles as prime minister were waged against the institutional left and its supporters among the British intelligentsia, which meant of course that they were extremely entertaining. They were fought on the same issue that divides Europeans to this day: When does the people’s demand for security become so all-consuming that it overtaxes the economy, saps initiative and buries the state under a mountain of debt? She worked for deregulation, privatization of state enterprises, tax changes and other domestic reforms she felt were desperately needed, many of which worked real hardship on the country’s poor, at least in the short term.

    But outside Britain she will be remembered primarily as a world figure. She strengthened Britain’s ties with the United States, bolstered its military, supported placement of intermediate-range missiles in Europe (an extremely controversial move at the time) and spoke out with undiplomatic boldness when she took offense at some countries’ actions. She saw a great divide between freedom and the various forms of tyranny in the world, and she made it clear, always, which side she was on. She voiced harsh criticism of the the Soviet Union, but then also, like her good friend Ronald Reagan, moved to engage its new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

    She made her name in the world a few years into her first term, when the military government in Argentina sought to whip up popular support by invading the nearby Falkland Islands. It was a largely unpopulated place, but those who did inhabit it had no desire to live under the Argentine regime of the time, and Mrs. Thatcher had no intention of letting the invasion stand. Against the advice of many, she ordered a military invasion of the Falklands and retook the islands. Eight years later, after another act of aggression in another part of the word, she reinforced President George H. W. Bush’s resolve to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.

    Mrs. Thatcher, who was raised in the family apartment over her father’s grocery store in Lincolnshire, and who thought that everyday upbringing an ideal preparation for political life, officially became a “lady” (a baroness) after she left office. She was pushed out by divisions within her party on several issues, the most important being the rapid pace of European integration, of which she was skeptical. For some years afterward, she continued to write, speak and agitate. The first woman to serve as Britain’s prime minister, she held the post longer than anyone else in the 20th century, and she might have held it even longer had she been a bit more flexible. But then of course she wouldn’t have been Maggie Thatcher.

    “I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t,’ she said in an interview shortly before her election as prime minister 32 years ago. She did what she thought necessary to stop that decline, and she didn’t really seem to have much worry about what anyone else thought of it. Her toughness in negotiation exasperated and even enraged adversaries. “I’m extraordinarily patient,” she once told an interviewer, “provided I get my own way in the end.”

    – Washington Post

  • World leaders mourn ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher

    World leaders mourn ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher

    •Britain’s first woman PM dies at 87

    Tributes have been pouring in for the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday at 87.

    Among those who sent their condolences to the Thatcher family and the British Government are: President Goodluck Jonathan, America’s President Barack Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron and Queen Elizabeth II.

    The “Iron Lady”, as the late Mrs. Thatcher was known, dominated British politics for two decades. She died yesterday following a stroke she suffered on Monday, Tim Bell, a family spokesman, said.

    The only British woman Prime Minister was a towering figure in the post-war British and world politics.

    Tough and outspoken, the late Mrs. Thatcher led the Conservatives to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990 – the longest continuous period in office by a British prime minister since the early 19th century.

    “It was with great sadness that I learned of Lady Thatcher’s death,” Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday.

    “We’ve lost a great leader, a great Prime Minister and a great Briton,” Cameron said.

    As a mark of honour, Cameron suspended his Europe trip.

    “Cameron cut short a trip to several European countries on Monday after the announcement that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had died,” a spokesman for his Number 10, Downing Street office said.

    President Obama said “America has lost a true friend” who strengthened U.S. ties with Britain and helped win the Cold War.

    Obama went on: “As prime minister, Thatcher was an important ally to American leaders throughout the 1980s, developing close ties with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

    “With the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.”

    Obama, who has two young daughters, Malia and Sasha, said Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first woman prime minister, “stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered”.

    The late Mrs. Thatcher was closely aligned with Reagan in building up defences against the defunct Soviet Union, policies that were seen as important to the eventual break-up of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War.

    Obama noted: “She knew that with strength and resolve we could win the Cold War and extend freedom’s promise.”

    “Here in America, many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history – we can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will.”

    According to Bell, Mrs. Thatcher died peacefully on Monday morning.

    “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” Bell said.

    A grocer’s daughter with a steely resolve, she became loved and loathed in equal measure as she crushed the unions and privatised vast swathes of British industry.

    The Queen of England, Elizabeth II, said she was sad to hear the news of the former prime minister’s death and sent a message of sympathy to her family.

    She retired from public life after a stroke in 2002 and suffered several strokes after that.

    The former Prime Minister made few public appearances in her final months, missing a reception marking her 85th birthday, hosted by Cameron in October 2010.

    She also skipped the July 2011 unveiling of a statue in honour of her old friend, Ronald Reagan, in London.

    In December 2012, she was hospitalised after a procedure to remove a growth in her bladder.

    Thatcher won the nation’s top job only six years after declaring in a television interview, “I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.”

    During her time at the helm of the British government, she emphasised moral absolutism, nationalism, and the rights of the individual versus those of the state — famously declaring “there is no such thing as society” in 1987.

    Nicknamed the “Iron Lady” by the Soviet press after a 1976 speech declaring that “the Russians are bent on world dominance,” Thatcher later enjoyed a close working relationship with United States (U.S.) President Reagan, with whom she shared similar conservative views.

    But the British cold warrior played a key role in ending the conflict by giving her stamp of approval to Soviet Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev shortly before he came to power.

    “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together,” she declared in December 1984, three months before he became Soviet leader.

    Having been right about Gorbachev, the late Mrs. Thatcher came down on the wrong side of history after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, arguing against the reunification of East and West Germany.

    Allowing the countries created in the aftermath of World War II to merge would be destabilising to the European status quo, and East Germany was not ready to become part of Western Europe, she insisted in January 1990.

    President Goodluck Jonathan extend condolences on behalf of the Federal Government to the government and people of Great Britain on the death of the former Prime Minister.

    In a statement signed by Dr. Reuben Abati, his Special Adviser on Media, Jonathan said: “Baroness Thatcher was one of the greatest world leaders of our time.”

    Abati quoted his boss saying: “President Jonathan and Nigerians join the Thatcher family, citizens of Great Britain, members of the Commonwealth and all those in far-flung corners of the world whose lives were positively touched by her dynamic and forward-looking policies in mourning the passage of the celebrated first female British Prime Minister.

    “The President believes that having already attained a legendary status in her lifetime after positively transforming Britain forever in her 11 and half years as Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher will, with her passage today, formally take her place in history as one the greatest world leaders of our time.

    “President Jonathan notes that Baroness Thatcher will be eternally honoured for serving her country with immense passion and strong-willed determination as well as for the great transformation that resulted from her economic and social policies which laid the solid basis for the remarkable economic growth that was witnessed in Britain under the Conservative Government that she led.

    “The late Baroness Thatcher, the President believes, will always be remembered by the world for her very unique, distinctive and purposeful leadership which restored pride and respect to her country and made a resurgent Great Britain a force to be reckoned with on the global stage.

    “He assures the Prime Minister David Cameron and the people of Britain that the government and people of Nigeria share their sadness and deep sense of loss at the passage of Lady Thatcher and join them in praying for the peaceful repose of her great soul.”