Will Northern Politicians Do To Tinubu What They Did To Wike?

 By Rotimi Fasan

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has been spending the last couple of few weeks fence-minding the relationship between their presidential flagbearer, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and his closest rival and challenger at the convention that produced the presidential flagbearer, Nyesom Wike.

*Buhari and Tinubu

The winning side of the contest initially acted like a short visit to Wike, whose hope of being selected as the winner’s running mate was not only dashed when Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta State governor, was picked over and above him, but was also portrayed as patently unfit for any position outside the one he presently holds as governor of Rivers State- the Atiku team acted as if snubbing Wike in the manner it did required nothing more than an advertised short visit of party members to his home to soothe his bruised ego.

This it promptly did and went about its way planning for the next phase of the presidential contest while its foot soldiers went about with their narratives of triumph, highlighting the unmarketability of an Atiku-Wike ticket on account of the real and perceived inadequacies of Wike that are too well-known to be repeated here.

Open Memo To President Muhammadu Buhari On The Impending 2023 APC Presidential Primary

Your Excellency, 

It isn't my intention to bother you with details of the drama of the absurd that attended the emergence of another Fulani - not even the majority Hausa ethnic nationality in the North - as the candidate of the major opposition party, the PDP. It happened because of two factors:  

First was the betrayal by prodigal Southern governors. They were the same ones disturbing our peace with threats of an Armageddon that would engulf the nation if the presidency doesn't rotate to the South in 2023. But each of them bought the pie in the sky of being made the running-mate. After all, in their world view, it is better to be servants in Paradise than rulers in Hell. 

Second, it was a bitter lesson for under-age school-boy politicians in the South to be tutored in the art of deception and betrayal by Fulani masters of the game. 

The Blood Of Deborah Cries For Justice!

 By Rotimi Fasan

In 1989 the Iranian spiritual and revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni, issued a fatwa that was to be executed by any Muslim anywhere in the world on the Indian-born British novelist, Salman Rushdie, following the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims considered blasphemous.

*Deborah Yakubu Samuel 

Not only did the British government and other Western powers at the time rise up in defence of Rushdie’s right of free expression, these countries were very unambiguous about the extent they were prepared to go to defend the right of just one man who was not even a Christian to say nothing of being White to hold personal views of religion and religious figures no matter how obnoxious.

Do You Want Nigeria Buried? Southern, Middle Belt Leaders Ask Ango Abdullahi, Others

 

*Clark 

Press Release

The Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum (SMBLF) has cautioned Political Parties and political Stakeholders not to tinker with the issue of zoning and rotation of political offices especially, the presidency. Warning that doing so would further threaten the bear threads of the Nation's unity.  

SMBLF particularly took exception to a recent statement credited to the Chairman of the Northern Elders Forum, Alhaji Ango Abdullahi that zoning is “dead and buried”. 

SMBLF says it is rather unfortunate and absurd that Ango Abdullahi and his Northern Elders Forum would make such twaddle.  Are they now ready to dissolve the country? What has happened that zoning, which has been a _sine qua non_ in the nation’s political progression has now become a “dead and buried” issue, in the irrational contemplations of Ango Abdullahi and his co-travellers? Could it be due to the incapacity, insipidity and disastrous performance of the Buhari administration or the narcissistic desire to perpetuate  Hausa/Fulani Hegemony? 

How Southern Nigeria Can Win 2023 Presidential Election

 By Dele Momodu

Buhari and Gov Akeredolu of Ondo

Fellow Nigerians, please, allow me to remind you of an article I wrote in 2014 titled IN SEARCH OF MATHEMATICIANS. It was a simple calculation and permutation I made about how Major General Muhammadu Buhari was going to defeat the incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in the 2015 Presidential election. As at that time, the confidence level of the Buhari camp was still quite shaky, indeed it was quite low. 

Dear President Buhari, Please Look In The Mirror

By SKC Ogbonnia
Dear Mr. President,
I am beginning with an Igbo proverb which says that a heedless lizard falling from a tall palm tree typically wrestles to clutch at any available straw on its path before its imminent crash. My father also never fails to tell me that a habit of excuse is the best friend of failure. Nowhere are these sayings more manifest than the case of your presidency.

*Buhari 

Today, the general view is that you are at it again, trying so desperately to cling on to another excuse to avoid responsibility for the crises that have befallen our great party, the All Progressive Congress (APC) and, by consequence, the entire Nigeria.

Gale Of Defections And The Buhari Factor

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

The coming together of political forces of the oppositional hue in the build-up to the 2015 general election portended a grave danger for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In any case, the behemoth, which the PDP typified at the time, had imprudently and lightly treated the ill-omened development and paid dearly for it.

*President Buhari 

The PDP was brought down in prostrate surrender to the supremacy of the rainbow coalition of opposition parties that formed the All Progressives Congress (APC) on which platform Muhammadu Buhari clinched his historic victory over Goodluck Jonathan. That defeat of an incumbent president was novel in the annals of the nation’s presidential elections. 

That Ill-Advised Search For Oil In The North

By Bolaji Tunji

On Monday, President Muhammadu Buhari was said to have met with three state governors from the northern part of the country. The meeting was to discuss what is becoming a desperate, continued search for oil in the north.

Sokoto governor, Aminu Tambuwal, one of the visitors to the president, was quoted to have called on the federal government to support the search for oil in the Sokoto basin, as that area had been discovered to have oil reserve as far back as 1957.

Why Is Governor’s Office So Seductive In Nigeria?

By Martins Oloja

The ecclesiastical saying that there is a time for everything comes in handy today to interrogate some political matters that are weightier than the stale and inevitable tango between the sleepy executive and the restless legislature in Abuja. And here is the thing, it is time to examine what is so constantly seductive about the office of the Governor in Nigeria, that most politically active persons, federal and state legislators, returning foreign envoys, retired public servants, retired clerics, repentant militants and insurgents, special advisers and former Speakers want to contest that office.

It is curiouser and curiouser that even former governors that have run for only one term and even serving as ministers, a former governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) all want to be nothing but governors. What is in it for the aspirants and even occupants of that office? Are they going to fulfill a constitutional provision for ‘welfare and security of the citizens, which shall be the primary purpose of government? Political intelligence has it that at the moment, Senator Chris Ngige, a former governor of Anambra state, a former Senator representing Anambra state, currently serving as a Minister is in a dilemma even as he is mobilizing fund to contest the 2017 election for governorship. So is Dr. Kayode Fayemi, former Governor of Ekiti State, a serving Minister who wants to return as Governor.

A former CBN Governor, a Professor of Economics who once contested the office, is said to be warming up again to plunge into the murky governorship waters. Mr. Dimeji Bankole, former Speaker of the House of Representatives who never had little or no experience before he was elected member of the House of Representatives, has been fighting to be governor of Ogun State, not minding the principalities and powers that would always frustrate him in his state. When his successor, Hon. Aminu Tambuwal raised his hand to be counted among those to challenge PMB, in 2015, he was quickly drafted by the powers behind the throne to accept to be governor of Sokoto State as a settlement. All protocols and legal processes were bent and broken for him to emerge as the only candidate. But the seducers got him with governorship ticket bait. What is in that office the occupants have added a qualifier to as “executive” governor” that is not in the constitution?

“There are a few exemplars that are quietly setting the tone for federalism at the moment: Lagos, Akwa Ibom,  Ekiti, Kano states, etc are strategically evolving as federalism brand ambassadors.” 

Ifeanyi Uba, an oil magnate, a successful football club owner and publisher of The Authority newspaper, in the eye of the storm over some allegation of missing N110 billion in his domain, would like to do all that is politically possible to be the next governor of Anambra state. Nothing else appeals to him. He had taken that road before. What is in that office?

Nigeria: Glamourisation Of Political Prostitution

By Dan Amor

It is a sickening reality in Nigeria that defection, the act of leaving one political party for another, also called carpet-crossing, or what the eminent poet and humorist, Uzor Maxim-Uzoatu called “Jumpology” (the political act of jumping from party to party), has been elevated to the height of a national ideology.

*Nuhu Ribadu, Murtala Nyako and Atiku Abubakar 

(pix:pointblanknews)

This glamourisation of political prostitution by Nigerian politicians signals the death of commonsense. Before the December 2013 defection of 37 members of the House of Representatives elected on the platform of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) in an open show and fanfare, four PDP governors had led the way in a much more rehearsed, media pampered braggadocio in November 2013. Many Nigerians believed that despite the larger implications of the defection with regards to the 2015 political permutations, nothing had really changed. Nigerians who are no longer shocked or surprised at the sheer ingenuity of the defection gale which has seen some politicians changing parties more than they change their agbada, have unanimously called for a stop to this wayward political culture.