Borrowing In The People’s Name To Steal!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Those who run and ruin Nigeria read like rogue characters in a picaresque. Nigeria has turned out to be a sordid adventure and those who dominate our landscape are the picaros. Roguish, arrogant and bra­vura-like, our rulers prance about and do things that normal people will not do.

Yes, those who presently rule Nigeria are not normal. Their mental constitution is made of something in the realm of the abnormal. Daily, we are confronted with a multiplicity of inanities orchestrated by government officials who are never fazed by their acts of recklessness and perfidy. They have turned Nigeria into a nation of anything goes since infractions now happen without sanctions.

Soludo Just Signed The Certificate Of His Marriage To Irrelevance

 By Onyemaechi Ogbunwezeh 

Charles Chukwuma Soludo is an intelligent man no doubt. But his most recent write up on Peter Obi, was to all intents and purposes, certifiably stupid. There is no polite way of telling an intelligent man, that he goofed big time. 

*Soludu and Obi

In all his wisdom, he missed the most important fact of this period. He missed the fact that Peter Obi is not the one running for President. He failed to realize that it is the ordinary, dispossessed and oppressed Nigerian youth that is running for the Presidency through Peter Obi. 

He thought that this is about Peter Obi. 

He forgot the fact that this is the first time in the history of this country that Nigerian oppressed youths have risen, financed themselves and set out to wrest their destiny from a thieving, visionless and lazy elite, which has disembowelled their aspirations and left them with a broken country without purpose. 

Nigeria’s Political Structures Of Corruption!

 By MC Asuzu

There have recently been discussions in this country concerning Nigerian politicians who have no political structures and those who had them, as the veritable determinants of those who will be able to win elections in Nigeria and otherwise. It was a very interesting discussion indeed. But what kept coming back to the mind of some of us who are incapable of any partisan political persuasions and/or memberships and participation is this: what structures are the people saying these things thinking of?

What does political structures by a single politician mean? Is it individual politicians or the group of people who wish to work together under specific political ideologies that develop such political structures? These organisational groups of people are simply called political parties, is it not? So, when politicians are talking of personal political structures (but not those of political parties), it becomes necessary to examine what these people may be having in mind and what it is that they themselves really have done in those regards.

Cardinal Okogie To President Buhari: We Are In Danger In Nigeria Today!

...Open Letter To President Muhammadu Buhari

By Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie

Dear Mr. President,
We read from the media the admonition to religious and traditional rulers at a recent interfaith conference in Abuja.  You advised them to refrain from partisan politics so as not to lose the esteem people have for them.

Nigeria: The March Of Progress And The March Of Misery

By Dan Agbese

Klump. Klump. Klump. It is the inexorable march of human progress. Nations march; individuals march. Kings march and commoners march. Rulers march and the ruled march.

*Benin-Auchi-Okene Federal Highway

The grand purpose of our relentless march is to move away from the undesirable to the desirable; from a life of hard scrabble in a village, for instance, to a modern life of luxury in towns and cities, as in Lekki in Lagos, Asokoro in Abuja and other enclaves of the wealthy and the well-heeled. Nations march to move from being under-developed to developing and thence to developed nations. The developed nations march because they want to develop even more and uneven the score.

Buhari’s Foreign Travels

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

 In arriving at the fact that the nation throbs with a plethora of questions over the necessity of the foreign trips of President Muhammadu Buhari, the presidency succeeds in feeling the pulse of the citizens. But it clearly underestimates the difficulty of stemming the impatience of the citizens by offering justification for the president’s travels. The citizens may not have wholly aligned themselves with the Emersonian disparagement of travelling as a fool’s paradise since those who made England, Italy or Greece venerable were not peripatetic. But the urgency of the need to solve the country’s myriad of problems at home and the unsavoury memories of the globe-trotting of past political leaders  have crashed what was left of the brittle confidence in our leaders’ fascination with overseas’ trips.

*President Buhari 

Our leaders have left the stark records of not sparing a thought for the suffering poor citizens. Instead of staying at home to consider strategies for taking the blight of poverty off the people, they are rather attracted to a life abroad at the expense of their states or the country. This is why they travel abroad to attend birthdays of their cronies and paramours. Some even travel abroad to organise weddings for their children or they are guests at the weddings of their friends which they have sponsored. In some worse cases, such travels have been used as opportunities to negotiate how to stash slush funds in foreign accounts. But our political leaders justify such travels as opportunities to bring foreign investments to the country.

Still, travelling abroad is a means of escaping from the problems at home.  Our political leaders have no problem with leaving the citizens to writhe and wither away under the weight of the crises sired by the former’s misbegotten governance. And when they are overseas, they do not bother to copy the good things they see there. They do not pay attention to how through transformational leadership, what would have been a barren country is turned into an investors’ delight. Nor do they observe how on account of the fact that leaders live by example, the citizens are ready to obey the laws of the country that would redound to the peace and good of all. What our leaders are only interested in as they travel abroad are the homes that are the exemplifications of modern architectural  ingenuity. They would come home and then loot the treasury in a bid to replicate these architectural masterpieces for their private use.

For a Nigerian leader who travels to the Vatican and takes a photograph with the pope, his or her day is made. Then such a leader would now strive to push the photograph to the front pages of major newspapers in the country. A political leader does this perhaps because he or she would like the citizens to know the opportunity he or she  has just got to put the name of their backwater carrying the beautiful title of a state or country on the map of the world. It could also be to gleefully announce to the hell-bound citizens that their leader is on the way to heaven.  For some politicians, putting the pictures on the front pages of newspapers is not enough. Billboards must be erected in every strategic corner of the state to announce this treasure trove. This was exactly what Governor Rochas Okorocha did in Imo State after taking a photograph with President Barack Obama during a visit to the United States.

Nigeria Economy Worse In 90 Days Of APC – PDP

…Says Nigerians Have Been Scammed With Empty Promises

Press Release 

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) decries as alarming, the damage so far done on the nation’s economy by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) since it took office at the center, three months ago.

The party said the shambolic state of the nation’s economy within the period, which represents the worst in the nation’s contemporary history, is a direct fallout of uncertainty created by the inability of the Buhari-led government to chart a clear-cut economic policy, worsened by abuse of regulations, and flagrant violation of constitutional provisions.

PDP National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh, in a statement on Saturday said instead of gains, official reports show that the last three months under the APC-led government have brought a sudden decline in the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with attendant losses and hardship to the citizens, while the government embarks on propaganda of imaginary achievements in addition to attempts to foist harsh economic regime to cover its ineptitude.

“If not for crass incompetence or a possible ulterior motive to subjugate Nigerians for selfish reasons, what else explains the adamant stance of this administration in running a government without the statutory components of a full cabinet and precise fiscal policy direction, even when the negative consequences of this strange totalitarian approach are taking serious toll on the economy and the polity in general?

“Whereas the APC led government is busy with its propaganda of imaginary achievements, official reports from the National Bureau of Statistics show that that the economy is being grounded with Nigeria’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) plunging with about 2.35%, while job creation has dropped by 69 percent.