Malawi’s Path To An ‘Award-Winning Judiciary’

 By Chidi Odinkalu

Joyce Banda, Malawi’s fourth (and first female) president, was in Nigeria earlier this month as guest of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, Anambra State in South-East Nigeria, where she spoke at the 12th annual lecture in memory of the man after whom the university is named. It was also the 119th birthday of Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe, Nigeria’s founding president, and the month of the 26th anniversary of the death in 1997 of Malawi’s founding president. 

 At the lecture, Joyce Banda described Malawi’s judiciary as “award-winning” and many Nigerians in the audience, embarrassed by the contrast with theirs which wallows in infamy, broke out in spontaneous acclamation. The story of how Malawi’s judges became “award-winning” should be of interest to Nigerians.

One For Zik….

 By Obi Nwakanma

Today, let us celebrate worthy men. This past Thursday, November 16, was the birthday of a giant of history; a man whom the colorful Ozuomba Mbadiwe could have called “a Caterpillar,” who showed the light, so that Africans may see the way. Incidentally, that was the motto of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s newspaper, the West African Pilot: “Show the Light, and the People will find their way.”

*Zik

It was the message at the core of his anti-colonial nationalist organizing. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe – “Zik of Africa,” as he was very fondly called – was the leader of the African anti-colonial Nationalist Movement, from 1937 to 1957, culminating in decolonization, with the independence of Ghana, that year, and home rule for the regions in Nigeria also that year, and full national independence subsequently in 1960. 

Zik’s 119th Posthumous Birthday: Celebrating An Iconic Tall Image

 By Enyinnaya Appolos 

Today is the 119th birthday of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Owelle-Osowa-Anya of Onicha, affectionately called Zik of Africa, a remarkable figure in Nigerian and African journalism and political history. 

*Zik

As the world marks Zik’s 119th posthumous birthday today, tribute must be paid to an iconic tall image who left an indelible mark in the nation’s sands of time. Dr. Azikiwe’s life and contributions as a journalist, politician and statesman are not only worthy of celebration, but the story about Zik should be religiously told and transferred to generations unborn, in remembrance of a Great Icon.

Dr. M.I. Okpara Was Different

 By Christopher C. Ulasi 

Dr. Micheal Iheonukara Okpara governed the nine states which made up eastern Nigeria from 1959 to 1966.  When the military coup of 1966 terminated his governorship on January 16, 1966 the only property he owned was an old bungalow he had in his village Umuahia Abia State.  When the Biafra war ended in January 1970 he desired to study Economics in an American University but he could not raise the fees.

In 1974 after he had gone back to brush up his medical knowledge and was in Edinburgh for his membership examination he shared a flat with a foreigner, a West Indian. 

The British Broadcasting Confusion (BBC)

 By Obi Nwakanma

I still do remember growing up, my father waking, and shaving with the BBC. Against a background of the bleep-bleep-bleep signal of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s World Service, he would do his private chores, and prepare for work. The BBC Foreign Service having fortified his appetite for “real news,” he would then switch to the Local Radio for Morning News.

This was unwavering ritual. For that generation, there was some naïve sense that the BBC carried real news and was committed to pietist truth. I did too for many years. Until I began to see the underbelly of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The small chinks in its armour which became in large part, wide cracks that left me both puzzled and annoyed. 

Before Babies Begin To Emigrate

 By Adekunle Adekoya

There must be a problem in the land, a very big one. I am not talking about the usual that we have lived with for decades — lack of potable water, epileptic power supply, parlous healthcare system and all that. I am talking about a feeling of disenchantment, perhaps hopelessness, especially among the youths which has fuelled what we now call “Ja pa.”

On the internet, it has trended for a few days now that 266 Nigerian doctors have been licensed to practise in the United Kingdom. In my hood, I noticed that I have not seen some of the younger men with whom I relate for some time. To be candid, I don’t remember having seen any of them since before the election. I asked around. Someone volunteered that the guys after whom I’m asking have joined the Ja pa train. “They left for Canada three weeks ago,” my informant said. I shuddered in disbelief. 

Stealing Nigeria!

 By Obi Nwakanma

All things bright and beautiful; all creations great and small; all things bright and wonderful, Nigeria ruins them all. This is a twist on the song many of us sang in the Nursery and Primary Schools of yore. But the last twist was first made to it by the late eminent historian, and one-time Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Professor Tekena Tamuno, during his convocation address at the University of Ibadan in the late 1970s.

What he saw sitting down, many of us had not then seen standing up. But the auguries were there. Nigerians could recognize the handwritings on the wall. In the decades that I grew up and have experienced Nigeria, and I’m just rounding the first half of my fifth decade on this beautiful earth, Nigeria has always presented a challenge. 

The Ayo Adebanjo Support For Peter Obi

By Luke Onyekakeyah

The Ayo Adebanjo-led Afenifere’s support for Peter Obi and the Labour Party (LP) has roots in the historic parley held between Ohaneze and Afenifere in Lagos in early 2017. That parley made strong national headlines as it was welcomed by political pundits from both sides as a worthwhile development.

*Adebanjo 

As an elder statesman who has no other option than to follow the path of honesty and speak the truth no matter what, Pa Adebanjo, who led Afenifere to that parley, cannot afford to backtrack from what he personally championed and endorsed. That is why he is not mincing words to say that equity, justice and fairness demand that the South-East should be given the opportunity to produce the next president in 2023, if the so-called national unity is anything to go by. Otherwise, the whole thing would be mere propaganda and deceit for sectional domination by those who think they are born to rule.

Once Upon A Fight Between Obasanjo And Babangida

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The two generals are seen as the best of friends across the political spectrum of the Nigerian nation. In many informed circles, General Matthew Okikiola Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo and General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida are seen as belonging to the rarefied class known as “Owners of Nigeria”.

*Obasanjo and Babangida

Only the uninformed does not know that when there was the transition to civil rule back in 1999 it was Babangida who arranged that Obasanjo should be brought out of General Sani Abacha’s prison to be made the president of Nigeria.

This act made Obasanjo to create the record of a two-time leader of Nigeria after having been a military Head of State in his first missionary journey.

Obidients: The Protest Before The Revolt

 By Tony Eluemunor

Keeping faith with the sorry saying that: "All things bright and beautiful Nigeria kills them all,” we members of the wasted and wasting generations (age 40 and above) are busy demeaning the only hope that Nigeria could ever hope to get it right as a nation.

*Obi

Nigeria is right now on the verge of a right thing. Ever lucky, Nigeria is hosting a new political and nationalistic and developmental Mojo; that magical phenomenon of Nigerian youth rising up to seize control of the political space and lead from the front, instead of following behind their fathers and mothers. Mojo? It is a slang for a magic charm, talisman or spell or magical power or supernatural influence or luck. 

Ordinarily, Nigeria has so failed and traumatized it’s youth that that segment of the citizenry should be totally alienated. But, here comes the young ones rising up to embrace and remake their fatherland. The political interest they have shown in the forth-coming 2023 election is out of this world, and could only have come from Nigeria, a country that breaks all the rules. 

2023 Presidential Election: Can We Get It Right?

 By Chiedu Uche Okoye

Why is Nigeria, a country endowed with humungous human and material resources, still trapped in the cocoon of   economic and technological quagmire and backwardness?  Why has she continued to bring up the rear on the global ladder of countries’ development? The answer to the above question is not far-fetched. The military incursions into our politics had dealt a severe and devastating blow to our democratic growth and national development. And we have not got it right, politically since Nigeria became a sovereign country in 1960.

 

The departing British imperialists laid the foundation for the egregious culture of imposition of national leaders on the populace in Nigeria. They surreptitiously helped Alhaji Tafawa Balewa to become our Prime Minister in 1960. Was Tafawa Balewa better than Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Rt. Hon. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who were intellectual giants and political juggernauts? Not surprisingly, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa failed to unite the Peoples of Nigeria and set the country on the path of sustainable economic growth and irreversible technological development.

Sam Omatseye’s Death Wish

 By Obi Nwakanma

What was Sam Omatseye thinking? That he could traduce an entire Igbo, and get resounding applause for his hackery? Everyone knows that Sam Omatseye does a hack job in contemporary Nigerian politics, and since he could not fit in properly at the Denver Post, where he did the last bit of real journalism inside him, he went to the dark side.

*Peter Obi

He came home to Nigeria to roost, and he became what the ‘Mad Maxim’ – mad only because like his kinsman ‘Jadum’ celebrated in the poetry of Okigbo, he tells prescient truth – called a “Kept Man.” Reckon with that, dear reader: Sam Omatseye as a “Kept Man.” The image is so very apt, if indeed it means that a kept man is one in whom and through whom a pervert patron relieves and performs all kinds of pervert fantasies. I’m still trying to discern some reason inside Omatseye’s death wish – his distinct form of professional self-immolation.

2023 Presidency: Why Jonathan Should Not Contest

 By Ifeanyi Maduako

Lagos Lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana, SAN, recently argued that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan is not eligible to contest for the presidency of Nigeria again having spent five years as president between 2010 and 2015.

Falana premised his argument on a 2018 constitutional amendment which purportedly bars Jonathan from contesting because if he (Jonathan) becomes the president of Nigeria in 2023, he will spend a cumulative nine years as president whereas the amended constitutional provision on which Falana relied on limits the occupant of the position to two terms of eight years.

*Buhari and Jonathan 

I am not conversant with the amended constitutional provision that Falana relied on but I dare say that he got his interpretation of that provision wrong. A law does not take a retroactive effect and the 2018 constitutional amendment does not affect Jonathan. It can only affect a fresh president from the date it was signed into law. What if Jonathan had won the 2015 presidential election, didn’t Falana know that he would have been in office for nine years by 2019?

Nigeria And The Threat Of A One-Party State

 By Dan Amor

Aside from the usual historical rendition that Nigeria became a political reality following the fusion of the Northern and Southern protectorates of the River Niger area in the interior coast of West Africa in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British military administrator, Nigeria actually adopted a Federal form of government in 1954. Even though still under colonial rule, party politics thrived in the country. 

*Buhari

The leading parties were: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) which stood for political democracy in its classical, individualistic form; the Action Group of Nigeria (AG) which stood for federalist democracy; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), which exemplified the modernization of traditional political authority; and its radical opponent, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), which espoused egalitarian democracy. As a strictly regional party, the NPC did not threaten the Southern parties in their home regions. Since the Northern Region was said to have contained an absolute majority of the national population, (though a myth of the 1959 population census), the NPC could control the Federal government by monopolizing electoral power in the North. 

Anambra 2021: An Appeal To The Mass Media

 By C. Don Adinuba 

 1. With the nomination on Wednesday, June 23, 2021, of Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, an internationally recognized economist, reformer and erstwhile Central Bank governor, as the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) gubernatorial candidate in the November 6 election in Anambra State, the campaign for the governorship election has, for all practical purposes, started. The campaign is expected to be issues-based, free of rancor and violence, as in the last two gubernatorial elections in the state. The APGA gubernatorial nominee has always been widely regarded as the shoo-in. 

C. Don Adinuba

2. The mass media have a huge part to play in the quest to make the November 6 vote exemplary. However, the reports by a section of the Nigerian media on the statutory measures towards the elections have been anything but assuring. A mainstream newspaper, for example, claimed three days ago that APGA would be disqualified from the forthcoming gubernatorial election because, as it claimed, it did not notify the Independent National Electoral Commission of the special ward congresses held on June 15, 2021, to choose ad hoc delegates to the June 23, State Congress, at least 21 days before the event. The newspaper based the speculative report on a letter purportedly written by an INEC officer claiming that it was not notified of the congresses. The INEC officer states nowhere in the letter anything concerning disqualification. Are some journalists now campaigning for INEC to be vested with the power to disqualify candidates and parties arbitrarily long after the courts have stopped such arbitrary actions? 

Ban On Open Grazing: Victory For The South

 By Tony Ademiluyi

The 1804 Jihad spearheaded by Usman Dan Fodio made the Fulani tribe the overlords of the Hausas. Dan Fodio departed from the norm in imposing Fulfulde as the new language of the court. Instead he did the unthinkable by ensuring an adoption of the Hausa language as the lingua franca of the conquered territory. This linguistic affinity spread throughout the north which ensured that they spoke with one voice and were united despite their tribal differences.

The British found this useful in their policy of indirect rule which made the northerners have a general apathy towards nationalistic activities that was largely a southern affair. As a reward, the departing colonialists ensured that they had the majority seats in the House of Representatives which was the more powerful of the bicameral legislature at the time as the senate was ceremonial. This action by the British has haunted us more than sixty years after the Union Jack was lowered. At the moment, the north has 19 governors while the south has 17 and far more seats in the National Assembly than the south which has ensured that they are always in charge no matter who sits in Aso Rock.

Kogi 2019: Will Yahaya Bello Carry The Day?

By Tony Ademiluyi

Before Nigerian independence, the youths played a vital role in wrestling political power from our erstwhile colonial masters. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe established the Zik Group of Newspapers with the West African Pilot as it’s foremost in the group in 1937 at the age of thirty-three after a three year stint in editing the African Morning Post in Accra, Ghana. It revolutionized the newspapering industry and was the most nationalistic while still maintaining a modest modicum of financial success in its three decades of existence.

*Gov Bello and aides took to the streets to celebrate
 Buhari's return from UK medical  trip

Chief Anthony Enahoro edited the Southern Nigerian Defender one of the newspapers in the Zik Group in 1944 at the age of twenty-one straight from the famous Kings College Lagos without any university education. He went on to move the motion for Nigeria’s independence in 1953 at the age of thirty. Chief Bola Ige became the organizing secretary of the defunct Action Group at the age of twenty-three. Ambassador Matthew Tawo Mbu became the minister for Labour at the age of twenty-three in 1954 before he went to the United Kingdom to study law. Mazi Mbonu Ojike spearheaded the cultural nationalism with his famous ‘boycott the boycottables’ in his early thirties after his educational sojourn in the United States and became the Deputy Mayor of Lagos long before he turned forty. The list is endless of youths who achieved a lot in pre-independence Nigeria.

The Death Of Truth In Nigeria

By Passy Amaraegbu

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election 

– Otto von Bismarck. 

The first documented census in Nigeria was carried out by Britain in 1866. Following this, others in 1971, 1896, 1901, 1911, 1921 and 1952/53.

However the first census after independence was in 1963. Thereafter, the degree of reliability of the figures has been on a spiral descent and decline. The official Nigeria position is that Lagos State with a population of 9,013, 534 is second to Kano with a first position of 9,401, 288 (Nigerian Finder). However, the Lagos State government puts the census of the State at 22 million while the United Nations puts it at 14 million.

Nigeria: Mindset Of Our Politicians

By Passy Amaraegbu

The greatest minds are capable
of the greatest vices as well as
of the greatest virtues.
—Rene Descartes.

A family of five perishes in one night because their old generator caught fire at midnight and before neighbours could offer any help, the soot suffocates them. A professor of engineering dies in a general hospital due to poisoned intravenous injection he received. Famine is ravaging several villages because the indigenes can no longer engage in productive farming. The villages are now the den of robbers, kidnappers, killer herdsmen and marauders. The road network linking several villages, towns and communities have degenerated and disintegrated. Some of the roads that were repaired are also quickly being eroded systematically.

*Nigerian Politicians

No doubt, the situation in the various levels of our societal life may not always be as sordid as earlier portrayed but in some occasions it is or even worse. Our society has reached a negative tipping point. We are on the edge of the cliff and if no systematic and determined positive steps are taken by the citizens and the government, the result will be an imminent and inimical descent into catastrophe. 

Political Defections In Nigeria, Causes And Consequences

By Simon Abah

There is an alarming rise in organised political defections in Nigeria.

Although she is being hyped as the giant of Africa, the democracy in Nigeria is not practised like in countries such as Ghana, Sierra Leone, Botswana, Tanzania, Liberia, Senegal and Zambia with stable democracies. Nigeria’s version is a guided democracy and a democracy for the few.

*Saraki

What are the reasons for the surge in defections? Turncoats complain about the absence of internal democracy in their parties and of political witch-hunt by political gladiators.

Do you agree with the beliefs of these defectors?

Particularly since no mention is made about the developmental interests of Nigeria as reasons for changing sides.