Disturbing Killings In Plateau State

By Adewale Kupoluyi

Over 200 persons have been reportedly killed and over 50 houses razed down in renewed attacks in 11 villages in three local government areas of Plateau State, namely: Barkin Ladi, Riyom and Jos South, attributed to armed herdsmen bandits, who have been terrorising the Middle Belt region since 2001. This time around, heavily armed gunmen had invaded the affected villages of Exland, Gindin Akwati, Ruku, Nghar, Kura Falls and Kakuruk; in the Gashish district as well as Rakok, Kok and Razat villages in Ropp district of the local government area. 

Eye witnesses to the killings claimed that security agents failed to intervene despite the high level of presence, as a result of the recurring communal violence. The source further noted that the crux of continuous unending bloodbath in the state was the unresolved crisis, saying the latest fighting was a result of the sale of cattle by herdsmen. After selling the cow, some locals attacked the herdsmen, killed them and took away the money alongside the cow.

Nigeria: Of Lawmakers And Bribe-Takers

By Olusegun Adeniyi 

From the judgement of a Federal High Court sitting in Lagos which orders President Muhammadu Buhari to “urgently instruct security and anti-corruption agencies to forward to him reports of their investigations into allegations of padding and stealing of some N481 billion from the 2016 budget by some principal officers of the National Assembly” to damaging allegations by both former Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, the spotlight is now on our federal lawmakers who are being perceived as no more than cheap bribe-takers. 

*Senate President Saraki and House Speaker Dogara

The situation is not helped by the widespread knowledge that the National Assembly has become the watering hole of high-maintenance ex-governors, semi-literate political contractors, wanted international criminal suspects and some yesterday’s men who are now in desperate need of economic empowerment. Yet, in a situation where lawmakers behave like gangsters, the various executive bodies like ministries and agencies will begin to see their assignments in transactional terms as oversight becomes a ritual of appeasement of the greed of committee members and the budgeting process, which ordinarily should be a serious assignment, degenerates into an annual bazaar. 

State Of The Nation: Open Letter To President Buhari

By Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi

Dear Mr. President

It is with a heavy heart that I sit down to write Your Eminence. As a conscious, patriotic and progressive youth, I could not help but register my dissatisfaction with my country’s plight alongside a volley of plea to your administration to rescue this dire situation. Excuse the curtness of my manners. The intensity of my pain has almost robbed me entirely of formality. My passionate plea is not for a personal gain but for a revision of government’s position on issues of health, poverty and education, the individual components forming the fulcrum around which our collective development and glory as a nation revolve.

Sir, I read the disapproving remarks you made at the 58th general conference of the Nigeria Medial Association (NMA) concerning the unpleasant effects of various strike actions embarked upon by the country’s health professionals on the nation’s health. With a commensurate level of concern – and perhaps more, I have found myself under the onus of speaking on this trend with a view to achieving an impressive turn in events.

Nigeria: Badoo At The Gate

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is far from reprieve for the citizens as the country lurches from one dismal failure to another. While they are still choking under the weight of an economic recession, their miserable existence has been further blighted by worsening insecurity.

Of course, it is not for nothing that the citizens loathe the country’s security agencies. It is just a way of their expressing their outrage at the incapability of the security operatives to deliver on their mandate of protecting life and property.

But in some rare moments when the security operatives exude flashes of professional brilliance and depart from the path of turning their guns on the citizens, they often get well-deserved accolades. This is why the police who have succeeded in smashing the kidnap syndicate led by Evans in Lagos have rightly been lauded for their courage and professionalism.

Yet, the praise is subdued. It is drowned in the phalanx of posers their success has triggered. Why did it take so long to get him? Why are kidnappers still on the prowl? And why are the pupils of the Lagos State Model College, Igbonla, Epe, still being held in captivity over 40 days after their abduction?

These are questions that the security operatives are not likely to provide answers to soon. In other words, the citizens are still haunted by insecurity. This is despite that even soldiers have been heavily deployed on the streets to boost security. The House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara who was recently alarmed by this heavy deployment declared that the country was under a state of emergency in peace time. In fact, the citizens have lost confidence in the ability of the security operatives to protect them.

Saraki, Dogara And Corruption

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Lest we miss a vital opportunity to reflect on the anti-corruption campaign, we must put the positions of Senate President Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara on the inveterate plague in the proper perspective. It serves no good to the anti-corruption campaign and the nation’s development in the long run for their views to be dismissed in a huff simply because of a phalanx of allegations that have portrayed the duo and other members of the National Assembly as not immune from corruption.

 

*Saraki and Dogara 

Saraki is facing prosecution at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) for corruption. The citizens are riled by other senators’ apparent complicity in the alleged sleaze of their leader because they have waited in vain for the lawmakers to evince a sense of moral repulsion against identifying with him whenever he goes to the tribunal or court over his case. Underpinning the outrage is that if they were not as corrupt as their leader why should they even allow him to preside over the affairs of the upper legislative chamber? Why not replace him and avoid him like a plague as long as the trial lasts? Also, Dogara has been accused of budget padding, a brand of corruption that reportedly entails the manipulation of a fiscal plan to the detriment of the wellbeing of the bulk of the citizens. But unlike the case of Saraki, the allegation of corruption against Dogara seems to be escaping from public consciousness.

Dogara and his colleagues have been able to squelch and banish the ex-chairman of the House of Representatives Appropriation Committee, Abdulmumin Jibrin, who made the allegation against him into political wilderness where he now flails, flounders and screams, striving to draw the citizens’ attention to the corruption in the lower legislative chamber. But nobody seems to hear him.

Not By Salary Alone

By Paul Onomuakpokpo 

What the citizens would be confronted with at the end of the squabble between Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai and the Speaker of the House Assembly Yakubu Dogara is not a resolution of the crisis that redounds to the transparency of their financial dealings. For the more either of the parties strives to portray himself as the poster boy for fiscal prudence, the darker the opacity that surrounds their remuneration becomes.

*House Speaker, Yakubu Dogara and
Gov Nasir e-Rufai of Kaduna 

Clearly, we cannot indict these officials for financial impropriety. That is a job for the anti-graft agencies and the courts. However, they represent the political class who has been identified with profligacy. In that case, it may be difficult for them to extricate themselves from the cesspool of corruption that has engulfed the entire political class from the heady days of the oil boom when our leaders did not know what to do with money, through the military era and the current democratic dispensation. For if there had been transparency in the financial dealings of our public officers, this spat would not have arisen. It is because of the lack of transparency that there have been speculations about the humongous salaries of our political office holders. Obviously, the National Assembly and other arms of the government have been so secretive about their remuneration because it is in stark contrast to the nation’s economic crisis that has impoverished the majority of the citizens. 

If the lawmakers were keen on bequeathing a legacy of transparency in their financial dealings, they would not have needed an El-Rufai to prod them onto this path. In the past two years since this democratic dispensation, there have been recurrent calls for the National Assembly to make public their remuneration. Their failure to heed these calls has led to a situation where the citizens have come out with a comparison of the remuneration of lawmakers here and that of their counterparts in other parts of the world. The citizens are shocked that lawmakers here are the highest paid in the world. This is despite that they are not as committed to their duties as their counterparts and the fact that in such other nations, their economies are more developed than ours and thus they have more money to pay their lawmakers higher salaries.

Nigeria’s House Of Greed

By Paul Onomuakpokpo   

What is insufferably scandalous about the Nigerian condition is that the more it appears we are on the cusp of effectively routing a debilitating menace plaguing the nation, the more in reality, it becomes deep-rooted.

Nowhere is this more obvious in contemporary Nigeria than the frenetic campaign against corruption. For over a year now, the nation has been regaled with the prospect of the inevitability of victory over corruption as long as at the head of the campaign against it is a  new breed of politicians. But it is clear now that the more the fetishisation of the fight against corruption dominates public consciousness, the more there are revelations of seamy dealings of our leaders that underscore the seeming irrevocable flight of probity from public offices.

House Speaker Yakubu Dogara and
Senate President Bukola Saraki

As though to mock the brutal focalisation of the past administration as the sole embodiment of corruption in the nation’s political experience,  we are now confronted with a situation where those who are the self-declared precursors of a corruption-free era are the ones who are now smeared with the miasma of corruption.

Think of the racking allegations of the members of the House of Representatives being responsible for a massive manipulation of the budget the point becomes clear. Of course, no one inveighs against the statutory right of the lawmakers to  tinker with the nation’s budget. But what has justifiably provoked the ire of the citizens is that such a discharge of a statutory obligation is by no means for the good of the citizens. It is solely for the interest of only a minority of the citizens – the lawmakers themselves.

To be sure, there is no deployment of a newfangled method by the lawmakers for the alleged perpetration of  corruption. For to a large extent, the purpose of seeking a public office in these climes, despite all pretentions to altruism, is simply the padding of budgets. There have only been accusations and counter-accusations because the deal has gone awry.

The Senate has protested its innocence as though such scandals could only be associated with the House of Representatives. Yet, the citizens are aware that the special new breed of  politicians that former Military President Ibrahim Babangida tried to mint through his endless  transition, and that the current dispensation is expected to sire remain elusive in the Nigerian political space. Thus, we remain saddled with politicians  who maim, kill,  forge birthday and educational certificates, sell their houses and borrow,  become cultists, fawn on unscrupulous benefactors and scramble for juicy committees not  because of the big  positive difference they would strive to use their offices to make but the  prospect of self-aggrandisement through padding.

NASS: An Anniversary, A Farce

By Alabi Williams  

This 8th National Assembly, on June 9, rolled out drums to mark the first anniversary of its inauguration; it was an eventful year. It was a year when the current leadership of the legislature, particularly the Senate, weathered severe storm sowed by it, but watered viciously from the outside. Their resort to celebration and arrogant chest-thumping was not so much about how the NASS quickly transformed the business of lawmaking within one year, and how that had made the country more governable. It was also not about how well life has become more meaningful in the last one year for ordinary Nigerians. It was more about Bukola Saraki, the Senate president and how he managed to survive the plot by his own party to wrest the mace from his grip.

*Speaker Dogara and Senate President Saraki 

Remembering how deftly Saraki and his loyalists valiantly engineered that parliamentary maneuver to take over the leadership sure deserves several backslaps. It was a historical move; hence the entire anniversary plenary was dedicated to recollecting how the tricks were played, and to bond together in the assurance not to break ranks, despite the shift in the battle from the floor to the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT).

The effusions were quite entertaining. Senators took turns to pour encomiums on that scheme and how deft hands have kept it from slipping. Minority leader and former governor of Akwa Ibom, Godswill Akpabio, poked fun at how the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) helped to install and stabilize Saraki, while his party tugged at his cloak to unmask him. Dino Melaye, ever boisterous, promised Saraki would never be unveiled, despite the distractions from outside. It was all smiles on the face of Saraki, whom he praised to high heavens.

 Indeed, victory is sweet, and for some, it does not matter the schemes that were deployed to fetch it. But there were some in the Red chamber who sat demurely all through the proceedings. They knew it was sham, but they have to live with it and wait for another time. They were outsmarted on that morning of June 9, 2015, when they followed another summon to the International Conference Centre (ICC), Abuja, instead of coming to the NASS after President Buhari, who allegedly issued the invite, had proclaimed the legislature.

The truth of that mix up will take time to unravel. Those who sent sms to invite APC senators to ICC knew what they were up to, to apparently distract the larger chunk of members from participating in the election of presiding officers. And the few APC senators, including Saraki, who shunned the invitation, and decided instead to sneak into the Red Chamber well disguised, also knew what they intended to achieve. Either way, what was at play was plain crookedness and not chivalry. The Senate has remained haunted since that episode, unable to be majestic and to rise up to the crucial challenges of a changed political atmosphere. Despite their huff and puff, they have not affected governance in any remarkable way.

Some people saw it coming in the manner the party in government was artificially and untidily strewed. In 2014, APC was all about how to win elections. There was no time and foresight to indulge in the luxury of an audit to test the integrity of its component units. After it won election, the next legitimate aspiration of members was how to allocate the booty. By that time, it was too late to enforce orders. Saraki and some people decided to help themselves to plum offices.