Nigeria: Population Boom In Economic Doom

By Jerry Uwah

Nigeria is sitting on a ticking population time-bomb. President Muhammadu Buhari passively acknowledged the danger ahead in his incoherent and inchoate broadcast on Democracy Day when he listed “galloping population growth rate” as one of the reasons why government could not provide jobs for Nigeria’s army of restless youth now being recruited into armed robberies, kidnappings, banditries and bare-faced terrorism. 

Ironically, the president was curiously silent on how to tackle the dangerous population growth that is now partially responsible for the breakdown of law and order in the land. The population time-bomb has started exploding. It is partially responsible for the obdurate security crisis that has placed Nigeria on civil war footing. 

Nigeria probably has the highest number of children of school age out of classrooms because of the population boom in economic doom that makes it impossible for government to provide enough classrooms for the millions of children qualifying for seats in primary and secondary schools. 

Nigeria: Wake Up, Sleeping Giant!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Tomorrow, May 29, 2020, is what used to be referred to in Nigeria as “Democracy Day,” but now it will only serve as the anniversary of President Muhammadu Buhari's regime and that of some state governors. It is usually a welcome excuse for great celebrations, chest-beating and wild claims about humongous achievements, many of which exist only in the imagination of the mostly failed leaders. 

*Nigeria Leaders: Jonathan, Obasanjo, Buhari

Even the term “Democracy Day” (which is now observed on June 12) is such an excruciating irony in a country where almost all the features that distinguish democratic societies have been brutally obliterated, leaving the populace continually trapped in destabilizing apprehension. 

There would, however, be no parties tomorrow. A hostile, dreaded   visitor called Coronavirus is town! Let’s hope, therefore, that the absence of bacchanals tomorrow will afford our leaders the conducive   atmosphere for deep, sober reflections, to determine whether they have merely added to the suffering and pain of the people or helped, even in some little way, to reduce them.             

If Nigeria is working, we will know! Those were the exact words of late Prof Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost writer and distinguished intellectual. In other words, the citizens do not need any bogus claims by government’s megaphones to realise that there is an improvement in their country’s economy because it will automatically translate to an enhancement in their lives.

Ambode, CAN And The Lagos Pastor

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

A democracy fiesta which began nationwide some days ago climaxed last Monday. Lagos strove to outdo other states with its Lagos My Success Story through which it celebrated those it considered as the exemplars of its exceptionalism. But the nebulous character of the concept became a source of excoriation for the state government in so far as it neglected some people whose successes constituted the excellence of the state.

*Gov Ambode

But this is not what has imbued the memory of the past few days with an unforgettable quality. Rather, it is the fact that the period unveiled a Lady Macbeth in the Lagos State house and that while the state government was valourising democracy which privileges the will of the people, it was at the same time serving one of its residents a robust measure of authoritarianism.

June 12, Not May 29, Is Nigeria’s ‘Democracy Day’

By Mike Ozekhome

On Sunday, June 12, 2016, leading lights in the human rights and pro-democracy movement in Nigeria, gathered at the late M.K.O. Abiola’s house, to mark “June 12”, 23 years after this talismanic, watershed and cornerstone of a people’s election. I was one of them. We paid tribute and sang solidarity songs. We x-rayed the state of the nation. We laid wreath at his tomb. We did not forget his lovely wife, Kudirat, who was martyred with him. We prayed by her graveside. An amazon that carried aloft the liberation torchlight after her husband’s incarceration in military dungeon, she epitomised women’s potency, fervour  and ardour.

June 12 is very stubborn. It is simply indestructible, ineradicable, indelible, imperishable and ineffaceable. It sticks out like a badge of honour, the compass of a beleaguered nation. It cannot be wished away. Never. Aside from October 1, when Nigeria had her flag independence, June 12 remains the most important date in her annals.

Nigeria and June 12 are like Siamese twins. The snail and the shell. They are inseparable.  Like six and half a dozen. Like Hamlet and the Prince of Denmark. You cannot discuss May 29 without its forebear and progenitor, June 12. To attempt that is comical, droll chucklesome, even bizarre and freakish. June 12 is not just a Gregorian calendar date. It is Nigeria’s authentic democracy day. That was when genuine democracy berthed in Nigeria. Nigerians had trooped to the polls to vote for Abiola. On June 12, 1993, Nigeria stood still. Nigerians became oblivious to religious sensibilities and ethnic nuances. They did not care that Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, Bashorun and Aare Onakanfo of Yoruba land, was a Moslem who was running with another Moslem, Alhaji Babagana Kingibe. The gods and goddesses of ethnicity, tribalism and religious bigotry were brutally murdered and interred.

The apparitions of gender, culture and class discrimination, were sent back to their graves. Abiola, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate, squarely won the election under Babangida’s option A4. He trounced his challenger, Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC). He had campaigned with “Hope 1993” (a message of possibilities later adopted by Obama in 2008). His was “Farewell to Poverty” manifesto. Both resonated well with Nigerians. Abiola, who had joined politics at 19 under NCNC, in 1959, had used his stupendous wealth to water the ground and build bridges of unity, understanding and acceptability across the length and breadth of Nigeria. He had Concord newspaper and airline to help propel his ambition. He regarded money as nothing but manure with which, like plants, human beings are nurtured. Abiola had defeated Bashir Tofa, even in his Gyadi-Gyadi Ward, Kano.

Scarcity Of Truth, Fatal In Governance

By Sly Edaghese  

It is fatal in governance when the citizens begin to perceive or see their President as lying through his teeth. The earlier President Muhammadu Buhari knows this the better for him. It is increasingly becoming the hallmark of the President and his administration to say one thing today and the next day you hear them reversing it or even denying it. This is referred to as a flip-flop. Flip flop is very harmful in politics, especially when it becomes pervasive, as we are seeing it happening in this administration. It started with the padding of the budget the President passed on to the National Assembly for debate.

*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed 

The document was inflated and stuffed with all sorts of unimaginable provisions by some unknown elements. As the President was saying that the budget proposal he sent to the National Assembly had been tampered with or padded with sand, so to say, the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, who seems unable to differentiate his propaganda work as APC National Publicity Secretary from his present portfolio as Nigeria’s Minister of Information, was saying another thing, that the budget remained as it’s submitted; that no one padded it. Later the budget was declared missing from the National Assembly. Who took away the budget, no one knew. Again, before you knew it, we heard the budget was not missing!

Then most recently, Buhari set a date, May 29, the Democracy Day, that he would be publishing the names of those who had looted the nation dry along with the amount of what each of them looted and what have so far been recovered from them. The day came and nothing of such or near to that was heard from the President in his national broadcast! Rather, as it were, the president developed cold feet and began to speak to the nation in “tongues”. Not a single name of looter was disclosed nor the amount of what was looted or recovered. It was only just two or three days ago the government published some amounts it claimed to have recovered from the looters, without stating the names of such looters. Yet another display of a master class in lying was when the President gave a notice the other day, first, that he was coming to visit Lagos State. Lagos made elaborate preparations to receive Mr. President.

At the eleventh hour, a change was made, the President would be represented by his deputy, because of his “tight schedule.” An online social media disclosed that the President not coming personally to visit Lagos was due to his ill-health: an ear tumour or so.  The presidency rose stoutly, as if the President was a superhuman who could not be touched by infirmity, to fault the claim of the online social media. To prove that the president was sound and healthy, they began to show him on TV the next day or so welcoming a visiting governor to his office. Next was the President’s planned visit to Port Harcourt.

Anniversary Of Truth-Telling Or Propaganda

By Levi Obijiofor

This past weekend has been one of celebrations – celebrations of a government that promised so much but found reasons to explain why it failed to provide for the basic needs of citizens, celebrations of a government that promised to transform our economy, to destroy corruption, to dismantle the Boko Haram insurgency in the North, suppress other ethnic uprisings, create a stable society by enhancing law and order across the country, and to tackle socioeconomic consequences of rising youth unemployment. By the end of the celebrations, Nigerians remain divided on whether the government of Muhammadu Buhari has significantly reduced poverty in the country or whether it has heaped more pain on ordinary citizens.

President Buhari and Information
Minister, Lai Mohammed

This disagreement is not surprising. Before the politicians were elected into office, there was so much hype and mystique built around Buhari, who was presented as the man who would redeem the country and emancipate everyone from 16 years of hardship created by the endemic corruption that manifested in the government of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Here is propaganda number one.

At a book presentation in Abuja  on Thursday, 18 February, 2016, President Muhammadu Buhari claimed that Nigeria “has the fastest growing economy in Africa and one of the fastest in the world.” It is intriguing to see that three months later, after Buhari’s statement was publicised across the world, a senior minister in Buhari’s government admitted publicly that the bad shape of the nation’s economy should not be used as justifiable ground to explain the failure to provide for the needs of the citizens. If that was the case, why did the president and his ministers and special assistants spread the propaganda that Nigeria had the fastest growing economy in Africa and one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world.   So far, it seems some government officials and some leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have been feeding citizens with a diet of misinformation concerning the state of the economy.

Away With Democracy Day

By Polycarp Onwubiko 

The federal government should stop the annual jamboree called “Democracy Day” on May 29 because several of us consider it an inanity and brazen frivolity. The annual celebration of the supposed ‘democracy day’ on May 29 exposes the country as a laughing stock and people who are not serious on development and civilized value system. It showcases us as a people who have brazenly refused to join advanced and civilized countries of the world, to showcase scientific inventions but to celebrate electoral fraud and other faux fax. 

The fact remains that Nigeria adopted democracy as a form of government in its 1960 Independent Constitution and 1963 Republican Constitution. Democracy would have taken firm root in Nigeria but for the vaulting ambition of some northerners who want to impose their decadent ethno-religious value systems and control government at all costs. The consequences brought about electoral brigandage and political crises which led to military regimes which for all intent and purposes were led by their kith and kin. The intransigence also led to the fratricidal civil war from 1967-1970.

The military autocrats brazenly maintained the overt and covert agenda of the feudal caliphate and centralized governance, thus bastardizing the principles of federal system of government, which promotes true federalism; thus forcing the country to be practicing jaundiced unitary system of government or ‘hegemonial federalism’. Of course, the consequences are what stares us in the face, and if inch-by-inch leading us to the brink of a failed state. It should be pointed out without equivocation that true federalism is a desideratum to reinvent Nigeria.

However, consequent of the jaundiced mindset of these imperialists who occupied the presidency more than other people, the concept and practice of true federalism were lost. It was this same pull-and-push mentality that forced former President Olusegun Obasanjo to chicken out to the forces they pulled together and became so naïve that he declared May 29 as ‘democracy day’. It should be pointed out that if for anything, if we count out October 1st, the day that should truly be declared ‘democracy day’ was the day the same Obasanjo, in Military uniform, handed over power to Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the first elected politician to take over power from the military. Not that Nigeria had never been ruled by civilians before then, but Shagari’s ascendancy was unique in the sense that it marked real water shed for the democratisation of the country. Even though that republic was short-lived through a military coup led by Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the current civilian president, it remained a reference point in the annals of the democratic history of the country.

Like the foolery called ‘Democracy Day’, it is also instructive that some states in the country, including several that If impunity is not brazenly celebrated in Nigeria, the immediate past President Goodluck Jonathan and now civilianised Muhammadu Buhari, ought to have abolished this non-sense called ‘Democracy Day’ celebrated on May 29. There is virtually no need for ‘democracy day’ to be marked at all or no that day because there is no precedent anywhere in the world.