Showing posts with label Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Buhari: When Silence Means Contempt

By Sam Omatseye
The president has always seen silence as a mark of dignity in a time of crisis. When he opens his mouth eventually, he spews out venom that neither gives him nor the office he occupies any form of dignity.
*President Buhari with Baru
Tall, gaunt, lean of face with a straight stare and loping strides, his smile comes across more like a lickspittle than a royal. Yet, behind that simpering exterior is a granite heart. However, little cunning or high thinking dresses up his hearty resolves. So, in the final analysis, what we have is not the Buhari of nobility but a pretension to the high moral act. Sometimes that façade confronts us in the form of silence.
Occasionally he does speak. When he breaks his silence, he ruptures not only peace but logic. As I have noted in the past, Buhari’s soul is a battle between the martial impulses of his breeding and the entitlement of his ambience as a Fulani hierarch. And then there is a third. He has managed, since his ouster from power as head of state, to cultivate the talakawa. So, he sees himself as a sort of royal with a common touch. He is simultaneously on top and at the bottom, a prince and pauper, a head and herdsman, at once erupting from the floor and swooping down from heaven.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

APC, NNPC And Procurement Disease

By Alabi Williams
I wonder how Governor Nasir el Rufai of Kaduna State feels at the moment. I wonder what his thoughts are now of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Remember his ‘kill NNPC or NNPC will kill us’ theory in the early days after the enthronement of their party? He waxed lyrical about his prescription for the corporation and the oil industry, which at the time was thought to be in a hopeless state, after the last regime made mincemeat of it.

It was in July 2015, the new government had been installed and all those who worked for the party, saints all of them, were upbeat on how to unleash a sinless regime where there is no corruption. El Rufai was to deliver a media lecture to mark the 81st birthday of Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka. He got for himself a fitting topic on how to sanitse the NNPC, which in its apogee of malfeasance was about to kill Nigeria. He thus propounded the topic urging that we kill NNPC before it kills Nigeria.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Corruption And Aisha Buhari’s Testimony

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
It is increasingly becoming obvious that the President Muhammadu Buhari government is chafing under the affliction of a one-week-one-scandal syndrome. Unless they are irrevocably befuddled by their partisanship, Buhari’s loyalists who have been consumed with the notion of his unrivalled integrity would not fail to observe the dark atmosphere of corruption in which the administration is immersed. But of course, while most of these loyalists are apologising for allowing themselves to be used to pave the way for the Buhari presidency, there are some who would counter that those who accuse the government of corruption are the shellacked members of the opposition. After all, the Kachikwu-Baru affair which is the latest scandal in the Buhari government has not been declared by a competent court as an unimpeachable case of corruption.
*Aisha Buhari 

But the evidence of financial sleaze such unalloyed believers in the integrity of the Buhari government may not be able to dispute is no longer from the members of the opposition and other citizens whose moral sensibilities are daily affronted by corruption cases. Now, the evidence is from an unlikely quarter. It is from Aisha Buhari, the wife of the president. Just a week after the nation was scandalised by the $25 billion heist in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which has no rival in the alleged financial misdeeds committed by the Goodluck Jonathan government, Mrs. Buhari alerted us to the possible mismanagement of over N4 billion at the Aso Rock Clinic in less than two years. She was shocked that despite this allocation, the clinic did not have a single syringe. Mrs. Buhari’s alarm came shortly after her daughter Zahra was outraged at the lack of syringe and common drugs like paracetamol at the clinic.