Showing posts with label Vice President Osinbajo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vice President Osinbajo. Show all posts

Monday, February 6, 2023

Fuel Scarcity And Bad Leadership

 By Dele Sobowale 

 “As a people normally gets the government it deserves, so a society normally receives the punishment it asks for.’’ Robert Ardrey in Social Contract 

Anarchy reigns in the Nigerian fuel sector today. Nigerians were warned in 2018 when President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo launched their re-election campaign on the dubious platform of Next Level. 

Like most shallow thinkers, the All Progressives Congress, APC, politicians easily forgot that if you are in an elevator, going down on the tenth floor, the next level is the ninth floor. 

Monday, July 25, 2022

You Can Go Now Mr President!

*Buhari

By Dele Sobowale

“I am eager to go. I can tell you, it has been tough. I am grateful to God that people appreciate the personal sacrifices we have been making. I wish the person after me the very best”President Buhari, Monday, July 11, 2022.

If that was a joke, Buhari, Public Servant Number 1, should know that, we are not amused. On the contrary, most Nigerians, his employers, take the entire statement as an insult from a servant who served so badly, those of us who, at first, believed in him, will spend the rest of our lives regretting we ever committed such a colossal blunder.

Despite knowing him to be a northern Fulani Muslim and sympathizer of Islamic fundamentalists, I worked tirelessly for his election in 2011 and 2015. To be quite honest, I was persuaded that the man had changed by the late Prince Tony Momoh – who was the Chairman of the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, which Buhari led to defeat in 2011. I repeatedly asked Momoh if he was certain about Buhari; and received an affirmative response.

Friday, December 8, 2017

How Rich Are The Super-Rich In Nigeria?

By Dan Amor
I think it was John Paul Getty, the American-born British billionaire, philanthropist and heir to oil industry fortune, who quipped, when asked how rich he was: “No one is really rich if he can count his money.” In Getty's days, anyone with one million British pounds (or even one million dollars) was rated as “rich” and anyone with more than five million pounds was “very rich”.
*Adenuga and Dangote
Above that and you were in the “super rich” category, and when you got above the fifty million pounds level, you rated as a “can't count”. Nelson Bunker Hunt, who with his brother inherited a fortune even greater than Getty's, was a “can't count” man before he tried to corner the silver market. Asked by a Senate Committee how much he was worth, he snapped, “Hell, if I knew that, I wouldn't be worth very much”.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

And The Truth Shall Make President Buhari Free

By Reno Omokri
Having worked twice at the Nigerian Presidential villa and once at the British Parliament, if there is anything I have learnt, it is that it is impossible to over inform a leader. You can under inform him, but no matter how much information you give a leader, you cannot give him too much information.
*Buhari 
In today’s world, strength and weakness are gauged differently than they were, say in 1984. In the millennial age in which we live in, information is power and lack of information is weakness. My concern is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Nigeria’s seat of power because not enough information is being given to President Muhammadu Buhari. I, like other Nigerians, have heard or read reports of ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being afraid to challenge him or disagree with him. Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these reports in a recorded YouTube video now circulating where he revealed that the President ignores his ministers when they bring up issues that he does not want to discuss.

Having such anodyne personalities around you just means that you are living in a bubble, seeing things as you want them to be and not as they are. On Friday May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of the year but had rather shrunk by 0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years! Since the announcement was made, there has been various reactions with pundits pointing at this or the other as being the cause of this setback. But I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubts that this negative trend owes more to President Muhammadu Buhari’s utterances on our economy and polity than to any other single causative factor.

 The bigger problem is that even though I suspect that his ministers know that what I have just said is true, they would rather pander to the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that Nigerians are lucky to have President Buhari (obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of luck). In the last eleven months, the President had traversed the globe and has spoken about Nigeria’s economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather than the chief marketer that he is meant to be. Of what benefit is it to the President’s agenda or to Nigeria’s economic well being for him to go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive things that are happening in Nigeria, he begins to regale his hosts with the most unsavory stories about Nigeria.

 And some of the stories the President tells are just that-tales. They are not factual. At best they are arguable. You go to India for a summit where other world leaders are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists and foreign investors and while your counterparts are talking about how great their countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your country is corrupt except you and oh, can they come and invest in your country? Only a foolish investor would go and invest in a country whose President thinks his citizens are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to the Telegraph of UK in February) and whose officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the President said in agreement with British PM David Cameron when questioned by Sky News). The President speaks on the Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments are causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of us.