Nigeria’s Unprofitable Lockdown

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

How exactly is the lockdown helping to halt the spread of coronavirus in Nigeria? Or put another way, how is the Buhari regime which announced the lockdown in three locations, Lagos, Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), ensuring that the measure unleashed is at least achieving a reasonable percentage of the purpose for which it was declared?

*Buhari 

Has there been any thorough audit of the exercise? Who is also undertaking such an assessment in the various states that are equally on lockdown? What is the level of compliance at the various places and what percentage of the anticipated gains has so far been achieved?    

One may never get a coherent answer.  That is the problem a people must learn to live with when they are stuck with a regime that appears to derive some kind of strange animation from maintaining an icy distance from the people it claims to be governing, a leadership that seems to have become incurably estranged from the people, their problems and feelings, and appears to be trapped in abject lack of the capacity to muster any empathy and fellow-feeling either when speaking to the populace or taking actions that are sure to harshly affect their lives.

Who Is Afraid Of Ezenwo Nyesom Wike?

By DAN AMOR

Within the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway's works – some seven novels, fifty odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction — The Sun Also Rises, is something of a curious exception.

*Gov Wike 

Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and The Sea (1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is one most wholly satisfying book. Here Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for his famous understated ironic prose style. And here he also made his first marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the Hemingway "code", the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue, and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the structure of The Sun Also Rises.

Arrest Of ExxonMobil Staff: Gov Wike Is Right!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

All those people out there speculating on the motives of the Rivers State Governor, Mr. Nyesom Wike, and condemning him for ordering the arrest of the 22 ExxonMobil staff who flouted the executive order signed by the governor to stop the movement of people from other states into Rivers in order to check the spread of coronavirus in the state should hide their faces in shame and thoroughly interrogate themselves to determine whether they are not labouring under the usual debilitating inferiority complex that often pushes some “natives” to prefer to endanger their people’s lives in order to please the “White Massa”? 

Gov Wike 

If it were some “ordinary” people from Akwa-Ibom that were arrested for breaching the law in Rivers State, would there have been any uproar? Would that have earned even a footnote mention in the media? I can imagine what will be the fate of some workers of a Nigerian company operating in the United States who chose to brazenly flout a movement restriction order in the state of Texas, the home of ExxonMobil, for whatever reason!  

Addressing a press conference in Port Harcourt on Friday, April 17, Wike said: “Security agencies arrested 22 staff of Exxon Mobil who came into the state from neighbouring Akwa Ibom State in violation of the extant Executive Order restricting movement into the state. We do not know the coronavirus status of these individuals. Even though security agencies advised that they be allowed to go back to Akwa Ibom State, I insisted that the law must take its course. This is because nobody is above the law. As a responsive government, we have quarantined them in line with the relevant health protocols and they will be charged to court.” 

Certainly, this is how civilized and rule-governed societies are run. There are no set of laws for the masses and another set for some gaggle of privileged lawbreakers. 

Imo: In Search Of The ‘Hope’ In Uzodinma

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Now that Nigerians appear to have tried their best to put behind them the controversial Supreme Court judgment that made Mr. Hope Uzodinma the Governor of Imo State, the great task before him now is to hasten to convince Imo people that the apex court has not brutally forced a very bitter and impuissant pill down their throats, but, that, he is, indeed, that governor they have always hoped for, who will change the face of Imo for good! 

*Gov Uzodinma and President Buhari 

He does not have the luxury time. A delayed performance might begin to sow in the minds of the people the toxic thought that the pill they have swallowed lacks the power to solve the several debilitating maladies weighing the state down. And if their worst fears are eventually confirmed, it would then amount to another hope devastatingly betrayed (if you will permit the pun). And the cost, politically, might be too high for Mr. Uzodinma.   

Well-meaning Nigerians are becoming increasingly worried that the courts are brazenly usurping the power of the electorate to choose their leaders. They are beginning to think that the ever-swelling number of court-crowned leaders constitutes a dangerous threat to our democracy and a frustrating and discouraging experience to the masses who take the pains and defy the often very harsh sun and rain to vote. Why bother to vote when, eventually, the decision on who occupies the office will be decided by about five or seven judges – none of whom may even come from the state or constituency in question? The danger is that the people are often alienated from the leader since they are increasingly finding it difficult to convince themselves that they are being governed or represented by somebody they chose.

Nigeria: A Nation Of 200 Million Fools

By Dan Amor

When the Union Jack (the British flag) was, at the glittering mews of the Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos on October 1, 1960, lowered for a free Nigeria’s green-white-green flag, gloriously fluttered in the sky by the breezy flurry of pride and ecstasy, it was a great moment pregnant with hope and expectation. The whole world had seen a newly independent Nigeria, a potential world power, only buried in the sands of time.

*Buhari 

Endowed with immense wealth, a dynamic population and an enviable talent for political compromise, Nigeria stood out in the 1960s as the potential leader in Africa, a continent in dire need of guidance. For, it was widely thought that the country was immune from the wasting diseases of tribalism, disunity and instability which remorselessly attacked so many other new African states. But when bursts of machine gun fire shattered the predawn calm of Lagos its erstwhile capital city in January 1966, it was now clear that Nigeria was no exception to Africa’s common post-independence experience.

COVID-19 And Nigeria's Pathetic Leadership Deficit

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

There is no better warning about the growing confusion that seems to be gradually beclouding the federal government’s response to the coronavirus challenge than the belief it betrayed last week that, perhaps, all it needs to calm the fears and apprehensions of Nigerians about its ability to halt the spread of the virus is to reel out a catalogue of activities President Buhari was said to have undertaken so far concerning the pestilence, whether the people felt their impact or not.

*President Buhari and his spokesman, Femi Adesina

Now, if your family is starving badly, do you solve the rumbling signs of biting hunger in their stomach with some wild tales of the efforts deployed by you so far to feed them, or just keep quiet, give them food, and they will see and feel for themselves that you have played your role responsively and effectively?  Or if you must talk, tell them something you have done whose benefits they can readily verify and identify with.

Indeed, some Nigerians are beginning to achieve the conviction that there must be something about being in government in this country that seems to diminish the reasoning ability of people once they get in there and deprives them of the capacity to realize when they have stopped making sense or even become downright annoying. This is very pathetic.

Will Nigerians Soon Wipe Out Each Other?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

I know that the dominant health topic now is Coronavirus (or, if you like, Chinese Virus), but I feel compelled to draw attention to some egregious practices by some callous and cruel Nigerians that are ruining many lives daily in this country. These vile characters are able to unleash this grievous harm on innocent Nigerians because the various regulatory agencies like, the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) or the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON, are either in very deep slumber or very sick and nigh unto death, or even dead and awaiting burial!

I think that if some far-reaching interventions are not urgently undertaken, we would not be able to rule out the possibility that the rest of the world might wake up one day and discover that this large, unproductive territory called Nigeria has become one wide stretch of empty space, devoid of humans or littered with decaying corpses? Is it that human life has since totally lost its value before Nigerians or what? How far should rational human beings tread on the path of mutual annihilation before they realise that it is, perhaps, time to do a rethink, beat a retreat and commence the homeward journey to self-reclamation?