MKO Abiola Deserves Apology, Not Humour

By Afam Nkemdiche

When I first heard about President Muhammadu Buhari’s surprise posthumous honour to Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the widely acknowledged winner of the 1993 presidential election, my instinctive thought was, “My God! How could he nerve his conscience to do that – he was a principal confidant of the maximum ruler who denied MKO his well deserved mandate, until the mysterious death-in-detention???”

*Abiola 

It cannot be gainsaid, even in fiction, that Buhari was the closest public figure to the Kano-born general in Nigeria’s darkest years. Soon after Abacha sacked Ibrahim Babangida’s contraption (Shonekan’s Interim Government), he decreed that all monies that accrued from petroleum be pooled into a Fund, the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. The humongous size of the envisaged pool qualified the PTF to be immediately referred to as a “parallel government”; even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, had to look to it for funding. Buhari was the first and only executive chairman of the PTF. This was a measure of the unique camaraderie that the duo enjoyed when Nigeria teetered on the brink of disintegration from November 1993 until June 1998 when Abacha suddenly succumbed to death ahead of his detainee. 

Nigeria: VP Yemi Osinbajo Still Didn’t Get It!

By Afam Nkemdiche

The federal government’s economic team, led by the National Economic Council (NEC), has once again received a hard knock for its poor understanding of how to grow a national economy.

Bill Gates; yes, Bill Gates of the Microsoft fame, who came calling a couple of days previously, was reported to have told a special session of the NEC that Nigeria’s ongoing Economic Recovery And Growth Plan (ERGP) is broadly flawed.

*VP Osinbajo

He said for the ERGP to be effective, it must reflect the people’s needs, and it should give priority to human capital development over physical capital, contrary to the present composition of the ERGP. 

He then advised the federal government to review the ERGP – I should interpret that to mean reconstitute the NEC.