By Casmir Igbokwe
From today, we will most
likely begin to behold Nigeria’s national flag and colours, green-white-green,
in many public places. This is in commemoration of Nigeria’s independence anniversary.
On Tuesday, many of us will clink glasses and chant, ‘Happy Independence,
Nigeria’. Our President will probably make a national broadcast to mark the
day. Every October 1, we celebrate our independence from British colonial rule.
But the question is, are we truly independent?
By Charles Okoh
They have always told us that politics is dirty but nobody informed us that there are also mad men in politics and that in politics indiscretion and sloppiness are virtues. It is sad that perhaps, because of the stupendous wealth and power politicians wield, there is something that makes some of them absolute nut cases, insensitive and unreasonable.
Former Edo governor and one time NLC president, Adams Oshiomhole, has consistently proven that wisdom indeed does not come with age. A man can be 100 years old and yet lacks wisdom. Oshiomhole has shown that the older he gets the more reckless, irrational and indiscreet he has become. How can somebody as old as this consistently speak without wisdom, discretion and self-restraint?
By Oseloka H. Obaze
Deciphering Nigeria can be depressing. Interrogating her history and present political trajectory can also be disconcerting. That awkwardness is further complicated by the fact that, in a nation where governance is now rife with propaganda, the truth is always a conspiracy; and truth-tellers, traducers.
That disposition did not prevent two recent unvarnished and non-salutary New York Times assessment of the state of Nigeria. Both pieces represent a reality check and the proverbial writing on the wall. Despite the pushback by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) government, what is dawning stealthily on Nigerians is that Nigeria’s long-forecast implosion might actually be self-fulfilling. Put differently, Nigeria is not too big to fail.
By Andy Ezeani
“Without death penalty, 90% of Nigerians will continue to see corruption as God’s blessings. The anti-corruption campaign will be a huge waste of time. We are already heavily populated, why can’t we sacrifice the top criminals to save the country’s future?” – Nasir el-Rufai
Now, the House of Assembly in Kaduna State, the state Nasir el-Rufai governed until May 29, 2023, says the former governor is corrupt.
*El-Rufai
Any report of the political demise of el-Rufai may not just be exaggerated, to call up that legendary construction by Mark Twain, it may also be premature.
By Adekunle Adekoya
Time flies. Does time really fly? Whichever, next Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the Tinubu presidency. May 29, 2023, was a day many Nigerians will not forget in a hurry. It was on that day that flimsy fabrics holding economic strands together was brutally rent asunder by a proclamation that we are all now familiar with: removal of subsidy on petrol. Up till the moment Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was reading his inaugural address to the nation, petrol sold for N187 per litre.
Before he finished reading the address, many petrol marketers shut their stations, and queues began growing at filling stations. By the following day, May 30, reality dawned on Nigerians as they awoke to the reality of higher prices of petrol. The increase was threefold; a litre of petrol was selling for N568, and that was the cheapest, available only at NNPC Retail stations. Other marketers, major or minor sold for prices anywhere between N700 and N650 in the Lagos and Abuja areas.
By Adekunle Adekoya
Time flies! And very fast too. In this space on September 24, 2021, the column carried a piece with the headline: “The attenuation of integrity.” Those who read between the lines would have discerned that it was a commentary directed at the nation’s head honcho at the time, a retired general known to the rest of us as Muhammadu Buhari.
Buhari was sold to us in 2014-2015 as the very personification of integrity, which meant he was a man of his words who would do exactly as he said. During the electioneering whose main objective, as we can now see, was not to make life and living better and easier for me and you but to oust Dr Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP cohorts from power, Buhari was sold to us as the next best thing to happen to humanity in Nigeria outside the scriptures.
By Nick Dazang
Unless drastic, coherent and proactive measures are taken, the chickens may soon be coming home to roost for the fledgling Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration. I state this with the highest sense of responsibility and advised by recent tragic events and ominous auguries.
For the first time, and on his watch, we have thus far had a rash of peaceful demonstrations against hardship. Nigerians, in their numbers, protested in Kano, Minna and Suleija. It is noteworthy that even before he departed Lagos for Abuja, after the Christmas and New Year breaks, Lagosians shouted at his convoy that Nigerians were having a hard time.
By Oseloka H. Obaze
A recent trending photo of the leaders of the BRICS nations hobnobbing and holding hands across-the-chest spoke eloquently to the group’s vital missing link and presumptive member. That photo brought to mind missed opportunities and lessons learned. It also brought to the fore, the fate of Nigeria: a country that is prima facie qualified to be the sixth member of that intergovernmental organization, but is not.
By Kenechukwu Obiezu
Nigeria is currently entertaining a conversation over whether it is a country of clowns. The conversation was ignited by Kashim Shettima, Nigeria’s Vice President. At an event in Abuja, Shettima described Nigerians celebrating the free fall of the Naira against the dollar as clowns. Particularly, Shettima chided them for their celebrations on microblogging site X.
Clowns imply a circus, and the use of the word by Shettima evokes memories of a 2018 interview of then President Muhammadu Buhari when he described Nigerian youths as lazy.
By Alabi Williams
Year 2023 began with a lot of trepidation over the general elections. Nothing seemed very sure, especially as the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), prevaricated on its choices. That caused them to resort to self-help at different levels. In all, new experiences emerged and suggestions are being canvassed on how to raise the integrity bar in the next elections.
The three off-cycle elections in Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa have also come and gone. Off course, there will be disputations at the tribunals on how the playing-ground was tampered with to make it cumbersome for some players. Some take-aways have emerged to further the conversation on the precarious nature of this democracy. For some, there were no elections in many places and the exercise was a bug joke. For others, it is the smart politicians that took the day.
By Alabi Williams
Rotimi Amaechi, former minister and governor of Rivers State, at a public lecture on Thursday, October 26, sounded rather melancholic. For a man who has been in government since 1999, first as two-term speaker of Rivers State House of Assembly and later as governor for eight years, before he served as minister of the Federal Republic for another eight years, all on a platter, the privileges he amassed do not justify the grief he attempted to offload. And he was most unfair and incorrect as he tried to blame the polity’s woes on the people.
That same week, Port Harcourt was in turmoil as former governor Nyesom Wike vainly and desperately sought to protect a so-called political structure he claimed to have built. In a democracy, do individuals own political structures to the exclusion of the political party? And whose resources did he deploy to build the structure, Rivers’ taxpayers’ monies?
By Ochereome Nnanna
Even before what became the All Progressives Congress, APC, was formed, I knew it would be a disaster. I prayed for the merger not to work. But my prayers were not answered. The merger not only worked, the party won the 2015 presidential election with Muhammadu Buhari as president. Buhari’s presidency, according to the APC pact, was to be succeeded by a Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency. When Buhari was about to finish his eight years of inept and extreme nepotism rule, he tried to block Tinubu’s turn to “rule”.
Tinubu went to Abeokuta and wailed: Yoruba l’okan( “It is Yoruba’s turn”); Emi l’okan!(“It is my turn”). When Buhari saw that the Northern APC Governors were all for Tinubu, he had no choice but to bring out his full powers of incumbency to install his political partner. You may ask: why would I, a columnist of 29 years standing, discredit a political party, the APC, even before it was formed? My answer is simple.
By Ayo Oyoze Baje
Former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, the beacon-bearer of Nigeria, nay Africa’s peaceful coexistence and the flag-flying patriot certainly deserves sincere apologies, eight years after he graciously and peacefully left the corridors of political power, at Aso Rock, Abuja.
And the apologies should in fact, come from the All Progressives Congress (APC) political party with its ‘Change’ mantra, which the millions of overtly naïve and gullible supporters swallowed line, hook and sinker. That played itself out of course, during its well-oiled, puerile propaganda-fuelled presidential campaigns back in the 2014/2015 season.
By Tonnie Iredia
To say that the next set of Nigerian legislators may also fail implies that their predecessors had earlier failed. But considering that since 1999 when democracy was restored in the country, our lawmakers have become Nigeria’s wealthiest class, is it not contradictory to describe them as failures? But when the steady decline of Nigeria is considered against the backdrop of the failure to use lawmaking as a tool for the attainment of good governance, it becomes obvious that our successive lawmakers have consistently failed the people whose interest they were expected to represent.
On June 04, 2015, the 7th National Assembly(NASS) while marking the end of its tenure, passed 46 Bills in 10minutes. The Bills were first passed by the House of Representatives before they were forwarded to the Senate which simply skipped all the necessary law-making procedures and passed them, thereby technically entering the Guinness Book of records.
By Luke Onyekakeyah
Once upon a time, the tortoise went to visit his in-laws. While he was there, a stubborn nanny goat picked his apparel, chewed and damaged it. That was a big problem. His in-laws were bothered with what happened. They didn’t know what to do.
The tortoise said to his in-laws, you see that your goat has chewed and torn my apparel; I will not ask you to pay for it but I will not go home naked. His in-laws were confused. They were in a serious dilemma. The tortoise left them and went ahead with other activities. At the end, his in-laws had no choice than to get another apparel, which they gave to the tortoise. The tortoise was happy.
By Steve Azaiki
For Nigerians, these are not the easiest of times. Happy faces are rare, because the mood is indignant. Adults—male and female—have stripped naked inside banking halls, demanding their cash. Fights break out routinely on queues before ATMs that dispense only miserly amounts. Small businesses have quietly folded up, at least in the meantime, because of low patronage occasioned by the cash crunch.
Fuel queues disappear for only a few days, and then the filling stations run dry for weeks amid official explanations that don’t quite make sense to anyone any more. Nor do citizens feel safe and secure in cities, on the farm, or on the highways. Add the epileptic public power supply and the excruciatingly high cost of living, and it is easy to read the nation’s mood.
By Casmir Igbokwe
The senior military officer looked with pity on some citizens marching enthusiastically to go and cast their votes. “You are wasting your time,” he said. It was in Lagos on the day of the presidential and National Assembly elections. When prodded, this officer alleged that a security report came shortly before the election, indicating who the powers that be wanted as President. This supposedly meant that the security men would have to cooperate to deliver the anointed one. I dismissed this information. But when President Muhammadu Buhari illegally raised his ballot paper to show that he voted for his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), I became suspicious.
It was then that what Reverend Father Emmanuel (surname withheld) told me five days to the election dawned on me. This priest said he was highly afraid the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, might not make it to Aso Rock. “The cabals are highly against him. I have been praying about this, but God can’t do for human beings what they can do for themselves,” he added. This was actually his reaction to my article titled, “Electing Nigeria’s miraculous President,” published on Monday, February 20, 2023.
By Obi Nwakanma
The governing All Progressives Congress (APC) had no sterling records on which to run and return to power in the federation of Nigeria in this election. The facts were stark. Compared to February 2015 when the party, an alliance of the discontented, fielded the ex-military dictator, Mr. Muhammadu Buhari, a former Major-General and at that time serial contestant for the office of the president of Nigeria, the mood had swung so heavily against the APC nation-wide in 2023.
Nigerians were measuring the time of the PDP, from 1999 to the time of the APC, from 2015 to the current year. As a Nigerian engineer told me, “you could say anything about the PDP, but what you could never say was that they put Nigerians through hunger. Under the PDP Nigerians took for granted that you could put food on the table without much hassle. But since the APC, all those things you took for granted – just food – including ordinary cereal and milk for kids have become unbearably exorbitant and impossible to buy.”
By Dan Onwukwe
You needed to have been at the Boundary market, Ajegunle, Lagos state, last weekend. There were tears of joy when the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr Peter Obi, went to campaign there. It was part of his open campaign in selected markets across the country. Remember he has always told us that he is trader.
It wasn’t the chant of his name, “Obi, Obi, Obi number One”… that touched the hearts of the enthusiastic crowd at the Ajegunle market. It was, indeed the crowd of excited women with their kids jostling like that woman with the issue of blood in the scriptures who desperately wanted to touch only the hem of the garment of Jesus Christ and be healed. (Matthew 9:20-21, KJV). Obi obliged them, carrying one baby after the other. It’s the audacity of hope, amid despair.
By Emeka Alex Duru
Growing up, we were treated to a certain ghastly form of wrestling, referred to as cage fight, in which the competitors were herded into a chained ring and made to attack one another until a winner emerged. Watching the contest could be gory and not for the faint-hearted. Each wrestler was free to adopt any strategy, no matter how unconventional, to dismantle his opponent. It was usually catastrophic. Not even the eventual winner got out of the ring intact. Everyone lost in one way or another.
This summarizes the tortuous route the All Progressives Congress (APC) has taken Nigeria through in the last eight years as the ruling party. Like ardent con artists, chieftains of the party have driven the country down the slope in a manner of a car without brakes to the point of crashing it beyond repair.
