Showing posts with label Balarabe Musa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Balarabe Musa. Show all posts

Sunday, July 29, 2018

I Celebrate Buhari For Killing APC

By Erasmus Ikhide
On July 31st, 2013 a day after All Progressives Congress (APC) was registered by Independent National Electoral Commission, I got a surprising call at dawn from the storming petrel, warrior of the pen, essayist and a poet who uses words like a sculptor, Mr. Odia Ofeimun with troubling apocalypse thus:
"Erasmus, do you know that Senator Bola Tinubu has sold Nigeria to the devil for accepting the merger of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) with Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a few little known political parties". 
*President Buhari 
I was caught off balance. Moreso because I had barely retired from my study to the bed before my sleep was rudely ruptured by the call. 

Friday, June 10, 2016

Multi-Partism As A Philosophic Construct

By Amor Amor
Like an inscrutable nightmare, the pon­derous mystery of the Nigerian national question, which is ultimately the nation’s enduring essence, is still at issue. Jolted by the scandalous and shocking dis­play of the obvious limitations of the human evolution, the unacceptable index of human misery in their country, and willed by the current spate of pain being inflicted on them by a stone-hearted old soldier and his quislings, Nigerians have been singing discordant tunes about the state of their forced union. This has further been exacerbated by disarm­ing pockets of inter and intra-communal clashes, ethnic cleansing by Fulani herdsmen, student unrest, rampaging madness of ethic militias and sectarian fanaticism in some parts of the country. There­fore, the matter for regret and agitation is that a supposedly giant of Africa has suddenly become the world’s most viable junkyard due to the evil mach­inations of a fraudulent ruling class and the feudal forces still bent on keeping the country in a perpetual state of medieval servitude.
(pix:123rf)
Yet, the most disturbing irony of the Nigerian con­dition is that a multi-party democratic system made up of over fifty registered politi­cal parties enthroned by the civil society and the media with the support of a few pro­gressive politicians such as the late legal luminary, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the great Yoruba leader, Chief Abraham Ade­sanya, Chief Ndubisi Kanu, Alhaji Balarabe Musa and a host of others, is gradually be­ing turned to a one-party state by a gang of confused politi­cians and discredited soldiers who call themselves “progres­sives”. After a keenly contested presidential election in which emotions rose to fever-pitch, a lot of unprintable and dam­aging words thrown into the bargain from all sides of the divides, rather than sue for a genuine reconciliation of all the contending forces, presi­dent Muhammadu Buhari and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) started by criminalizing the opposition led by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which was hither­to the ruling party. Rather than show magnanimity in victory as genuine progressives would do, extend the olive branch to the defeated, resuscitate and rejig the Inter-party Advisory Office and promote peaceful co-existence amongst the vari­ous political parties, ethnic na­tionalities, religious and other interest groups, the APC-led federal government did the op­posite.

Soon after its inauguration, the APC government, like a bull in a China’s shop, started embarking on the aggressive promotion of belligerence, acrimony and rancour; crimi­nalization, demonization, de­humanization, and demolition of the major opposition party, the PDP. While decimating their prime enemy, the APC was trying to lionize and can­onize its members in messianic emblems at the detriment of other politicians. The APC, in its smugness, self assurance and we-know-it-all bravura, is bliss­fully unaware of the fact it won the election not only for them­selves but for all Nigerians. The ruling party is sadly engrossed in the envenomisation, intimi­dation and balkanisation of the PDP, organized Labour, the intelligentsia and the critical elite that it has forgotten how to govern this complex nation. By trying to rubbish the sustained achievements of the PDP which succeeded in rebuilding almost all the broken segments of the national economy for sixteen unbroken years after sixteen consecutive years (1983-1999) of military gangsterism, rapac­ity and greed, the APC has, unknown to itself, committed political harakiri before all dis­cerning Nigerians and the in­ternational community which rated the country under former president Goodluck Jonathan as easily the biggest economy in Africa and one of the fasted growing economies in the world.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Buhari’s War On Corruption — Real Or Fake

Part I of “Buhari’s First Hundred Days—An X-Ray”

By Chinweizu
27sept2015

Introduction
Many Nigerians are puzzled by President Buhari and wonder what his #Change agenda really is. Someone has even gone as far as to say that “Most people are feeling conned, and it's only morning yet.”  Luckily,Buhari’s First Hundred Days now belong to history. So historians can begin to examine it for clues to Buhari’s actual mission and agenda as president, and how he will go about implementing it. This essay is my contribution to that effort.

























*Buhari 

It is helpful to divide his actions into two groups:
(A) those he embarked on without public pressure and, in some cases, in great haste, as if to accomplish them before Nigerians wake up to what he is up to;and
(B) those he embarked on only after public outcry and pressure.
(A) includes his napalming of Akwa Ibom villagers claiming that he was going after what he called “Oil thieves”; his sending of Boko Haram detainees to Ekwulobia prison in the Igboland; his claim that those seeking the breakup of Nigeria are crazies; his determination to limit his anti-corruption prosecutions to the Jonathan administration; his directive to make Islamic books mandatory in all secondary schools; his slowness in appointing his cabinet; his war on corruption; his pattern of lopsided appointments.
(b) includes his delay in making public his assets declaration.
Nigerians have protested against most of these.
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To help those who are confused about Buhari’s agenda, this series will X-ray his First Hundred days with the aim of finding clues to his real but hidden agenda.
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This, the Part I of this x-ray series, shall examine Buhari’s War on Corruption to see why it won’t work, indeed why it will further entrench corruption and lootocracy; how it is being restricted to implement the Caliphate hidden agenda; and if it is real or fake.

Buhari’s War on Corruption
The question to be answered here is this: Is Buhari’s War on Corruption real or fake?
The first thing to note is that, as we all know, corruption is a worldwide malady. But what most people don’t know is that the Nigerian brand of corruption is peculiar in two ways. First of all, it is primarily lootocracy. Whereas corruption is the dishonest exploitation of power for personal gain—as by a clerk who hides a file until he is bribed; or a policeman who mounts a checkpoint and extorts money from bus drivers; LOOTOCRACY is the  constitutionally approved and protected looting of the public treasury by officials. It should be noted that the bribe-taking clerk or policeman is breaking a law, but the governor or president who empties the treasury into his personal bank account in not breaking any law. His constitutional immunity is a license to do so.  Secondly, because lootocracy is legal and not prosecutable in Nigeria, it’s example has promoted rampant and brazen corruption throughout the society. This makes lootocracy the fountainhead of corruption.
In his Inaugural address, Buhari listed Corruption among the enormous challenges which he promised to tackle immediately and head on:
“At home we face enormous challenges. Insecurity, pervasive corruption, . . . are the immediate concerns. We are going to tackle them head on. Nigerians will not regret that they have entrusted national responsibility to us.”

And he has also just told us that:
“corruption in our country is so endemic that it constitutes a parallel system. It is the primary reason for poor policy choices, waste and of course bare-faced theft of public resources.”
While further clarifying his administration’s commitment to the war against corruption, the President said “our fight against corruption is not just a moral battle for virtue and righteousness in our land, it is a fight for the soul and substance of our nation.”
Giving an insight into the way corruption destroys the nation, the President told the Second Plenary of the Conference that “it is the main reason why a potentially prosperous country struggles to feed itself and provide jobs for millions.”
In the same way, the President posited that “the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the infant, maternal mortality statistics, the hundreds of thousands of annual deaths from preventable diseases are traceable to the greed and corruption of a few. This is why we must see it as an existential threat, if we don’t kill it, it will kill us.”

--Corruption is cause of poverty in Nigeria –Buhari


Despite all that rhetoric, we must ask: How serious is Buhari’s war on corruption? What are the chances that it will reduce, let alone kill, corruption? What is the likelihood that it is just a foxy PR gimmick that will further entrench corruption by leaving its fountainhead, lootocracy, in place?
I must first draw attention to how a war on corruption can paradoxically obscure and protect a corruption system.