Masters Of The Game: Britain Plucks Cameron To Regain Balance

 By Owei Lakemfa

The British are known masters of diplomacy and politics. This is exemplified in the quote by its former Prime Minister Winston Churchill who said: “’Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

*Sunak and Cameron 

That was how Britain, an island in the North Atlantic Ocean ruled the waves and the world before its sun began to set from the injuries of the Second World War. Britain and its allies won that war, but it lost its position as the world power.

Nigeria: The ‘Demise’ Of The Peoples Democratic Party

 By Olu Fasan

Once upon a time, a political party bestrode Nigerian politics like a colossus. It governed Nigeria for 16 years and vowed to rule for 60. But it’s utter hubris. Buffeted from crisis to crisis, a deep rot set in, then an existential decline. Charles Darwin famously said that any organism that cannot adjust to its environment will become extinct. In the struggle for existence, it’s survival of the fittest; only the strong organisms will continue to exist, the weak will succumb to extinction. That’s the story of the Peoples Democratic Party!

In truth, PDP is not dead, not extinct; it’s still alive, albeit on life support. Thus, it’s more appropriate to say that PDP is dying, that it’s on a deathbed. The undertakers and political vultures are circling, and whether the party can survive, whether it can escape extinction, depends on how it handles Nyesom Wike and his gang of renegades. 

President Buhari’s Unguarded Tongue

By Ray Ekpu

It is obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari does not always filter his words before they come out. If he filters them at all he does not fully appreciate the connotative and denotative meanings of the words he uses. All words have meanings, and can be subjected to literal or metaphorical interpretations. We have had several occasions when the President’s handlers have accused the public of misinterpreting or misunderstanding, or misconstruing what the President had said. Sometimes they claim that the president’s words were taken out of context or have been stretched to achieve a political purpose. I sympathise with the President’s minders who have to lick the vomit from time to time to make the President look as presidential as presidents are expected to look.

*President Buhari 

The recent Westwinster episode is the latest in the series of presidential gaffes. The President was at the Commonwealth Business Forum in the UK recently. The forum is described as “a truly unique and historic opportunity to promote and celebrate the very best of the Commonwealth to a global audience.” In an answer to a question he reportedly said that “more than 60% of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare, education free.”

President Buhari’s Dissonance Problem!

By Reno Omokri

 How can two walk together except they agree? Now if two people cannot walk together except they agree how much more three, four or a hundred? For any government, company, family or association to succeed, there must first be unity of purpose. This unity of purpose does not mean that everybody must agree, but it means that behind close doors the groups meets to harmonize.

*President Buhari and APC National
 Leader, Bola Tinubu

Now that word, harmonize, is a much misunderstood word. Harmony does not mean that everybody has the same purpose, but it means that everybody’s purposes are brought together and through a process of give and take, a common thread is woven that encapsulates everybody’s agenda and when this is presented it produces an effect that is pleasing to the group and those it wants to serve. Both Christians and Muslims agree that God created the entire world with His words.

It is something we can all agree on and in agreeing to this, we agree that words are creative. They created the atmosphere of the world and they will create the atmosphere of our individual worlds. This being the case, we have to be careful, very careful, about the words we speak because if we agree that information is power, then the management of information is power and its mismanagement is weakness.

So often, many of us do not realize that the words that emanate from a leader and his surrogates must have credibility because those words affect everything within the domain of that leader. Every word that emanates from a leader is a promise. Don’t believe me? Try to get the British Currency. On every British Pound note you will find this promise ‘I Promise to Pay the Bearer the sum of’ £5, £10, £20 or £50. The promise on the British Pound is made by the Queen of England who happens to be the Head of State of the United Kingdom. There is nothing inherently valuable about the paper the British Pound is printed upon. It has no intrinsic value.

Are You See What I’M Saw?

By Chuks Iloegbunam 

"Are you see what I’m saw?" Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo, alias 4.30, often asked his co-actors this question in the New Masquerade, the soap opera that held millions, especially east of the Niger River, spellbound during the 1970s and 1980s. Each time he put that question, there was something astonishing or peculiar. Often that peculiar or astonishing “something” formed the bedrock upon which a specific offering of the episodic sitcom was developed.

 

*Buhari and Cameron 

In borrowing from Chief Zebrudaya’s lingo, to ask whether or not readers of this column are in awareness of certain things all too obvious to this columnist, the intention is simply to point to confounding and bizarre happenings that are plenteous in the entity today.

A few of these developments deserve a mention, and possible exploration, here. British Prime Minister David Cameron pronounced Nigeria “fantastically corrupt”. A leaked document showed that Minister of Information Lai Mohammed had transgressed the antiseptic integrity of the Change Administration to seek a loan in excess of N13 million from a parastatal under his Ministry, and for an international junket. The government, after months of insistence to the contrary, devalued the Naira. Or did it? The government, after a prolonged stretch of inchoation in the petroleum sector of the economy, inflicted an upward spiral of over a hundred percent in the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) or petrol.

All these happened at such a dizzying speed as to impel the weary and unwary to demand a stoppage of the world so they could hop off. All these happened, predictably, when the Steersman of the Ship of State, was blissfully abroad, attending yet another one of his innumerable conferences across the length and breadth of the globe. All these, predictably again, prompted reactions as numerous as they were conflicting.

It may be easiest to start from an astonishing development, one that incongruously escaped critical examination, despite its underlying ominous implications. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour cornered President Buhari in London, where he was busily attending the anti-corruption summit put together by the one who had cheekily pronounced his country “fantastically corrupt”, and prized from him an interview slightly in excess of six minutes.

As the short interview progressed, Ms Amanpour asked how the Nigerian government was killing corruption in order that corruption doesn’t kill the country. Buhari responded by discussing those he claimed had pocketed billions meant for the fight against terrorism. The interviewer’s follow-up was inevitable: 

Goodbye Nigeria!

By Idowu Ohioze

Recent occurrences, many of which many Nigerians would identify with, have led me to reach an arguably inevitable conclusion: Nigeria is a country on an unarrestable decline.

*President Buhari 

You may or may not share my rather pessimistic opinion depending on your ethnic or political affiliation or religious persuasion since most Nigerians are easily given to assessing public policies and socio-political trends on destructively bias yardsticks namely –and in order of subjective preference - the ethnicity, religious or political origins of the principal protagonists.

My conclusion is the outcome of a deductive reasoning that is based on an analysis of the essentials that impede national progress or are known to have orchestrated the demise of known ancient empires and nation-states.

In the following short essays on a range of issues, I make, hopefully, a string of compelling arguments to support my hypothesis of a disappearing political construct.

The genie is out of the bottle. We just have to figure out how the demise of Nigeria will affect us as individuals

A Killing Field?

If you consider that the emergence of Boko Haram insurgency was sadly the failure of government at each level in Nigeria, you certainly should be alarmed that cattle rearers are wrecking havoc in parts of Nigeria unchallenged by the government.

Confrontations between landowners and heavily armed nomadic cattle rearers have resulted in numerous deaths in Benue, Enugu and other parts of Nigeria but the closest to a government response has been a tepid statement by Lai Mohammed, the federal minister of information.

Rumour of the presence, at the National Assembly, of a draft grazing bill with equally rumoured provisions for statutorily delineated grazing lands within states, has so far been denied by some legislators but the question of Nigerians’ age-long vulnerability within its borders has been brought to the forefront of the debate by the wanton destruction of lives and properties by individuals who are, disturbingly, above the law.

Some state governors have vowed to resist cattle rearers within their territories. In fact, in the south-east, a governor has hinted at resuscitating and re-arming the dreaded Bakassi boys in defence of the citizens of his state against terrorizing cattle herders. As it is commonly the level to which such matters of dire consequences degenerate to in Nigeria, some ethnicists – among them the influential Sultan of Sokoto and Senator Godswill Akpabio – promptly disclaim the erring cattle rearers as Nigerian Fulanis but foreigners from bordering countries.