Ndigbo And Fallacy Of Power Not Served A La Carte

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Nigerians love clichés to bits. But if there is anything they love more than clichés, it is their penchant to determine the fate of Ndigbo based on pre-conceived notions. As the curtain is slowly but inexorably being drawn on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency and the political silly season is, once again, upon us, those two tendencies are manifest.

As 2023 beckons, the buzz phrase these days is the fallacy that power is not served a la carte. Interestingly, that banality is only voiced in reference to the legitimate clamour for a Nigerian President of Igbo extraction.

You often hear people speaking tongue-in-cheek that “power is taken and not given”, ostensibly latching onto Gloria Steinem’s phrase that “nobody gives you power; you have to grab it,” without putting it in context as Steinem, an American feminist journalist and social political activist, did.

The Offa Robberies, Political Thuggery And The Near-Death Of Nigerian Democracy

By Kennedy Emetulu

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark and it’s either we clean it up now or we all die from this stench. This is not an alarmist testament; it is real. The killings and findings following the Offa robberies have provided us an opportunity to cleanse the Aegean stables once and for all.

Thirty-three citizens woke up on Thursday, the 5th of April 2018 to go about their lawful businesses, but they were brutally murdered in cold blood by a group of young people in apparent armed robberies involving six banks in Offa, Kwara State. The banks are the First Bank, Ecobank, Guaranty Trust Bank, Zenith Bank, Union Bank and Ibolo Microfinance Bank. Amongst the dead were 9 police officers, pregnant women and other ordinary citizens. The police have arrested some of those behind the killings, including leaders of the gang and they have allegedly been making confessions. I say “allegedly” because whatever they are saying now has not been tested in a court of law.

Rethinking The National Assembly

Lewis Obi

It took the distribution of exquisite luxury cars that cost N57 million apiece to members of the Senate to shock Nigerians from their slumber and resignation. To a great many Ni­gerians, the National Assembly has become like the malady without cure, which must be endured. Perhaps the nearly N3 billion spent on vehicles the senators did not need, at a time the nation could not afford it, might be the overreach that finally serves as the last straw.

It might not. But the “Occupy National As­sembly” protests which began earlier in the week was a signal that at last Nigerians are beginning to lose their cool and are starting to voice it out.

The demands of the protesters were modest: immediate resignation of the Senate President, Dr. Olusola Saraki; the return of the expensive vehicles by the senators; and the revision of the 2016 budget. In a real democracy, the stu­dents and others who staged the “Occupy Na­tional Assembly” would never have needed to protest. A senate president facing something akin to felony and perjury charges would not need a reminder to step aside. It’s expected to be automatic. The vehicle purchase by the senate was a clear case of abuse of power, a flagrant misuse of the constitutional power of the purse, and the senate cannot point to any country in the world where such a purchase would be contemplated much less executed.

Nigeria has never been a nation of pro­testers, a fact which tyrants have exploited to perpetrate all kinds of enormities in the military dictatorship era. Now the National Assembly has latched on the same theory to stand democracy on its head and to contin­ue to assume that Nigerians wouldn’t know the difference.

Senate Majority Leader Ali Ndume took on the protesters and was quoted in a newspaper as saying that no form of pro­test would force anyone to resign from the National Assembly because the protest­ers were not the people who elected them in the first place. The 107 vehicles would not be returned because they were meant for the senators to carry out their various committee assignments and the vehicles remain the property of the National As­sembly. On television Senator Ndume said that the National Assembly was the differ­ence between autocracy or dictatorship and democracy. In other words, take away the National Assembly and all you have is dic­tatorship.

Senator Ndume is never given to mod­esty and when he speaks Nigerians see a tyrant in democratic garb. The reason no form of protest would force anyone to re­sign from the National Assembly is because the National Assembly is not a democratic institution in the first place. With very few exceptions, the seats were bought and paid for in millions, sometimes, hundreds of mil­lions of Naira of dubiously acquired wealth which partly accounts for the desperation of members to claw at everything and use all kinds of machinations in their quest for wealth in order to retain their positions.