Dele Giwa: Lingering Echoes Of A Murder

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

“Now, I think no riches can compare with being alive…”

–      Achilles, Homer’s Iliad.

“One life taken in cold blood is as gruesome as millions lost in a pogrom.” – Dele Giwa

*Dele Giwa 

Death is one appointment which every being must keep. And as we know, appointments can either be brought forward or moved to a later date or cancelled altogether. In the matter of life and death, any changes in appointment schedules should be the exclusive prerogative of the Creator. No man, therefore, has any right to arrogate to himself the role of bringing forward any other person’s appointment with death. In fact, it is abominable to even use one’s hands to hasten one’s own appointment with death. Laws of God and man hold such actions highly condemnable. So, suicide bombers and their sponsors, supporters and cheer-leaders should, therefore, get it into their heads that they have no mandate whatsoever from the Creator of man to either take their own lives or that of another, no matter the beliefs that fire their unholy zeal and action.

Death, however, is unavoidable, though loathsome. There is hardly anyone that wishes to die. Not even the most valiant of men would embrace death so willingly. Even those people who had been compelled by very harsh, unbearable circumstances to wish for death have had to shudder, cringe and shrink back when the icy hands of death sought to grip their throats. Deep down the heart of every man and every woman, and beyond the facade of all apparent fearlessness and bravery, lie this cold loathing and resentment for death. The survival instinct is there and also the desire to avoid danger and death, and the longing to postpone one’s date with death, temporarily at least, if not forever, hence the struggle and fight at many a deathbeds.

Nigeria: Eighteen Years Of Threatened Democracy

By Alabi Williams

After 18 years of democracy, we do not need to search very far to know how well the journey has fared. The glaring evidence of how troubled it has been is the very fact that we are still discussing the idea of a coup, no matter how embryonic and remote it may have been. That some people still nurse nostalgia for the salvation procurable via coups suggests that this democracy is not offering what it was programmed to deliver. There is sufficient amount of desperation that triggers a search for alternatives. Unfortunately, the one ready alternative people tucked somewhere in their psyche, is the military, with capacity to obliterate the present nonsense and begin afresh. Very tempting.

But many have rushed out to condemn the thought of a coup because of very ugly past experiences. The military has so debased itself that its original messianic capacity has been squandered. At the point it was forced to exit from civil governance, the military had transformed into a rampaging occupation force, abusing rights of citizens and stealing their money.

Nigeria: Is The Past The Future?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Since the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari government became intolerably manifest, a noticeable feature of discourse in the public space is its polarisation. In one camp are those who argue that the present status quo is precisely what the country needs and in the opposing camp are those who seek its replacement with a political system that existed in the past. Indeed, the Buhari’s years have been marked by the citizens’ hankering for the past and the rejection of the present. Having appropriated the past as the only means of corporate survival, they want to make it not only the anchor for the present but also the future.

Clearly, we are not witnessing this laudation of the past for the first time. Ever since the oil boom evaporated and the country has been afflicted with a governance crisis, the Nigerian people have often sought to recover a past that they consider a golden era. They do not seek the co-opting of only some useful values from the past into the enrichment of the present and the future. No, they want a wholesale displacement of the past with the present and the future. In this regard, their march to their collective destiny has often been disrupted by prolonged moments of contemplation of the desirability of replacing their present with the past. 

Aisha Alhassan’s Declaration

By Ray Ekpu

Aisha Alhassan aka Mama Taraba is the Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development in the cabinet of President Muhammadu Buhari. She is a lawyer and the first woman in Taraba State to hold the position of Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice. She also served as a Registrar of the Federal High Court, Abuja and as a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Mama Taraba also fought valiantly in the last election to register another first as the female Governor of Taraba State. She did not get there. But her political credentials are amply acknowledged by those who know her.

*Aisha Alhassan 

With such a formidable curriculum vitae and her acknowledged political battles many people have wondered why she made the unguarded public statement she made recently. Here are her words: “Atiku (Abubakar) is my godfather even before I joined politics and again Baba Buhari did not tell us that he is going to run in 2019. And let me tell you today that if Baba said he is going to contest in 2019 I swear to Allah I will go before him and kneel and tell him that Baba I am grateful for the opportunity you gave me to serve your government as a minister. But Baba, just like you know I will support only Atiku because he is my godfather. That is if Atiku said he is going to contest. As we are talking now Atiku has not said he is going to contest.”

How APC Betrayed Buhari

By Joe Igbokwe

I was shocked to the marrows when I heard that some APC Senators asked the National Working Committee of the Party led by the National Chairman of the Party Chief Odigie Oyegun to prevail on President Buhari to drop all charges against Bukola Saraki at the Code of Conduct corruption trial before they stop sabotaging the presidency. Words failed me when it dawned on me that this potentially dangerous demand is coming from some APC Senators who are supposed to be the agents of change we promised Nigerians while seeking their mandate in 2015.

*Buhari, Tinubu and Saraki 

I reflected on the event of the past 24years from 1993 when we elected Chief MKO Abiola to bring hope to Nigerians and how he was crushed and decimated by demonic and satanic forces after five years struggle to defend and sustain the mandate. Time and space will not permit me to recall the quantum of energies expended to defend the mandate for five years, the wars, on the streets, the casualties including MKO Abiola and the late wife Kudirat Abiola, and many others, the damage to the national project, the devastation of our economy, the balkanization of the political entity called Nigeria, the alienation by the international community making Nigeria a pariah nation, and the ethnic division it visited on Nigeria.

After killing Chief Abiola in July 7, 1998, the same satanic and demonic forces still bent on decimating Nigeria further decided to foist PDP and retired General Obasanjo on Nigerians. In sixteen years, from 1999 to 2015 the same forces wasted huge resources running into hundreds of billions of dollars earned in times of oil boom. The unconscionable looters and unrepentant thieves diverted and stashed away these huge resources into private pockets. These funds have been traced to private accounts both at home and abroad, traced to real estates both in Nigeria and abroad, and traced to farms and some buried underground. The rest is now history.

Buhari, Please Don’t Die Before Me!

By Steve Onyeiwu

Buhari and I are in a race of death. I hope and pray I win that race. As transient humans, we all embark on the race to death right after sliding from our mother’s womb. How long it takes to run that dreaded race depends largely on exogenous factors beyond our control. Religious people believe that the more pious and God-fearing you are, the higher the probability that your race to death would be protracted. In other words, you’ll be competing head-to-head with the likes of the famed and biblical Methuselah. 

*Buhari

But secular folks argue that the duration of the race to death depends on a combination of factors that include genetics, life-style and serendipity. The latter may be influenced by God, spirituality and “providence.” For these reasons, I may well die before Buhari, though he is far older than me. As an inherently unpredictable phenomenon, some of those who have been overly obsessed with Buhari’s death may die before him. Death can also be a biased umpire that fulfills some people’s wishes, but dashes other people’s hopes. While some politicians who are prematurely positioning themselves for 2019 have been cheering Buhari to run faster on the death track, many other compassionate Nigerians pray for his quick recovery.

Right from when he began receiving treatment in London early this year, endless news about Buhari’s death have been circulating around the world. Some say he has a terminal disease. Quack doctors have looked at his photos and conclude that he is chronically ill. Some medical doctors who should refrain from diagnosing a disease by perusing a patient’s visual outlook, without conducting blood, X-Ray, MRI, colonoscopy, physical and other vital tests, have jumped into the fray, declaring that Buhari is a lost cause! But they forget that even the best doctors in the world cannot look at photos and diagnose a patient’s ailment, let alone provide a prognosis for the patient’s survival.

President Buhari And The 20-Month Jinx

By Femi Fani Kayode

Permit me to begin this contribution with an interesting and historically accurate observation made by the Vanguard Newspaper on 3rd February 2015.  

*Buhari 

They wrote: "Between 1983 and 1985, Peter Onu of Nigeria was Acting Secretary-General of the OAU. 

“At the 1985 Summit in Addis Ababa, statesmen like Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, lobbied for his election as substantive Secretary-General. 

“However, there was a major stumbling block to Peter Onu’s candidature: his Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari, was campaigning against him. 

“Buhari claimed: ‘This generation of Nigerians and indeed future generations have no other country than Nigeria.’ 

“But when the crunch came, his allegiance to Nigeria disappeared. In the election of the OAU Secretary-General in 1985, Buhari voted against Nigeria and for Niger instead. 

“He secured the election of Ide Oumarou, a Fulani man from Niger; as opposed to an Igbo man from Nigeria. 

“By so doing, Buhari became the first and only Head of State in the history of modern international relations to vote against his country in favour of his tribe".

Graphically illustrated and succinctly put, that is the mindset of the quintessential General Muhammadu Buhari for you. Yet even in his triumphs and all his glory he has suffered immense pain and his challenges and travails are legion.

Consider the following. In 1983 he toppled the much-loved democratically-elected civilian President Shehu Shagari in a military coup and became Head of State.

He ruled with an iron fist for exactly 20 months (31st Dec 1983 - 27th August 1985) after which he himself was overthrown in another military coup led by his erstwhile and again much-loved Chief of Army Staff, General Ibrahim Babangida. Thereafter he was detained for three years in Benin City.

Exactly 30 years after he was removed from power in 2015 he was "elected" civilian President on the platform of the APC.

Once again he presided over the affairs of our country for another 20 months (29th May 2015 - 19th January 2017) until he was struck by an undisclosed yet strange and debilitating illness, fell gravely ill, was compelled to formally transmit his presidential powers to the Vice President, was rushed to the United Kingdom where, up until today, he has remained incommunicado and on "indefinite medical leave".

Gen Obasanjo’s Many Faces

By Ike Abonyi

Soon after the first National Convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jos, Plateau State in 1998 during which Olusegun Obasanjo emerged the presidential flag-bearer of the party after defeating the bookmakers’ choice former Vice President Alex Ekwueme, I recall interviewing a top Igbo politician who later became governor to explain to me why he and some Igbo voted against Ekwueme, their kinsman.

*Obasanjo 

In his response to my question he smiled and said, “the only reason why vehicle manufacturers put various levels of gear is to enable the driver change when one gear is not coping.

"In politics there are various levels of gears, you as a good driver should know when to change to the next level.

“We all went to Jos, driving on one gear but as things unfolded we saw the need to apply the other gear and that was what happened.”

Since then as a political journalist I have always had this political education at the back of my mind when looking at the behaviour of every Nigerian politician particularly in studying the politics of Nigeria’s former President Obasanjo.

Over the years I have come to realise that one Nigerian politician you take for granted at your own peril is Chief Obasanjo.

All those who overlooked him politically paid dearly for it. The Awoists, the core Yoruba politicians under the tutelage of the late Yoruba political sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, took Obasanjo for granted and thought of him as an inconsequential politician.

But since he came to the scene the group never remained intact to make the desired and deserving impact. Instead it is he Obasanjo who has become the most successful Yoruba politician going by the records of his achievements and accolades.

The other person who took him for granted and got a thorough flagellation for it is his former Vice Atiku Abubakar.