Baba, Go Straight To Niger, Forget Daura

 By Dele Sobowale

“The evils that men do live after them…”- William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, in Julius Caesar

Outgoing President Buhari announced a few weeks ago that he might relocate to Niger Republic – if people disturb him too much in Daura. Since then, some commentators have assumed he was serious with the declaration; a few said he was only joking and his comments should not be taken too seriously. I take a different attitude.

*Buhari 

Irrespective of whether he meant it seriously or as a light joke, I think he should fly straight to Republic of Niger – where a befitting Presidential Lodge is probably waiting for him. After eight years as President of Nigeria, during which he did Niger more good than Nigeria, he should, quite rightly, expect a warmer welcome there than Daura or any place else in Nigeria.

When Will The Benue, Southern Kaduna Killings End?

 By Charles Okoh

It appears that there will be no end in sight to the killings in Kaduna as well as Benue states. The lackadaisical approach of the Federal Government to halting the carnage in both states remains worrisome. If it is argued that the sheer spread of violence and wanton killings across the country have become too much of a burden for the government to handle, will it be out of place to demand from the Federal Government what its plan is towards ending the senseless killings especially in these states?

No fewer than 29 people have been killed in a fresh attack by bandits on Runji Village in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area of Kaduna State.

The attack which occurred at about 10 p.m. penultimate Saturday night came barely three days after bandits killed eight people at the Atak’Njei community also in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area.

Nuisance Around New Naira Notes

 By Ray Ekpu

When Mr Godwin Emefiele announced in October last year that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) would be redesigning the N200, N500, and N1000 notes many Nigerians might have thought that they would have an opportunity to touch clean naira notes. The truth is that the common people of Nigeria never have a glimpse at clean naira notes in Nigeria.

 Only the rich, the very rich, get to hold clean notes. They are also the ones who buy mint fresh notes for spraying at parties. The rest of us just lick our lips when the extravagant rich engage in that obscene vulgarity at weddings, birthdays, chieftaincy ceremonies. As they spray stylishly the notes drop on the floor and other eager sprayers march them as they take their turn to display their vanity.

Why The 2023 Elections Matter For Nigeria And Its Future

 By Chuka Onwumechili 

Nigeria is expected to be home to 380 million persons by 2050, making it the third most populated country in the world according to the United Nations. Of course, that is made of a huge youth population, given that the population was barely 55 million in 1980. Presently, 90 per cent of the 220 million population is 50 years or younger.

The dire situation is heightened by a growing poverty line where four out of 10 Nigerians live below the line, according to World Bank data. Worse still, a Nigerian online publication recently reported that Nigeria’s 2022 debt servicing is 18 per cent higher than projected revenue.

Nigeria: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold

 By Donu Kogbara

On Tuesday, President Muhammadu Buhari took off to Monrovia to celebrate Liberia’s Special Independence anniversary (commemorating 175 years of self-rule) with other African leaders. According to Garba Shehu, his Senior Special Assistant (Media and Publicity), one of the important issues Mr. President was going to address in his speech at this event was West Africa’s security. 

*Buhari and Weah 

A couple of days before this announcement was made, a harrowing video clip went viral globally. It depicted terrorists flogging male passengers who were abducted from a Kaduna-bound train on March 28 and are still stranded with their tormentors in the middle of a forest, alongside female captives who were seen weeping and wailing. Since Buhari became our head of state, Nigerians in all six geopolitical zones have been subjected to endless security disasters.

2023: When APC Treads The Path To Doom With Northern Agenda

 By Abdulsalam Muhammed Kazaure

The All Progressives Congress, APC, appears intent on snatching a sure defeat from the jaws of a likely victory with its baffling ‘all-Northern’ strategy.  

Following the nudge of certain Northern figures who are blinded by self-interest and an inflated sense of their political prowess, the party looks to be plotting the emergence of a Northerner as its presidential aspirant, an audacious betrayal of its agreement with its Southern bloc on ceding its ticket to the zone in honour of the power-sharing arrangement key to Nigeria’s political stability. 

*Buhari and APC Chairman, Adamu

It was the agreement, brokered by leaders of the party from the two regions, that shaped its national convention held in March where Senator Adamu Abdullahi, a Northerner from Nasarawa State, emerged as the consensus choice for the position of National Chairman. 

Kaduna Killings And A Silenced Nation

 By Ayo Oyoze Baje

“Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths’’     – Isaiah 59:17

The recent heartless, blood-letting attacks of terrorists on the Abuja-Kaduna rail line and train, twice within 72 hours, in addition to the Kaduna airport have brought to mind my opinion essay titled: ‘Southern Kaduna Killings and Our Fragile Unity’. It was published by several newspapers on January 15, 2017. The aim then was to draw the needed attention of the powers that be, that more was being said than done in reining in the rampaging monster of killer herdsmen on innocent citizens. That was precisely so in several Sothern Kaduna villages such as Gad Biyu,  Agwan Ajo as well as  Zango Kataf, Jema’a and Kaura local councils, as perpetrated and escalated from August of the previous year, 2016.

The Disinvitation Of Nasir El-Rufai By The NBA

By Tony Ademiluyi

Mallam Nasir El-Rufai came into the public limelight in 1999 when democracy returned back to the country after a sixteen year hiatus of military misrule. The then President Olusegun Obasanjo made El-Rufai the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) which was saddled with the gargantuan responsibility of disposing some of the assets hitherto held by the government to private investors. It was as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory that his name became permanently etched in the minds of many Nigerians as he had the ambition of restoring the original master plan of the city.

 

*El-Rufai

Many houses including those owned by prominent Nigerians were bulldozed as the then diminutive minister spared no one and took no prisoners. Some of his die-hard supporters pushed his name forward as a possible successor to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in 2007 after the alleged failure of the latter’s third term bid. For some reasons best known to Baba Iyabo as the former President is fondly called, he settled for the Late Umaru Musa Yar’adua who was then governing Katsina state. El-Rufai went into political winter for eight years after his former boss’s Presidency and he was hounded by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to give an account of his eight-year stewardship especially as the minister. He went on to write his memoir – ‘The Accidental Public Servant’ which was an interesting read even though some critics accused him of hagiography.

What Does Atiku Abubakar Want?

By Hope Eghagha   

Early in 2018 when Mallam Atiku Abubakar began to reference restructuring the nation’s polity as one of his cardinal goals, I thought I should take him seriously. As a man from the Niger Delta whose region has been fundamentally shortchanged by the current quasi-federal arrangement I naturally took interest in this core northern leader who had decided to make restructuring a campaign issue. 

*Atiku Abubakar 

Middle of last year I tried through some of his aides to reach him. No luck. He was either too busy or the aides I reached did not have the clout to arrange a meeting. So I let it rest. Once Atiku Abubakar secured the PDP’s nomination as presidential candidate I thought I should use this medium to broach some of the issues I would have presented to him.

APC Crisis: Oshiomhole Is Becoming A Problem, Not The Solution

By SKC Ogbonnia

The most compelling attribute of Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole, the new chairman of our great party, the All Progressive Congress (APC), remains the doggedness in which he organized protests during the democratic regime of then president, Olusegun Obasanjo. But events thus far are revealing the hard truth: trade union activism is far from party leadership. This point is that, Oshiomhole, who was brought in to stave off crisis and lead the party to victory in 2019, is already becoming a problem, not the solution. 

*President Buhari and Adams Oshiomole

Recall that the first turmoil that greeted Oshiomhole’s chairmanship was the splinter group, the Reformed APC (R-APC). Instead of exploring meaningful avenues for peace at the time, the new party chairman heightened the crisis by attacking the group’s credibility. To Oshiomhole, the R-APC was inconsequential, boasting that the party would win in 2019 regardless. He went further to dismiss the group merely as a “counter force” against “President Muhammadu Buhari’s resolve to fight corruption.” 

Buhari 2019: The Audacity Of Buharideens

By Martins-Hassan Eze

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance  and an conscientious stupidity” — Dr. Martin-Lurther King Jnr.

Walahi! This thing called shame some Dudu’s just don’t have it. How can a man with conscience and human heart refuse to acknowledge the regrettable fact the GMB is a disaster; a ticking time bomb. Is it not now clear that GMB is the worst thing to happen to Nigeria since the return of civilian rule in 1999? Yet, some mugus are not just shameful enough to stop selling the candidature of this Mobutu in the social media. And, I ask. Is the protection of lives and properties no longer the primary responsibility of government? Have PBM and APC not failed woefully in this regard? Perhaps, for Elrufai; the petit Kaduna tyrant and Dean, college of Buharideens, good governance is all about ethnic cleaning and political jihad. 

President Buhari 

Who should we blame? Did KONGI the noble laureate not bemoan the fact that social media is a vomitorium some years back?  Some folks think that the social media is their village stream. They just jump into the square with rotten and stinking narratives: fighting corruption is the reason why we should become slaves in our country. Fighting corruption is also the reason why all ancestral lands of non-Muslims in the north should become a mass grave and grazing land for Fulani herdsmen.

The Wailing Of Madam Oluremi Tinubu

By Modiu Olaguro

"For what Ricardo foresaw was the end of a theory of society in which everyone moved together up the escalator of progress. Unlike Smith, Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly on the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then were kicked back down to the bottom. Worse yet, those who kept the escalator moving were not those who rose with its motion, and those who got the full benefit of the ride did nothing to earn their reward. And to carry the metaphor one step further, if you looked carefully at those who were ascending to the top, you could see that all was not well here either; there was a furious struggle going on for a secure place on the stairs.”

—The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers by Robert L. Heilbroner.

*Oluremi Tinubu

Remi Tinubu’s outburst on the seeming side-line of her hubby, Bola Tinubu, by the Muhammadu Buhari administration illustrates the existence of an acrimonious struggle for dominance by actors in the political space. It connotes the very fact that the poor masses of Nigeria are not the only victims of the serial subterfuge by politicians who find their thumbs useful before elections only to find their faces unworthy after.

Nigeria: Nasir El-Rufai’s Politics Of Demolition

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Carl Von Clausewitz has an ardent disciple in Nigeria. Clausewitz was the Prussian general and military strategist who theorised that war is an extension of politics by other means. But Nasir El-Rufai who is evidently enamoured of this theorisation has reformulated it to suit his condition.

*Gov Nasir el-Rufai

Obviously encumbered by his lack of access to an arsenal to prosecute his political war, the Kaduna State governor might have appropriated demolition as a form of war to extend his politics. 

Benue Massacres: How Gov Ortom Got His Groove Back!

By Reno Omokri

I must say that I was rather disappointed in the Benue State Governor’s initial response to the killing of 73 residents of Benue State by killer Fulani herdsmen. I felt that it was wrong of him to have accepted President Buhari’s summons to go to the Aso Rock Presidential Villa with Benue elders only to be talked down at by the President who had no harsh words for his Fulani herdsmen kinsmen and who condescendingly told Gov Samuel Ortom and his elders to “accommodate your countrymen” (never mind that he, the President, once claimed that killer Fulani herdsmen are foreigners).

*Gov Wike of River State in Benue State to Commiserate with Gov Ortom on the Killings 

My disappointment with Ortom stemmed from the fact that he allowed himself be summoned by a President who did not have the common decency to first of all pay a condolence visit to the state where killers who share affinity with him had just killed his countrymen and women. 

Fulani Herdsmen And Endless Killings

By  Benedict Ahanonu

FOR most part of 2016, Nigeria was plagued by incessant letting of blood by a group alleged to be Fulani herdsmen. While some may claim that the real Fulani herdsmen are peaceful and essentially mindful of their flock, the fact remains that this marauding group is composed of herdsmen who appear in the garb of Fulani pastoralists.

That aside, their modus operandi is unwavering and follows a common pattern. From Benue to Enugu, Delta, Ekiti and now Niger, Kaduna it has been a gory tale of woe.

Thousands of innocent Nigerians have been killed, cash and food crops destroyed, villages and communities sacked.
Because there seems to be no indication of readiness by the government through the security agencies to deal with these murderous offenders, they have got more emboldened even as they visit mayhem on Nigerians with flagrant impunity.
One had expected President Muhammadu Buhari to demonstrate strong leadership in dealing with these marauders whom it appears may not be Nigerians.

While there is “Operation Lafiya Dole” for the Northeast insurgency, “Operation Python Dance” for the Southeast Biafran agitators, “Operation Crocodile Smile” for the Niger Delta, there is none for this bunch of killers who have succeeded in inflicting pain on almost every part of the country.

It is even quite disturbing  and strange that the same President Buhari who is always quick to condemn such dastardly acts when they happen elsewhere has so far been unable to rebuke what seems like genocide taking place in Southern Kaduna.

Reacting, perhaps, at the behest of Buhari, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, who spoke on a Channels Television programme, “Sunrise Daily,” said that it was needless for the president to speak on the destruction of southern Kaduna State since the governor assured that he was in full control of the violent crisis and had been briefing his boss regularly.

El-Rufai’s Blunders And The Christmas Killings In Southern Kaduna

By Moses E. Ochonu

For the people of Kaninkon Kingdom in Southern Kaduna, this was a bleak Christmas. On Christmas Eve and on Christmas day armed Fulani herdsmen attacked and destroyed Goska village, killing, maiming, and burning. This attack occurred in spite of the area having been put under a 24-hour curfew by the state government, an indication of the brazenness and sense of impunity on the part of the well-armed attackers.

*Nasir el-Rufai

The attack is part of a broader genocidal war against the people of Southern Kaduna, a war that is in its fifth year and has killed thousands of people in their homes and farms and destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. As we speak an estimated 53 villages lay in ruins, some of them occupied by Fulani herdsmen and their cattle, a forceful annexation that recalls the similarly forceful displacement in Agatu.

Let’s be clear: the crisis predates the administration of Governor Nasir el-Rufai, so he cannot be accused of causing it or of being behind it as some people are insinuating. However, his utterances and actions in the past and the present have exacerbated the problem and emboldened the attackers. An ill-tempered man given to incendiary, inciting, and divisive outbursts, el-Rufai has made several egregious errors in dealing with the crisis. Some of these errors are errors of approach, thinking, and mentality. The errors have inspired actions that have wittingly or unwittingly transformed what was a low level series of massacres into a full-blown genocide.

To understand some of the governor’s current failures in dealing with the killings, you have to understand his past utterances, his incendiary character, his insensitivity, and his inability to moderate his thinking and resultant public expressions, all of which offer clues about why he has no credibility or political capital to solve the problem and why he is widely perceived as part of the problem, not its solution. Let’s consider the governor’s many problems in this regard.

El-Rufai is widely regarded as a Fulani supremacist, and with good reason. On July 12, 2012, he tweeted the following: “We will write this for all to read. Anyone, soldier or not that kills the Fulani takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes.” The governor’s response to the killings in Southern Kaduna has been eerily consistent with this mindset. In a recent chat with newsmen in Kaduna, the governor made three statements that substantiate this Fulani supremacist statement from four years ago.

First, he said when he became governor, he traced the attackers to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger and sent a message to them that one of their own, a Fulani like them, was now governor. This statement displays a spectacularly parochial mentality. A governor of a Nigerian state was basically making appeals based on ethnic kinship and brotherhood to a group of foreign killers of people in his own Nigerian state! In other words, he was appeasing his murderous foreign kinsmen at the expense of indigenes of his state who are not his ethnic kinsmen but whose safety and interests he swore to defend. The governor’s shocking statement indicates that ethnic solidarity trumped his constitutional obligations to protect Southern Kaduna citizens from the external threats of foreign Fulani herdsmen.

Second, the governor told the journalists that the crisis began in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential elections when foreign Fulani herdsmen passing through Southern Kaduna were attacked, with some of them killed and their cattle stolen. The governor claimed that the ongoing genocidal killings are revenge for the 2011 attacks.

Nasir El-Rufai, Nigeria And The Killer-Herdsmen

By Kenechukwu Obiezu

The concerned citizens who have over the years painfully followed the bloody mindless Kaduna State were hit with another sucker punch the other day: The Governor of Kaduna State and its Chief Security Officer, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai declared that he had paid Fulani herdsmen money to stop their attacks on long-suffering indigenes of Kaduna State, especially the Christian-dominated area of southern Kaduna.

Given his eccentricities and insatiable thirst for controversy, those who have followed his colourful political career from when he held the office of the Honourable Minister, FCT during which time countless buildings fell and countless families were rendered homeless controversially, to implement the Abuja Master Plan, to his current stint as Governor of Kaduna State, have never been starved of drama and unpredictability. His most ardent supporters and even many neutrals posit that the face of Abuja as it is today can be chalked up to the courage and determination of El-Rufai who allegedly tore down a house belonging to his father-in-law to give way to the Abuja Master Plan. Many would also argue that Kaduna State today is being set on a path of irreversible development. Razor-blunt and confrontational, since he assumed the highest office in the state.

To put it in proper perspective, the orgy of blood-letting which has enveloped Kaduna State for years now did not start with El Rufai. Years of internecine crises between the predominantly Christian Southern Kaduna area and the predominantly Muslim central and northern parts of the state have reduced one of Nigeria's most iconic states to a valley flowing with blood. When the Islamic Movement of Nigeria blindly charged into a confrontation with men of the Nigerian Army obviously lacking in professional restraint and were mercilessly massacred in Zaria, Kaduna State added another trophy to its bulging cabinet of mindless killings. A judicial commission of Inquiry was set up by El-Rufai and though the IMN never appeared as the condition it demanded for its appearance which was that its incarcerated leader, Ibraheem El- Zakzaky be released was never met, the Commission duly concluded its work within time and in its findings trenchantly indicted both the members of the IMN and the Nigerian Army for the bloodbath.

Since then, the IMN controversy has raged with its boiling point being Kaduna. When El Rufai introduced an executive bill which he posited was to ‘protect Kaduna State from extremism and hate speech,’ a cry of alarm issued from the throats of those who argued that there was more to the bill than met the eye in a state that has historically been a cauldron of religious tension.

It was against this background that the recent revelation by El Rufai that he had ladled out undisclosed sums of money to criminal herdsmen to placate them and stem their killings has drawn more than a little flak from Nigerians. Nigeria has officially been in recession for a while now and even those whose financial cocoons are the hardest have found themselves pricked even if only lightly by the austerity measures and seeming economic incompetency of a Federal Government which is looking more directionless by the day. Nigeria`s poor, of which ordinary families make up vast swaths have been desperately hit with many unable to maintain supply of the basic necessities of life ad many others losing their lives and livelihoods to the myriad negative effects of economic difficulties. From whence then, it must be asked, did El Rufai draw his ‘ingenious’ precedent of placating killer-herdsmen with money which seems in short supply in the Nigeria of today?

Buhari, El-Rufai: From Democracy To Guncracy?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No one can easily impugn the sense in making democracy to be responsive to the special needs of the milieu in which it is practised. But such domestication retains its validity to the extent that the objective is to serve the people. We need not split hairs in so far as the reformulation of the concept of democracy is not a precursor to an accommodation of the crude cravings of some benighted leaders. What must, however, trigger vigilance is an attempt to tinker with an essential principle of the democracy – periodic elections.

*Pres Buhari and Nasir el-Rufai

For here in Africa, we are not unfamiliar with the truncation of democracy through such tinkering. From Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Algeria, Chad, Congo, Sudan, to Burundi, there are relics of democracies that held so much promise when they began but were later truncated through the greed of their leaders that made them to choose to perpetuate themselves.

Back home in Nigeria, democracy has been subjected to serial betrayals by the nation’s leaders. Either they are failing to make the people choose those they want to serve them or they are reworking democracy to be amenable to their quest for self-perpetuation through a third term. It is in this regard that we must take note of the contemporary reformulation of democracy by President Muhammadu Buhari and Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State. 

Yes, they are not yet afflicted with the incubus of self-perpetuation like the Robert Mugabes of Africa. Yet, they have demonstrated a tragic propensity to rework democracy to serve not the people’s interest but their own. What the duo have brought to the table of democracy is neither a celebration of the rule of the majority nor a clarion call for adherence to the rule of law and equality of all. It is rather the reformulation of democracy in such a way that it derives its legitimacy from the barrel of the gun.

Clearly, Buhari and El-Rufai got to their offices on the back of elections that they won. But if they got to offices through elections by the majority, they are not now being sustained in those offices by amenability to the wishes of the majority. What is obvious now is that Buhari and El-Rufai are now beholden to a travestied version of democracy that could be identified as guncracy – a process of legitimising democracy through guns. In no way are guns metaphorical here. For even in unlawful incarceration as in the cases of a former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki, whom courts have asked for his freedom many times and the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu, the guns of the state security operatives were used to shove them into prison having been branded as implacable threats to the state.

Buhari has long embraced guncracy. He has demonstrated this in the South South and South East. In the South South, Buhari has deployed soldiers. They are on the prowl and under the guise of searching for militants and safeguarding oil facilities, they are destroying property and killing innocent people. And in the South East, Buhari has deployed soldiers under the portentous rubric of Operation Python Dance. This was shortly after the Amnesty International indicted the military for killing and maiming innocent citizens in that part of the country.