Decriminalising Nigeria’s Democratic Estate

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

A lot has been agitating my mind in recent times on the state of our union and why evil seems to continually thrive over good. Why is it that the things which disqualify people in other climes from holding public office are exactly what is needed by an average Nigerian politician to be considered astute?

In other climes, hardly will a certificate forger make a successful career in politics. In Nigeria the reverse is the case. Many of those in public office in Nigeria today forged their academic qualifications even when the bar is so ridiculously low that all you need to be president is the West African School Certification Examination, WASCE. You don’t even need to pass.

Governors, Thugs And Settlement Of Disputes

 By Owei Lakemfa

In 2011, we in the Trade Union Movement were worried that the new National Minimum Wage of N18,000 consented to by the Federal and State governments, and signed into law the previous year, was not being implemented.

Negotiations had gone pretty well with the Federal Government, but had hit a brick-wall when its team said on a note of finality it had reached the limit of the wage bill it could shoulder. We needed an additional N2 billion. Labour met directly with then President Goodluck Jonathan and he directed that the additional fund be added to the Federal wage bill.

Lai Mohammed And His Treason Allegation

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

On Tuesday, April 4, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, did in the U.S. what he knows how best to do – fib. Mohammed, in Washington DC on official engagements with some international media organisations, including the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine, accused the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, and his running-mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, of inciting people to violence over the February 25 presidential election.

The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, quoted the minister as saying: “Obi and his Vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress, APC, is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria. This is treason… Obi’s statement is that of a desperate person, he is not the democrat that he claimed to be. A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins the election.”

Nigeria’s Election In The Ides Of March

 By Sola Ebiseni

ON this page last week, asking rhetorically for the whereabouts of Mr. President as the nation boiled during the elections between February 18 and March 18, we bemoaned this curious premonition of the coincidences in times between these occurrences in our land and the tragic happenings in Rome in the Shakespearian Julius Caesar. It is both about the politics and leadership of a nation.

*Ebiseni

We have expressed that those who gave Peter Obi and his structure-less Obidients no chance but swept off their feet in the unprecedented political hurricane that the youths wrought throughout the land in electoral victory for Obi, would rather die than surrender power and its lucre. They would spare nothing, including our cherished legendary culture of civility, to regain and keep power. Losing Lagos was particularly too scary to them.

As Nigeria’s Judges Get Set To Begin Voting

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

This week, the opening salvo will be fired to signal the onset of the final round of voting in Nigeria’s electoral marathon. This is not a reference to the state-level ballots that occurred around the country on Saturday, March 18. I refer instead to something far more consequential.

Democracy may be about choices and decisions by citizens in theory. As practised in Nigeria, however, citizens are mostly spectators. In every election, Nigeria’s judges have the final votes.

Tinubu And The Certificate Scandal That Refuses To Die

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

IF there is anything that the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, would want to die down at this critical moment, it is the certificate scandal that has dogged his political career for more than two decades. Though he survived the scandal when it first reared its ugly head in 1999 even as the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Salisu Buhari, accused of the same scam, lost his plum office, it has refused to go away.

*Tinubu 

Tinubu survived the scandal then because the same gladiators who forced Buhari to resign on July 22, 1999, exactly 49 days after he clinched the coveted seat of the House of Representatives Speaker, turned around to save his neck from the political guillotine. 

And what was the case against Tinubu? 

Like Salisu Buhari who claimed to have attended University of Toronto in Canada and graduated with a degree in Business Administration, when he did not, shortly after he was sworn in as governor of Lagos State on May 29, 1999, there were allegations that Tinubu had perjured and forged the credentials that qualified him to run for the governorship election.

The allegations were contained in a petition dated August 12, 1999, written by Alhaji Jameed Seriki and Dr. Waliu Balogun-Smith. They alleged a discrepancy in Tinubu’s age since the profile published during his inauguration stated that he was born in 1952 and the age on his transcript at the Chicago State University claimed that he was born in 1954.