Who Are Nigeria’s True Heroes Of Democracy?

 By Tonnie Iredia

In 1987, the then Federal Military Government led by President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) set up an electoral body – the National Electoral Commission NEC to midwife a robust transition to civil rule political programme. This columnist was deployed from the Nigerian Television Authority NTA, to serve as the pioneer Director of Public Affairs of the Commission.

*Chief Abiola casts his vote during the 1993 election 

This positioned me to observe a number of things about politics and elections in Nigeria. I once came across a pamphlet titled ‘future heroes of Nigeria’s democracy’ compiled by a non-governmental organization identifying some well-known politicians that would likely succeed the military. But from my interactions with several politicians, I had huge doubts that many of the listed political leaders would readily choose to undergo danger and pain for the sake of democracy.

2019: Because Buhari Is Too Old To Run

By Martins Oloja

I would like rely on some ancient words of a wise king who once said, “there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heaven”. Yes, there is a time to be quiet. There is a time to be loud; a time to be politically correct in the interest of peace. And there is a time to refrain from political correctness and speak truth to power in public interest. And this should include a time to tell our best friends the truth and nothing but the truth, especially the one to set them free from unnecessary fear. I am therefore fully persuaded that it is time to tell our friends, especially in the far North, some plain truth about Nigeria. Yes, Nigeria whose destiny all of us are gambling with at the moment. 

*

For the record, I have more friends in the North. I have had some personal relationship with the North that spanned about three decades. My professional profile was remarkably shaped in December 1990 when the premier newspaper in Abuja owned by investors from the North appointed me Editor of their newspaper, The Abuja Newsday. I once narrated part of the remarkable story of the first newspaper in the nation’s capital here. I had then noted that Alhaji Bukar Zarma, former editor of New Nigerian who hails from Borno state, set up the newspaper and appointed all the editors without consideration for religion and ethnicity. The Chairman of the Board of Directors was Alhaji Hassan Adamu, Wakilin Adamawa.

Buhari And Remembrance Of Things Past

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

As the first half of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration lurches into the twilight, it is refreshing that he has given us an opportunity to interrogate his intervention in national politics from another perspective. Beyond the well-worn exploration of Buhari as a profile in persistence, having taken him over a decade to chase a return to power, we can now attend to the   relationship between personal tragedies and national glories.

*Buhari

It is now clear from Buhari’s disclosure in Benin during his commissioning of some projects of the outgoing Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole that his tragedy of incarceration after his overthrow in 1985 as military head of state remains a stimulant for his quest for regaining power.  Buhari said that he spent 40 months in a bungalow in Benin after he was overthrown by some corrupt army officers. In fact, he said that the coup was a preemptive strike against his crusade against some corrupt officers.

From that crucible of 1985, through the next 30 years, Buhari might have realised the essence of engendering an equitable society. But as he tells us, such a society is not attainable in so far as it remains a bastion for the proliferation of injustice as evident in the complicity of the judiciary in the denial of his electoral victories on three previous occasions. Of course, Buhari’s quest for an equitable society after suffering injustice is not an isolated case. Before him, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, among others appropriated a sense of injustice inflicted by warped state powers to develop their societies.

Even back at home, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo was prised from prison to cobble together a dismembering nation. But in the case of Buhari, it is unfortunate that while his regaining of power after 30 years might have served a personal cathartic purpose, it is far from playing a significant role in his relationship with the need for the development of the country. For the danger that the nation faces today under the Buhari government is that at the end of his tenure, he would have succeeded in making millions of citizens to feel a sense of injustice and alienation from the society. This is the clear possibility that Buhari would engender through his policies and programmes.

If Buhari had truly learnt the lessons of suffering injustice, he would guard against fostering a sense of injustice. But does Buhari really have consideration for the need to ensure justice for others? Consider his  appointments  since he  became president. How have these ensured justice and the strengthening of the unity of the country?  In those appointments, Buhari brazenly favoured his northern part of the country. It is such nepotism that has thrown up a situation where from the National Assembly, the military, police, Department of State Services,  other security apparatuses, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), to other major government agencies, the heads are northerners.

Why Nigerians Are Leaving The Country

By Dan Amor

It sounds very much like an apocryphal tale. But it is true that the joke is once again on the Nigerian society. What I am saying is that Nigeria is constantly losing batches of experts to the larger world. Thousands of highly trained medical doctors and other professionals are daily departing these shores for greener pastures abroad. Even those who summoned the courage to return back home during the immediate past administration of Goodluck Jonathan are heading back abroad.

They are going to join millions of talented Nigerian intellectuals, academics and professionals, who had been driven out of our land by the harsh realities of our current existence. It is not a matter of profound argument or intellectual debate to say that the death of the Nigerian middle class due to equivocation and compromise has long been awaited. Yet, implicit in the very meaning of compromise as a means of harmonizing the best features of opposing values is an element of tension. And it is this unwearied straining after the ideal within the actual rather than any lame begging of issues that imparts so devastating a tone on the social life of our dying middle class. Check our various passport offices, consular offices of other countries in Nigeria and international airports to confirm this. The exodus of Nigerians to other lands in the past six months is frightening. It sends shivers down the spines of most of us who don't have money to move our families to our villages not to talk of traveling abroad.

In fact, it takes a thorough grounding and deep reflection on our belligerent and turbulent social system to appreciate the interplay of the social forces that impinge on the growth of the Nigerian educated elite. But the situation now exerts a critical immediacy and honest evaluation. "We cannot pretend that the profound implication of the exodus of members of the Nigerian middle class to foreign lands have been intellectually confronted except in pious lamentations and official platitudes. For instance, the Ibrahim Babangida task force on brain-drain was another comic relief constituted in 1988 only to signal the official recognition of the menace." Professor Ibidapo Obe who headed the committee even attempted to bamboozle Nigerians into believing that brain drain was a good thing. Whereas, according to Professor Adebayo Williams, the inimitable critic and essayist, "nothing can be more excruciating than the pain of having to abandon one’s patriotic post at a time when national events demand scrutiny and vigilance, yet to remain in Nigeria is to surrender your life to grinding poverty and penal servitude or even death. Hence the compelling need to choose between dying in abject poverty and negating your patriotic obligation by checking out”. Consequently, in 1986, the first batch of Nigerian experts, having felt the suffocation occasioned by a wanton reduction of their wages to mere pittance as a result of the senseless devaluation of the naira, fled to the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Asian Tigers for survival.

Buhari, The Logic Of Change And Democratic Tyranny: The Lessons Of History

By Arthur Nwankwo

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it"— George Santayana

 One thing you cannot take away from most Nigerians is their penchant for collective amnesia. Despite the lessons of our history, we seem to learn nothing. On several occasions, especially in times like this, most Nigerians find themselves in a state of apparent exhaustion, as though drained of all their physical and mental energies; in a kind of torpor from which we are aroused only by difficulty and hardship. I have come to appreciate the fact that of all human institutions, none is as pervasive and inescapable as the state. 

As socio-political beings, God has destined man to live together; to form groups for physical and emotional sustenance. In forming such groups, the most powerful group, which man has formed is the state. In line with the principles of “social contract”, it is to the state that we grant, explicitly and implicitly, willingly and unwillingly, powers that affect every aspect of our lives. History has shown that when the state exercises its coercive powers without restraint we have little choice about this grant, and we may find ourselves with hardly anything beyond the hope for survival. In such circumstances, we can only take recourse to history to raise society’s consciousness to prevent the birth of tyranny; to avoid finding ourselves with no choices except suffering oppression and brutality.

The present government of Muhammadu Buhari is a direct threat to this country. Make no mistake about this –  the lessons of history weigh heavily in this direction. I have in one of my earlier articles drawn attention to the activities that heralded the collapse of the ancient Mali Empire. In about 1203, Sumanguru (the Sorcerer King) took over what was left of old Ghana Empire. He was cruel and killed all that challenged his power. He killed many Malinka people but did not kill one of the crippled princes named Sundiata. In 1235, Sundiata crushed Sumanguru's forces. This victory was the beginning of the new Mali Empire. Sundiata took control of the gold-producing regions and became Mali's national hero.

Sundiata’s first major assignment was to eliminate all those who helped him to power; introduced a regime of monster and brutality comparable only to the monstrous Maghreb warrior, Samouri Ibn Lafiya Toure of the infamous ‘earth-scorch” policy – much in the mould of modern day Boko Haram attacks. A few years in power, the people of the ancient Mali Empire would actually come to realize that he was more brutal and sadistic than Samanguru. 

History is coterminous with the fact that brutal leaders all over the world have always emerged under the veneer of changing the status-quo in favour of the society. This trend sign posted the emergence of Adolph Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in former USSR, Nimiery in Sudan, Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic and Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo. This was also the trend that greeted Buhari’s jackboot dictatorship in 1983. Despite the euphoria that greeted the emergence of his military junta, his colleagues booted him out on August 27, 1985.

*Buhari 

In his national broadcast on 27th August 1985, Brigadier-General Joshua Dogonyaro remarked that “Nigerians were unified in accepting the intervention of December 31st 1983 and looked forward hopefully to progressive changes for the better”. Then most crucially, he noted that “almost two years later, it has become clear that the fulfillment of our expectation is not forthcoming. Because future generation of Nigerians and indeed Nigeria have no other country but Nigeria, we could not stay back and watch a small group of individuals misuse power to the detriment of our national aspirations and interests”.

In his own broadcast on the same day, General Ibrahim Babangida threw more light on why Buhari had to go. According to Babangida, “when in December 1983, the former military leadership of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari assumed the reins of government with the most popular enthusiasm accorded any government in the history of this country, with the nation then at the mercy of political misdirection and on the brink of economic collapse, a new sense of hope was created in the minds of every Nigerian. Since January 1984, however, we have witnessed a systematic denigration of that hope…Regrettably, it turned up that Major-General Muhammadu Buhari was too rigid and uncompromising in his attitudes to issues of national significance. Efforts to make him understand that a diverse polity like Nigeria requires recognition and appreciation of differences in both cultural and individual perception only served to aggravate these attitudes. Major-General Tunde Idiagbon was similarly inclined in that respect”.

Buhari: President Without Economic Think Tank

     By Omoh Gabriel

In this column in August last year, I had cause to ask how far President Buhari can go in managing a tough economy. There has been growing concerns about this government’s handling of the economy. At the moment, there seems to be no clear cut economic blueprint for which government policies are framed. It appears to me that every minister is working by intuition without any economic guiding principle.

*President Buhari 

The President is yet to appoint his Chief Economic adviser, have an economic management team or a think tank that meets regularly to discuss what is on ground, what measures needed to be put in place to address them quickly. It is like the focus is all about looking for thieves, catching them, and recovering what they have stolen. This is good and fair enough. After the President has finished the recovery of the looted funds, what next and how will the looted funds be channeled into the economy to benefit the ordinary Nigerian?

What the ordinary Nigerian is interested in is food on his table, good school for his children, good medical care and shelter and security of life and property.

In any economy, the goal of macro economic policy is to achieve full employment of resources, balance growth, stable prices of goods and services; and a stable currency through a healthy balance of payment.

As it is today, all four macro economic indices are pointing south. This government seems not to understand or know what to do to address the situation. The government does not need to go too far to know what to do. Nigeria has several development research documents that speak of ways to better manage the economy. But the problem has always been that leaders are often not focused enough to implement them faithfully.

In most countries today, the economics of the middle class has taken the center stage. This is because if the middle class is doing well, the purchasing power in the hand of this class will make the economy to grow. When in 1986, General Babangida introduced the famous Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), it was with good intention. But half way down the line of implementation, the programme was derailed by Nigerians who kept crying of the hardship the programme was putting the nation through.

President Babagida before coming up with SAP had a retinue of very bright minds as his advisers. Babagida had a team then that was called the Presidential Economic Advisory Council. This body was busy preparing documents and seeking informed opinion from operators in the private sector. He went to the point of instituting what was then known as Corporate Nigeria — a yearly gathering of captains of industry to tap their knowledge of the economy before any policy initiative.

Pursue Justice, Not Retribution – American Lawyer Tells Buhari In An Open Letter

President Muhammadu Buhari

Aso Rock, Abuja Nigeria

Dear President Buhari:

When you visited the United States Institute of Peace last July, you pledged that you would be "fair, just and scrupulously follow due process and the rule of law, as enshrined in [the Nigerian] constitution" in prosecuting corruption.

Such loftiness is laudable. As the Bible instructs in Amos 5:24: "[L]et justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." 

But to be just, the law must be evenhanded. It cannot, in the manner of Russian President Vladimir Putin, be something that is given to punish your enemies and withheld to favor your friends. If so, the law becomes an instrument of injustice bearing earmarks of the wicked rather than the good.

In the United States, you declared a policy of "zero tolerance" against corruption. You solicited weapons and other assistance from the United States government based on that avowal. But were you sincere?

During your election campaign, you promised widespread amnesty, not zero tolerance. You elaborated: "Whoever that is indicted of corruption between 1999 to the time of swearing-in would be pardoned. I am going to draw a line, anybody who involved himself in corruption after I assume office, will face the music."

After you were inaugurated, however, you disowned your statement and declared you would prosecute past ministers or other officials for corruption or fraud. And then again you immediately hedged. You were reminded of your dubious past by former Major General and President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, who succeeded your military dictatorship. He released this statement: