Showing posts with label Ike Abonyi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ike Abonyi. Show all posts

Thursday, May 9, 2024

David Umahi: When Envy Rules Our Politics

By Ike Abonyi 

It’s in the character of a very few men to honour without envy a friend who prospered.” – Aeschylus

*Umahi and Obi

Envy and jealousy drive political rhetoric in Nigeria, particularly among handicapped Igbo politicians. David Umahi, the former Ebonyi State Governor and current Minister of Works, has been mistaking envy towards Peter Obi, the Labour Party's presidential candidate for normal political behaviour. The minister's recent outburst against Ndigbo is a desperate and disingenuous effort to impress his political allies and gain favour from the Aso Rock Villa.

Monday, October 23, 2023

The King Is Naked, Why Fear The King?

 By Felix Oguejiofor

A naked king is like the legendary naked truth: both are contemptible, unwanted.

As the legend goes, truth, always impeccably dressed in white, was the darling of everyone. On the other hand, lie, always dirty and in rags, was despised by everyone, a complete turn-off. One day, according to the legend, truth went to the stream to bathe and, to be sure, she removed her white clothes, put them by the side of the river and dived into the water. Lie, ever looking to better her lot at the expense of truth, took the latter’s white clothes, put them on and ran away.

Truth came out of the water in her full nakedness and ran after lie, to no avail. In one of the most dramatic examples of trading places, well before the legendary Eddy Murphy and Dan Aykroyd acted it out in the 1983 epic American comedy film, Trading Places, lie, now resplendently dressed in white (white lie) became society’s darling while truth, now completely naked and unkempt, became society’s despised and unwanted. As it is today, while many would rather be told ‘white’ lies, very many others are simply loathe to hear the ‘naked’ truth. Meaning that even truth, once it becomes naked, becomes abhorrent!

When I first read about this legend in one of columnist Ike Abonyi’s must-read pieces in his Thursday Political Musings column in New Telegraph, it struck me as quite symbolic of the current Nigerian situation: our king is, certainly, naked now and the aura of the throne gone. So, society must of necessity redeem itself. Or will the cabinet answer to a naked king on the throne? Will a land and people allow a naked king to interact and conduct business with other kingdoms on their behalf? Will the palace guards still give their limbs to protect a naked king insistent on sitting on the throne of their forefathers?

In ancient Israel, as recorded in the Bible, once the glory of God left a king, he was all but dead to the kingdom. Until his death, Saul was only a king in mouth after the God of Moses and Joshua pulled His support from His own anointed and gave it to David. It was obvious from the unimaginable missteps of Bubu that the glory of God had long left his ‘house and kingdom’ (read APC).

Indeed, while the lifeless one was king, we, at first, lived in mortal fear of him. Because we thought he was a king with his clothes on. For a moment, even our eternally erratic power supply stabilized and we were only too happy to ascribe the development to the king’s aura and our fear of him. The usually disruptive, not to say sabotaging, electricity workers, it was said, were afraid of the long, punishing hands of the presumably no-nonsense king. Until we discovered that he was nothing more that a hobbled Khalifa, one with neither the purity of heart nor the wisdom that progressive leadership required: he was just an existence in time and space – a naked king without any substance!

Needless to say that our honeymoon with Bubu was brief, nothing more than a year plus, before he was completely unmasked as a man with nothing to offer as a leader. What we did was to stop fearing him and start despising him. Any surprise that Bubu, to say the least, was such a disaster, a leader who turned Nigeria upside-down for the eight years he answered president?

Unfortunately for the current king, he became naked from the very beginning. Therefore, having known or seen him inside out, what do we have again to fear him for? As my friend Abraham Ogbodo recently offered in one incisive piece on a platform to which I also belong, Bola Tinubu has no wherewithal to recommend him for the Nigerian presidency beyond the corrupting influence of money. Of the three most prominent presidential candidates in the February 25, 2023 election, Tinubu has the least national appeal. And one doesn’t even have to believe former SGF, Babachir Lawal’s word for it. For, as they say, by their fruits we shall know them. And, of course, PBAT’s fruits aren’t exactly the universally or, if you will, nationally consumable types.

So, yes, why would the Nigerian establishment still hail this king? Striped of all moral authority (thanks to the recent discoveries about his embarrassing propensity for forgeries) to reward good behaviour or punish infractions, why would the operators of this system still appear so willing to do the bidding of this king, even to the extent of courting the risk of practically throwing the nation under the bus without a tinge of conscience? Why so eager to please a naked king?

Let’s face it, what judicial system would garland a man whose obvious infractions of the law warrant that he should actually be out of circulation for his sins? While Bubu was clean enough (or so we thought initially) to harass even the judiciary and get away with it, on what grounds would the Nigerian judiciary subject itself to the current public pillory and odium that have become its lot, for the sake of one man whose records have been proven by courts of competent jurisdiction in Nigeria and elsewhere to be unwholesome, unable to withstand any legal scrutiny?

What debts of obligation, which must be repaid even at the risk of  destroying the foundations of the nation’s democracy, does the Nigerian judiciary owe PBAT and others like him holding positions of trust in society but with personal records that are clearly at odds with what are permissible under the law? Would the Nigerian Bench and Bar so conveniently destroy the hallowed position of the judiciary as every democracy’s bulwark against dictatorship and other manipulative geniuses of politicians, simply on the altar self-aggrandizement?

Elsewhere in the world (as we recently saw in the case of Atiku Abubakar v Bola Tinubu in the district courts of Illinois, Chicago, the United States), the judiciary gets people who infract the law to account for their actions, irrespective of their status in life.  Immediate past President of the of the United States, Mr. Donald Trump has been in and out of courts since leaving office in 2020 for his alleged offences against the law, in his private and business life. Every attempt by President Tinubu’s lawyers to prevent the Illinois courts from forcing Chicago State University (CSU) to release the president’s academic records expectedly fell through because the United States courts couldn’t be dissuaded from releasing the documents whose release, the courts were persuaded, was in public interest.

 

 The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had initially said it would not make public its files on PBAT until 2026 but had to decide otherwise, agreeing to release them batch by batch starting this month (beginning from October 23, to be precise). The FBI’s change of plan followed a freedom of information request filed last year by Aaron Greenspan, owner of PlainSite, a website that pushes anti-corruption and transparency in public service,  in collaboration with Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin. Again, the need to serve justice in public interest overrode the technicality of the seeming inviolability of FBI’s rules and schedules, hence the decision to release PBAT’s well ahead the earlier scheduled 2026. Although PBAT’s lawyers are fighting hard to prevent those FBI files on him from being made public, it is most likely that, as in his case with Atiku, the Nigerian leader will have his files with FBI made public as already scheduled by the agency.

 

That is what Nigerians expect from their judiciary: to always courageously stand on the side of justice for the many and not destroy its own essence just to serve the interests of a few powerful elements in society. As the Supreme Court hears LP presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi and his PDP counterpart, Atiku Abubakar’s appeals against the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) dismissing their petitions against INEC’s declaration of Tinubu as winner of this year’s February 25 presidential election, starting this Monday, the question many have asked and continue to ask is, will the Nigerian judiciary ditch technicalities and stand on the side of justice for the many this time around?

Soon, very soon, that question will be answered one way or another.

*Oguejiofor is a commentator on public issues 

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Peter Obi @ 62: A Consistency In Charity

 By Ike Abonyi 

Yesterday, Wednesday, July 19, 2023, the former Governor of Anambra state and the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party in the February 25, 2023 election, Peter Obi was 62 years old. On Monday he alerted his friends and well-wishers of the date and reminded them how his birthday is usually celebrated, devoid of owambe, but a time to think about the poor, the less, and the underprivileged in our society. 

*Peter Obi 

According to him in his reminder message “Wednesday 19th July 2023, marks my 62nd Birthday. While I remain immensely grateful to God for His infinite mercies, I still maintain my decision of over 20 years, that I will not celebrate my birthdays in today’s Nigeria, with the current deplorable state of the nation. 

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Nigeria: Who Says Army Cannot Takeover?

By Ike Abonyi
"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia"— George Orwell 

In the title of this piece is the harmful question asked by the Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu that set the polity and military authorities talking? It is one contribution to a debate last week at the nation's parliament - the Senate, that ignited a tense conversation in the polity. The topic was on the incessant human rights abuses especially on the Senators by their obsessional state governors.

Ekweremadu was reacting particularly to a report from a Kogi state Senator Ahmed Ogembe to the effect that his youthful controversial state Governor, Yahaya Bello, has been sending political thugs after him and threatening to chase him out of his constituency.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Nigeria: APC And Its Rotten Eggs

By Ike Abonyi
“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people, to focus your energies on answers – not excuses.”
– William Arthur Ward
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is desperately searching for the cause of its inability to raise their governance beyond plinth level. 
There is no doubt that the party has been struggling in its administration of the country in the past 20 months. As they try to cover one hole another opens. The fight against corruption which is their biggest strength has been trapped in the intrinsic contradictions in the regime.
The government has been rolling in and out of series of embarrassing scandals even as it tries to hold on to the acclaimed status of being a cleansing government. As the party strives to find its bearings, it has been groping aimlessly trying to look for whom to blame for its failings. For two years, it can hardly cough without calling on the past government. Even when their people face personal domestic problems they try blaming the past administration.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

President Buhari’s Corruption War

By Ike Abonyi
“If you love your country, you must be willing to defend it from fraud, bigotry, and recklessness even from a President”
– DaShanne Stokes
*President Buhari 
At a conversation over a curtail in May 2016 by three prominent British citizens, the then Prime Minister David Cameron, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Speaker of the British Parliament, John Bercow at the Buckingham Palace to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth, Nigeria was the topic and the issue was a scheduled corruption summit in United Kingdom.
The PM said: “We have some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to BritainNigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the World.”
But the Archbishop intervened to say: “But this particular President in Nigeria is not corrupt… he is trying very hard.”
The speaker typical of a watchdog to government simply said: “They are coming at their own expense, one assumes?”
If that set up is to repeat itself today, the PM would be standing on the same position and would be right, but the Archbishop certainly would not provide same defence he did 17 months ago given the myriads of corruption scandals around the President and his henchmen.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

What Do The Igbo Really Want?

By Ike Abonyi
“Those who lie to Mr. President that he is doing well in building a nation are unfair to him. Since he became our President in 2015, we have not seen much of that leverage of the personality of the President to mobilise and unite” –Oby Ezekwesili
That is the red hot question in the country now. Everyone in and out of government, are asking the question and many are struggling to provide the answer. What has become very clear however is that there is no unanimity to the answer even among the Igbo themselves. But what really do the Igbo want in Nigeria? Is it possible pigeon holing their desires into one straight answer? Why is Igbo always the issue among all ethnic groups in the country?
John Nnia Nwodo,
President General, Ohaneze Ndigbo
Why are they the issue now after they were the issue 50 years ago? Why is everyone now talking about the Igbo and the Nigeria question? Why has the Igbo question dominated the nation’s political space to the extent that the President had to make two national broadcasts under two months on it. To effectively provide appreciable response to these whys, I intent to use a story illustration to further give insight into the problem and possibly reinforce and bolster the historical journey of this crisis.

Once upon a time, in one notable Kingdom, a strong King had emerged bearing in his bag grudges against a particular family in his Kingdom for causing the Kingdom to go to war against itself for which the King was an active player as a youth in the Kingdom’s army. The new leader’s relationship with this family in question has not been the best politically as the family did not support his emergence.
Because of his record as a no gobbledygook leader there was great fear and apprehension when he emerged as the King but he allayed the fear in his installation speech assuring the people that his past was already a prologue as they were seeing a brand new convert from what they use to know.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

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.