What APC Can’t Destroy…

 By Ugo Onuoha

On Thursday, February 9, South Africa’s embattled President, Cyril Ramaphosa, went to the country’s Parliament, braced heckling by the militant opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party to declare that the country was in a ‘“national state of disaster.” So, what was the problem with that Southern African country? They have been grappling with energy, particularly electricity, supply crisis for about two years. Yes, two years.

*APC leaders

The country has been experiencing load-shedding, read, power outages, where some consumers experience blackouts for up to 12 hours in a day. A mere 12 hours.

Last year, the country’s economic growth fell to 2.5%. This year, the projection is that it would shrink to 0.3%, the declines essentially boil down to South Africa’s electricity crisis. In parliament, Ramaphosa told South Africans: “We are, therefore, declaring a national state of disaster to respond to the electricity crisis and its effects.”

Bulkachuwa: Red Rag To A Bull

By Banji Ojewale

We are not in Spain. But there, it is claimed that bulls are enraged when red flags flutter before them.   The matador, the man who fights and kills a bull in a sport, gets the beast into the game by waving the red cloth. The indifferent, motionless animal only charges at his opponent when it sights his muleta, the stick with a crimson swathe employed in the final third of the bullfight…We know what follows:  savagery, slaughter and sanguinary cheers from the spectators.

*Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa 

In Nigeria, we appear to be in for a bullfight over the Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa affair. She is the President of the Appeal Court, who has been asked to head the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal looking into the suit of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and its Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar. They are challenging the victory of Muhammadu Buhari in the poll of February 2019. 

President Buhari’s Militocracy

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Unless the citizens resolve to prosecute an urgent rescue agenda, the nation’s hard-won democracy would collapse at the hands of President Muhammadu Buhari. And above the rubble would be autocracy and anarchy. These are not far-fetched. We already have their precursor in the now burgeoning militocracy whose chief promoter is Buhari.

*President Buhari 

Ever since Buhari succeeded in conning the citizens with his pretensions to being a born-again democrat, he has never hidden his contempt for the obligations of his newly-found calling. Yet, the citizens make allowance for the blossoming of the democrat in him. But the more they expect him to demonstrate the readiness to abide by the tenets of democracy, the more they are disappointed.

Buhari Not Wanted On This Journey

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Until after the election of Saturday, we are denied the prescience to tabulate its winner and losers and thus the nation’s president in the next four years. Clearly, poll predictions, even when they seem to be highly informed, have oftentimes been trumped by reality. But one thing is certain: We should be preoccupied with a post-Buhari era if we are genuinely interested in the continued existence of the country . In other words, the citizens should muster sufficient patriotic fervour to consign the re-election ambition of President Muhammadu Buhari to the realm of unrestrained fantasy.

*President Buhari 

The country is on the cusp of a new era where Buhari does not fit in. For in less than four years, we have seen enough of the president to be secure in the conviction that he is a blight not only on the nation’s corporate existence but also on individual citizens’ lives. Or why has Buhari’s second coming brought so much hardship to the citizens? Why has he been a source of massive unemployment resulting in several suicides?