Have Nigerians Truly Suffered Enough?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

In the twilight of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, a drama played out in the Red Chamber of the National Assembly as senators squared up in a crunch tenure elongation. The day was May 16, 2006, one year before the end of Obasanjo’s constitutionally guaranteed maximum eight years of two terms. But Obasanjo didn’t want to leave, hence the need to amend the Constitution with an open ended-tenure. 

As pro-tenure elongation senators plotted their third term agenda, anti-Obasanjo forces also arranged their cards.

On the day of the second reading of the Amendment Bill, the Senate President, Ken Nnamani, called out his colleagues one after the other and his predecessor, Adolphus Wabara, became the starboy. 

On The People’s Train With Peter Obi And Datti Baba-Ahmed For Nigeria’s Redemption

 By Sola Ebiseni

Our presence at the momentous OBIDATTI rally in Ibadan last Wednesday, November 21, was the ultimate evidence that we have boarded the people’s train with Peter Obi and Datti Ahmed for the redemption of our country.

*Peter Obi and Datti Baba-Ahmed 

To those who could not see beyond the conventional and are irredeemably fixated on the search for structures that have only held our nation and people hostage, let them know that the Obidient phenomenon is not a joke they thought would soon frizzle out. 

A brother and learned colleague, out of sheer love, described our move, after my initial television interviews justifying the Afenifere’s endorsement of the ObiDatti ticket, as a descent to political Golgotha. We are quick to remind him that the way to redemption is paved with torns and a burdensome cross that must be borne at Golgotha, which Nigeria must experience, willy nilly.

Ken Nnamani And Odinkalu’s Misplaced Aggression

 By Reginald Okafor

Chidi Odinkalu has cut a niche for himself as a critic of the intellectual hue in the last few years in Nigeria so much that his views are well regarded. His place in advocacy and as a former Chairman of Nigeria Human Rights Commission (NHRC) place him in a privileged position. They confer some credibility on whatever he says. But, in a recent piece he wrote titled ‘Ken Nnamani:The Man Who Sold His Conscience’, Odinkalu missed his shot by a mile!

*Chidi Odinkalu

Odinkalu, in what is understandably his frustration with the state of anomie in the southeast, where killings and unexplained kidnappings have been the lot of the people, took umbrage with the current administration and dragged some persons in the ruling All Progressives Congress into the sordid affairs in Anambra State, one of them former Senate President Ken Nnamani, a man who has earned his badge of integrity even in the murky waters of Nigerian politics.

Ken Nnamani: The Man Who Sold His Conscience

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Kenechukwu (Ken) Nnamani, trustee of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), and leader of the party in South-East Nigeria is about to embark on a book tour with a story about how he, as Senate President in 2006, stood between a rampant President Olusegun Obasanjo and a constitutionally impermissible Third Term.

                   *Ken Nnamani (2nd left) greets President Buhari 

His book is impressively titled Standing Strong. The story would ordinarily be a bestseller if its release was not timed to coincide with the Anambra State governorship election in which Ken Nnamani leads the charge on behalf of Andy Uba, the candidate of the APC, who was coincidentally Obasanjo’s bag-man for Third Term. What Ken seeks to do is plainly grubby and disreputable and he needs to be told so in clear terms.

Nigeria: This Country Belongs To Us All

 By Dan Amor

Even as the River Niger surges still along its wonted paths to its dalliance with the River Benue and the consequent emptying of the passionate union into the mazes of the Delta, and, thereafter, into the vast, swelling plenitude of the all-welcoming seas, it is Nigeria, our Nigeria. True, Lagos is still Lagos; Abuja is still Abuja. It is, indeed, injury time in a new country under a new democracy, our democracy! Yet, everywhere you look, things look pretty much as they always have been. Still, the sway of buffoonery and unintelligent greed; still the billowing gown arrogance of the supposedly powerful, the surface laughter of the crashing rivers celebrating the disquieting crisis of democracy, the riveting appearances of things. 

Splendid is the current! Yet, into the heart of the average Nigerian pop uninvited intimations that we live today in the cusp of a new age, a new country and a new democracy. Alas, it is a new era. But in the lull between the passions and exertions and excitations of our workaday world today, at these times when the body yields to repose and the mind nestles in shades of quietude, it hits you: it is the dawn of change! But, what manner of change is this? From better to worse?

Nigeria: The Igbo Are Speaking!

By Humphrey C. Nsofor

The 40 million Igbo people resident in Nigeria and elsewhere, represented by Ohaneze Ndigbo and the South East Governors Forum, will on Monday, May 21, command global attention as they take a stand on how Nigeria can achieve a more perfect union and consequently regain its manifest destiny. It promises a galaxy of Igbo stars in politics and leadership. The promise of the gathering has been accentuated by the fact that it is hosted by Governor Willie Obiano of Anambra State whom former Senate President Ken Nnamani rightly describes as the Star of the East. No one doubts that Nigeria, as currently configured, needs a better design. 

*Nwodo, Ohaneze President-General

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) set up a powerful committee headed by Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai to fashion out a more realistic and effective Constitution. President Muhammadu Buhari has stated categorically that he is not opposed to rearranging the country’s administrative structure. Ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar has become one of the greatest proponents, after initially opposing it because of his mistaken ideas about it. In other words, the call for Nigeria’s rebirth is popular and patriotic. All of us desire—and are deserving of— a better Nigeria. In the moving and wise language of the late Vice President Alex Ekwueme, Nigeria is a miracle waiting to happen.

Buhari, The Opposition And 2019

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

Beyond the official hectoring about the need for the citizens to be sympathetic towards their sick president, pray for his recovery and not allow themselves to be co-opted on to a malignant campaign of gloating over his predicament is the contempt for the citizens’ expectations of good governance. This disdain is betrayed by President Muhammadu Buhari’s associates’ unvarnished interest in the next election at a time he is hobbled by ill health that has aggravated his inability to effectively deliver his current mandate.

*Buhari 

Those who importune the citizens for a pledge of fidelity to this charter of demands do not demonstrate the understanding that they expect of the citizens. Clearly, what they envisage is not the president walking into full recovery, but a single candidacy in 2019 so that they would not lose their privileges of their closeness to power. They talk gleefully about his re-contesting for the presidency in 2019 as though there would not be opposition from any quarter.

Your expectation is misplaced if you think that they would demur at the prospect of their principal losing the election because he has failed to perform in his first term. They do not bother about the ill health of Buhari and the need for him to take good care of his health. Amid this dizzying quest for re-election, we are drawn to the increasing similarity between Buhari’s associates and the wife of Robert Mugabe. Remember, it was Mugabe’s wife who recently declared that the corpse of her 92-year-old husband and president would contest Zimbabwe’s election and win even if he dies before the exercise takes place.

Ken Nnamani And Co’s Beggarly Villa Trip

By Ochereome Nnanna

I would not have commented on the recent appearance by a group of political adventurers in Aso Villa if not for the fact that they were described as “Igbo leaders” in some sections of the media. If they had simply gone as All Progressives Congress (APC) members from the South East visiting the President and leader of their party for whatever purposes, it would have passed as a non-event (though I have not seen APC leaders from other geopolitical zones going similarly cap-in-hand for special attention of President Muhammadu Buhari).

They called their gathering South East Group for Change (SEGC), probably a name they coined just for the Aso Rock trip, as nothing of such had been heard before now. Led by Mr. Ken Nnamani, a former Senate President, some of the known names included Mr. Osita Izunaso, a former one-term senator; Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, a two-term Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr. Chris Akomas, a former Deputy Governor of Abia State and Chief George Moghalu.

Apart from Moghalu, the rest were in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) when the going was good. They owed the high public offices attached to their names to the PDP, and now that the APC has become the new party with the “knife and yam”, they have trooped over there to reap where they did not sow. They are political opportunists, and it shocks many of Nnamani’s former admirers that he has degenerated to this level after once seeming a strong presidential possibility from Igboland.

Of this lot, only Moghalu is a genuine, thoroughbred APC leader. From 1999, Moghalu has been in the movement that eventually transmogrified into the APC – from the All People’s Party (APP) to the All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP) to the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) to the APC. He is a true party man; a genuine politician who stuck with the former opposition party through sun, rain, storms and high winds until it finally became the ruling party.

Buhari told us that the reason he violated the constitutional principle of federal character in the appointment of his inner government, was that he distributed positions to those who toiled and suffered with him over the years as a reward for their loyalty. I wonder how Moghalu could not qualify for appointment since he had been one of Buhari’s faithful point men in the South East since 2003 when he first ran for president. He was in that movement long before Dr. Chris Ngige decamped from the PDP. Even though no communiqué or media statement was issued after that visit (Buhari, knowing them for the opportunists they were, probably had nothing tangible to tell them), I read a most annoying analysis credited to an unnamed member of the group.

Africa: Epitaphs For A Failing

By Dan Amor

Africa, my beloved continent, appears to have lost out in the world's debate. Aside from the achievements of its founding fathers, the continent which habours the largest population of the black race in the world has almost gone comatose politically and economically. Africa is indeed the only continent in the world in which it takes a fortune teller for its leaders (looters) to realize that something is really lacking in their character.

The black continent has been reduced to a guinea-pig laboratory in which wanton denigration of corrosive state power has been carried out in its unspoken barbarity. In no other continent than Africa have the citizens been so abused by the powers of the state. In their idiotic, shameless and sadistic mentality, our rulers think that the people are destined to last, unmoving throughout the cataclysms of the surrounding world in the face of national usurpers and foreign conquerors. With the physical exit of the whiteman, African rulers ostensibly formed a new generation rebellious at its inheritance of a cynical and hypocritical legacy.

Today, Africa has produced more treacherous dictators than any other continent in the world and even any other race in history that could even make the Age of Antiquity and tyranny of the Renaissance green with envy. Even as some of them now pretend to be democrats, they still cannot cover their inner colours with their new 'democratic' skin. Yet, how do we appreciate the nebulous fancy of the average African dictator? How do we extrapolate his consummate excesses? How do we vitiate the nuances of his personal pride and ambition? And, finally, how do we impugn the Johnsonian epigram about the innocuousness of corruption and the mentality of the African dictator? It takes only serious thinking for analysts to decode that much of the savagery connected with the African tragedy can be explained in the violence inherent in Western manners. African leaders are therefore hapless tools of that logic of history which leaves a minority determined to assert itself against the majority with no choice of methods than using terror as not merely an attendant phenomenon, but a vital function of insurrection.

Almost six decades after gaining political independence from European exploiters of their resources, Africa, easily the most naturally endowed region on the face of the earth, has been turned into a theatre of war no thanks to the lackeys who took over the mantle of political leadership from the colonialist. It has been a monumental tragedy that Africa is yet to find its bearings more than fifty years into self rule.