Buhari, Our President In The Clouds

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Bristling with rage at the unceasing carnage and fecklessness that have bogged down the nation since the emergence of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari as the president, Prof. Wole Soyinka recently warned us against the fate of a people whose affairs are presided over by a leader in a trance. But not a few of those who are befuddled by their devotion to Buhari sniggered at Soyinka’s position as another instance of the dramatist over-dramatising the perceived failings of his president. 

*President Buhari 

But those who did not share Soyinka’s prescience and thus did not appreciate the horrendous developments that validated his position can no longer ignore what has happened since that grim verdict.

Indeed, we have all been confronted with subsequent stark developments that have been triggered by the administration of Buhari which show that Soyinka’s position remains unimpeachable.

Why President Buhari Doesn’t Mourn The Dead

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Even without Samuel Ortom shedding tears, history is bound to credit him with a stellar role during the trying time of his people. He could have reached a pact with the devil and secured his cocoon of ease, unperturbed by the howls of his people being slaughtered by Fulani herdsmen.

*President Buhari 

 A peril of his sense of filial obligation to his people has been his humiliation at the hands of his colleagues. In their midst, he is burdened with a pariah status. One of them, Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong, might have given expression to what they were inhibited by political correctness from letting out . In a moment Lalong was overwhelmed with a sense of vindication of his prescience, he reminded Ortom that he warned him against making a law to stop Fulani herdsmen from destroying the people of Benue and their means of livelihood. Yes, Lalong attempted to recant, but this did not vitiate his stand.

Nigeria: Is Dapchi A State Conspiracy?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is a robust measure of how much the President Muhammadu Buhari government has lost credibility that the abduction of 110 pupils of Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State, has spawned conspiracy theories. Racked by unfulfilled promises, fervent backers of the Buhari government who were ready to vouchsafe the eternal integrity of the president no longer accept that his position can be trusted. They strive to ferret out what could be the real motive for the action or inaction of the Buhari government.

To be sure, we should not dismiss the purveyors of these conspiracy theories as sadists who inscrutably derive fulfillment from the suffering of others. As fellow citizens, they share the pain of the families of the abductees and the nation. They are not unaware of the agony parents are subjected to when a child they have sent to school to learn is abducted. They understand the gnawing anxiety of parents over the current condition of the abductees, whether they are alive or dead and whether they would see them again. Their worry is not unfounded. Still fresh in their memories are the ordeals of the Chibok abductees and those of their parents. For a long time, nothing was heard about them. Even after the rescue of some of them, others cannot be accounted for as they have died or the Boko Haram leaders have made good their threat to sell them off as sex slaves.

Fulani Herdsmen And (Il)logic Of Self-Defence

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is now over two weeks since President Muhammadu Buhari ordered security operatives to arrest and prosecute illegal arm-bearers. The president first gave the order towards the end of last month during a National Security Council meeting attended by the defence minister, the service chiefs, among others. He repeated the order when he visited Nasarawa State this month.

Here, we are confronted with two possibilities. One is that the order has been fully complied with by security operatives, leading to the mass arrest and prosecution of illegal arm-bearers. The other is that the order has been completely disdained by security operatives. Sadly, the second possibility is the reality today. Nothing underscores this more than the fact that herdsmen who chiefly belong to the category of illegal arm-bearers are still on the prowl despite the presidential order. Indeed, the order has rather become a source of impetus to them to illegally bear arms and use them to inflict pain and death on their victims. 

IGP Ibrahim Idris, The Conqueror Of Benue

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is not garlands from the citizens for a successful prosecution of an agenda to fight crime that Inspector General of Police Ibrahim Idris hankers after. There is a bigger prize he is ready to give up anything for, including his professional credibility – to be in the eternal annals of the herdsmen’s war of 2017 and 2018 as the conqueror of Benue.

*President Buhari and IGP Idris

Benue might just be the ultimate trophy for Idris. He might have considered victory in other parts of the country, including southern Kaduna, the south-east, south-south and south-west less stellar. In the south-west, for instance, a prominent son of the region, a former minister and secretary to the government of the federation, Olu Falae, has been subjected to traumatic experiences ranging from kidnapping to the burning of his farm by Fulani herdsmen.

Nigeria: The Decline Of Female Politicians

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Through their numerous feats in different spheres of human endeavour, many a woman has vitiated the wrongheaded diatribe of the iconoclastic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that “when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is something wrong with her sexuality.”

Clearly, women could justifiably declaim against Nietzsche’s notion of woman as God’s second mistake. But it is not unlikely that Nietzsche’s opinion would have enjoyed a fair measure of validity if he had had the Nigerian woman in mind and declared that she suffers an unhinged sexuality as long as she has political inclinations. Nietzsche’s postulation could even be much more valid in a place like Saudi Arabia where women only secured the right to vote in just about three years ago.

Beyond Obasanjo’s Letter To Buhari

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No profound insight has been offered in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari as having not passed muster. He only articulated what has not only been in the public domain but has equally been kept in focus in the domestic sphere of the president. Of course, we cannot forget so soon that Aisha, the First Lady, has been warning her husband of the political misfortune that could trail his re-election bid if he fails to make necessary amends and rescue his governance style from being a blight on the citizens’ lives. Even in the early days of this government when it was still unvarnished amid the seeming towering popularity of Buhari and when the whimpers of protest against his lack of leadership acumen were easily dismissed as emanating from ‘wailers’ who were nostalgic for a dark past of the nation, Mrs. Buhari was already giving forebodings of the sad end of this administration.

*President Buhari and Obasanjo 

Yet, we must appreciate the significance of Obasanjo’s letter which lies in its ineluctably ominous character. Obasanjo could be seen as an angel of death or an undertaker whose letters only serve as the hearse to convey a government that has irredeemably crashed to its grave. This was the case of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

President Buhari And The Herdsmen’s Endgame

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Of the many traumatic marvels of the President Muhammadu Buhari government, its predilection for crashing deeper into the abyss when we thought that we would no longer be jolted by its blunders, is striking. If his linkage to marauding and bloodthirsty Fulani herdsmen were only a staple of blackmail sustained by his traducers, he has just stoked the suspicion of his fidelity to their ghoulish vision with his response to the killings in Benue State.

*President Buhari 

Buhari did not bother to visit Benue for a first-hand apprehension of the tragedies that the Fulani herdsmen inflicted on the people. Nor was he seen to have expressed deep regret over the killings, except the platitudes that were regurgitated by his aides after a grudging approval from him. Or is this not a true measure of his lack of humanity and a perverted sense of justice and patriotism that while the nation was gripped by grief, Buhari and the governors from his northern region were preoccupied with his re-election in 2019?

President Buhari And The Herdsmen

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

In a seeming bid to douse his increasing credibility crisis, President Muhammadu Buhari has now belatedly realised the need to absolve himself of killings by herdsmen. No longer does he find comfort in his practised silence in the face of the citizens’ outrage at the atrocities being committed by herdsmen.

*Pres Buhari and Gov El-Rufai

But Buhari’s newfangled disposition has failed to prove the fast-expanding camp of the naysayers wrong. Rather, what has become clear is that Buhari has bungled another opportunity to shore up his credibility. Thus, Buhari’s defence of himself ended up being a reinforcement of his history of incapability to meet the demands of his high office.

Nigeria: Where The Dead Lead The Living

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If the German-speaking Jewish writer Franz Kafka were in Nigeria now, he would observe that it is not only in the imaginative space that there are boundless possibilities in the depiction of the human condition. A validation of his art would have been that his brand of surrealism that is a staple of the imaginative provenance has assumed actuality in the human realm. In that case, Kafka would have been spared being sniggered at on account of Samsa Gregor, a human being, mutating into a vermin in his The Metamorphosis.

*Buhari 

This kind of validation was the lot of Chinua Achebe when his prediction in A Man of the People of the epochal termination of the nation’s first democratic experience was fulfilled by the military who sacked the wayward politicians of the 1960s and triggered a series of cataclysmic events that provoked the civil war. But Kafka and Achebe would have been at the same time amused and shocked that the boundless and surrealistic possibilities in their fictional worlds could be located in the realm of actuality in Nigeria – even beyond their imagination.

President Buhari’s Year Of Sleaze

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It would have been an intriguing surprise if this year were to end without the government of President Muhammadu Buhari being further begrimed with its scandalous quest for $1 billion to fight insecurity. It is not unexpected that since the Buhari government has been bogged down by cases of corruption from the beginning of the year, it is ending it with the controversial $1 billion quest that betrays the vacuity of its claims to zero tolerance for corruption.

*President Buhari 

We should remember that the Buhari government has gleefully touted its successful trouncing of Boko Haram as a validation of its electoral mandate and a loud rebuke of the government of Goodluck Jonathan who floundered in the face of the insurgents. Now, the same Buhari government wants to deplete the Excess Crude Account by $1 billion to fight the already defeated insurgents. And this is after reportedly paying three million pounds for the release of some Chibok girls.

Nigeria: Who Are The Civil War Victims?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No one who is actuated by a keen sense of justice and patriotism that is hallmarked by a desire that the nation’s cohesion remains inviolable would inveigh against efforts to give the people of the south-eastern part of the country the assurance that there is no deliberate state policy to consign them to a benighted realm of the polity. There is the overarching need for such an assurance since 47 years after the three years of the civil war that inflicted monumental catastrophes on their lives and property, they are still chafing under a sense of alienation. There is a constant reminder of this exclusion by the fact of their being the only people who make up the so-called tripod in the country who are yet to produce the nation’s president.

Thus, what we witness when the Federal Government moves in the direction of breaking this exclusion is a cascade of plaudits from different parts of the country. This was why when in 2000 the then President Olusegun Obasanjo commuted to retirement the dismissal of the military personnel who fought on the side of Biafra, he was commended. Similarly, the decision by the President Muhammadu Buhari government to pay the entitlements of former Biafran police officers has been justifiably applauded. And this is why the government’s further demonstration of its magnanimity by announcing its decision to pay the victims of the civil war N50 billion and deploy N38 billion for the evacuation of abandoned bombs and construction has equally elicited approval from the citizens.

On Maina, Blame President Buhari

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Aside from the tragedy of the monumental failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari government, there is also that of the barefacedly audacious attempts to still project him as glowing in the halo of incorruptibility that some have associated him with. To his diehard loyalists, it is not Buhari who has betrayed the high ideals of transparency he has espoused before the public but only those whom he has given responsibilities who are prevented by their greed from living up to the expectations of their high offices.

*President Buhari 

This is the trajectory we are confronted with again as the public is scandalised by the heist and remorselessness of the former Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms, Abdullahi Abdulrasheed Maina, and the complicity of high-profile officials of the Buhari government. In the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, Maina was given the responsibility of bringing reform into the pension system to break the cycle of pensioners dying broke in their post-service years because of their inability to access their pensions. But the reformer soon turned away from his official assignment and became preoccupied with the looting of the billions that he was supposed to guard against pecuniary predators. Before he was caught, Maina had already allegedly stolen N100 billion. Maina was not at a loss as regards how to avail himself of this haul. He launched into a splurge and this civil servant who was an assistant director before he was made to manage the pension system became the owner of posh houses and companies in choice areas of Abuja and other parts of the country. Yes, Maina is presumed innocent until he is declared guilty by a competent law court. But he declared himself guilty before the public. Instead of making himself available to the Senate and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to clear himself of the charges of egregious corruption he fled abroad.

President Buhari’s Race To Develop The North

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With the seemingly irreversible flight of a pan-Nigerian vision from the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, he continues to flail about in a bid to give the impression to the less discerning among us that he is committed to the unity of the nation. He emotes about the censure of hate speech that threatens the oneness of the country that was cobbled together by some foreign invaders and that has remained so for over a century. He fumes at the citizens’ obliviousness of not only his visions but projects that have overwhelmed the landscape, all aimed at improving their lot that has been negated by years of neglect and misrule of past state helmsmen.

*President Buhari 

Yet, what the citizens see beyond this veneer of Buhari’s self-confessed love for his country is the urgent need for him to preserve the nation not by being obsessed with the hunt for some elusive enemies of their collective wellbeing who spew hate. Rather, he must consider himself as the enemy of the nation whose actions have worsened the fissures which his utterances have inflicted.

In the past two years since Buhari emerged as the nation’s president, he has translated into reality his apocalyptic prediction conveyed in the mathematical absurdity of consigning those who gave him five per cent of his votes to immiseration while sparing those who gave him 97 per cent. This bifurcation of the citizenry for the purpose of punishing some and rewarding others has clearly stoked mutual suspicion. 

Corruption And Aisha Buhari’s Testimony

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is increasingly becoming obvious that the President Muhammadu Buhari government is chafing under the affliction of a one-week-one-scandal syndrome. Unless they are irrevocably befuddled by their partisanship, Buhari’s loyalists who have been consumed with the notion of his unrivalled integrity would not fail to observe the dark atmosphere of corruption in which the administration is immersed. But of course, while most of these loyalists are apologising for allowing themselves to be used to pave the way for the Buhari presidency, there are some who would counter that those who accuse the government of corruption are the shellacked members of the opposition. After all, the Kachikwu-Baru affair which is the latest scandal in the Buhari government has not been declared by a competent court as an unimpeachable case of corruption.

*Aisha Buhari 

But the evidence of financial sleaze such unalloyed believers in the integrity of the Buhari government may not be able to dispute is no longer from the members of the opposition and other citizens whose moral sensibilities are daily affronted by corruption cases. Now, the evidence is from an unlikely quarter. It is from Aisha Buhari, the wife of the president. Just a week after the nation was scandalised by the $25 billion heist in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which has no rival in the alleged financial misdeeds committed by the Goodluck Jonathan government, Mrs. Buhari alerted us to the possible mismanagement of over N4 billion at the Aso Rock Clinic in less than two years. She was shocked that despite this allocation, the clinic did not have a single syringe. Mrs. Buhari’s alarm came shortly after her daughter Zahra was outraged at the lack of syringe and common drugs like paracetamol at the clinic. 

Buhari, Kachikwu And NNPC

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No matter how much we strain to sustain the illusion that the President Muhammadu Buhari government is on the right track, we are often jarred into reality by his regular missteps and seemingly intentional negation of the common good. Buhari’s platitudes about patriotism and the indivisibility of the country notwithstanding, we are confronted with a situation where it is clear that he ignores the exploration of the opportunities that have frequently come his way to blur the fissiparous tendencies in different parts of the country.

*President Buhari and Dr. Kachikwu

We have seen this in his refusal to heed the calls for the restructuring of the country as a means of quelling agitations for equity that clearly threaten the unity of the country. Rather, Buhari has a penchant for regarding those criticising him for taking wrong decisions as courting government’s attention in order to be settled – a euphemism for bribery. But by making this argument, the government is rather indicting itself. For the government is only saying that public service in the Buhari era is still fabulously lucrative; a means of self-enrichment as it has not been made less financially attractive. If it had done this and public office had been rightly turned into just a means of serving the people with its attendant sacrifice, it would not have considered government officials as privileged Nigerians who other citizens are striving to join or replace.

Nigeria: Is The Past The Future?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Since the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari government became intolerably manifest, a noticeable feature of discourse in the public space is its polarisation. In one camp are those who argue that the present status quo is precisely what the country needs and in the opposing camp are those who seek its replacement with a political system that existed in the past. Indeed, the Buhari’s years have been marked by the citizens’ hankering for the past and the rejection of the present. Having appropriated the past as the only means of corporate survival, they want to make it not only the anchor for the present but also the future.

Clearly, we are not witnessing this laudation of the past for the first time. Ever since the oil boom evaporated and the country has been afflicted with a governance crisis, the Nigerian people have often sought to recover a past that they consider a golden era. They do not seek the co-opting of only some useful values from the past into the enrichment of the present and the future. No, they want a wholesale displacement of the past with the present and the future. In this regard, their march to their collective destiny has often been disrupted by prolonged moments of contemplation of the desirability of replacing their present with the past. 

Thespian Buhari At The United Nations

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is not that we have ever doubted the thespian talents of President Muhammadu Buhari that render him eligible to assume the role of an actor before any audience. We have always known that he is like any other wily politician, especially in these climes, who can fit into any dramatic role before a given audience. Remember, in 2015 when Buhari had before him citizens who were desirous of a leader with democratic credentials, he offered himself as perfectly fitting that role. He regaled them about his mutation into a democrat since he was forced by Ibrahim Babangida and his co-travellers to pull off his military uniform and jackboots.

*President Buhari addressing
UNGA 2017

Again, before a south-east audience, he identified with them by dressing like an Igbo man. Still, before the general population as his audience, Buhari played the role of a charmer, the man with a magic wand to solve the nation’s problems and root out corruption in a short time. He made the audience swoon over him. And he was rewarded with the prime prize – the presidency – as the encore continued until it was disrupted by the subsequent months of the reality of hardship.

Now, Buhari has taken these dramatic skills onto the global stage. At the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, Buhari took on a role that was totally alien to his personality. The meeting was about the wellbeing of people. It had the fitting theme of “Focusing on People: Striving for Peace and Decent Life for All on a Sustainable Planet.” Thus, Buhari played the role of an actor who wants to improve the wellbeing of the people and make them to live in peace and live a decent life. 

Nigeria: Pythons Need Not Dance In South-East

By Paul Onomuakpokpo 

Although there is a myriad of indicators of the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, there is one that sticks out like a sore thumb. It is the inability of the government to effectively grapple with the challenge of making right choices in a manner that negates the social imagination that it is incapable of listening and ever doing what is appropriate. This incapacity has found expression in a brazen defiance of good proposals from the citizens to set governance on an even keel.

*President Buhari with the Service Chiefs

Or how do we explain the fact that despite the warnings from prominent citizens, the Federal Government has made good its threat to crush agitators in the south-east? But the government must not fantasize about its triumph over an already oppressed people. It should rather stop its troops in their tracks since the outcome of their misguided expedition in that part of the country would not only conflict with genuine efforts to bring peace to the region, it would aggravate the mutual distrust among people of different parts of the country.

Nigeria Police And Audacity Of A Squealer

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

After years of a tempestuous relationship with the police, the citizens have become very familiar with a plethora of cases that reify the ignoble identity of that security institution of government as a site of unbridled corruption. Thus, they were by no means suddenly hoisted onto an uncharted territory when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) last month alerted them to the egregious indices of the corruption under which the police chafe. Nor did the recent allegation by Senator Isah Misau that the police reek of corruption expressed in cronyism, patronage and financial misdeeds come to them as a surprise.

*President Buhari and IGP Idris

Indeed, Nigerians live daily with a catalogue of woes the police inflict on them. We are quite familiar with these: the police shoot to maim or kill commercial bus drivers or motorcyclists popularly referred to as okada riders because of their refusal to part with N50. They do not respond to emergency calls when the citizens are under the siege of armed robbers. It is only when the armed robbers have finished their operations and gone that their victims would be harassed with the sounds of police sirens. And that is if the police come at all. In most cases, they place obstacles in your way: they tell you that they cannot respond to your call because they have no vehicles; if they have, they are faulty; and if they are not faulty, there is no fuel in them. If you go to make a report at their station, the police would ask you to pay for the pen and piece of paper with which to make your complaint. After the complaint, you need to give them money to investigate your case. On the walls and doors of a typical police station would be emblazoned the warning: bail is free. But you must pay for detainees to secure their freedom.