Until humanity blurs
the power distinction that privileges the leaders and afflicts the led with
misery, the magic for banishing strike would remain eternally elusive. Like in
most post-colonial states, the power relations in Nigeria have rendered the majority
of the citizens nugatory. The citizens’ input is not sought into how the
resources of the nation are shared. Even if it is sought, it is not reckoned
with when decisions are made.
This is why while the leaders have security,
the citizens are left at the mercy of marauders, kidnappers and armed robbers.
Again, the leaders can live in plenitude, thanks to the resources of the
society, while the other citizens go to bed on empty stomachs. Yet, when the
citizens say they are fed up, they are told not to complain.
Showing posts with label Paul Onomuakpokpo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Onomuakpokpo. Show all posts
Thursday, November 8, 2018
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Buhari Owes Shiites Justice, Not Massacre
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Even in its twilight, President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration
remains impenetrable to the simple logic that democracy is leavened by the
disparateness of opinions. It is in epochs of heightened divergence of
opinions that sometimes spawn crises and tend to unspool the state that the
genius of a great leader is given stellar expression.
The man or woman who comes into leadership
fully prepared for such near-fatal periods know how to parlay them into
opportunities for national development. Thus, the best leaders are not brewed in epochs when the people luxuriate in
ease but when they are confronted with life-threatening crises.
*President Buhari |
Was the genius of Winston Churchill not
unfurled, and thus he became a touchstone of good leadership, because he had
Adolf Hitler to prevent from adding Britain to his definitive list of
conquered territories? Did Franklin D. Roosevelt not etch his name in the
memory of Americans because he had the Great Depression to contend with on
behalf of his people?
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Yusuf, President Buhari’s Anti-Corruption Poster Boy
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
No matter how much
President Muhammadu Buhari strives at every critical juncture to portray his
so-called anti-corruption fight as incontestable reality, it often unravels as
an unrelieved charade before the citizens. This irrevocable futility has once
again gained expression through the case of Usman Yusuf as a foil for the
acclaimed Buhari’s lack of tolerance for corruption at a time there is a list
of 50 corrupt persons, albeit disavowed by the government. Those on the list
have been embargoed from travelling abroad while the nation’s law courts have
not found them guilty of the allegation of ruthlessly heisting the national
treasury or their state patrimony.
*Usman Yusuf |
Yusuf is the Executive Secretary of the National
Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). He has been suspended from office by the
agency’s governing council led by Dr. Ifene Enyantu. There are allegations of
corruption against him. He has been accused of illegally executing N30 billion
investments, inflating the cost of biometric capturing machines and unlawfully
posting staff.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Nigeria: Before Backing Atiku
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Since we seem fated to
chafe under the carapace of duplicitous politicians, we are justifiably cynical
about their promises. In their desperation to get power, politicians harangue
us with these promises in varied shades. But there is often that lurking caution
that we should treat these promises as mere hallucinations of people who flay
at anything in sight to assuage their hunger for power.
Yet, how do we measure the authenticity of our
politicians if we accept as a given that politics is not a site of credibility?
How do we align with the self-immolating notion that politicians are free to
live in a world that is divorced from the reality of the rest of the citizens?
We should not rule out the possibility that it is politicians who do not want
to meet the demands of their offices but want us to take them seriously who are
the purveyors of the expectation to gloss over the tragedy of the violation of
their promises.
*Atiku Abubakar |
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Nigeria: Musings On Our Sham Democracy
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Osun State
have shown that we are vulnerable to further rude shock at the hands of Buhari
and his APC.
After surviving the
dark days of an autocratic military rule with its grisly infringement on the
liberal ethos that conduces to good governance and development, we do not need
a reminder of the need to be protective of the nation’s democracy. But the
tragedy is in the amnesia that goads on to make our environment perpetually in
hospitable to democracy.
In no other time in our national history is
this mental affliction more horrid than the President Muhammadu Buhari’s era.
Since he became the president, the democracy that paved the way for his
emergence as president has been so travestised that it poses a huge danger to
the continued existence of the nation. Since Buhari’s demystification after he
became president, we thought that we could no longer be shocked by the depth of
perfidy into which he and his All Progressives Congress (APC) would sink. But
we were mistaken. For the recent political absurdities in Thursday, September 27, 2018
Gov Ambode, Stop Begging Tinubu!
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
If Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode feels being held
hostage by his political godfather, he should blame no one but
himself for how long his ordeal lasts. No, we are not lost in schadenfreude –
gloatingly cavorting about over the political misfortune of Ambode as he is
being hoisted by his own petard.
Rather, we are interested in the political
fortune of Lagos ,
its development and the fact that Ambode is not confronted with a terminal
crisis. It is within his power to end his predicament.
Ambode has been chafing under this political affliction that he is not sure of
how and when it would end because he has refused to look for a cure outside
Bourdillon.
*Tinubu and Ambode |
Thursday, September 20, 2018
President Buhari’s Appointments, Seiyefa And DSS
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
When posterity reflects on this dark political epoch whose
principal actor is President Muhammadu Buhari, it would be racked by the
disappointment that some people were so swayed by self-interest or naivety that
they made him their number one citizen.
Perhaps, it would be dissuaded from unleashing a harsh judgement
on its forbears after the realisation that the emergence of Buhari as the
president has eternally served to demystify him. Stripped bare of his
much-trumpeted integrity as cases of official sleaze cascade around him, he has
irrevocably rendered himself unfit for the pantheon of statesmen.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Buhari, Abacha’s Loot And The Poor
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
As the administration
of the President Muhammadu Buhari lurches into the twilight amid the
fast-vanishing possibility of securing a second mandate, it flails in all
directions in search of survival. It is striving currently to make the poor
among us to accept as reality the illusion that it can ratchet up their
fortunes in the remaining days.
It is an unrelieved illusion because since the
administration has failed in three years to improve the lot of the people, it
cannot in less than one year secure the acumen to accomplish this. Rather, the
citizens should steel themselves for the prospect of their immiseration
reaching its nadir in the remaining period of this administration.
*Gen Abacha |
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
President Buhari Or Herdsman Buhari?
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Having not suffered any traumatic dilemma over his overweening
loyalty to herdsmen who are his fellow Fulani, President Muhammadu Buhari is
oblivious of his rapid erasure as a statesman. Or if he is aware, he is not
bothered about the grim verdict of history – here was a president of a great
nation who ended as a leader of a segment of the country, Fulani herdsmen.
*President Buhari (pix: African Herald Express) |
Yes, we must discountenance Buhari’s sense of
justice that seeks to exculpate him from the tragedies being unleashed by
Fulani herdsmen. He vouchsafed this notion of justice during his visit to
Plateau after the Fulani herdsmen’s attacks whose death toll has been
officially put at 135 while witnesses claim it is over 200. He wondered why he
should be accused of being silent over the now perennial massacres.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Fulani Herdsmen And The Adamawa Five
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Any lingering doubts that these are the best of times for Nigerian
herdsmen of Fulani extraction become easily vitiated in the light of two recent
developments in the country. The Federal Government has just released a bumper
package of incentives of over N179 billion for their business.
The government is to use this amount to set up
ranches for them in 10 states including Adamawa, Benue, Ebonyi, Edo, Kaduna , Nasarawa, Oyo,
Plateau, Taraba and Zamfara.
Those who have dismissed as an idle boast
their position that they cannot be denied access to any part of the country to
graze their cattle may now be ruing their delusion.
But the government needs to be reminded that with Nigeria becoming a haven of herding,
this budget would be doubled, even tripled in the days ahead.
Or how would this amount cater to the herding
needs of other Fulani herdsmen in other parts of the world who would now bring
their cattle here?
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Nigeria: June 12: Every Life Matters
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
After the elaborate
ceremony of apology and award of honours, it is now time to come to terms with
the fact that the greatest tribute has not been paid to the victims of the
truncation of the nation’s democratic watershed on June 12, 1993.
*Abiola |
Clearly, there has been in the past 25 years a
persistent clamour for restitution for the victims. Every June 12 has witnessed
calls for the closure of the sad political trajectory in the nation’s life.
President Muhammadu Buhari has apparently heeded these calls. But sadly,
Buhari’s action has rather shown the poor premium we place on life in the
country.
Thursday, June 7, 2018
Nigeria: Buhari, Saraki And Politics Of Guns
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
While we cannot credit President Muhammadu Buhari with a
transformative genius that has redounded to the citizens’ wellbeing, we must
not ignore his masterstrokes in self-preservation. What we have been confronted
with in the past three years is his craving for self-protection with its
trappings of paranoia.
Thus, beyond the need to punish crime no
matter the station of life of the allegedly culpable, the alleged linkage of
Senate President Bukola Saraki to armed robbers who raided banks and killed
over 30 people in Offa, Kwara
State seems an extension
of the politics of Buhari’s self-survival.
*President Buhari and Senator Saraki |
Through his words and actions, Buhari has not
concealed his prejudice that it is only from the executive arm of government
flows a genuine desire for good governance that would improve the citizens’
lot. Buhari feels trammelled by the legislature and the judiciary. He is riled
by the absence of military powers that could enable him to decree life or death
in a democratic milieu. This was why he sought emergency powers that the legislature
refused to grant him.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Arabisation Of The Nigeria Police?
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
As though to prove the sceptics wrong, the country suffers no
deficit of evidence of its descent into anomie. This is underscored by the fact that what
seems only plausible in the provenance of macabre fantasy easily becomes
reality.
It sounds implausible that a country and its
leaders would do nothing while citizens are being killed and pillaged. But this
is the reality in Nigeria
- Fulani herdsmen are busy raping, maiming and killing citizens.
Even places of worship that should have served as refuge from bloodlust and
plunder have become the prized targets of the herdsmen.
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Nigeria: The Past As President Buhari’s Utopia
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Whenever President Muhammadu Buhari lifts the façade and allows us
a glimpse into the convictions that propel him, he leaves no room for doubt
that he is out of depth with the demands of his high office. At that moment of
supposed candour, Buhari rather recommends himself to us as a relic of an
antediluvian era that is far removed from the nuances of democracy and the
challenges and possibilities of contemporary life.
Buhari is fixated on
the valourisation of the past as an irreplaceable era that was full of glories
that neither the present nor the future can yield. Thus, Buhari yearns for that
past. He wants us to exhume that past because it held the secrets of an
Eldorado that are elusive to the present.Yet it is a past that the majority of
the citizens would like to consign to eternal oblivion because it only afflicts
them with searing memories. Indeed, the past that in the imagination of Buhari
provided a utopian state is in the reckoning of the citizens a dystopia that he
is recreating in the present.
*President Buhari |
Thursday, April 26, 2018
Nigeria: Blood On President Buhari’s Hands
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Buoyed by the high approval rating he received from the misguided
Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, President Muhammadu Buhari has readied
himself for more foreign validation ahead of the 2019 election.
But the next rendezvous for validation does
not remain in the United
Kingdom .
It is in the White House of President Donald Trump in the United States . Beyond the communiqué on the pledge of bilateral fidelity, Trump would have rendered inestimable service to the world and particularly Nigeria when he takes note of the tragedies in the country that have heralded this meeting. Trump must note that he cannot engage in meaningless banters with Buhari while the latter’s country is choking under the carapace of Fulani herdsmen’s terrorism.
Thus, the meeting should provide Trump an opportunity to bring this wayward African leader to the path of probity. Of course, before Trump, Buhari might attempt to disparage Nigerian citizens as criminals and lazy. He would justify the incarceration of Nigerian citizens inU.S. prisons
and laud Trump’s immigration laws that are meant to send foreigners home. He
would massage Trump’s ego for agreeing to sell 20 Tucano warplanes to Nigeria whereas
his predecessor Barack Obama refused to do that. Buhari might regale Trump with
tales of the gains of his anti-corruption campaign. But all this should not
make Trump to miss the opportunity to tell Buhari that blood is on his hands.
After all, Buhari would never listen to the counsel of his Nigerian people. But
he would listen to Trump because he considers him as the chief representative
of a version of life that is beyond the reach of Africans. Or how do we explain
the excitement that Trump is magnanimous enough to open the doors of the White House to Buhari?
*President Buhari |
Thus, the meeting should provide Trump an opportunity to bring this wayward African leader to the path of probity. Of course, before Trump, Buhari might attempt to disparage Nigerian citizens as criminals and lazy. He would justify the incarceration of Nigerian citizens in
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Theresa May’s Search For Wife In Nigeria
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
It is either that British Prime Minister Theresa May is on the
verge of divorcing her husband or she is a lesbian even though she is married
to a man, Philip.
In either case, the PM might be considering
taking a wife from Nigeria
or any other Commonwealth country that her ancestors presided over its
expropriation and ruination.
British PM Theresa May President Buhari |
Obviously, May is ruing her mistake of ever
getting married to a man. She would have preferred to be a lesbian-husband with
a wife. Or why is she rhapsodising about the glories of homosexuality?
If May does not hanker after lesbianism, then she should be charged with
duplicity directed at sexually perverting millions of other people while she is
enjoying being married to a man. We could see May’s duplicity in her
proselytising zeal for same-sex marriage while at the same time professing how
much she has enjoyed the benefits of the marriages of others.
Thursday, April 19, 2018
President Buhari’s Naked Self-Interest
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
It was not really
unexpected that President Muhammadu Buhari would hinge his bid to return to
office on patriotism. It is the way of all politicians. They are not tired of
striving to mislead us into considering their personal ambitions as goals that
are inextricably tied to our collective good. Thus, Buhari wants us to see him
as a good patriot who is only responding to the call of his people to serve
again.
*President Buhari |
But it is clear to those of us who are far
from the madding Buhari chorus that he is propelled by naked self-interest.
Before the leaders of his political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC),
Buhari rhapsodised about how much the people who are appreciative of his
service to them want him back. But he should have gone further to provide the
specific areas in which the citizens have benefited from his government.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Nigeria: Boko Haram Needs No Amnesty
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
It was President
Muhammadu Buhari’s veiled sympathy for Boko Haram that found expression in his
slouching through the murky water of proposing to dialogue with the murderous
bandits. This having failed to resonate with the citizens, the government is
flailing toward the option of granting amnesty to Boko Haram members. But
neither dialogue nor amnesty is the appropriate response to Boko Haram now. The
government is propelled onto the path of offering amnesty because it has
reached its wits’ end as regards the insurgents. It is now confronted with the
stark futility of its triumphalism over what it dubbed a technical defeat of
the killers.
Instead of contemplating amnesty, the
government should declare that it has been defeated by Boko Haram, technically
or otherwise. A follow-up to such a declaration is that the government should
award the contract for a fight against Boko Haram to contractors to prosecute.
Such contractors should be foreigners. For, we need our doubts to be cleared
about the invincibility or otherwise of Boko Haram through foreigners who do
not sympathise with them fighting them. A complicity of events since the
emergence of Buhari as the president has rendered it difficult for us not to
align with the suspicion that Boko Haram enjoys official sympathy. Or was it
not state sympathy that would make Boko Haram to invade Dapchi in a convoy of
trucks, abduct 110 schoolgirls and return them in the same manner without any
obstruction from security operatives and other citizens?
Thursday, March 29, 2018
President Buhari, Danjuma And Looming Anarchy
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Like medieval potentates who fiddled around while their empires
were in the grip of mortal perils, President Muhammadu Buhari has since lost
the capacity to resolve for us the question of whether our nation is on the
brink of anarchy.
This is because Buhari and his officials are
stuck in a reality that does not reflect the pains of the people.
In other words, if the country staves off a
post-Gaddafi Libya-like anarchy and it remains one after the tenure of Buhari,
the credit should go to the forbearance and prescience of those who are outside
his government.
*Buhari and Danjuma |
During the recession that the government claims to have overcome through its
deft economic management, it amounted to blackmail of the Buhari administration
to draw its attention to the reality of the suffering of the masses.
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Nigeria: Vice President Osinbajo’s Bluster And Burden Of Proof
By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Nations like
individuals who have recorded giant strides in most spheres of life sometimes
look backward. It is not to escape from the challenges of the present. Rather,
they appropriate vital lessons in such moments to turn their travails into
opportunities for a stellar lot in life. In that case, they appreciate the
place of history in their current march to progress. But we are trapped in a
tragic situation when we think that such moments only serve as opportunities to
gloatingly point to others the glitch in the wheel of a people’s quest for
development. Thus, we do not deny the necessity for the past to pay for its
misdeeds.
Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo
In this regard, the
current government headed by President Muhammadu Buhari is free to hold its
predecessor to account. But the danger the current government has not
successfully negotiated is that of going to a ridiculous extent. Deluded by the
notion that the past is complicit in its denial of a star rating, the Buhari
government could unabashedly blame the Jonathan government for disrupting the
president’s domestic felicity by inducing his wife to rail at his failings in
private and public.
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