Where Is Tinubu’s Executive Capacity?

 By Ochereome Nnanna

Even before what became the All Progressives Congress, APC, was formed, I knew it would be a disaster. I prayed for the merger not to work. But my prayers were not answered. The merger not only worked, the party won the 2015 presidential election with Muhammadu Buhari as president. Buhari’s presidency, according to the APC pact, was to be succeeded by a Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency. When Buhari was about to finish his eight years of inept and extreme nepotism rule, he tried to block Tinubu’s turn to “rule”. 

*Tinubu

Tinubu went to Abeokuta and wailed: Yoruba l’okan( “It is Yoruba’s turn”); Emi l’okan!(“It is my turn”). When Buhari saw that the Northern APC Governors were all for Tinubu, he had no choice but to bring out his full powers of incumbency to install his political partner. You may ask: why would I, a columnist of 29 years standing, discredit a political party, the APC, even before it was formed? My answer is simple. 

MKO Abiola Deserves Apology, Not Humour

By Afam Nkemdiche

When I first heard about President Muhammadu Buhari’s surprise posthumous honour to Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the widely acknowledged winner of the 1993 presidential election, my instinctive thought was, “My God! How could he nerve his conscience to do that – he was a principal confidant of the maximum ruler who denied MKO his well deserved mandate, until the mysterious death-in-detention???”

*Abiola 

It cannot be gainsaid, even in fiction, that Buhari was the closest public figure to the Kano-born general in Nigeria’s darkest years. Soon after Abacha sacked Ibrahim Babangida’s contraption (Shonekan’s Interim Government), he decreed that all monies that accrued from petroleum be pooled into a Fund, the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. The humongous size of the envisaged pool qualified the PTF to be immediately referred to as a “parallel government”; even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, had to look to it for funding. Buhari was the first and only executive chairman of the PTF. This was a measure of the unique camaraderie that the duo enjoyed when Nigeria teetered on the brink of disintegration from November 1993 until June 1998 when Abacha suddenly succumbed to death ahead of his detainee. 

Buhari And The Petroleum Trust FRAUD

By Ray Ekpu

It is not known to this column how close Brigadier Sani Abacha was to Major General Muhammadu Buhari by December 1983. It was Abacha who announced at the end of a few minutes of martial music on New Year ’s Eve that the government of President Shehu Shagari had been thrown into the dust bin of history. Buhari became the fulcrum of that history as Nigeria’s head of state. On August 27, 1985, there was another game, the Revolving Doors’ game. Buhari was out, thrown out, while Ibrahim Babangida, was in, thrown into the pinnacle of political power in Nigeria.

Babangida clamped Buhari into the dungeon for some months where he cooled his feet, while his colleagues were bestriding the Nigerian political and military firmament like they owned the world. Babangida left or was forced to leave the throne after eight years of dangerous foot work. He called Chief Ernest Shonekan, a successful private sector entrepreneur, to come and take the baton of leadership.

President Buhari’s Anti-Corruption Conundrum

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

There is common sense in the submission that the anti-corruption crusade of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s government has slumped.

This is validated by the slipshod, ineffectual and selective manner the administration has so far executed the vaunted crusade. 

*President Buhari 

There has been so much mismanagement of the process, so much misapplication of the momentum, and so much floundering of the philosophy underpinning the anti-corruption agenda. The corollary, thus, is a concomitant contention, which will be explicated shortly. 

Nigeria: A Season Of Scandals

By Bright Emenena

Lest we forget, like many past government, this administration rode to power on the back of the promise to fight corruption. It is safe to say though, that more than any previous administration, the present administration comes top on the perception that a government will actually fight corruption. For many Nigerians, the one reason why this government was voted into power was the belief that corruption which was perceived as the problem of Nigeria shall be brought to a stop.

President Buhari then General Buhari was the symbol of this perception. For many who voted for him, he was an embodiment of integrity, a man capable of doing no evil, an incorruptible disciplinarian and in their view, was what Nigeria needed at the time. He was even applauded by many when he claimed he could not afford the presidential nomination form of his party despite having served as a military head of state, a key player in another military government adjudged as most corrupt by both local and international bodies, a former military governor, a petroleum minister and chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), an agency that was also alleged of corruption. This was perceived by his supporters as evidence of his incorruptibility.

Why Bola Tinubu Must Be Rescued

By Ochereome Nnanna

It is obvious now that, for the first time in his illustrious political career, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the much touted National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, has fallen into a political ditch. He needs a helping hand to get out fast. If the APC manipulates itself to victory in Ondo State (by using the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and the Judiciary to ensure that a fake candidate, Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim, stands for the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP), it might signal the end of the Tinubu political saga in the South West. 

*Tinubu and Buhari 

Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, masquerading as the APC that won the general elections last year will have two states in the zone (Ondo and Ogun) in its kitty. Being the party in power, and with the Tinubu loyalist governors in Oyo and Osun not eligible to run again, Buhari can use the same INEC, Judiciary, Directorate of State Services, DSS, and the “may-my-loyalty-never-be-tested” former Tinubu boys like Babatunde Fashola to make a grab for the rest of the South West come 2019. If that happens, the pro-Caliphate, Kaduna Mafia Arewa North led by Buhari would start calling the shots in the politics of the South West on their terms, and no longer in alliance with a “homegrown” political leader of the zone. 

That will bode very ill, not only for our democracy that thrives better on inter-regional alliances (which was what brought Buhari into power) but will entrench Buharist Northern domination; a recipe for national instability and eventual disintegration. Buharist Arewaism (coded into his 97%/5% parasitic formula for the distribution of the Nigerian commonwealth) has been on open display since he assumed power on May 29, 2015. It has shown itself in the manner in which the Federal Government was formed, the deployment of the security agencies, the repositioning of the top echelon of the Federal Bureaucracy, the denial of the South the right to produce the substantive Head of the Federal Judiciary (the Chief Justice of Nigeria) and in the way the INEC has been robbed of its Jonathan-era independence. 

It is also manifesting in the Islamisation of Non-Muslim communities in the Middle Belt and South by armed Muslim militias masquerading as herdsmen, the frequent abductions of under-aged Christian girls by emirs and Islamic clerics who promptly marry them off to themselves or other Muslims without the consent of their parents, the manner in which “blasphemy” murder suspects are being set free when the law enforcement agencies bother to get them arrested and tried; and the way the Federal Character principle in the constitution is contemptuously ignored while a brash reign of nepotism is plunked down the throats of Nigerians. Who knows in what other forms we will be seeing it in the years to come?