What Tinubu Must Do To Avert Food Riots In Nigeria

 By Steve Onyeiwu

AS the saying goes, a hungry man is an angry man. He is also a restive and dangerous man. Nigerians are already very angry and weary about the country’s severe economic challenges; the lack of inclusivity in economic development; the high unemployment rate; extreme poverty; infrastructural decay, pervasive insecurity, and a bleak economic future. For many Nigerians, a persistent and steep increase in food prices would be the last straw that jolts them into violent food riots. 

Prof Onyeiwu 

President Bola Tinubu understands the severity of the problem when he declared a state of emergency on food security in July 2023, and the formation of a Presidential Task Force on food insecurity early this month. It would be recalled that Acting President Yemi Osinbajo also set up a similar task force in February 2017. But long-term solutions require much more than the mere setting up of a task force. Nigerians are sick and tired of task forces, special committees, advisory councils, high-level summits, council of experts, technical committees, extraordinary body of thinkers, leaders of thought, etc. They want action and impactful results, not admonitions, regurgitated solutions, and empty promises.

Nigeria: Is There A Reason To Be Hopeful?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Is Nigeria making progress? Is there any reason to be optimistic about the future? These are the questions that continue to concentrate my mind as the country and its leadership continue to fumble. Ordinarily, I am a very optimistic person with a positive outlook on life. I would rather look at a half of a glass of water and see it as half-full than half-empty. But wishing Nigeria the best or being hopeful that things will get better does not necessarily translate to reality. The vehicle that transports hope to the destination of reality is positive action.

*Tinubu 

Esther Boyd, the Editorial Director for State of Formation, an offshoot of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, JIRS, in a 2016 article, “Hope is an Action,” wrote: “Hope as an action means pushing boundaries, dismantling barriers, and taking steps – however small they may be – one by one, towards the better that we’re hoping for. To hope for something means to strive towards it, to build it if it doesn’t already exist, and to keep moving forward.” But hope, as Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and cultural critic, once noted could be “the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torments of man”.

Buhari’s Frivolous Medical Trips Abroad

 By Charles Okoh

When the presidency announced that the out-going (thank God) President Muhammadu Buhari would be visiting the United Kingdom for the coronation of Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as King and Queen Consort of the United Kingdom penultimate Saturday, something told me that the presidency was telling its usual lies and that the president ultimately was going for a medical trip. And I said that openly to those around me.

*Buhari 

Now, the president is human and like every other human being, is liable to fall ill and deserves all the best the country can give as a nation to its president. But I dare ask, must the best healthcare be delivered outside this country? What image is the president portraying of Nigeria to the larger world? That we can’t even treat his dental challenge locally?

Nigeria: From ‘Go To Court’ To ‘Withdraw From Court’

 By Promise Adiele

A new strand of neurosis seems to pervade Nigeria’s political sphere compelling victims to embrace bipolar conditions with relish. Indeed, political exchanges before and after the recently concluded general elections convey a degree of rational deficiency among some observers, especially those sympathetic to power desperado’s inclination to State Capture. 

*Peter Obi 

These developments force one to ask the all-important question reminiscent of Sunny Okosun’s timeless song - Which Way Nigeria? The current election season has exposed many people, hitherto perceived as sensible, in their stark, irreconcilable idiocy which calls to question public perception of individuals. For some Nigerians, the meaning of politics is distilled in shamelessness, dishonour, debauchery, and the subtle inauguration of treacherous culture across the country. 

Let Our Best Brains Move Nigeria Forward!

 By Ayo Oyoze Baje 

 “Where there is no vision, the people perish”

—Proverbs 29:18

The piece of heart-warming and inspiring news that three Nigerian lecturers, Dr. Aliyu Isa Aliyu, Tukur Abdulkadir Sulaiman and Abdullahi Yusuf have been listed among the top 2% most-cited scientists in the world soon after another Nigerian-born,31- year old Silas Adekunle became the youngest and richest robotics engineer in the world at the age of 26 is thought-provoking.  

Not left out of the praise-worthy exploits of Nigerian-born scientists, inventors,  engineers, innovators, lawyers and entrepreneurs is the interesting fact that Nigerian doctors, nurses, hi-tech entrepreneurs rank amongst the best and highest in number in the United States(US). For instance, it is gratifying to know that Myma Adwowa Belo-Osagie (nee Bentsi-Enchill), a Nigerian, serves on the Global Advisory Council of the Office of President of Harvard University, and she is also a member of the Harvard University Center for African Studies. 

Open Letter To Wole Soyinka

 By Promise Adiele 

I greet you, sir. I crouch and genuflect before your domineering presence – the irrepressible man of letters, the first black man to win a Nobel Laureate. Despite your recent paradoxical posturing which suggests a striking alignment with corrosive forces in Nigeria, you remain a global totem of literary ingenuity.

*Soyinka 

You are a legend in the literary fraternity, a position you share with your late friends and compatriots Chinua Achebe and J.P Clark. No genuine engagement of African literature is complete without a mention of your names. Besides your creative impute to the literary family, you are a critic, autobiographer, activist, translator, and a radical opposer to all forms of misrule. In appropriating Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and subterranean agent of self-examination as your patron god, you challenge humanity to self-purify and reject all forms of subjugation. You are a great man, and there is no controversy about it.

Appraising Nigeria’s Healthcare Delivery

By Carl Umegboro 

In a civilized climate, this wouldn’t stir interest but in Nigeria, where public officeholders largely work contrary to public interest, it should. Recently, the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, underwent a leg surgery in a hospital in home-country. It was a departure from the flawed status quo. Over the years, at any slight ailment, people in authority fly abroad with public funds, which chiefly accounts why healthcare centres are left in decay. Osinbajo literally displayed leadership acumen. 

The message is simple – a prudent leader can’t live foreign, abandoning the led to their fate in home facilities. The action is a template that must be sustained for a turnaround. Government is about the people. This accounts why Section 14 (2) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, explicitly provides; “It is hereby, accordingly declared that (b) … the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” 

2023: Shettima Unfit To Be Nigeria’s Vice-President

 By Olu Fasan 

If Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, becomes president next year, it is not only his exclusionist Muslim-Muslin presidency that would unsettle Nigeria, but also his would-be deputy, Alhaji Kashim Shettima. With Shettima’s inherent tetchiness and truculence, he would be gratuitously provocative. And with his uncouthness and indiscretion, he would be utterly divisive and toxifying. Truth is, a Vice-President Shettima would be unlike any civilian vice-president in Nigeria’s history. 

*Tinubu and Shettima 

But that proposition stands on another critical one that we must discuss first, namely: no previous presidential candidate in Nigeria did what Tinubu has done. I’m not referring to the devilry of his Muslim-Muslim ticket. Rather, I’m talking about his deliberate decision to pick a long-standing political ally and close associate as his running-mate. None of the past leading presidential candidates behaved in that manner. 

Nigeria: Why Getting The Economy Right Matters

 By Dan Agbese

Vice-president Yemi Osinbajo was in Washington last week to talk shop with US and World Bank officials on issues that matter to our country and the rest of the world. His takeaway from that trip will most likely be the brief lecture given him by the World Bank Group president, David Malpass, on the management of our stubborn national economy. Osinbajo was shopping for support from the World Bank on the vexed challenge that has defeated every president since our return to civil rule in 1999: fuel subsidy. Yes, that again.

Malpass thought the vice-president was looking for a solution in the wrong place because, as we say in this country, the solution is in his sokoto, not in Sokoto. The Daily Times online publication captured the essence of his advice to the vice-president with this headline: “World Bank to Osinbajo: Go home, address your staggered exchange rates, over-bloated fuel subsidy.”

Buhari’s Legacy And Tinubu’s Albatross

 By Shaka Momodu                                      

Fellow Nigerians, it is the season of politics and another election cycle is upon us. Candidates are presenting themselves to the electorate to be considered for various positions. But this cycle is looking more and more like 2015 when men and women, young and old, reasoned in reverse order. All efforts to make them see the danger and demagoguery that then-candidate Muhammadu Buhari represented proved futile. They were deaf to reason and blind to the red flags.  

*Buhari, Tinubu, Oluremi Tinubu

Today, we are all experiencing the consequences of electing incompetence dressed in borrowed robes as president. See the mess that Nigeria has become – a tragedy of monumental proportions. In just eight years, Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC) have turned Nigeria upside down, a land flowing with milk and honey, has been turned into a famished land. They say once bitten, twice shy, but strangely, many are at it again, eager to repeat their foolery.   

As I have consistently stated, Nigerians are incredibly smart people, with a history of foolish choices.  Is it not baffling that despite the   damage done to this country by the APC in nearly eight years of staggering misrule that is palpable even to the blind,  that some people still support it to remain in power, from top to the bottom of the social class?

How The Rich Deny The Poor Power To Develop

 By Bjorn Lomborg

The rich world’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is on full display in its response to the global energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the wealthy G7 countries admonish the world’s poor to use only renewables because of climate concerns, Europe and the United States are going begging for Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, while Spain and Italy are ramping up African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the country will have to triple its exports.

A single person in the rich world uses more fossil fuel energy than all the energy available to 23 poor Africans. The rich world became wealthy by massively exploiting fossil fuels, which today provide more than three-quarters of its energy. Solar and wind deliver less than three per cent of the rich world’s energy.

Yet, the rich are choking off funding for any new fossil fuels in the developing world. Most of the world’s poorest four billion people have no meaningful energy access, so the rich blithely tell them to ‘leapfrog’ from no energy to a green nirvana of solar panels and wind turbines.

Corruption And The Failure Of The Nigerian State

 By Sam Amadi 

"It was a big deal that the VP attended a local hospital to have a low-risk surgery" 

It is official. Nigeria has been caught in a fiscal trap. In the second quarter of 2022, the country spent all its revenue and borrowed more to service its debt. This means that Nigeria is broke, even if its Debt-to-GDP ratio is still within ‘prudential’ level. 

*Amadi

But Nigeria is a country that is blessed with abundant natural resources. It is a country that has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil exports but has no good hospitals, nevertheless. The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, had a minor surgery in a Nigerian hospital, and it was a heroic deed that elicited praise and celebration. That is how bad healthcare is in the country. All Nigerian notables attend foreign hospitals for even the most routine checkup. So, it was a big deal that the VP attended a local hospital to have a low-risk surgery.   

Muslim-Muslim Ticket: A Disastrous Error!

 By Babachir Lawal

I thought I will be able to avoid commenting on the disastrous error by my very good friend, Sen Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in his choice of a running mate.

I will be the very last person to stand in the way of my very good friend Tinubu’s path to the presidency. This is because, since 2011, my consuming passion has been for him to succeed Buhari as President of Nigeria. 

*Tinubu

It will not be true if I say that I did not see it coming. I have often read his body language, picked up snippets from several discussions with his lapdogs (some of whom, sadly, are Christians but most of whom are Muslims), and I have conveyed my reservations to them against the pitfalls of a Muslim-Muslim ticket towards which I sensed they were drifting.

As part of my obligation to him, a close friend, I had on many occasions argued the merits and demerits of both ticket permutations to him. 

Tinubu’s Muslim/Muslim Ticket Obsession

 By Ochereome Nnanna

The chances are that, by the time you read this article, the major presidential candidates – Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP; Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC; and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, would have announced their running mates.

*Bola Tinubu

Of the lot, Tinubu’s matter matters the most. From the distant past when he started developing interest in becoming the president of Nigeria, he has always postulated that a Muslim/Muslim ticket “can work; competence is all that matters”.

If “competence” is all that matters, why not just pick a fellow Yoruba; they also have their share of competent people. Why look for something in Sokoto when you can simply pick it from your Sokoto pocket? But hey, I perfectly understand his situation.

The Blood Of Deborah Cries For Justice!

 By Rotimi Fasan

In 1989 the Iranian spiritual and revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni, issued a fatwa that was to be executed by any Muslim anywhere in the world on the Indian-born British novelist, Salman Rushdie, following the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims considered blasphemous.

*Deborah Yakubu Samuel 

Not only did the British government and other Western powers at the time rise up in defence of Rushdie’s right of free expression, these countries were very unambiguous about the extent they were prepared to go to defend the right of just one man who was not even a Christian to say nothing of being White to hold personal views of religion and religious figures no matter how obnoxious.

2023 And Southeast Presidency: Quislings Beware!

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

This is an election season like no other. Everything is defying logic. For instance, how does one explain the fact that when the All Progressives Congress, APC, decided to sell its presidential nomination form at a whopping N100 million, an amount so outrageous in an economy where the minimum wage is N30,000, and many thought the only reason for the ridiculous hike was to scare aware “unserious” aspirants, that was when every Tom, Dick and Harry, joined the fray.

With the latest declarations on Wednesday of Senator Godswill Akpabio, Minister of Niger Delta, in Akwa Ibom, and Dr Kayode Fayemi, Governor of Ekiti State, in Abuja, there are now at least 14 aspirants jostling for the APC ticket.

Nigeria: Script For A Final Looting Spree

 By Ochereome Nnanna

The Good Book says “by their fruits ye shall know them”. When you dress a person in borrowed robes just to show off, William Shakespeare (Macbeth Act 5, Scene 2) says it will be “(hanging) loose about him like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief”. Before 2003, the Finance portfolio of the Nigerian economy had always been handled by men. After his frivolous first term, former President Olusegun Obasanjo decided to get serious in his second. Nigeria had a debt overhang of $32bn owed to the Paris Club alone.

*Buhari 

Obasanjo saw that his global gallivanting and begging for debt forgiveness was not cutting ice. He needed to do more than merely advertise his “beautiful” mug on the streets of Western capitals.

Who Is Afraid Of Ezenwo Nyesom Wike?

By DAN AMOR

Within the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway's works – some seven novels, fifty odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction — The Sun Also Rises, is something of a curious exception.

*Gov Wike 

Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and The Sea (1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is one most wholly satisfying book. Here Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for his famous understated ironic prose style. And here he also made his first marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the Hemingway "code", the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue, and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the structure of The Sun Also Rises.

Is Buhari Poorer Four Years After?

By Banji Ojewale

A new race of men is springing up to govern the nation; they are the hunters after popularity, men ambitious…the demagogues, whose principles hang laxly upon them, who follow not so much what is right as what leads to a temporary vulgar applause. 

– Joseph Story (1779-1845), American Judge

*President Buhari 

President Muhammadu Buhari has offered the ‘ideal’ measuring rod to assess him and other public officers while serving the people or when out of office. We don’t need to consult any arcane research or some tongue-twisting grammatical construction to guide us to determine whether outgoing executives have fared well or underperformed. 

Why Have They Thrown Gov Ambode Into The Lagos Lagoon?

By Sam Ohuabunwa 

Many Nigerians will remember the story of the threat which the Oba of Lagos was said to have issued to Ndigbo who lived in Lagos during the 2015 political season. Those who decide what happens in Lagos State were in great panic. They looked into their crystal balls and found that a majority of Ndigbo in Lagos had planned to vote for Jimmy Agbaje of PDP as governor of Lagos. All the political principalities in APC in Lagos went beserk.

*Ambode

What to do? Oba of Lagos was recruited. He summoned some of the so called Eze Ndigbo in Lagos and issued the infamous threat. They must vote for Ambode of APC or they better be prepared to be thrown into the Lagos Lagoon. It was a desperate situation that demanded desperate action.