As Gov Akeredolu Steps Aside

 By Dan Agbese

The centre did not quite fall out in Ondo State. Governor Rotimi Akeredolu has done the right thing even if reluctantly. He persuaded himself to end the needless crisis and take another medical leave and very reluctantly leave the state in the hands of the deputy governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, as acting governor.

*Akeredolu 

The State House of Assembly has formally confirmed him in that position. This was the eventuality the governor had risked his health to fight. I join the people of Ondo State in heaving a huge sigh of relief. 

Hunger And Anger In The Homeland

 By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

There is hunger in the land. Real hunger. There is food and food everywhere. But majority of our citizens cannot afford to feed three times daily. Inflation is eroding the purchasing power of the naira. Transportation costs have gone up. The costs of medications have gone up. Incomes have not gone up. It is cheap to die; it is also expensive to die.

A paradox. A little emergency could take one’s life. Organ failure, expensive to treat, can take one’s life too. People are starving. I do not refer to quality of feeding. I am concerned that there are too many people who are now compelled to go through days without meals.

Why Nigeria’s Economy Retrogressed Under Buhari

 By David Adonri

The pursuit of socio-economic welfare of citizens is the cardinal goal of every government. The process of attaining this goal is centered around mobilisation and efficient allocation of resources for production of goods and services. Entrepreneurship has been identified as the catalyst which drives resources or factors of production into generating the desired economic outcomes.

*Buhari 

Nigeria is blessed with abundant resources but continues to lack capable entrepreneurial leadership competent enough to convert resources into modern products. Eight years of President Muhammadu Buhari’s rule demonstrates how an unenterprising and incapable leadership can damage the prospects of a resource-rich developing economy. All macroeconomic indicators deteriorated during the eight years of President Buhari’s disastrous administration.

Corruption: EFCC Is Not Fit For Purpose; It’s Time To Scrap It!

 By Olu Fasan

When General Olusegun Obasanjo became president in 1999, he was under pressure from the international community to tackle corruption frontally. Obasanjo himself described corruption in Nigeria as cancerous, saying it required surgical operations. He established an anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, in 2003.

But 20 years later, Nigeria remains a “fantastically corrupt country” as a former British prime minister memorably put it. The cancer of corruption has festered and spread malignantly, destroying every facet of Nigeria’s polity.

Fuel Scarcity Again! Have We Not Suffered Enough?

 By Ayo Oyoze Baje

The newspaper headlines are haunting, heart-jerking, painting a horrifying spectacle of the preventable pains of the long-suffering Nigerians, still stewing in the paradox of want -of refined premium motor spirit (pms)- in the midst of plenty natural deposit of crude oil resource.

If in doubt, consider some of them: ‘Petrol scarcity bites harder in Abuja, Oyo, Yobe’(-2nd March, 2021). ‘Commuters groan as fuel scarcity bites harder’ (24th Nov., 2022). ‘Fuel scarcity bites harder, cripples socio-economic activities in Kebbi (18th December, 2022). ‘Commuters trek, motorists sleep at filling stations as petrol scarcity bites harder’ (23rd January, 2023).

Easing The Niger Bridge Traffic Agony At Christmas

 By Luke Onyekakeyah

Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola’s recent announcement that work on the Second Niger Bridge has been completed made cheery news, especially, for motorists and other travellers who use the Niger Bridge at Onitsha at Christmas. The route is usually bedlam, indeed, hell on earth during Christmas and New Year festivities.

There is hysteria that the suffering and pain experienced at the Onitsha-Asaba Bridge head would, henceforth, be a thing of the past once the Second Niger Bridge is commissioned and opened. Fashola’s announcement came on the heels of the ministry’s acting Federal Controller of Works in Anambra State, Seyi Martins, who announced earlier that the bridge would be ready for use in December 2022.

Goodluck Jonathan Rejects Presidential Form

 Press Release 

It has come to our notice that a group has purportedly purchased Presidential  Nomination and Expression of Interest forms, of the All Progressives Congress APC, in the name of former President Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

We wish to categorically state that Dr. Jonathan was not aware of this bid and did not authorize it. 

Nigeria Confirms First Case Of Coronavirus In Lagos

...Plus: Basic Protective Measures Against The New Coronavirus

*Gov Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State addressing a press conference
today on the outbreak of coronavirus in Lagos 

The Nigerian Ministry of Health has confirmed the first case of Coronavirus in Lagos. A tweet sent out by the ministry early today (Friday February 28, 2020), reads:

“The Federal Ministry of Health has confirmed a coronavirus(Covid-19) case in Lagos State Nigeria. The case which was confirmed on 27/02/2020 is the first case to be reported in Nigeria since the beginning of the outbreak in China in January 2020”

Nigeria: Who Hates The President?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

In the buildup to the 2015 elections, the wild, uproarious promotion of General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the man with the panacea for   Nigeria’s myriad of problems wasted no time in saturating the air.

*Buhari 

 This was, however, sloppily packaged with a strange, aggressive refusal to give the slightest consideration for any voice of caution, any alternative opinion no matter how sound and redemptive. You either joined the rowdy herd or you are a “hater” of the “messiah.”

Buhari, Certificate Scam And Declining Plank Of Integrity

By Evaristus Bassey

It does seem that when a politician is popular people overlook his sins and when he becomes unpopular they want to examine his faults. In 2015, the  Buhari-mania and its mantra of Change would not allow anyone examine the matter of Buhari’s certificate but it does seem that with the turn of events, those who were ready to accept recharge card and NEPA bill in place of a certificate are insisting they want to see the real certificate. 

*WAEC Registrar presents certificate to Pres Buhari 

Those who regularly respond to calls for proposals in the humanitarian and development sector know that one of the first places you must read through are the guidelines for application. These are more or less criteria for eligibility. If among the things required are audited reports for five years and you are only four years old as an organization, you simply know ipso facto that your organization is disqualified; and if they require only a ten paged summary and you go ahead to make it fifteen, or they want an anti-terrorism certification attached and you forget to, or attach only two out of three required letters of support from established organisations, then you must already know you are out, being that the first step is to prune the applications and without even reading the proposals, screen out those who had not met the criteria.

2019: Why Nigerians Are Highly 'Atikulated'

By Dan Amor

Until recently when the erstwhile Vice President of Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, (Turaki Adamawa), began to attract my attention in a very edifying and ennobling manner, I had almost concluded that President Muhammadu Buhari had no challenger within and outside the All Progressives Congress enclave. At the risk of alienating himself from his regional political constituency, Atiku, as he is popularly called, who is better appreciated as a child of events and circumstances, has espoused a large vision of a new Nigeria.

*Atiku Abubakar

"No section of the Nigerian State can claim correctly that its people are better served by the current structure of the federation within the context of the past 50 years of a failed unitary federalism", he boldly proclaimed. Atiku, one of the most respected and consistent national voices, especially in the current political dispensation, has also said that state actors and other politicians who insist that Nigeria cannot be renegotiated and who equate every demand for restructuring with secession may actually be setting the stage for unsavoury outcomes.

Nigeria: Worn Nation, Worn Destiny

By Alade Rotimi-John

Writing about Nigeria in these days of a menacing or threatened enactment of a Hate Speech law can be irksome. The writer may be unable to properly delineate the terrain of a possible infraction of the law even as he attempts to give rein to free speech or truthful exposition. There is also the difficulty of plotting the graph between transcendental truths and the fraying of irritable nerves or temper of persons in authority.

An accustomed tendency to be infatuated or be deprived of judgement regarding the passion to speak the truth about the actual state of affairs in the country is thereby unfortunately hampered or put on hold.

Nigeria, A Nation At War With Itself

By John Odeyemi

For the past couple of weeks, I have had the weirdest misfortune of listening to friends and former colleagues, people that I hold in high respect espousing ideas that I did not imagine any rational Nigerian would consider at this time. I have heard the incessant clamouring for PVCs – and for a while I thought they were referring to some plumbing device. On further inquiry, I came to understand that it has to do with the upcoming elections. 

*President Buhari 

I wonder how PVCs translates to electoral power when your votes are limited by the choices available to you. APC, PDP, are they not the same characters we ought to kick out of government? I am aligned with the position to suspend any absurd elections and call for a national referendum. The other insipid and malignant vituperation is the suggestion that President Muhammadu Buhari is fighting corruption and moving the country forward. 

Between Jonathan, Buhari’s Cabinets, Facts Speak For Themselves!

By Reno Omokri

In a tweet he tweeted on January 9, 2012, the Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, tagged Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a “zero”. Not too long after, a nasty little child who was promoted by the same El-Rufai, tweeted that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was ‘overrated’.

*Jonathan and Buhari 

The two characters aforementioned also spouted some of the vilest things about former President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, with the nasty little El-Rufai social media sidekick comparing then President Jonathan to a “dead pig” and referring to his wife as a “natural disaster”.

To say El-rufai threw decorum to the wind would be the understatement of the year. He insulted former President Jonathan while he was praying, calling him “stupid” and “lazy” as he prayed to his God. El-Rufai’s ill-brought up children also joined the fray and used some of the most uncouth language on the then President. And then it became the turn of LaiMohammed and his principals, Muhammadu Buhari and pastor Yemi Osinbajo.

It seemed they were in a competition to outdo themselves in a bid to cast aspersions on the person of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and his government. Clueless, useless, inept and incompetent were some of the choice words they used to describe either the then President or his administration. While campaigning in February 2014, then candidate Muhammadu Buhari said he ‘would not continue with the programmes and policies of President Jonathan’s administration, because to continue with the ideas of a government that does not have a clue signals danger’.

His deputy, Osinbajo accused the Jonathan administration of lacking ‘commitment’ and promised that their administration would do better. Not to be undone, Lai Mohammed called Dr. Jonathan ‘clueless’, “callous”, “insensitive” and “punch drunk”! All three of them promised to give Nigeria a better government and reverse the “rot” of the Jonathan years. Yet in three years of being in office, the Buhari administration has been unable to initiate, start and complete any project in three years. Where they met an economy that was growing at an unprecedented rate of 6.7%, they negatively turned the table and in six months, an economy that was officially cited as the third fastest growing economy in the world in 2015 and the largest economy in Africa, officially went into corruption!

Whereas, Nigeria gained 3 million new jobs in the last three years of Jonathan, we have lost 11 million jobs in the same period of review under Muhammadu Buhari. Do not look at me. Those figures came from the National Bureau of Statistics which is owned and controlled by the government Buhari heads! President Buhari, a man who claimed that then President Jonathan was weak on security has been faced with an ever increasing level of herdsmen killings.

There is a lot of press coverage over the fact that there has been 1,692 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2018, which is the highest number in the war on terror to date. The sad fact is that this number is not up to the number of Nigerians who died in the first 10 weeks of 2018. Yet Nigeria is supposedly at peace while Afghanistan is at war!

Faced with these facts, you would expect the clueful Buhari to come up with strategies to stem the killings, instead, he had this to say: “There is nothing I can do to help the situation except to pray to God to help us out of the security challenges” (I am not making this up, Buhari actually said that). When bandits killed 34 people in Sokoto two week’s ago, the same President Buhari said Nigerians should be patient because ‘my security teams are cracking their brains’!

To think that this is the man who called Jonathan and his government clueless is so annoying! And to show you how jobless President Muhammadu Buhari is, he could not visit Sokoto State, where 32 Nigerians were killed by bandits, but he traveled to the Netherlands to attend the 20th anniversary of the International Criminal Court.

NO OTHER Head of State attended the anniversary other than Buhari! The man places no priority on his citizens’ life. How can he expect the world to value him when the world knows he does not value his own people? And the truth is that as long as Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressive Congress are in power, Nigeria is not going to make any real progress. I mean look at the people who make up the Buhari cabinet!

Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s minister for finance got her PhD in regional economics and development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On Thursday July 19, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter appointed Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to the board of Twitter. She also seats on the boards of Lazard, Gavi and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. President Buhari’s minister of finance on the contrary went to a London Polytechnic, seats atop a recessed economy and is accused of forgery. Now tell me who is CLUELESS between Jonathan and Buhari?

It is commonly said, show me your friends and I will tell you who you are. A good leader knows that he or she is a product of his or her environment so they surround themselves with the best people. This is a principle that Jonathan lived by. Can the same be said about President Buhari? A leader should surround himself with those who are on the same mission as himself. Looking at President Buhari and the people he has surrounded himself with, I am tempted to believe that the mission the President has chosen for himself is a mission to fail!

Ex President Jonathan’s former health minister is now a Professor at America’s Duke University. His former agriculture minister is now the President of the African Development Bank. His former finance minister sits on the board of Twitter, Gavi, Lazard and the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. His communications minister is now the Chairperson of the global Alliance for Affordable Internet. All this is happening while President Buhari and his finance minister are still looking for their certificates!

Buhari’s Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Mounir Gwarzo, was fingered for high level fraud and was so incompetent that Nigeria’s equity markets kept shrinking under him. Compare this with Arunma Oteh, who tripled the net worth of our capital market to $150 billion and was so good at her job that she was appointed a vice president and treasurer at the World Bank. Now take all these in and again ask yourself who is truly clueless between Jonathan and Buhari? Back to Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, my response to him on his ‘zero’ tweet is as follows-Thank God Twitter, GAVI, Lazard and the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank do not think that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a zero.

But the curious thing is that El-Rufai, who thinks that he is a hero, has not accomplished anything worthwhile as Governor of Kaduna state. He had saddled his state with debt, pays herdsmen by his own admission, while internal strife kills his own citizens. After six years, we now know who the real zero is. ‪As for Lai Mohammed, the man who told Nigerians that President Buhari’s achievements have ‘exceeded his promises to Nigerians’, Nigerians laughed when he launched ‘A National Campaign Against Fake News’.

This is like satan opening a church. Lai Mohammed and fake news are 5 and 6. They are Siamese twins! Lai should buy a mirror and arrest the person he sees there and by so doing he will reduce fake news in Nigeria by half! The truth is that when you compare and contrast Jonathan’s cabinet with Buhari’s cabinet, the facts speak for themselves?

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RELATED POST

Lai Mohammed: An Unmanageable Mistake!

President Buhari: A ‘Messiah’s Loss Of Appeal

By Godwin Ogla

We are not all endowed with the peculiar gift of clairvoyance like Nostradamus, the famed fourteenth century astrologer -cum- physician, who arguably foretold great happenings and events that would later shape centuries he could only imagine. But when an audacious attempt is made to do a post-mortem of a presidency that is yet to round off its first tenure, then, one begins to wonder whether such a presidency has crossed the Rubicon on policies with disastrous effects from which returning may be impossible or perhaps, difficult. Who would expect something good from an administration whose actions and inactions conjure pictures of hopelessness even in its final days?

*President Buhari 

There is a limit to the propaganda machinery any government in the world can set in motion to inveigle her citizenry into giving it their unalloyed support, if there is great gulf between actual falsehood and reality. It is only a matter of time before the propaganda messages being deployed to influence public opinions, metamorphosed into an uncomfortable jarring sound that must be turned off to prevent the people from losing their sanity. The once fervent converts have now taken a deep dive into the rivers of apostasy because in vain, have they laboured for the religion of change. 

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. 

*President Buhari

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’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. 

Obasanjo’s Sermon In The Creeks

By Abraham Ogbodo

Last week, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was in Bayelsa State preaching love. He went at the instance of the State Governor, Seriake Dickson who wanted him (since the incumbent president is not readily available for such task) to commission projects built by the state government as part of the activities to mark the sixth anniversary of the government of Dickson in the state.

*Obasanjo and Dickson

Obasanjo did a little more outside the official schedule. By some arrangement, he was appropriated to lay the foundation stone of the second private refinery after Dangote’s, but the first in that region of the country, penultimate Saturday.

The Azikel Modular Refinery sitting on about 20 hectares is being powered by Dr. Eruani Azibapu Goodbless, President of Azikel Group in collaboration with foreign partners.  

Obasanjo: Ambushing The Emergence Of The Proper Third Force

By Alade Rotimi-John

General Olusegun Obasanjo’s Coalition for Nigeria Movement has been expressed as the former President’s projected avant garde prescription for taking beleaguered Nigeria out of the political woods into which it had been marooned by successive visionless administrations. Fiercely patriotic, Obasanjo is touted as the embodiment of the values for the preservation or continuing corporate existence of the Nigerian contraption.

*Obasanjo 

For good measure, he is an inflexible defender of the status quo. He has after all, been a major beneficiary of the system. Even as the general mood of the nation is in favour of the political restructuring of the country and of charting a proper course around the issues of good governance, equity, justice, etc. the Obasanjo intervention contained in his letter to President Muhammadu Buhari is cleverly positioned to divert attention therefrom and guide the national narrative in the direction of a prepared script.

Benue Massacres: How Gov Ortom Got His Groove Back!

By Reno Omokri

I must say that I was rather disappointed in the Benue State Governor’s initial response to the killing of 73 residents of Benue State by killer Fulani herdsmen. I felt that it was wrong of him to have accepted President Buhari’s summons to go to the Aso Rock Presidential Villa with Benue elders only to be talked down at by the President who had no harsh words for his Fulani herdsmen kinsmen and who condescendingly told Gov Samuel Ortom and his elders to “accommodate your countrymen” (never mind that he, the President, once claimed that killer Fulani herdsmen are foreigners).

*Gov Wike of River State in Benue State to Commiserate with Gov Ortom on the Killings 

My disappointment with Ortom stemmed from the fact that he allowed himself be summoned by a President who did not have the common decency to first of all pay a condolence visit to the state where killers who share affinity with him had just killed his countrymen and women.