Ghana @ 59: Surely, We Can Do Better!

By Stephen Agbai
Newly born babies bring unmatched joy to their families, especially their biological parents. Their births mark new beginning and new hope. Such was the case when Ghana, after decades of battling merciless and ironhanded colonial domination, successfully gained political independence.

Being the first nation south of the Sahara, and arguably with most of the leading lights in the global fight against colonialism being its citizens, Ghana’s Independence was most heartily welcomed by many freedom fighters — home and abroad. Ghana held the key to opening the floodgate of freedom for the rest of Africa and other oppressed peoples as succinctly captured by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah: "Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African Continent."

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in fulfilling this dream and vision to lead the path towards perpetual liberation of the entire African continent, inspired and reinvigorated the rest of Pan African freedom fighters — notably Patrice Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Nelson Mandela, W. E. B. Dubois, Ahmed SékouTouré and George Padmore. So strong and indomitable was the wave of change led by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah that within three years after Ghana's independence, many countries within the sub region — Guinea (October 2nd, 1958); Senegal (April 4th, 1960); Burkina Faso (August 5, 1960); Cameroon (January 1st, 1960);Congo (August 15th, 1960); Congo DR (June 30th, 1960); Cote d'Ivoire (August 7th, 1960) and Nigeria (October 1st, 1960), etc. — in quick succession had also gained their political freedom from colonial domination. This trendsetting effort is to be celebrated today by Ghana and the rest of the world.

Who Abducted This Lovely Child – Master Jonathan Suleiman?

Master Jonathan Suleiman was reportedly abducted this week at gun point in Okene on his way to School. 

If you have any useful information regarding his where about, please contact the nearest police station or call 07016479422 

Please Spread the Word...and Share Widely ...until this little, lovely, innocent boy is found and brought home to his parents...

Nigeria: Ese Oruru’s Mirror

By Okey Ndibe

I received a plaintive note last week from a young man who seemed rather shocked that I had not written about Nigeria’s scandal of the moment—the harrowing story of a 14-year old girl named Ese Rita Oruru, abducted from her home in Bayelsa State, transported to Kano by a 22-year old drifter, Yunusa (alias Yellow), who contrived her conversion to Islam and then made her his bride. My young correspondent then pleaded with me to write about the Ese matter, as if the burden of rendering whole again a world turned on its head rested with whatever I was going to say.

*Ese Oruru

The matter of Ese, even the fragment of it sketched out above, is a tragic story. But what makes the story truly, deeply tragic is far less the specific details of what happened to a solitary young woman than what the Ese Affair says about Nigeria, its institutions, its attitude to children, and the vexed subject of religion.

In short, the tragedy lies in the fact that Nigeria is a country at war with its most vulnerable, weak citizens. It is a country at war with its poor, its workers, especially those of them who are minimum wage earners, its womenfolk, especially those of them who are, in every important sense, children.

Speaking to a reporter, one of Ese’s best friends at school in Bayelsa State disclosed that her friend’s dream was to become a nurse. According to this friend, Ese excelled at math, integrated science and English. In her first interview with reporters, Ese corroborated the account of her dream. In a child-friendly society, Ese would have received encouragement to enable her to achieve her professional aspiration. But this is Nigeria, a country that’s turned into a killer of dreams, if not of the dreamers. Instead of being on her way to a nursing career, Ese, who is now five months pregnant, must become the charge of nurses as she, a mere child, prepares to bring a child into the world.

How did the young man who abducted Ese manage to pull off his crime—for crime it was—in broad daylight, without anybody, civilian or uniformed, to stop him? How was it that several adults presided over the farcical conversation of the young woman without one of them pausing to ask, one, whether she was competent to voluntarily understand said conversion and, two, whether she understood the implications of what was to follow?

In her interview, Ese described the process of her ostensible conversion. “They took me to one place. Before they took me from the house to Kura, they put me in hijab, then we went to Kura. When we got there, they went to one place, and one old man came there and he would say something and they would say I should repeat. Then I would repeat. If the man said something again, they would say I should repeat and I would repeat just like that.”

A conversion indeed, just like that!

Buhari’s Foreign Travels

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

 In arriving at the fact that the nation throbs with a plethora of questions over the necessity of the foreign trips of President Muhammadu Buhari, the presidency succeeds in feeling the pulse of the citizens. But it clearly underestimates the difficulty of stemming the impatience of the citizens by offering justification for the president’s travels. The citizens may not have wholly aligned themselves with the Emersonian disparagement of travelling as a fool’s paradise since those who made England, Italy or Greece venerable were not peripatetic. But the urgency of the need to solve the country’s myriad of problems at home and the unsavoury memories of the globe-trotting of past political leaders  have crashed what was left of the brittle confidence in our leaders’ fascination with overseas’ trips.

*President Buhari 

Our leaders have left the stark records of not sparing a thought for the suffering poor citizens. Instead of staying at home to consider strategies for taking the blight of poverty off the people, they are rather attracted to a life abroad at the expense of their states or the country. This is why they travel abroad to attend birthdays of their cronies and paramours. Some even travel abroad to organise weddings for their children or they are guests at the weddings of their friends which they have sponsored. In some worse cases, such travels have been used as opportunities to negotiate how to stash slush funds in foreign accounts. But our political leaders justify such travels as opportunities to bring foreign investments to the country.

Still, travelling abroad is a means of escaping from the problems at home.  Our political leaders have no problem with leaving the citizens to writhe and wither away under the weight of the crises sired by the former’s misbegotten governance. And when they are overseas, they do not bother to copy the good things they see there. They do not pay attention to how through transformational leadership, what would have been a barren country is turned into an investors’ delight. Nor do they observe how on account of the fact that leaders live by example, the citizens are ready to obey the laws of the country that would redound to the peace and good of all. What our leaders are only interested in as they travel abroad are the homes that are the exemplifications of modern architectural  ingenuity. They would come home and then loot the treasury in a bid to replicate these architectural masterpieces for their private use.

For a Nigerian leader who travels to the Vatican and takes a photograph with the pope, his or her day is made. Then such a leader would now strive to push the photograph to the front pages of major newspapers in the country. A political leader does this perhaps because he or she would like the citizens to know the opportunity he or she  has just got to put the name of their backwater carrying the beautiful title of a state or country on the map of the world. It could also be to gleefully announce to the hell-bound citizens that their leader is on the way to heaven.  For some politicians, putting the pictures on the front pages of newspapers is not enough. Billboards must be erected in every strategic corner of the state to announce this treasure trove. This was exactly what Governor Rochas Okorocha did in Imo State after taking a photograph with President Barack Obama during a visit to the United States.

Africa: Epitaphs For A Failing

By Dan Amor

Africa, my beloved continent, appears to have lost out in the world's debate. Aside from the achievements of its founding fathers, the continent which habours the largest population of the black race in the world has almost gone comatose politically and economically. Africa is indeed the only continent in the world in which it takes a fortune teller for its leaders (looters) to realize that something is really lacking in their character.

The black continent has been reduced to a guinea-pig laboratory in which wanton denigration of corrosive state power has been carried out in its unspoken barbarity. In no other continent than Africa have the citizens been so abused by the powers of the state. In their idiotic, shameless and sadistic mentality, our rulers think that the people are destined to last, unmoving throughout the cataclysms of the surrounding world in the face of national usurpers and foreign conquerors. With the physical exit of the whiteman, African rulers ostensibly formed a new generation rebellious at its inheritance of a cynical and hypocritical legacy.

Today, Africa has produced more treacherous dictators than any other continent in the world and even any other race in history that could even make the Age of Antiquity and tyranny of the Renaissance green with envy. Even as some of them now pretend to be democrats, they still cannot cover their inner colours with their new 'democratic' skin. Yet, how do we appreciate the nebulous fancy of the average African dictator? How do we extrapolate his consummate excesses? How do we vitiate the nuances of his personal pride and ambition? And, finally, how do we impugn the Johnsonian epigram about the innocuousness of corruption and the mentality of the African dictator? It takes only serious thinking for analysts to decode that much of the savagery connected with the African tragedy can be explained in the violence inherent in Western manners. African leaders are therefore hapless tools of that logic of history which leaves a minority determined to assert itself against the majority with no choice of methods than using terror as not merely an attendant phenomenon, but a vital function of insurrection.

Almost six decades after gaining political independence from European exploiters of their resources, Africa, easily the most naturally endowed region on the face of the earth, has been turned into a theatre of war no thanks to the lackeys who took over the mantle of political leadership from the colonialist. It has been a monumental tragedy that Africa is yet to find its bearings more than fifty years into self rule. 

Buhari: If We Were Truly In A Democracy

By Stephen Gbadamosi

Democracy! They say you are the government of the people, by the people and for the people; the government that is strictly built on the rule of law and adherence to the very minute tenet of the nation's constitution. Ok! In Nigeria, if we were truly in a democracy, would all these despicable 'peculiar mess,' as that revered South-Western politician of yore would say, be happening in Ekiti today, under the much-awaited change leadership of President Muhammadu Buhar? 

*President Buhari 

If we were truly in a democracy, would the Federal Government be brazenly disregarding the proclamations of the judiciary, courts, held as one of the three arms that is the last resort of the people in a people's government?

If we were in a democracy in Nigeria, why would the sanctity of the Ekiti governorship election be tested from the very first rung of applicable judiciary hierarchy to the Supreme Court (after which, in Nigeria's constitution, next is court of God), only for the Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) to be employing every available subterfuge means to truncate the elected wishes of the people in the name of politics?

If we were truly in a democracy in Nigeria, why would the Department of State Security (DSS), an agency of the Federal Executive, storm the Ekiti State House of Assembly, a component of the legislative arm recognized by the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and abduct four members of the House on trumped-up allegations, when the same constitution guarantees separation of powers?

To my consternation, I even heard that another Ekiti government official, secretly apprehended by the DSS, respected Chief Toyin Ojo, Commissioner for Finance, was asked by DSS what he contributed to Fayose's election to merit his appointment. What a mockery and rape of democracy, if that was coming from officers of the DSS. When did contribution to electoral finances become a criterion for holding professional positions in our governments? Why haven't the moneybags in this nation who have been known to bankroll governors' and presidents' elections been appointed to key government positions? And if they had been, in which statute book is it stated that they had no right to be so appointed?

Nigeria’s Killing Fields

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If our claim to being an irreducible part of civilised humanity is to be validated, we must meet an acceptable degree of adherence to the norms that guarantee that level of life that is superior to that of a people at their inchoate stage of development. For what entitles us to be a part of civilised humanity when the robust allowance we ought to make for the sanctity of human life is non-existent?  

*President Buhari 

If we all take it as a given that  respect for human life is a fundamental principle   of  a civilised society, then we must come to the grim realisation that as a people we still have so much work to do to remain part of the civilised world. For clearly, the ascendancy of the disdain for the sanctity of human life in our society daily spawns crises with their attendant loss of lives. If these deaths were only caused by Boko Haram, there would have been the tragic consolation that the perpetrators are only irredeemable and blood-sucking lunatics on the fringes of humanity.

The first step towards retrieving the society from its self-affliction of the warped norms that nurture violence is that our political leaders must not recoil from the responsibility of admitting that they were the ones who  first torpedoed the rules of mutual engagement that foster trust between the leaders and the citizens. In them is reposed the trust of using the nation’s resources to improve the lot of all the people. But on almost every occasion, this trust is often injudiciously requited.  They cater to their selfish interest – buying mansions  they do not need, buying private jets to escape the pothole-ridden roads  they fail to repair  and acquiring wives  and mistresses in conformity with their sybaritic lives . 

This state of mutual distrust is expressed in an aggravated form through ethnic suspicion. The tragic consequence is that thousands are killed on account of unfathomable or  the  flimsiest provocation. It is this mutual suspicion that provides the ground for the perpetuation of the inter-ethnic feud as the case of the Agatu community where hundreds were allegedly killed by herdsmen. In the case of the people of Agatu and the herdsmen, we may make an allowance for the possibility that a lack of constant interactions  has over the years exacerbated   this mutual distrust. But how could there be mutual distrust among people who intermingle almost daily in the course of business or living in the same neighbourhood? This is the puzzle that the tragic clash between traders of different ethnic origins threw up in Lagos recently.

Fulani Cross-Country Cattle Grazing Menace

By Farouk Martins Aresa

Cattle grazing should not be a cross country menace across West Africa with Fulani’s philosophy that only God owns land. No ethnic group does in this century; because they only provide a marginal amount of Africa’s meat supply. It is about time their masters who are the real owners of the cattle measure up. They either provide modern facilities to feed their cattle where they are or face massive outrage in each of these countries treating them as cross-country terrorists.

The appeasement of granting grazing rights on properties that do not belong to them deprive the owners their wish to use their land as they see fit. It is myopic, dense and opportunistic. One would expect better cerebral solutions from the Schools of Agriculture in the universities and colleges of any country. Are they going to each country to negotiate land or just creating attraction for other Fulani into one privileged country until they run out of grazing land again?

Another philosophy within Fulani is that the life of a cow is more precious than that of human. If that philosophy is limited to their communities, as if that is not bad enough, extending it to their hosts in each of the country they invade raises a moral problem apart from economic and precious loss of lives. It becomes a clash of cultures, religions and laws.

The Hausa in Nigeria have been dominated by Fulani for over a century now. Hausa are proud people with their own indigenous civilized way of life and religion that ruled some of the Great Empires of West Africa. Today Hausa children of kings and queens are most of the impoverished talikawa in West Africa. Generally spread but mostly prominent in Nigeria as Fulani dominate the Hausa. Unfortunately, Hausa have taken to the philosophies and religion of their captors.

I Won't Stop Criticizing Buhari’s Bad Policies – Fayose

Ekiti State Governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose, on Wednesday said he would not stop criticizing the Federal Government over its bad policies despite the recent clamp down on state officials by men of the Department of State Security (DSS).

*Fayose 

The governor, who arrived the state from Abuja where he had been since Sunday to attend PDP meeting, said no policy of the FG that is inimical to the welfare of the people would be spared by his comments.

According to a press statement issued by the Governor's Chief Press Secretary, Mr Idowu Adelusi, Fayose who was reacting to the development for the first time since DSS officials invaded the House of Assembly Complex, Ado-Ekiti and whisked four lawmakers away said he remained resolute in his determination to criticise obnoxious policies of the president in the interest of Nigeria and our democracy.

The Commissioner for Finance, Chief Toyin Ojo, was also arrested by DSS officers but was released late Tuesday night.

"The Bible says people with God are in majority. This is not the first time people will harass me. It is a conspiracy and it will collapse like other attempts before it. I will remain critical of the activities of the Federal Government, especially when they do things that are inimical to the welfare of Nigerians.

"Imagine the questions they asked my Commissioner for Finance, they asked him if the Federal Government has reimbursed the state government on works done on federal roads. But the records are with them in Abuja, can't they check? We have nothing to hide and they are only chasing shadows and are time wasters.

Jonatan Korsintin

By Chuks Iloegbunam  

A rich man looked at all approaches to his life and found every one of them particularly daunting. Dispirited, he exam­ined all routes from his person. Each held the dreadful promise of his extinction. He shuddered. A veteran of many of life’s excru­ciating struggles, he decided on remedial action. He, therefore, consulted oracles and diviners, sorcerers and stargazers, astrolo­gers and palm readers, mara­bouts and prophets.

At the end of his inquiries he got a distinct message from the spirit world. His problems were complicated but not impossible to surmount. He only had to abstain from sex for six straight months and his deliverance would be automatic. The man smiled. He had spent more than half his life kicking the can of sex around. He had fathered children in more places than he cared to enumerate. Surely, after an al­most endless stretch of sexual freedom, he could manage absti­nence for six month, a mere 180 days.

Fortunately, he had only one wife. Explaining the lay of the land to her posed little difficulty. As for the army of consorts, gold diggers and freeloaders who masqueraded as a part of him, they could go to blazes and burn to ashes. His wife made a useful suggestion. She said that sleep­ing in separate rooms thencefor­ward would prevent the flesh’s weakness from throwing a span­ner in the works. Given that the man was no hater of the bottle, he could come from a binge any night and, finding himself on the same bed with the wife, pounce on her. The man agreed. But he was the kind of man who liked the spectacular. Instead of a new bed in a separate room, he built the wife a duplex, tastefully fur­nished and fitted with combina­tion locks she could operate even by remote control, to thwart all intrusions.

Abstinence began in earnest, with the man blocking his phone from the calls of vixens. He got home early everyday, per­formed the prescribed rituals and hopped into bed, without giving in to the temptation of watching blue films. That could lead him to masturbation and the prohib­ited outcome of spilling semen all over. The first month passed rather quickly. All correct. The second month was even more fleeting. As for the third month, it seemed to have lasted only a fortnight. However, the fourth month came scowling. He no­ticed a kind of glow on the wife’s face that suggested a disagreeable development. But he kept quiet. When, however, he espied the wife spitting indiscriminately, he was perturbed.

“Darling, you can’t possibly be pregnant, can you?”

“Whosai? That’s as impossible as the earthbound crushing the airborne.”

“Thank heavens.”

There were many other things to thank as time went on, includ­ing the fact that no pregnancy could be permanently screened with a basket. It soon became obvious, even to the blind, that Madam was pregnant. Who­dunit?

EFCC Is Nigeria’s Most Corrupt Institution – Prof Nwabueze

*Says Agency’s Lawyers Promote Graft

By Daniel Kanu

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the agency set up to eradicate the cankerworm of corruption in Nigeria, has been described as the most corrupt institution in Nigeria today, a classic case of the hunter becoming the hunted.

Making this assertion in an exclusive interview with The Niche is Professor Ben Nwabueze, Nigeria’s foremost constitutional lawyer and anti-corruption crusader who has called for a social and ethical revolution as the only way to eradicate the malaise.

Nwabueze said President Muhammadu Buhari’s belief that he will win the war against graft with all the probes undertaken by the EFCC will remain a mirage because according to him, “The EFCC is one of the most corrupt institutions in this country.”

The erudite lawyer said those who believe, like Buhari, that the EFCC is the solution to the problem of graft in Nigeria should first find out what happened to all the money recovered from looters or realized from sale of their assets forfeited to the Federal Government.

Told that many Nigerians may not agree with his assertion, Nwabueze countered: “What happened to all the money EFCC claimed to have recovered through plea bargain? You said many people won’t agree with me? Why has Buhari sacked Ibrahim Lamorde, the former EFCC chairman? Have you looked at the report on the sale of assets of former Inspector General of Police Tafa Balogun, and former Governor of Bayelsa State Diepreye Alamieyesegha, forfeited to the Nigerian state?

Buhari Has No Capacity To Govern Nigeria – Nwabueze

*Nwabueze

*Says Jonathan, Obasanjo Promoted Corruption

By Daniel Kanu

Nigeria may not extricate itself from the woes bedeviling it soon because those at the helm of its affairs have no capacity to govern it.

This is the submission of Nigeria’s foremost Constitutional lawyer and one of the oldest Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), Professor Ben Nwabueze, in an exclusive interview with The Niche.

The erudite professor of Law said Nigeria may continue to wallow in socio-economic and political wilderness because the man they elected president last year, Muhammadu Buhari, has neither the “academic nor intellectual credentials” to govern the country.

He said the election of Buhari was a big mistake, accusing Nigerians of suffering from amnesia and refusing to learn from the mistake of electing ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo 16 years ago.

In his words: “I said it at the beginning that Buhari does not have what it takes, he does not have the academic and intellectual credentials to rule Nigeria. He just went from School Certificate to the army. Does training in a military academy adequately equip anybody to govern this country, knowing what it takes, what it means to govern Nigeria? Can what you are taught in a military academy without a university background prepare you?”

Will Nigeria Survive Buhari’s Regime?

By Benjamin Obiajulu Aduba

The 9-month span of Mr. Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency is not long enough to pass final judgements on his stewardship but long enough to predict the future of Nigeria. Nigerians should start thinking whether the president has the right temperament to govern a complex country like Nigeria; whether he understands convoluted relationships between the federal government and states, between the government and citizens, between dictatorships and democracies, etc. The country should consider if the president understands the differences in the last sentence; does he have the nuances necessary to maneuver though these intricate relationships; does he have the judgement to implement his understanding; and most importantly, is he capable of carrying the whole country with him

*Buhari

A few examples would illustrate the fear for Nigeria after PMB’s administration. It is reported that last week members of the Department of state Security Services (DSS) invaded Ekiti House of Assembly and kidnapped four legislators who were in the peoples’ house doing peoples’ business (http://metrowatchonline.com/fayoses-criticism-buhari-dss-military-style-invades-ekiti-assembly-abducts-4-lawmakers/) If the report is correct there cannot be any more impunity than this. How can a federal force invade a state legislative body and forcibly remove state law makers? In Nigeria there is defined state boundaries and federal boundaries of authority. Each, sacred and sacrosanct. If some Ekiti legislators violated federal laws, they should be apprehended outside the state legislative building. I am aware that the people of Ekiti like their counterparts in Anambra have well-educated and bold citizenry who publicly express their views no matter the circumstances but that does not give DSS any right to violet the protection that their membership in the state legislature provides them. They are immune from harassment inside the building doing state duties. Anambra and Ekiti stand as the last bulwark against dictatorship from federal authorities. Anambra stood against Obasanjo’s regime just as Ekiti is standing against PMB’s.

If the alleged incidence in Ekiti is not frightening enough, consider the reported interview that Mr. President gave to Al Jazeera television. It was reported as follows

Responding to question about how he plans to deal with the issue of Biafra, Buhari said, Biafra quest is a joke he added “At least two millions Nigerians were killed in the Biafra war. And for somebody to wake up, may be they weren’t born. Looking for Biafra after two millions people were killed, they are joking with the security and Nigeria won’t tolerate Biafra.”

Beyond Ese Oruru: Naming And Shaming The Kidnap-And-Convert Villains

By Moses E. Ochonu

A quick proclamation by way of introduction: Ese Oruru, Patience Paul, and their parents are not the villains of the kidnapping and conversion of underage Christian girls in Northern Nigeria. Blaming the victim is a form of re-victimization, an exculpatory gimmick employed by those who, for reasons known only to themselves, do not want to confront or unequivocally condemn an egregious crime.

*Ese Oruru: After her traumatic experience 

More instances of abduction, forced conversion and in some cases forced marriage of underage Christian girls have now come to light since the resolution of the Ese Oruru and Patience Paul cases. Ese’s case has opened a floodgate. Many cold cases, long-stalled in the labyrinth of law enforcement and legal inaction, are now in the public domain, resurrected by parents as the press and social media have become sensitized to this menace. As of today, there is an unresolved case in Zaria, one case in Zamfara State, and four cases in Bauchi State, the details of the latter appearing in Sunday’s edition of Punch Newspaper with pictures and interviews with parents, law enforcement, and the ubiquitous Sharia Commissions.

There should be no justifying the many wrongs that have been committed against these children and their parents by overzealous religious enforcers who have placed themselves above the legal and law enforcement institutions of the country. Some of these cases, in addition to the crimes of forceful conversion of and sexual assaults on a minor, are clear cases of kidnapping, a heinous offense under our penal code. Even in the case of Yunusa and Ese, clearly a 22 year old (his own father says he is 22) cannot have sexual relations with a 14 year old under Nigerian law. It is statutory rape of a child. A 14 year old is not at the age of sexual, romantic, and marital consent, period; so enough with all the specious mitigations of this egregious crime. Enough with the defensiveness.

Those of us who lived and schooled in the Muslim-majority states of the North know that these incidents have been going on for years. They are not outliers, as some people would want us to believe. Parents and pastors have been crying about these crimes for decades but very few cases actually made it to the national press. Starved of national press attention and without the democratized discursive space of today’s social media, many such cases were never resolved in favor of the children and their parents.

Buhari's Many Failed Promises

*Buhari

By Jim Lawson Moses
When in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari, PMB, won the Presidential election after a keen contest with the then incumbent President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, most Nigerians were happy thinking that the 'messiah' that will take Nigerians from the woods to the 'Promised Land' had come. Many, also jubilated with the firm belief that the ''change'' which he and his Party, the All Progressives Congress, APC, promised Nigerians was certainly going to transform Nigeria.

But with just about 100 days to the end of his first year in office, PMB is still apportioning blames rather than proffering solutions. Rather than shop for those that will help him fix the nation's bleeding economy, President Buhari is busy globetrotting; spending the little resources that Nigeria is left with abroad and returning back home with little or no results for his missions abroad.

I am calling for the humble resignation of Mr. President because of the following obvious reasons:

Failed Promises
During the 2015 presidential electioneering campaigns, PMB, promised to make the Naira equivalent to the United States of America Dollar. With this pronouncement, most of us where happy since our economy is an import dependent one. As at May 29, 2015, when he assumed office, the value of the Naira to the Dollar, in the black market was N195.00 against its current rate of N385.00. As a result of this, cost of almost every commodity in the market has skyrocketed.

How Rich Are The Rich In Nigeria?

By Dan Amor

I think it was John Paul Getty, the American-born British billionaire, philanthropist and heir to oil industry fortune, who quipped, when asked how rich he was, 'No one is really rich if he can count his money.' In Getty's day, anyone with one million British pounds ( or even one million dollars) was rated as 'rich' and anyone with more than five million pounds was 'very rich'. Above that and you were in the 'super rich' category, and when you got above the fifty million pounds level, you rated as a 'can't count'. 

President Buhari and Vice-President Osinbajo 

Nelson Bunker Hunt, who with his brother inherited a fortune even greater than Getty's, was a 'can't count' man before he tried to corner the silver market. Asked by a Senate Committee how much he was worth, he snapped, 'Hell, if I knew that, I wouldn't be worth very much'. In the United States, for many years Forbes Magazine and Fortune, among others, have published lists of the very wealthy which have been eagerly awaited events in a society where wealth is a macho symbol, to be boasted about rather than hidden. In Great Britain, however, wealth is something best not talked about, and it has never been easy to establish authoritatively just who owns what, and what they are worth. Most of the stupendous wealth in Britain as in Nigeria, had been shrouded in secrecy.

Yet, in 1989, the Sunday Times of London broke with tradition by publishing the first real guide to Britain's wealthy, causing a considerable amount of unease among those who hated being on it. In 1990, the Sunday Times repeated the exercise, adding a further 70 names to the list and raising the stake to £70 million. Both the 1989 and 1990 lists which occupied most of one entire colour magazine, have since been widely discussed and copied by the rest of Fleet Street. They have also been used as ammunition by both sides of the Old Britain versus New Britain, quoted on the one hand to show how even in the Thatcher years old money had reinforced its power, and on the other hand, to record the rise and rise of the new rich at the expense of the old in Britain. 

When the Sunday Times published the first list in 1989, the paper commented editorially on its own study, mourning the fact that, after a decade of Thatcherism, old money still dominated and paternalism appeared to be making a comeback. Others, of course, took an entirely different view of the list, expressing astonishment at the amount of new money, at the relative decline of old wealth, and the degree of egalitarianism which had crept in. It generated a debate which still goes on more than two decades after the publication.

Foreign Portfolio Investors Are Plundering Africa

                                                                                                           (pix: mgafrica)

By Farouk Martins Aresa
If you have your own resources like gold, diamond or oil that brings steady income, why gamble for leverage? Businesses have a good reason for using Other People’s Money OPM to establish and split the profit with risk takers on the long run. If the business fails, owner of the business is protected from personal liability and shareholders also absorbed a loss. In case of governments, Africa’s liability multiplies since countries do not fold, even when they defaults on odious loans.

It is well known that the advantage of stocks and bonds as part of financial portfolio has its gain in long-term profits. This is where capitals are raised for most projects with the hope that the project would produce gain for the investors on the long run. The only beneficiaries of short-term trade, acquisition and corporate raiders are funds managers and black knights in hostile take-over. They now descend on African countries, to make quick cash or profit in Nigeria.

Politicians send loot out while our domiciliary foreign cash account gamble in devalued naira. Dollar account and loot cannot enhance local development. Instead of relying on whatever we have by making sure our foreign reserve is not drained by foreign portfolio investors, we place faith on FPI intention. It’s pennywise pound-foolish to stake foreign income as collateral loan.

Unfortunately, each time these foreign portfolio investment fund managers pull their money out of stocks and bonds at a convenient and opportune time, the government of the day is blamed for bad economic policy driving foreign investors away. In the first place, they are not in our countries for local interest and their local partners furnish them inside information on our policies. Foreign ratting agencies look after the interest of their partners, not local beneficiaries.

Foreign portfolio investors have gravitated towards funds manager seeking their interest for maximum profits around the world. While this is a legitimate pursuit to increase shareholders’ return on investment, it devastates poor African countries trying to get on their feet by seeking long-term investments for infrastructures and capital projects. It could be a win-win situation if the foreign investors do not seek short-term gain at the expense of their hosts.

Can Trump Beat Clinton?

*Donald Trump, Hillary and Bill Clinton (pix:abc)

After all of the ink and pixels spilled on 2016 election coverage, Super Tuesday confirmed what the polls have been telling us for months: We are headed for a clash of the titans between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. 

And if the numbers hold true again, it appears Trump will have an uphill, though not insurmountable, climb to best Clinton, and there’s a chance he could wind up one of the biggest losers in presidential history. Or become President Trump. 

Nobody thought he could win the Republican nomination either, and he might just be getting warmed up. 

“I haven’t even started with her,” the mogul said of Clinton in the last GOP debate. So what might it look like when he does and the Trump-branded wrecking ball hits the Democratic Party establishment? 
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Ese Oruru Affair: Power Without Responsibility

By Louis Odion, FNGE
Though isolated, the recent budget-padding comedy in Abuja and lately the Ese scandal in Kano invariably underscore one acute elite affliction in contemporary Nigeria: an obsession to exercise power and the unwillingness to bear its responsibility. 

The pathology is what manifests today whenever President Buhari goes about issuing threat to deal ruthlessly with the "budget mafia" believed to have sexed up figures in the 2016 appropriation bill in view of the dust raised at the National Assembly. But a more honest response should have been an acceptance of responsibility ab initio by Mr. president on whose desk the buck stops. 

*Ese Oruru

Apparently following their principal's odd footsteps, ministers have, in turn, made a huge theatre of publicly disowning the numbers ascribed to their respective ministries, departments and agencies as if vetting the figures was not part of their briefs as CEOs of the MDAs to begin with. Health minister, for instance, swore "budget rats" ate up the documents he originally submitted. No one is ready to defend the allocation of N3.87b for capital projects at the Abuja State House Clinic while all the nation's teaching hospitals individually got peanuts. Or why a whopping N576m was earmarked for the construction of the residences of the Vice President's ADC and CSO among other outlandish entries. 

Taken together, the impression thus created is that whereas the government is exhorting the citizens with evangelical fervor to tighten their belts for an exceedingly lean year ahead, its own hierarchs are ironically busy loosening theirs to take more fat in their mid-sections. Not surprising, various conspiracy theories have since been mushrooming around the budget fiasco. Perhaps the most outlandish is the suggestion that the whistle was blown at the Senate by forces sympathetic to the embattled Bukola Saraki as a fight-back over his unfinished business at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. 

If true, that only begs the issue. In case the Buhari handlers don't know, they should be enlightened that the signature the president appended to the document before its presentation to the National Assembly on December 22, 2015 is tantamount to a proof of ownership and, therefore, a provisional claim of responsibility. Much more compelling is the obligation to admit that the seed of the present scandal was inadvertently sown with the inexplicable delay in constituting the federal cabinet last year. 

Hence, the initiative was inadvertently ceded to bureaucrats who, from experience, are hardly any different from buccaneers. In fact, Buhari unwittingly handed them the rope to hang him the very moment he announced in faraway France that civil servants were "the ones doing the real work" while ministers were mere "noise-makers", in response to then growing public apprehension over the delay in raising the federal cabinet. 

Ese's Abduction: Emir Sanusi Has A Case To Answer

By Femi Fani-Kayode

All those that are attempting to distort the narrative about the tragic plight of Miss Ese Oruru are evil and we commit them to God’s judgement. The facts are as follows. She is 14 years old and not 18, and she was abducted from her home. She did not leave her home freely or of her own volition. She was cruelly and wickedly carried away and stolen from her parents, family and loved ones and forcefully taken by complete strangers to a distant land that she had never been before on the other side of the country.

*Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa'adu Abubakar III and Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

This is not a love story about two inseparable young people: it is a story about pedophilia, child abduction, kidnapping, human trafficking, slavery, rape, impunity, wickedness and ritual sex, and Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has a case to answer. That little girl has been raped over and over again and she may well have AIDS, VVF or some other strange sexual disease by now.

Instead of sympathising with her and considering the fact that she may never be the same again in view of the physical and mental torture and trauma that she has suffered over the last few months, some misguided souls and shameless commentators have the temerity to come to social media and say that she was old enough to “get it”, whilst others say that she “loved it” and “wanted it”. I am utterly disgusted and appalled by these sentiments. Where is the humanity of those that speak and think like this? Where is their compassion and where is their soul?

May God judge them and may their own infant daughters be abducted, forcefully Islamised, raped, enslaved and kept against their will as a sex slaves in an Emir’s palace in the same way that Ese was.