Willie Obiano Shines In Governorship Debate

 By Chuks Iloegbunam

 Governor Willie Obiano displayed a sense of purpose all through the debate. He was first asked the nature of the quarrel between him and ex-Governor Peter Obi. He brushed it aside, saying that Mr. Obi was not a candidate in the governorship ballot. His preference was to state his work and his plans for Ndi Anambra. In the course of the debate, the Governor was asked if he could authenticate the story that Mr. Obi had demanded a refund of the N7.5 billion he claimed to have invested in his election. Yes, indeed, the demand had been made but Obiano declined to pay any such money because Anambra was not indebted to anybody on campaign funding. These underscore his clarity of thought on the night.

*Gov Willie Obiano 

The issue of probity was raised. Mr. Oseloka Obaze accused Governor Obiano of selling off dollars “they” had saved for “future generations.” This was the Governor’s masterful response: “First, that’s Anambra’s money. In banking, we call it ‘liquidity management’. You don’t leave an idle fund when you desire to put funds into activities. This guy (Peter Obi) left a debt of N127 billion. Contractors have to be paid. While you are balancing your act, you won’t have money sitting in the bank and you are looking for money to pay contractors. That’s a legitimate transaction. It is not a personal fund. So, in liquidating only $10 million (out of over $100 million) in four years to be able to pay contractors in a recession is good. That’s money management.”

Festus Iyayi And The Violence Of Death: Four Years After

By Dan Amor

Even for the casual observer of the convoluted Nigerian social system, the news of the murder of Professor Festus Iyayi, a University of Benin (UNIBEN) Professor, creative writer and human rights activists, was rudely shocking. The former President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was said to have died on Tuesday November 12, 2013 in an accident involving the convoy of the then Kogi Sate Governor Idris Wada. He was just 66. This was one inexplicable death too many. Four years after and given the fact that this was now the second fatal crash involving Wada’s convoy, the Federal Government is yet to punish the driver of his convoy’s vehicle that hit the bus in which the lecturers were traveling.

*Festus Iyayi 

Like Chima Ubani, another fire-brand activist who was killed in a similar circumstance a few years back, Iyayi was yet another victim of the penchant for the Nigerian State to murder its best and brightest stars. But I write of him today not only as a committed intellectual and activist but also as one of the best literary minds to have emerged in the twentieth century anywhere in the world. For Iyayi, one of Africa’s shining titans in the literary firmament, there is no more intrinsic and indivisible quality of art, no better, no other initiation is there into the craft of creative writing but the most discriminating and appreciative practice of the literature of engagement. The Nigerian politicians’ betrayal of national trust and the general apathy of the citizens provoked a fighting (revolutionary) literature from writers through committed satirization of society with prophetic dimensions.

Reflections On Rotimi Amaechi And Nyesom Wike

By Pius Adesanmi

Yesterday, the convoys of Rotimi Amaechi and Nyesom Wike clashed in Port Harcourt. Today, the airwaves will be flooded by their aides. There will be narratives and counter-narratives. Colourful lies will clash with colorful hyperbole. Aides will be locked in a competition to win public sympathy for their bosses. On all sides, the scramble for the winning story has actually begun.

Amaechi and Wike 

Citizen, let me advise you. Let the aides do what they are paid to do. You have no dog in this fight. It is just two irresponsible Nigerian leaders involved in a street fight. Who is right and who is wrong between Wike and Amaechi is none of your business. Both men are mountains on your back. They are your oppressor. In these tough economic times, do not be misled by aides to waste your precious data taking sides with one man against the other. The only way this applies to you is that you are the grass beneath the feet of the two elephants going at it naked in public.

Do you want to know how you are the grass? Come with me.

Thanks are due to Sahara Reporters for providing photographic slides of the street location of the skirmish in Port Harcourt. They are fighting in dirty, rain-soaked streets. Evidence of horrible drainage abounds in the photos. There is some flooding. Everything looks jaga jaga like the streets of urban Nigeria look whenever the rains come.

Nigeria: APC And Its Rotten Eggs

By Ike Abonyi

“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people, to focus your energies on answers – not excuses.”
– William Arthur Ward

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is desperately searching for the cause of its inability to raise their governance beyond plinth level. 

There is no doubt that the party has been struggling in its administration of the country in the past 20 months. As they try to cover one hole another opens. The fight against corruption which is their biggest strength has been trapped in the intrinsic contradictions in the regime.

The government has been rolling in and out of series of embarrassing scandals even as it tries to hold on to the acclaimed status of being a cleansing government. As the party strives to find its bearings, it has been groping aimlessly trying to look for whom to blame for its failings. For two years, it can hardly cough without calling on the past government. Even when their people face personal domestic problems they try blaming the past administration.

Governor Willie Obiano’s Staying Power

 By Chuks Iloegbunam

 The electioneering campaigns in Anambra State are grounding to a halt, making way for the governorship ballot of November 18, 2017. It is necessary to review the road since travelled, and project on expected outcomes. For those with an ear to the ground, the campaigns unofficially started when, a year after he got into office, Governor Obiano made it clear that he was not interested in being anyone’s stooge.

*Gov Obiano

Now everything is coming to a dazzling conclusion. The campaign convoys are backing out of streets and squares and veering into parking lots. Loudhailers are coming unstuck from sundry lips, stopping the torrents of flowery promises. Those that have screamed their vocal cords sore can now race to “chemist” shops for lozenges. Branded T-shirts and ankara wrappers will thenceforth constitute little other than fashion statements and bed sheets.

Nigeria: Who Are The Civil War Victims?

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No one who is actuated by a keen sense of justice and patriotism that is hallmarked by a desire that the nation’s cohesion remains inviolable would inveigh against efforts to give the people of the south-eastern part of the country the assurance that there is no deliberate state policy to consign them to a benighted realm of the polity. There is the overarching need for such an assurance since 47 years after the three years of the civil war that inflicted monumental catastrophes on their lives and property, they are still chafing under a sense of alienation. There is a constant reminder of this exclusion by the fact of their being the only people who make up the so-called tripod in the country who are yet to produce the nation’s president.

Thus, what we witness when the Federal Government moves in the direction of breaking this exclusion is a cascade of plaudits from different parts of the country. This was why when in 2000 the then President Olusegun Obasanjo commuted to retirement the dismissal of the military personnel who fought on the side of Biafra, he was commended. Similarly, the decision by the President Muhammadu Buhari government to pay the entitlements of former Biafran police officers has been justifiably applauded. And this is why the government’s further demonstration of its magnanimity by announcing its decision to pay the victims of the civil war N50 billion and deploy N38 billion for the evacuation of abandoned bombs and construction has equally elicited approval from the citizens.

Is Nigeria Heading For Food Riots?

By Steve Onyeiwu

Nigeria is no stranger to riots and demonstrations. From the days of “Ali Must Go” in the late 1970s, the SAP riots in 1989, the June 12, 1993 protests and the perennial outbursts by the various militant groups in Nigeria, the country appears to have become accustomed to riots. While the Nigerian state has managed to weather these storms, the country can ill-afford food riots. As the saying goes, a hungry man is an angry man. Nigerians are already very angry about the high level of corruption in the country, the ongoing recession, the lack of inclusive growth, the high unemployment rate, chronic poverty, infrastructural decay and the lack of economic opportunities. For many Nigerians, a persistent increase in food prices would be the last straw that would jolt them into food riots.

(pix: WB)

Professor Yemi Osinbajo, Nigeria’s Vice President, understood the severity of the problem when he established a Presidential Task Force last February to address the problem of escalating food prices. But long-term solutions require much more than the mere setting up of a task force. Some of those solutions will be discussed later in this article.

President Buhari's Alleged Northernization Policy

By Reuben Abati

Perhaps the biggest news this week so far, has been the attempt by the Presidency to debunk the allegation that President Muhammadu Buhari has been kinder to Northerners and Muslims in the recruitment of persons into his administration. The published list, itself a response to an earlier indictment by the BusinessDay newspaper, has been dismissed as incomplete, selective and misleading but all of that draws attention to a crisis at the heart of Nigerian politics, nay African politics. Matthew Hassan Kukah once described this in our context as “the-myonisation-of-power”.

That is when a Nigerian from a particular part of the country becomes President, his people including his kinsmen and his friends and associates from his community and other parts of Nigeria see his ascendance as their own opportunity to have a taste of the national cake. They fight over the proverbial cake. Invariably, they benefit from what is called the politics of proximity. They get appointed to the best positions. They gain better access to the seat and the man of power than everyone else. Nigeria is not alone in this regard.

The same politics plays out in other African countries. In Kenya, John Githongo, their once-upon-a-time anti-corruption czar, in a book on him, the author, Michela Wrong complains that what prevails in Kenyan politics is the syndrome of “it-is-our-turn-to-eat.” In that country, the emergent politics is not even just about what to eat, it is about ego, elite contestation, dynastic rivalry and power. Wrong is right in many ways. That drama has been played out in the recent elections in Kenya but here in Nigeria, we have also been dealing with the same crisis since independence.

Fulani Herdsmen: Grim Statistics Of Their Bloody Exploits

By Dan Agbese

You probably thought it could not get more unsettling. You were wrong.

Here is some evidence. Former head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, addressed a one-day forum organised by a group known as the Search for Common Ground on his farm October 30. In it, he released some grim statistics about the killings and maiming in clashes between Fulani herdsmen and peasant farmers in four states – Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna and Benue – in just one year. These figures are certain to chill your bones and make your eyes go rheumy for the present and the future of our country.

Here are the details he gave for 2016 only: 2,500 people killed; 62,000 people displaced; $13.7 billion lost to the clashes and 47 per cent of the internally-generated revenue in the affected states lost. 

The problem with statistics is that when they are about human beings, you cannot put faces to them. Human beings are thus reduced to stark, impersonal numbers. The death of 2,500 Nigerians and the displacement of 62,000 others may do no more than give you a momentary jolt only for you to shrug it off. You are not likely to think of them as struggling Nigerians in our rural areas who were doing nothing criminal but pursuing their legitimate livelihood as peasant farmers who fed the nation.

The Slaves Of Nigeria

By Femi Fani-Kayode

Many years ago​,​ ​the irrepressible Hausa leader who hailed from Kano and who was the founder of the radical leftist political party called NEPU, Mallam Aminu Kano, said,​ ​“Until the Fulani Emirs are toppled northern Nigeria will not know peace”.

*Femi Fani-Kayode 

History has proved him right. The feudal structure of the north and its deeply conservative ethos has resulted in nothing but retrogression, poverty, disease, radical Islam, terror and killer herdsmen.

Yet the problem goes much further than the north: it extends to the whole of Nigeria. Worse still it has affected the psyche of the Nigerian people and left them with a very low self-esteem.

We have become victims and casualties of our modern history and little more than miserable serfs in a Fulani-controlled artificial, man-made vassal state which deems non-Fulanis as nothing more than the biblical “hewers of the wood” and “drawers of the water”.

In our very own eyes we are nothing and in our hearts we believe that the Fulani are everything. We bow and tremble before them, we jump when they sneeze or express their displeasure and we smile and commend them when they commit all manner of abominable atrocities and slaughter.

Mainagate: Is President Buhari Still Mr. Integrity

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

The video on Channels Television was dramatic.

The event was the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on Wednesday and the dramatis personae were the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, who obviously was the arbiter, but never uttered a word, even as he listened with rapt attention, the embattled Head of Service (HoS), Mrs. Winifred Oyo-Ita, who was the most agitated, the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari, whose action(s) or inaction seemed to be the reason for the testy tango, and the National Security Adviser (NSA), Major General Babagana Monguno (retd).

*President Buhari 

It was a full house of ministers and other top government officials including the leadership of both the National Assembly and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), and military top brass, who were waiting for the arrival of President Muhammadu Buhari for the commencement of the meeting.

The audio quality of the video was poor and nobody could hear what was being said but the facial expressions, gesticulations and general body language of all the actors said it all. When Mrs. Oyo-Ita could no longer take the heat, she walked off in a huff, back to her seat, still seething.

Buhari: Corruption Enabler And Defender

By Moses E. Ochonu

Buharists are always asking us to applaud the president for every little tokenistic and symbolic gesture even when such a gesture is late, ineffectual, and compelled by public pressure. It's a form of emotional blackmail of course, but no matter. Let us humor them.

*President Buhari, wife Aisha, surrounded by
family and friends, during his birthday party  

Because of its track record of deception, lies, overwrought propaganda, hypocrisy, and duplicity, many thoughtful citizens are now understandably hesitant to praise the Buhari administration even when it appears to have done something praiseworthy. This is proving irksome to Buhari’s hardcore loyalists. But why are Nigerians who are notoriously politically easy to please reluctant to extent praise to Buhari? It is because they don't want to look stupid days or hours later when the leaks and revelations start occurring, implicating the do-gooders themselves as the culprits of the very problem they were pretending to solve.

On several occasions, some Nigerians have praised the president prematurely for taking a particular action only to look foolish a few days or even hours later when it emerged that the wrong that the president was being praised for righting was caused by him in the first place. These Nigerians realized that the president and his propagandists had manipulated them. 

President Muhammadu Buhari And His Unfaithful Mistress

By Dare Babarinsa

Absolute power loves to come in the benign habiliment of profound understatement. When General Yakubu Gowon came to power after the coup of July 29, 1966, he was called the Supreme Commander and Head of the Federal Military Government. Yet his supremacy was heavily contested and the military government was deeply divided. Then the soldiers went to Ghana under the auspices of the new military ruler of that country and they met in Aburi. From that point on, Gowon took on the title of Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces. Yet with this new sober title, Gowon wielded more powers than hitherto.

*President Buhari 

When he came to power in succession to General J.T.U Aguiyi-Ironsi, the new Gowon was talking of handing over power to an elected regime by 1971. Then the Civil War intervened and the assignment of nation building came in earnest. After the war, Gowon wore his powers with outward lavishness. We all love his regular movement to the airport, with the white uniform outriders displaying the arts and science of acrobatic motorcycling. The pomp and pageantry of power appealed to our youthful sense. Gowon was young, breathtakingly handsome and power becomes him like a natural accouterment. He too fell in love with power, its dizzying scent, its allure and its tantalizing romance.

President Buhari’s Corruption War

By Ike Abonyi

“If you love your country, you must be willing to defend it from fraud, bigotry, and recklessness even from a President”

– DaShanne Stokes

*President Buhari 

At a conversation over a curtail in May 2016 by three prominent British citizens, the then Prime Minister David Cameron, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Speaker of the British Parliament, John Bercow at the Buckingham Palace to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth, Nigeria was the topic and the issue was a scheduled corruption summit in United Kingdom.

The PM said: “We have some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain… Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the World.”

But the Archbishop intervened to say: “But this particular President in Nigeria is not corrupt… he is trying very hard.”

The speaker typical of a watchdog to government simply said: “They are coming at their own expense, one assumes?”

If that set up is to repeat itself today, the PM would be standing on the same position and would be right, but the Archbishop certainly would not provide same defence he did 17 months ago given the myriads of corruption scandals around the President and his henchmen.

No Cure For Yakubu Gowon Fever

By Tony Iwuoma

Former head of state, Yakubu Gowon, was gifted with opportunity for atonement when he recently appeared on AIT’s People, Politics and Power programme. Unfortunately, the man, who wanted to ‘go on with one Nigeria’ (Gowon), flunked the grace of history.

*Gowon

Perhaps, the greatest take-away was Gowon’s inadvertent exoneration of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. He had actually set out to vilify the venerable Biafra leader by heaping inordinate falsehood on the dead, who can no longer defend himself. Gowon claimed he went to Ghana for the famed Aburi Accord unprepared. That, according to him, accounted for why highly cerebral Ojukwu bamboozled all of them and wringed the concessions he got. He added that secession was not on the card in Ghana and, of course, it couldn’t have been. It was not on Ojukwu’s agenda either. However, secession crept into the matter when the pogrom against the Igbo in the North continued unabated and Gowon, admittedly, could not halt it. According to Gowon and rightly so, the Igbo saw Biafra as the only hope for safety and freedom.

Gen Yakubu Gowon Should Think Again

By Amanze Obi

It does appear that General Yakubu Gowon, the man who became Nigeria’s Head of State under very controversial circumstances, is weighed down by a certain hangover. He still thinks that the only way a country can be ruled is by diktat. He is yet to come to terms with the fact that power, in a democratic setting such as ours, must flow through popular consent. More than 40 years after he was booted out of office, Gowon still wishes for a static Nigeria, where the old order must continue to hold sway.

*Gowon

When, the other time, some secessionist groups gave Nigeria cause to worry about its unity, Gowon clearly went livid. He made nostalgic references to the Nigeria he fought to keep together. He was afraid that the trophy he took home some four decades ago was about to be snatched away from him. Many clearly understand the passions of the likes of Gowon over one Nigeria. He considers Nigeria’s unity as his life-time legacy. He does not want it to be toyed or tinkered with.

Why Buhari Should Recontest In 2019

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is only those who are unfamiliar with the politics of mutual backslapping in these climes who are surprised by the verdict of the governors of the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). At the meeting of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in Abuja on Tuesday, the governors declared President Muhammadu Buhari fit to recontest for presidency in 2019. The governors strove to justify their decision. Buhari has done very well in the past two and half years and thus he needs to be rewarded with another fours years, so their argument goes. To them, no other person in the APC possesses so sterling credentials that conduce to the unity of the party and the country and the wellbeing of its citizens as Buhari.

*President Buhari and Zimbabwean
President Robert Mugabe

But for now, the NEC does not share the enthusiasm of the governors. Thus, the governors were not able to convince the NEC to give automatic ticket to Buhari to recontest. However, it is unlikely that the NEC would deny Buhari an automatic ticket at the right time; the governors were just the first to declare their position. It is clear to the citizens that these governors have only flattered the president for various selfish reasons. Of course, the governors are aware of the power of incumbency that could be used to hunt them if they were opposed to the ambition of the president to recontest. Most of these governors have not conducted their financial affairs in a manner that could make them different from those the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has hung charges of corruption on. Again, most of the governors rode to power in 2015 on the back of the popularity of Buhari. Thus, the calculation of the governors is that once Buhari recontests, they are likely to return to power. 

Fayose Wants Army To Shift Attention To Fulani Herdsmen Menace

The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, has called on the military to direct its Operations Python Dance and Crocodile Smile to those areas in Nigeria, especially the North Central States of Benue, Plateau as well as North East States like Taraba and Adamawa where Fulani herdsmen are killings Nigerians and destroying farmlands worth several billions of naira.

The governor who described the reported threat by Miyeitti Allah Kautal Hore, a splinter group of Miyeitti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, over the Benue State Anti-Open Grazing Law as reckless and open threat against the sovereignty of Nigeria added that the silence of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government over the Fulani herdsmen menace was a sign of complicity on the part of the federal government.

In a statement in Ado Ekiti on Monday, by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Governor Fayose said: “If the Federal Government does not want to be seen as protecting the Fulani herdsmen, attention of the Army’s python that is dancing in the Southeast and crocodile that is smiling in the Southwest and South South should be focused on the killer herdsmen.”

Anambra: APC’s Farcical Campaign Flag-Off!

By Chuks Iloegbunam

 Salvation was to befall Ndigbo! So went the media hype. Salvation’s landfall was slated for Onitsha. And once it set down, every Anambra indigene would be happy ever after. It was the APC campaign flag off for the November 18 gubernatorial ballot. Appropriately, the conveyor of the balm to turn Anambra from ill to glory was the Gombe-born Ibrahim Jalo-Waziri, APC’s Youth Leader. Given his eminence, therefore, it was with a swagger that Alhaji Jalo-Waziri found his way to the podium.

*Anambra Governor, Willie Obiano

 Given again that most of those in attendance were in their teens and twenties – as if they had been corralled from secondary and tertiary institutions – there was rapt attention and immense anticipation. The Youth Leader had hope to deliver. Most of those drowned in mire or shot dead for carrying Biafran flags and seeking self-determination were in the same age bracket as those Jalo-Waziri would address. Perhaps he would explain to them the rationale behind the heavy-handedness. The man cleared his throat. “Vote for APC,” he intoned. “Our victory will connect you to the big contracts of Abuja”!

Mr. President, Under Your Watch Corruption Only Changed Its Tactics And Swagger!

By Ishaq Sani

Dear Mr. President,
Thank you for rewarding our die-hard loyalty with betrayal. Before the 2015 election, those who told us never to believe in you, and described you as nepotistic and tribalistic, and called you an unrepentant fundamentalist have been vindicated. Those who ascribed your 1984 war against indiscipline and corruption fight to Gen. Tunde Idiagbon did not lie.

*President Buhari 

Shortly before the 2015, I likened you with my idol Thomas Sankara, and deified you like the Greek god Apollos, but like the popular cliché “the leopard cannot change the colour of its skin,” you proved our opponents right.

Under your watch the lives of animals appear to be more sacred than the lives of humans; killer herdsmen or better still, unknown gun men, as you would prefer them to be called, are the second most deadly terrorist group in Nigeria and not IPOB as your government tried to establish.