Nigeria: APC And PDP In Governance: What Difference?

By Hope Eghagha

It was the late Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi who first tickled my poetic imagination on objects, parts or things that look alike or seem different but indeed are the same. This came in form of a wise saying, that linguistic form which the African skill for imaginative communication had perfected along with proverbs and aphorisms before ‘Westernisms’ caught up with us. I had just been introduced to the play The Gods are not to Blame as a sophomore at the University of Jos. A character posed the question to the unfortunate King Odewale and his wife Ojuola: what is the difference between the right ear of a horse and the left one? No difference, I dare say. They are similarly shaped and perform the same auditory functions even though they are located on two different sides of the face. 

However, this aphoristic question cannot be applied to dogs and monkeys. For, in spite of the fact that both are animals they are different types of animals. Okot p’Bitek the Ugandan poet wrote in Song of Lawino that the ‘graceful giraffe cannot become a monkey.’ Furthermore, we cannot ask, whether figuratively or otherwise ‘what is the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Beetle car;’ they are both cars but cars in different categories, in terms of pricing, prestige and general construction. If you arrive at Dangote’s office or Mike Adenuga’s residence in a ‘Tortoise car’, the security men would not bother to entertain enquiries from you. Just drive home and return in a Mercedes 600 car and watch the difference! I remember once when a young man asserted ‘all women are the same’ and another man countered ‘all women are not the same; my mother is not a prostitute.’ Hehehehehe!

Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' Among 12 Greatest Books Ever Written – Encyclopedia Britannica

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 The Greatest Books Ever Written, According To Encyclopedia Britannica

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By John Pecoraro

 Top of Form

Bottom of Form

*Chinua Achebe 

Everybody has an opinion on the best books to read. There are hundreds of lists online of the 10 best books to read, or the 25 books everyone should read, or the 100 books you need to read before you die. But if you’re looking for a dozen great novels, look no further than the list of the Greatest Books Ever Written on the website of the “Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy is the tragic story of Anna Karenina, a married noblewoman and socialite, and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. Called by Dostoyevsky “flawless as a work of art,” the novel explores several topics, including politics, religion, morality, gender and social class.

President Buhari’s Naked Self-Interest

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It was not really unexpected that President Muhammadu Buhari would hinge his bid to return to office on patriotism. It is the way of all politicians. They are not tired of striving to mislead us into considering their personal ambitions as goals that are inextricably tied to our collective good. Thus, Buhari wants us to see him as a good patriot who is only responding to the call of his people to serve again.

*President Buhari

But it is clear to those of us who are far from the madding Buhari chorus that he is propelled by naked self-interest. Before the leaders of his political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), Buhari rhapsodised about how much the people who are appreciative of his service to them want him back. But he should have gone further to provide the specific areas in which the citizens have benefited from his government.

Nigeria: When Individuals Are Stronger Than State Institutions

By Adewale Kupoluyi

William Easterly is a Professor of Economics at the New York University, who in a 2006 publication: The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Harm and So Little Good, enunciated that fragile states are plagued by two factors, namely: political identity fragmentation and weak national institutions in their development.

According to him, states with poor institutions have negative effects on growth and public policy implementation.

Relying on this line of argument, what any serious democracy should strive for should be the state whereby institutions are stronger than individuals or persons, no matter how powerful. What usually transpires in the Nigerian public affairs tends to suggest otherwise. 

Nigeria And The Silent Majority

By Simon Abah

The founder of this newspaper refused to be silent in the face of governmental-wrong, even when a despot thought it best to cashier him on the long questing route for peace. In spite of his exit to the land of permanent silence years after, his newsprint has maintained its streak of excellence, it publishes well researched materials and avoids sycophantic news reporting, is wholly and strictly without fail, a national paper which approbates to no region or individuals.

I wish Nigerians aren’t known for silence in the face of wrong and tackle governmental persons for accountability, for nationalism. If this were the case, the politicians from the regions where these herdsmen come from would have been pushed into taking action with governments to end the barbarity, after all cattle rearing, established as a thriving economy for herdsmen with a substantial workforce, servicing the whole country wouldn’t be considered positive if brigands go about killing people in whatever guise. 

Nigeria: Boko Haram Needs No Amnesty

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It was President Muhammadu Buhari’s veiled sympathy for Boko Haram that found expression in his slouching through the murky water of proposing to dialogue with the murderous bandits. This having failed to resonate with the citizens, the government is flailing toward the option of granting amnesty to Boko Haram members. But neither dialogue nor amnesty is the appropriate response to Boko Haram now. The government is propelled onto the path of offering amnesty because it has reached its wits’ end as regards the insurgents. It is now confronted with the stark futility of its triumphalism over what it dubbed a technical defeat of the killers.

Instead of contemplating amnesty, the government should declare that it has been defeated by Boko Haram, technically or otherwise. A follow-up to such a declaration is that the government should award the contract for a fight against Boko Haram to contractors to prosecute. Such contractors should be foreigners. For, we need our doubts to be cleared about the invincibility or otherwise of Boko Haram through foreigners who do not sympathise with them fighting them. A complicity of events since the emergence of Buhari as the president has rendered it difficult for us not to align with the suspicion that Boko Haram enjoys official sympathy. Or was it not state sympathy that would make Boko Haram to invade Dapchi in a convoy of trucks, abduct 110 schoolgirls and return them in the same manner without any obstruction from security operatives and other citizens?

Abacha Loot: Matters Miscellany

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

I got a credible information last week from some grapevines in Abuja that the much-talked about outstanding sum of $322 million (not $321 million as has been widely reported) stashed away in some secret accounts by former military dictator, the late General Sani Abacha, in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland, routinely referred to as Abacha loot, has been repatriated and it is sitting pretty in a dedicated account in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

This calls for pomp and ceremony, especially by the office of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami (SAN), which had committed to ensure that the loot was repatriated, regardless of the shenanigans and blackmail from within and outside some official quarters in Nigeria. 

*Late Gen Abacha

 A powerful Nigerian delegation, led by Malami and comprising a team of Nigerian law firm of Oladipo Okpeseyi and Co., had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Swiss Federal Council and the World Bank on December 7, 2017 for the repatriation of the loot, composed of $250 million traced to Liechtenstein and $72 million traced to Luxembourg, which was confiscated by the Court of Switzerland. 

President Buhari And The Irresistible Allures Of Lagos!

By Olugbenga David

On Thursday, after commissioning a bus stop - Ghana will in May, commission their new and futuristic Kotoka International Airport - in paralysed Lagos, President Buhari went to the main event that brought him to Lagos, the Bola Tinubu Day, which has now been surreptitiously made into a national holiday.

 

*President Buhari, Bola Tinubu, Oluremi
Tinubu, during Buhari's visit to Lagos

And while Mr. President was attending events to mark this birthday, the Army was burying 11 soldiers in a very lowkey funeral in Kaduna. The soldiers were killed at Birnin Gwari, Kaduna State, several days earlier, reportedly by late Buharin Daji’s murderous bandit group.

This was the same day also, that dozens were killed, for the umpteenth time, in Zamfara, said to be by the same Buharin Daji’s murderous group. But the President did not care to even ask for a minute’s silence in honour of the murdered soldiers. Nor silence in honour of the poor peasants killed. He only had time and words of praise for the Jagaban Borgu, whose electoral value is suddenly attractive, valuable and desirable to the President. After all, 2019 elections are here, and John Odigie-Oyegun has no electoral value in the new turn of events and scheme of things. So the Jagaban must be vigorously courted, and be properly romanced.

Nigeria: Leah Sharibu On My Mind

By Mazi Ohuabunwa

I was feeling low last week and began wandering what was weighing me down. Yes my mother, Madam Mathilda Nwannediya Ohuabunwa, who recently finished her race on the Earth will be laid to rest this week’s Friday, 6th of April 2018 in my home town- Arochukwu in Abia State. So it was natural to feel that was my problem. But I shook that thinking away because since our mother got called back to The Lord, my siblings and I had maintained an attitude of gratitude. After what our mother went through to raise 12 children (seven boys from her womb and five other children from the womb of her mate) and lived to the ripe age of 90, we felt God had done so well for her and for us. And having come to that conclusion, we have remained upbeat as we prepared for her interment.

*Leah Sharibu

Later, it dawned on me that my mood was caused by the pain that I have had in my heart even before we heard of the dramatic release of the girls abducted by Boko Haram from the Science & Technical Secondary School in Dapchi, Yobe State. Actually the pain started on February 19, when the men of Boko Haram marched unchallenged to abduct our school girls the same way, they abducted the Chibok girls in 2014. One would have expected that my pain would ease with the news of the release of 104 or 105 or 106 of the girls (as the total number has kept changing from 110 to 112 to 113).

Nigeria: Treading The Road To Rwanda

By Brady Nwosu

History is replete with nations that fought wars, survived and came out stronger, but nations that are at war with themselves hardly survive or come out stronger. The so-called Nigerian civil war was rather an invasion of the Eastern Region. Every civil war, in fact all fought wars thereafter, go with lessons and a cause never to repeat itself. But it was not a civil war because there was no spread of ill experiences, except in the conquered enclave. While the people dwelling in rest of Nigeria were going about their normal live, banks and other utility institutions were actively functioning, age grades overlapped their delayed mates in the invasive eastern conquest.

*Buhari 

Today, Nigeria is at war with itself; pushing itself to negative entropy. It is at the precipice and could fall apart sooner than predicted. Nigeria is described in the Failed Index State as extremely fragile. By extreme fragility, they mean, when a country is unable to supervise its territorial areas.

Nigeria: Time To Rework APC

By Alabi Williams

The fortunes of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have plummeted seriously since the party won the 2015 presidential election. The party had drifted aimlessly for three years, and some of us waited for the time someone will halt the drift.

*APC leaders: President Buhari and
Bola Tinubu

 That nearly happened last week, when President Buhari, as the foremost leader of the party told his party men to take another look at the contentious tenure elongation that was gratuitously handed to the John Odigie-Oyegun-led national executive, as well as others in the states and local governments.

On February 27, at the end of its National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, the party, without due consultations suddenly extended the tenure of its National Working Committee (NWC), by one year. 

Rape And The Nigerian Condition

By Promise Adiele

A first glance at the title of Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock immediately rouses the sensibilities to his deployment of the word ‘rape’. Although the mind instantly acquires a sexual cognition of ‘rape’, Pope’s use of it connotes entirely different meaning in the context of the poem. For Pope, ‘rape’ means to take away or remove something from its original place thereby depriving the owner of its importance and service. Indeed, this appears remote from ‘rape’ which describes the forceful initiation of sex without the consent of one of the persons involved. 

Before we begin to scrutinize rape, let us establish that the symbolic ethos of any society is essentially composed in its moral order by which the conduct of members is regulated. A breakdown of moral order in any society through rape signifies a dislocation of cosmic harmony and therefore requires propitiation, sometimes punitive; in order to salvage humanity’s doomed fate before chthonic gods. Rape is an undesirable, anti-social act which must be consistently repudiated and abhorred. I do not know of any religion, culture or creed that condones rape. Whether as an act of sexual perversion or an act of stealing, rape today – like all other social vulgarity – stands trial in the court of public opinion.

Winnie Mandela Dies At 81

Mrs. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and wife of the late former South African president, Mr. Nelson Mandela, is dead. She was 81.  

Her PA‚ Zodwa Zwane‚ confirmed the ant- apartheid struggle veteran’s death on Monday afternoon. She said the family would issue a statement later in the day.

Born in Bizana in the Eastern Cape in 1936‚ Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela-Mandela moved to Johannesburg to study social work after matriculating.

She met lawyer and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela in 1957 and they were married a year later.

President Buhari Can’t Fight Corruption, He Is A Direct Beneficiary Of Corruption Freebies — PDP

Press Statement

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) says President Muhammadu Buhari has no moral rectitude to fight corruption being a direct beneficiary of the corruption freebies deployed by his party leaders to fund his 2015 presidential campaign.

*President Buhari 

The party said the President who declared that he had no resources to run a presidential campaign in 2015 ought to have known, particularly as a leader, that the billions of naira deployed for his campaigns were proceeds of corrupt activities of known All Progressives Congress (APC) governors and leaders.

The party further challenged Buhari to make open the sources of fund available to his campaign in the 2003, 2007 and 2011 race as well as the names of the donors.

The Petroleum Industry Governance Bill (PIGB) – A Watered-down version of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB)

By Idowu Oyebanjo

The 8th Senate has passed the PIGB which, when assented to by the President, will give birth to a new era for the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria. Most of the countries that established National Oil Companies as did Nigeria have actually developed their Petroleum Industries to benefit their citizens and nations especially in making electricity available as a free commodity which in my opinion can also be implemented in Nigeria.

*Buhari: President and Petroleum Minister 

After several years of attempts to reform the oil and gas industry in Nigeria, the watered-down version of the original Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) may be on its way for Presidential assent with a 5% levy on fuel sold or distributed in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s Arrested Development And Bill Gates Wake-Up Call

By Magnus Onyibe

By now, most Nigerians would be familiar with Bill Gate’s incisive perspective on Nigeria’s development because his speech to the National Economic Council has gone viral. So there is no need repeating the fact that he identified health and education as sectors that Nigerian policy makers have to rejig in the Economic Recovery Growth Plan, ERGP to enable the full realization of our country’s potentials. This is because he noticed that even if the ERGP boasts of being focused on Nigerian people via investment in healthcare and education which are the critical elements of human development, attention seem to be skewed in favor of physical infrastructure to the detriment of sustainable human development from birth.

*Bill Gates

According to Gates, for real development that would make reasonable impact on the polity to take place, both human and physical infrastructure have to be developed pari pasu.

To me, Gates’ perspective is a pretty straight forward analogy of the prospects and impediments to Nigeria’s much anticipated lift off from the poverty trap. But such positive optics of Gates presentation is not shared by Nasir El Rufai who was part of the audience at the forum. He faulted Gates’ presentation and offered a counter view which is that the ERGP is a great document as it is. He is of the view that it only needs to be adopted at the state level for the vision behind it to be accomplished.

That Danjuma’s Significant Outburst

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

We mean to hold our own.  I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, said the indefatigable Prime Minister of Britain during World War 11, Winston Churchill, in 1942. But unfortunately, that was what he was compelled to do as recounted by Peter Clarke in his book titled: The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. In a rave review of the book, Allan Massie surmised that Churchill rightly dominated the book as he was shown, warts and all, from the drawing on the diaries of Alan Alanbooke and Sir Alec Cadogan, as infuriating, often boring, sometimes wandering, arriving at meetings without having read his briefing papers, often unrealistic in his demands, hell to work with.

*Gen Danjuma

Curiously, the more Churchill’s weaknesses were exposed, the more splendid he seemed. According to Massie, If at times Alanbrooke and others wondered how they could win the war with him, they all knew it would have been impossible without him.  To be sure, Churchill, soldier, writer and politician, was one of Britain’s greatest heroes, particularly remembered for his indomitable spirit while leading Great Britain to victory in World War 11.  Churchill wrote his war memoirs and titled the last volume: Triumph and Tragedy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 among other great accomplishments.

Nigeria: So Much Anger In The Land!

By Robert Obioha

There is anger in the land. Nigerians are not happy. They are fuming with anger and despair over failed electoral promises of the ruling party.  They are angry over their miserable living conditions. They are angry over the continuous rape of the country by her unfaithful political leaders. There is no mistake about it. Every Tom, Dick and Harry are bitter about the excruciating Nigerian condition. Even children are not excluded.

*President Buhari

The Nigerian condition is fast becoming beyond prayers and redemption. It has defied all logic and solutions including dry fasting and intercessory incantations. It can be easily felt from the north to the south and from the east to the west. Everybody in Nigeria is angry over the general insecurity in the country dubbed the giant of Africa. Apart from the menace of the Boko Haram insurgents in the North-east and other isolated places, the murderous campaign of Fulani herdsmen across the country has caused much pain and anguish in the land to the extent that a former Defence Chief, Lt. Gen. Theophilus Danjuma (retd), has urged victims of such mindless attacks to defend themselves. 

President Buhari, Danjuma And Looming Anarchy

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Like medieval potentates who fiddled around while their empires were in the grip of mortal perils, President Muhammadu Buhari has since lost the capacity to resolve for us the question of whether our nation is on the brink of anarchy.  

This is because Buhari and his officials are stuck in a reality that does not reflect the pains of the people.

*Buhari and Danjuma 

In other words, if the country staves off a post-Gaddafi Libya-like anarchy and it remains one after the tenure of Buhari, the credit should go to the forbearance and prescience of those who are outside his government. 

During the recession that the government claims to have overcome through its deft economic management, it amounted to blackmail of the Buhari administration to draw its attention to the reality of the suffering of the masses.

Nigeria: Dapchi Rescue And The Nemesis Of Propaganda

By Israel A. Ebije

Let me congratulate parents of abducted Dapchi secondary school girls recently returned after weeks of adoption. I must congratulate security operatives on their consistent absence when the girls were taken and retuned. Let me also congratulate the federal government on successful hostage negotiation, where millions in alien currencies was allegedly paid and ‘just’ a few Boko Haram militants released in exchange. 

I will not forgive myself if I fail to congratulate those in government allegedly involved in hostage on the ransom racketeering for a booming business venture. Let me also congratulate those who have been able to convince Nigerians that the abduction was staged for publicity stunt ahead of 2019 presidential election. Let me, however, condole with the losers, those whose kids died for “money and politics”. My heartfelt sympathy also goes to Leah Sharibu who is held as slave for her religious belief. Let me indeed sympathize with those who have turned the unfortunate development into a religious and ethnic fight.