What June 12 Reveals About Nigerian Democracy

By Femi Aribisala

Exactly 25 years ago, a landmark election was held in Nigeria after ten long years of military rule. There were two main contestants: Moshood Abiola of the Social Democratic Party and Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention.  Abiola was from the South-west: Tofa from the North-west.

*Gen Abacha, MKO Abiola, Bola Tinubu (behind Abacha)

 Although the results of the election have never been officially certified, nevertheless, they are well known and readily-accessible.  Abiola won with 8,243,209 votes; while Tofa lost with 5,982,087 votes. 

June 12: Celebration Of Yoruba Triumphalism Or Righting Historical Wrong

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

My “June 12: I Still Remember” article last week elicited, expectedly, diverse responses. The annulment of the election and the consequent turmoil remain very emotive issues. What the responses prove most conclusively is that President Muhammadu Buhari remains a very polarising leader. And he profiteers from that. Sadly. I will come to that shortly.

*MKO Abiola

A quarter of a century after the annulment of that historic poll and 20 years after the death of the winner, Bashorun MKO Abiola, President Buhari sprang a political surprise on many penultimate week by declaring subsequent June 12 anniversaries Democracy Day and honouring Abiola with the highest national award – Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR).

My article, though an endorsement of the president’s action, was issue-specific as captured in the last paragraph which read:

On Biafra And Democracy

By Obi Nwakanma

These are busy times for Nigeria. May is the month of blooms. But in the last couple of weeks, two parallel celebrations came to underscore the fragility of the Nigerian state, and the hollow rituals of its self-annunciation.  First, on May 29, the president like the other presidents before him since the year 2000 when it was initiated by Olusegun Obasanjo, celebrated what it now calls “Democracy Day.”

*Odumegwu-Ojukwu 

I personally think this a truly annoying misnomer because May 29 carries with it, the germ of a profound national tragedy. It was on May 29, 1966 that the Pogrom of Easteners commenced in earnest in Nigeria. On May 29, 1967, General Ojukwu declared the birth of the Sovereign state of Biafra, and announced the excision of the East from the old Federation of Nigeria.

Nigeria: Toxic Request On Anti-Grazing Bill

By Adewale Kupoluyi

Many Nigerians were greatly disturbed by the hasty decision suggesting that anti-grazing bills, as operational in some states in the country, should be repealed. The Minister of Defence, Brig-Gen. Mansur Dan-Ali (rtd), had spear-headed the abrogation move, arguing that laws enacted by states prohibiting open grazing should be suspended. Dan-Ali had called for the suspension of the implementation of anti-grazing laws in some states while instead negotiating safe routes for herders. For the Defence Minister, suspension of the law would reduce tension and restore peace in the country.

The Anti-Open Grazing Law seeks to outlaw open rearing and grazing of livestock and provides for the establishment of ranches and livestock administration, wherever the law is operational. It is currently being used in Benue, Ekiti and Taraba states. Abia is working on the passage of the bill. In Ekiti, the law prohibits open grazing between the hours of 6pm and 7am. In Benue, it enforces an absolute ban on open-grazing throughout the state and in Taraba, there is a proviso that it would be implemented gradually after massive enlightenment and awareness campaigns across the state. The legislation further prohibits movement of livestock and requires livestock owners to ranch them by criminalising free grazing and movement of livestock by foot. The implication of this is that the law seeks to end the age-long practice of nomadism, particularly, among the Fulani herders, whose activities in recent times have heightened violent clashes with farmers in many states across the country.

Gen Obasanjo's Swan Song And Hubris

By Dan Amor

That General Olusegun Obasanjo, the emperor who misruled Nigeria for eight miserable years ( May 29, 1999 - May 29, 2007) recently raised the alarm that President Muhammadu Buhari was plotting to arrest him, shows how transient or ephemeral power can be! But, to paraphrase Frank Arthur Vanderlip, the great American banker and journalist, "Since nothing is settled until it is settled right, no matter how unlimited power a man may have, unless he exercises it fairly and justly, his actions may return to plague him." Yet, how many Nigerians can see Obasanjo's frustrations and arrogant gaffes as plain as a boil on the nose? As an army general, former head of state and an imperial president for eight years, Obasanjo is a tacit representative of the reactionary faction of the Nigerian ruling class - those shameless apostles of feudal revival who want Nigerians to continue in medieval servitude.

*Olusegun Obasanjo 

Obasanjo's recent alarm is Karma at work. The question is: why is Obasanjo still walking about freely in Nigeria in spite of his crime against the people of this country? For almost eight years, he was the petroleum minister who would not brook any nibbling at shouting down anyone who had the courage to challenge him to appoint a substantive minister to man the oil and gas portfolio. The restiveness, acrimony and rancour which had enveloped the Niger Delta were deliberate creations of President Obasanjo, who would continue to stoke the fire while mindlessly looting the booty. Only a demented despot would spend N200,000,000 daily to maintain the presence of Joint Taskforce in the region that produces over 90 per cent of the nation's foreign exchange earnings while fueling agitations and restiveness among the youths.

June 12: President Buhari’s Left Handed Charity…

By Obi Nwakanma

Mr. Muhammadu Buhari, President of Nigeria, announced on Wednesday, that June 12 will now be “Democracy Day.” He went further to award posthumous honours to the presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 elections, Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, with the GCFR, the highest political honour in the land, and his running mate, Babagana Kingibe, the second highest honours, the GCON. To top the gravy, he also honored the late Gani Fawehinmi with the GCON too.

*Buhari 

Quick as the announcement came, there were various reactions. Not unexpectedly, many from the Southwest of Nigeria, particularly the partisans of the APC, began to call Buhari the “new progressive.” Mr. Ahmed Tinubu in fact did gush so much that he came short of describing Buhari as the greatest democrat of Nigeria’s modern history. This is not unexpected, because Buhari’s gesture fits into the logical interest of the APC partisans of Southwestern Nigeria. And I shall return to this. But the president’s gesture was quickly called into question – the legality of it: first from the senate, came a flurry of tongue-in-cheek statements.

Again, Where Is Nnamdi Kanu?

By Obi Nwakanma

Last week, I felt nauseous just watching “our own WS” stand at a podium talking-up the Buhari gesture of naming June 12 “Democracy Day” and awarding the GCFR to the late Moshood Abiola. It was a dog-shit fare clothed in damask. I half hoped that Soyinka would not be part of this hollow ritual; but in the end Soyinka’s presence there served to remind us all that Nigeria is a circus; and the relationship between circus masters, puppeteers, and the circus animals is that they are all there to entertain us. 

*Nnamdi Kanu 

And Nigerians were properly entertained in what I still regard as the hollow ritual of forgetting. Every time, this government and its mind-warpers try to turn us all into amnesiacs, so that we will forget for instance, that Muhammadu Buhari himself was not only a key beneficiary and supporter of the abrogation of June 12, he himself led a military coup that overthrew a properly elected civilian government on the last day of 1983.  Nigeria began to slide radically down the order of things from that very coup. 

If Buhari Apologised For June 12, Who Will Apologise For Him?

By Reno Omokri

To say I was stunned when Asiwaju Bola Tinubu said Buhari had fulfilled his campaign promises and deserved a second term would be an understatement. I mean it is the holy month of Ramadan for goodness sakes. Even if Bola Tinubu wanted to spew such nonsense, why would he do it at a time when the Muslim Ummah should be displaying piety.

*President Buhari 

Even as I write this, I am trying to comprehend why Tinubu made such a fallacious statement. How could he possibly say that Buhari deserves a second term because he has kept his campaign promises? Why do Buhari, Lai Mohammed, Garba shehu and now Tinubu continue to lie during Ramadan? Is ₦1 equal to $1? Is petrol ₦40 per liter? Has he created 3 million jobs per year? Is Buhari paying the promised Job Seekers Allowance?

President Buhari’s Queer Blandishment Of A Kleptocrat

By Ochereome Nnanna

 President Muhammadu Buhari gave hints of how his supporters will enter the upcoming electioneering fray when he met his Buhari support groups in the Presidential Villa on Tuesday last week: it’s going to be a gale of lies all the way. I am not referring to his allegation of $16 dollars spent on power projects “without power”. Figures that have been bandied down the years – from $3billion to $6 billion to $10 billion to $16 billion.

*President Buhari 

This reminds us of how former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor (now the Emir of Kano) Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, had in February 2014 bandied figures as the amount “diverted” by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, instead of being remitted to the Federation Account. He started with $20 billion, brought it down to $10 billion and readjusted it to $12 billion. That is Nigeria for you. Others use figures to inform and educate. We use ours to confuse and promote falsehood. 

Nigeria: June 12: I Still Remember

By Ikechukwu Amaechi
June 12, 2018, was the 25^th anniversary of Nigeria’s historic election, which outcome held out so much promise. How time flies! Who will believe that 25 years have rolled by and yet the June 12, 1993 poll, which by the sheer magic of one man’s transcendental personality almost obliterated the country’s primordial fault lines of religion, ethnicity and prependalism, remains on the front burner. 

Generals Abacha and Babangida 

While some claimed to have stood on June 12 in the days the locusts ate under military jackboots, many dismounted the high horse at the return of civilian rule on May 29, 1999, partly because the primary beneficiary, President Olusegun Obasanjo, worked so hard to ensure that the date and what it represented were consigned to the dustbin of Nigeria’s history. The winner of the election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, had died almost a year before the 1999 polls and most stakeholders had been sucked into the new political tendency.

MKO Abiola Deserves Apology, Not Humour

By Afam Nkemdiche

When I first heard about President Muhammadu Buhari’s surprise posthumous honour to Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the widely acknowledged winner of the 1993 presidential election, my instinctive thought was, “My God! How could he nerve his conscience to do that – he was a principal confidant of the maximum ruler who denied MKO his well deserved mandate, until the mysterious death-in-detention???”

*Abiola 

It cannot be gainsaid, even in fiction, that Buhari was the closest public figure to the Kano-born general in Nigeria’s darkest years. Soon after Abacha sacked Ibrahim Babangida’s contraption (Shonekan’s Interim Government), he decreed that all monies that accrued from petroleum be pooled into a Fund, the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. The humongous size of the envisaged pool qualified the PTF to be immediately referred to as a “parallel government”; even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, had to look to it for funding. Buhari was the first and only executive chairman of the PTF. This was a measure of the unique camaraderie that the duo enjoyed when Nigeria teetered on the brink of disintegration from November 1993 until June 1998 when Abacha suddenly succumbed to death ahead of his detainee. 

Nigeria: President Buhari’s Greek Gifts

By Sunny Awhefeada

June 12th 1993 was a Saturday and it met me in Ughelli.

June is a month of unpredictable rain, but that day was bright; bright and fair.

We trooped out to vote for a new dawn. 

 I was then an impressionable undergraduate of the University of Benin possessed by ideals instilled by youth.

*President Buhari 

The buildup to that day was momentous and exciting. The military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida had embarked on the rigmarole it called transition to civil rule programme.

In the course of that tortuous experience, political parties were formed and disbanded.

Politicians were classified as new breed and old breed and they were banned and unbanned.

Nigeria: June 12: Every Life Matters

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

After the elaborate ceremony of apology and award of honours, it is now time to come to terms with the fact that the greatest tribute has not been paid to the victims of the truncation of the nation’s democratic watershed on June 12, 1993.

*Abiola 

Clearly, there has been in the past 25 years a persistent clamour for restitution for the victims. Every June 12 has witnessed calls for the closure of the sad political trajectory in the nation’s life. President Muhammadu Buhari has apparently heeded these calls. But sadly, Buhari’s action has rather shown the poor premium we place on life in the country. 

Nigeria: Their Tomorrow Will Surely Come!

By Dan Amor

Are Nigerians hopeful of the day after? The collective answer to this rhetorical question is a resounding NO. If Nigerians are no longer hopeful of tomorrow, they deserve pardon. For, never in the history of mankind have a people been so brutalized by the very group of people who are supposed to protect and take care of them. They ought to be pardoned knowing full well that their manifest state of hopelessness has extended beyond disillusionment to a desperate and consuming nihilism. Which is why the only news one hears from Nigeria is soured news: violence, arson, killing, maiming, kidnapping, robbery, corruption, rape.

*Buhari, Obasanjo and Abdusalami

It is sad to note that Nigeria is gradually and steadily degenerating into the abyss. Even in a supposedly democratic dispensation, a sense of freedom, a feeling of an unconditional escape, a readiness for real and absolute change, is still the daydream of the whole citizenry. Everything is in readiness for the unexpected, and the unexpected is not in sight. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we look. We straggle along with far less cohesion than a flock of sheep. We are, in fact, even forced to believe that tomorrow will no longer come. Quite a handful of us are simply robots without souls, as we are hopeless because we are conditioned to a state of collective hopelessness.

Nigeria: Buhari, Saraki And Politics Of Guns

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

While we cannot credit President Muhammadu Buhari with a transformative genius that has redounded to the citizens’ wellbeing, we must not ignore his masterstrokes in self-preservation. What we have been confronted with in the past three years is his craving for self-protection with its trappings of paranoia.

*President Buhari and Senator Saraki

Thus, beyond the need to punish crime no matter the station of life of the allegedly culpable, the alleged linkage of Senate President Bukola Saraki to armed robbers who raided banks and killed over 30 people in Offa, Kwara State seems an extension of the politics of Buhari’s self-survival.

Through his words and actions, Buhari has not concealed his prejudice that it is only from the executive arm of government flows a genuine desire for good governance that would improve the citizens’ lot. Buhari feels trammelled by the legislature and the judiciary. He is riled by the absence of military powers that could enable him to decree life or death in a democratic milieu. This was why he sought emergency powers that the legislature refused to grant him. 

APC’s Recent Congresses: Omen Of Impending Calamity

By Godwin Etakibuebu

At the last count, eight states of the federation have drawn up parallel Executives to counter what some people called “authentic Executives” of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, during the recently concluded congresses. One of the most unbelievable states where this happened is Lagos. That some people, albeit members of the APC in Lagos State, could challenge the supremacy of the de-facto Jagaban of the South-West politics would remain one of the wonders of modern Nigerian political history.

 

Emergence of the parallel Executives in the eight states came with re-introduction of politics of blood-spilling into the Nigerian polity and this is the most unfortunate dimension of the APC debacle. These eight  states of Lagos, Oyo, Ondo, Zamfara, Enugu, Ebonyi, Kwara and Delta, where parallel Executives emerged saw violence. A few people died in some of these states while in others, it was a day of bloodbath; like the case in Ondo State, where notable citizens were grossly humiliated as most of them were stripped naked. This is without mentioning Imo State where Rochas Okorocha, the APC governor, was completely demystified and dethroned by the  machinery of the APC itself.

The Offa Robberies, Political Thuggery And The Near-Death Of Nigerian Democracy

By Kennedy Emetulu

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark and it’s either we clean it up now or we all die from this stench. This is not an alarmist testament; it is real. The killings and findings following the Offa robberies have provided us an opportunity to cleanse the Aegean stables once and for all.

Thirty-three citizens woke up on Thursday, the 5th of April 2018 to go about their lawful businesses, but they were brutally murdered in cold blood by a group of young people in apparent armed robberies involving six banks in Offa, Kwara State. The banks are the First Bank, Ecobank, Guaranty Trust Bank, Zenith Bank, Union Bank and Ibolo Microfinance Bank. Amongst the dead were 9 police officers, pregnant women and other ordinary citizens. The police have arrested some of those behind the killings, including leaders of the gang and they have allegedly been making confessions. I say “allegedly” because whatever they are saying now has not been tested in a court of law.

Nigeria: The Road To Babylon

By Reuben Abati

Nigeria is on the road to Babylon: a place of confusion. Three years ago, the people were convinced that they had found a messiah who will lead them to the Promised Land, and meet all their expectations. 

*Buhari 

Today, everyone is speaking in different tongues; “turning and turning in the widening gyre…the falcon cannot hear the falconer… things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-doomed tide is loosed, and everywhere/the ceremony of innocence is drowned…surely, some revelation is at hand…”

But just may be, there is still, no cause for despair. The good thing about democracy is that it teaches people lessons – ask them in Malaysia and the United States – and even when the people refuse stubbornly to learn – ask them in Syria, Venezuela, and Libya –  the lessons exist nonetheless.

Nigeria: Dirty Buses In Lagos

By Oshineye Victor Oshisada

It is conventional that, whenever we, as Nigerians are confronted with challenges, the usual mantra that is invoked is: “Prayer to God is the solution.” It is believed that “prayer’’, “prayer” and nothing, but “prayer” is the solution to our numerous problems. But, can our resort to “prayer” without pragmatic efforts solve problems? I doubt if it is the panacea for every challenge. Two instances readily come to my mind. 

In the early 1970s, my radio-mechanic assured me that, if he retired into seclusion for prayer, he would successfully accomplish the task of repairs. Instantly, I concluded that he was incompetent and a failure. The second instance was a student who confidently told me that if she prayed on to her bath- water, she would succeed in her examinations. The lazy drone spent hours praying in the bathroom, but failed her examinations. I have it on the authority of the ancient Romans: `Ora et labora`, meaning. “Pray and work”. The Romans did not exhort us to pray, and fail to work. Therefore, actions and not prayers alone can solve our problems. It is against this backdrop that our public utilities are examined.

Buhari And The Petroleum Trust FRAUD

By Ray Ekpu

It is not known to this column how close Brigadier Sani Abacha was to Major General Muhammadu Buhari by December 1983. It was Abacha who announced at the end of a few minutes of martial music on New Year ’s Eve that the government of President Shehu Shagari had been thrown into the dust bin of history. Buhari became the fulcrum of that history as Nigeria’s head of state. On August 27, 1985, there was another game, the Revolving Doors’ game. Buhari was out, thrown out, while Ibrahim Babangida, was in, thrown into the pinnacle of political power in Nigeria.

Babangida clamped Buhari into the dungeon for some months where he cooled his feet, while his colleagues were bestriding the Nigerian political and military firmament like they owned the world. Babangida left or was forced to leave the throne after eight years of dangerous foot work. He called Chief Ernest Shonekan, a successful private sector entrepreneur, to come and take the baton of leadership.