Nigeria: Only Fools Die For Looters!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

A chapter in my new book, “NIGERIA: Why Looting May Not Stop” (which will be in bookstores in Lagos next week) is entitled, ‘Dying For Looters.’

Tomorrow (Feb 16, 2019) is the presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria. One very sad, painful truth is that there are some fellows who call themselves “party supporters” who may not live to see the end of the voting exercise tomorrow or hear the results declared. 

Buhari Not Wanted On This Journey

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Until after the election of Saturday, we are denied the prescience to tabulate its winner and losers and thus the nation’s president in the next four years. Clearly, poll predictions, even when they seem to be highly informed, have oftentimes been trumped by reality. But one thing is certain: We should be preoccupied with a post-Buhari era if we are genuinely interested in the continued existence of the country . In other words, the citizens should muster sufficient patriotic fervour to consign the re-election ambition of President Muhammadu Buhari to the realm of unrestrained fantasy.

*President Buhari 

The country is on the cusp of a new era where Buhari does not fit in. For in less than four years, we have seen enough of the president to be secure in the conviction that he is a blight not only on the nation’s corporate existence but also on individual citizens’ lives. Or why has Buhari’s second coming brought so much hardship to the citizens? Why has he been a source of massive unemployment resulting in several suicides?

The Flowing Tears Of Leah Sharibu

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

As President Muhammadu Buhari, the commander-in-chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, moves from one state to another, campaigning for a second term despite nearly four years in office which has been widely adjudged a horrendous failure, a 15-year old, tender, innocent girl named Leah Sharibu remains a hapless, pathetic, traumatized captive of Boko Haram terrorists, obviously,   under the most dehumanising conditions.

*Leah Sharibu

Given what has, reportedly, been the horrible experiences of young, beautiful girls like her who have been captured by these terrorists, one is really scared to imagine what Leah might have been subjected to for nearly one year now. Most painful is that she hardly gets mentioned again these days by those whose job it is to rescue and bring her home!

Buhari And The Enduring Hate Narrative

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

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

*President Buhari 

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

Nigeria: Youthful President? Whitewashing 2019 For 2023 Mirage

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With the obvious dominance of the two major political parties and the imminent abortion of a third force, the dream of a youthful president this year is gradually receding.

*Durotoye, Moghalu and Sowore

But those who have surrounded this year with the halo of an epochal period for an inevitable break with the nation’s trajectory of geriatric presidents have obviously given up too early. After all, the next president would only be declared after the election of February 16. So, it is still a possibility that some future political circumstances could throw up a youthful president this year.

Presidential Debate: Between Buhari And Atiku

By Jude Ndukwe

The much talked about Presidential Debate scheduled to hold on Saturday, January 19, 2019, at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, has come and gone but not without its dramas that have kept Nigerians wondering and talking about so many things including why the incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari, shunned the debate, and why his closest challenger, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, excused himself from it after realizing that the incumbent was not going to be in attendance.

*Atiku and Buhari 

The debate was supposed to be a Presidential Debate. Such debates world over lose their essence and savour once the incumbent is not present, and it is unthinkable that the incumbent in the US, for example, would miss out on such a debate since the debate is designed to scrutinize the performance of the incumbent/his party and extract commitments from the contenders.

Buhari, Onnoghen Et Al And Their Common DNA

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Except the unabashed pretenders to the throne of equity and transparency, Nigerians need not be shocked by the murkiness and ravenous appetite with which the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, has been identified. If the alleged fraud of Onnoghen centres on his not claiming what is his, a greater tragedy is the Nigerian state and its leaders claiming what is not theirs.

*Justice Onnoghen 

In that case, how could it be strange that the chief judicial officer allegedly pleaded amnesia to mitigate his culpability when the entire fabric of the Nigerian nation is steeped in fraud? It was fraud that actuated the cobbling together of Nigeria in the first place.

President Buhari And The Arrogance Of Power

By Anthony Igiehon

Ahead of the 58th quadrennial United States presidential election on November 8, 2016, the world watched with bated breath as the two major candidates in the election, Republican Candidate Donald Trump and Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton went head to head at three separate debates held at New York’s Hofstra University (September 26, 2016), Washington University in St. Louis (October 9, 2016), and University of Nevada, Las Vegas (October 19, 2016).

*President Buhari 

For the two candidates who met the Commission on Presidential Debates’ criteria for participation, the debates provided a much-needed platform to present to the American voting public their plans or reform proposals on a number of foreign and domestic issues.

President Buhari’s Act Of Tyrannical Desperation

By Ilemona Onoja

It is probably no longer news to Nigerians that in, what can only be seen as an act of tyrannical desperation, President Muhammadu Buhari has announced an illegal suspension of the Chief Justice of the Federation – Justice Walter Nkanu Onnoghen. The move which was announced a few days ago is seen by most Nigerians as what it is, a last ditch effort to prevent Justice Onnoghen from empanelling the election petition tribunal judges who are to oversee disputes arising from the conduct of the 2019 general elections.

*President Muhammadu Buhari 

The announcement preceded the hurried swearing of Justice Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed as acting Chief Justice of the Federation. I will speak about the disappointment of Justice Mohammed offering himself up for appointment in this manner on another occasion. 

18 Years Without Justice For Chief Bola Ige

By Dan Amor

A calculated insult and the guilt preceded his death, stealing from the actual murder all its potential impact and drama. There never was a crime more dramatically rehearsed, and the tale only provides it could not have been otherwise. Yet there are no clues to be uncovered, no enigmas to be revealed; for this was a murder almost predicted like its predecessors.

*Bola Ige

As a principled and astute politician, even though he agreed to serve in former President Olusegun Obasanjo's cabinet, Chief Bola Ige did not preach to Nigerians. But he provoked questions and left us in no doubt as to where he stood . He shared none of the current tastes for blurred conflicts, ambiguous characters and equivocal opinions. Nor was he disdainful of strong dramatic situations building up for firm climaxes. From the critic's point of view, the plot of Ige's senseless murder in December 2001, in its high velocity treachery, summarizes modern Nigeria in one word: "shame".

Restructuring And Its Feasibility

Folk food for thought and some hard knots and nuts to crack (5)

By Chinweizu, the Back Room Boy.

Sundoor999@gmail.com

Despite evidence of an incipient southern solidarity, pessimists are likely to believe that hoping to restructure Nigeria is utopian this late in the day in the Caliphate agenda when it is almost game, set and match to the Caliphate Jihadists.

Resist Buhari’s Most Brazen Assault On The Constitution! – Agbakoba

PRESS RELEASE

Nigerians Must Resist President Buhari’s Attack On The Constitution

*Dr. Olisa Agbakoba 

President Muhammadu Buhari`s suspension of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen is the most brazen assault on Nigeria`s constitutional history. The President has obviously not listened to the advice of the Hon. Attorney General of the Federation or the Attorney General of the Federation has misadvised him or both.

A Leveler And His Next Level

By Banji Ojewale

I met a man at an intersection in one of the towns of Nigeria, as he headed for where he called No man’s land. I didn’t know where the place was. Nor had I heard of an area by that name in our beloved country. I wanted to find out more about his destination and his mission there. He rejected my entreaties. Instead, he pleaded I should follow him, so I could learn more through experience.

I politely turned down his request. “I’m on national assignment,’’ I told him. 
“It’s a task not brooking personal distractions or extraneous considerations such as you’re asking me to undertake’’.

Nigeria: Outsourced Campaign And Presidency

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Even in saner times, the citizens are confronted with an epic struggle in an attempt to trust their politicians. Bogged down by decades of treacheries that have manifested in the repudiation of promises on whose back politicians got to office, the prospect of the citizens trusting them is effortlessly rendered nugatory.

*President Buhari

All the citizens could see is a land strewn with broken promises and the politicians as a venality-plagued species of humanity who veil their self-serving ambitions as the inevitable means of the people attaining development.  Yet, because politicians are indispensable components of the democratic experience, the citizens have to learn to tolerate their peccadilloes, vanities and cupidity. The duplicities of politicians often gain heightened expression in the times of campaigns for offices. Our country is in such times now.

Nigeria: Letter To Our Politicians

By Tony Afejuku

What a Christmas it has been! What a new year it will be! And what future of our country confronts us! Where are our politicians to write and shape Paradise that our country wants? These were nagging questions, nagging thoughts that were versions and portraits and figures and images that were collectively part of my mental voyage as I spent ample time walking, thinking, meditating and trying to write about our country.

The source of my image-making power which is my sub-conscious mind moved and moved toward political action in our country as I paced about in the serenity of my wonderfully quiet abode of plain living devoid of material things that tantalize our politicians everywhere, materials things that our politicians crave, and which have turned them into exploiters, speculators, avaricious financiers who have unleashed in our country economic inferno preventing workers, including university lecturers and professors, from enjoying minimum wages corresponding to their labours.

Musings On President Buhari’s Eldorado

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

By not preceding his quest for re-election with an apology for his current poor performance, President Muhammadu Buhari has taken the citizens he is seeking their votes for granted. His is a campaign driven by the notion of the citizens as not being discerning enough to know what is right for them. Buhari and his party are propelled by the illusion that the political enlightenment of the majority of the voters is still at an inchoate stage. 

*Buhari 

Buhari would only realise the falsity of this notion when he has been sent back to Daura. In Daura, he would rue his not taking cognisance of the fact that it was the same voters whom former President Goodluck Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) disdained by not living up to their expectations who sent them out of Aso Rock.

The Many Contradictions Of Muhammadu Buhari

By Reno Omokri

President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed everybody but himself for his problems and now that he has gotten to the end of his tenure, he has run out of human beings to blame, so he has now been reduced to blaming inanimate objects.

*Buhari 

I mean, on Christmas Day he told the visiting Federal Capital Territory Christian community that his anti-corruption war had not really taken off because the Nigerian system was slow. Well, he does have a point, because if the Nigerian system had been working, Muhammadu Buhari would have faced a firing squad for overthrowing the democratically elected civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari on New Year’s eve of 1983.

May Our Road Be Rough In 2019!

By Banji Ojewale

Tai Solarin, Nigeria’s under-celebrated educationist, social critic and visionary reformer, wrote a newspaper article 55 years ago to usher in 1964. He simply titled the essay, May Your Road Be Rough. It was the great man’s prayer that the going should be tough and rough for his compatriots during the year.

Hardly a wish to say Amen to by millions who were in churches across Nigeria and worldwide to usher in the year 2019. In his days, as it still is in our age, Solarin realized the controversy his position would generate. So, early in the write-up he allayed his readers’ fears. He wasn’t wishing them evil, he averred.

“I am not cursing you;” he said. “I am wishing you what I wish myself every year. I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year, may there be plenty of troubles for you this year!” If fellow citizens didn’t know how to respond to this strange salutation on New Year’s Day, the Ikenne-born writer offered this counsel: ‘’ If you are not so sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’? I ask for no more.’’

President Buhari, Let IGP Idris Go Home!

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If the President Muhammadu Buhari government’s patent obsession with plumbing the depths of cronyism gains fresh expression in the extension of the tenure of Inspector General of Police Ibrahim Idris, it would not really be a source of shock to the citizens. By January next year, Idris would have put in 35 years of service and thus by his terms of employment he should quit the police. But the suspicion is rife that Buhari would extend his tenure. Such suspicion may not be unfounded. After all, that was how Buhari extended the tenures of the nation’s service chiefs last year when they were supposed to retire.

*Buhari and Idris

The tragedy of these extensions is that they are not reflective of exemplary services that render the beneficiaries indispensable. No, what has become clear is that they are actuated by a desire to cater for the dark motives of the Buhari government. Or why is multi-faceted damage often inflicted in the course of prosecuting these extensions? Consider these: officers in whom the nation has invested so much in terms of professional training are often retired prematurely.

Indeed, Christmas Is Idolatrous!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

The recent statement by the General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, Pastor W.F. Kumuyi, that Christmas is idolatrous has attracted widespread reactions.  Pastor Kumuyi was quoted in the Punch newspaper of December 13, 2013, as saying: 

“We don’t celebrate Christmas. It actually came from idolatrous background. That is why you don’t hear us sing what they call Christmas carol. Never! ... When you find anybody coming in, or any leader, trying to introduce the idolatry of mystery Babylon that they call Christmas, and you want to bring all the Christmas carol saying that is the day that Jesus was born, and you don’t find that in the Acts of the Apostles or in the early church, then you don’t find that in the church either.  If you don’t know that before, now you know.”

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

These are indeed weighty, unsettling words on a widely cherished festival. The reactions they immediately stirred were, therefore, to be expected. However, it was a very courageous assertion by Pastor Kumuyi and I would love to pitch my tent with those who insist that he is right, and that those attacking him are either doing so out of sheer lack of adequate information on the matter or, worse, unwittingly betraying their reluctance to let go of a cherished idol.