Okonjo-Iweala, The WTO And A Naysayer

By Chuks Iloegbunam

If the current controversy surrounding the search for a replacement for the outgoing director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the Brazilian Roberto de Azevedo, were not global and intense, it would mean that the position was worth little more than a sinecure. Appointed in 2013, Mr. de Azevedo has served notice that he will step down this August, a year before his term concludes.

 

*Okonjo-Iweala

Up came eight candidates from all regions of the world, three of which are Africans: Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; the former Kenyan foreign minister Amina Mohamed, who previously was the chairperson of the WTO General Council; and Abdel-Hamid Mamdouhm, an Egyptian lawyer who also had a stint as a senior WTO official. Because the headship of the WTO is not geographically rotational, no region of the world can claim it is its turn to produce the organisation’s next D-G.

Rot In NDDC: Beyond Titillating Tales From ‘Port Harcourt Girl’ And ‘Uyo Boy’

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Nigerians are fond of turning very serious matters, even ones threatening the very life of their country, into objects of jokes and laughter.

*Joi Nunieh  and Godswill Akpabio

And so, as President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption posturing  and grandstanding which have for some years now been on life-support finally breathed its last and was wheeled out for burial (without an autopsy), and the loud attempt by some shameless pretenders to clean up  the cesspit of corruption called the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) degenerates into a public trial of the National Assembly, Minister of Niger Delta and the remorseless (mis)managers of affairs at the NDDC, instead  of there to be a national mourning and grand coalition against graft and its perpetrators, Nigerians are all over the social media and at various points of gathering, demonstrating that they have only found in the calamitous development fresh ingredients for juicy comedy skits and colourless jokes. What a tragedy!    

To make matters worse, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) which should have moved in immediately to clear the Augean stable is presently incapacitated by the crushing weight of its own self-inflicted woes as its once ebullient leader is embroiled in earth-shaking allegations of corruption and facing a panel set up by the Minister of Justice who himself is equally struggling to ward off unrelenting fingers pointing at him and raising weighty allegations of graft against him.

Adams Oshiomhole Was A Mistake!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Just like the All Progressive Congress (APC) which was driven by very poor judgment to ask him to pilot its affairs, there is no doubt that having Mr. Adams Oshiomhole as the national chairman of the ruling party was a horrendous mistake, which, by the way, should surprise no one, given that there is hardly anything the APC has got right since 2015 when Nigerians naively (or, more appropriately, blindly) stampeded themselves into inflicting the malformed party on themselves. 

*Oshiomhole 

But Mr. Oshiomhole has not always been like that – a huge liability to the people he is leading. As the president of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), he was admired by many Nigerians, including this writer. He had the facts and eloquence as he confronted the government about the plight of the masses. He was often unbeatable and it was such a delight to listen to him. I would recall that I sometimes quoted him in my column, especially, during the Obasanjo regime. When then he indicated interest to go to the Edo State Government House to function as governor, he easily won the support of people, even beyond the state. 

Is Nigeria A Country Of Morons, Imbeciles, Idiots Or All Of The Above?

By Bayo Oluwasanmi

It is no secret that Nigeria’s ruling elite are cruel, amoral, unfit for the office they hold. They are all fucking morons. Ironically, this hasn’t stopped them from becoming presidents, governors, ministers, and what have you.

*Buhari 

Though the citizens are aware of their leaders’ flaws, they choose to be willfully blind, dumbed down and misinformed. Both citizens and leaders are deficient in self-respect and courage. The oppressed are afraid to rattle the cage of their oppressors.

9 Facts That Should Make You Buy Property In Ibeju Lekki!

1. Do you know that the only area you can invest now and get over 500% returns on your investment in two years time is Ibeju Lekki, Lagos? 

2. Do you know that Ibeju Lekki is the fastest selling and developing area in the whole West Africa?

3. Do you know that Ibeju Lekki will develop much faster than Lekki Phase1, Victoria Island and others? 

Will Herdsmen Plunge Nigeria Into Food Crisis?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

One of the most worrisome developments in today’s Nigeria is what appears like a firm resolve by the Muhammadu Buhari regime to continue circulating the very distressful impression that it does not know how to solve the endless aggression being unleashed in different parts of the country by Fulani herdsmen who move and operate as if there are no laws in the land capable of containing the menace of troublesome people.

The soft targets of these herders are usually harmless and toiling farmers whom they gruesomely slaughter in their farms, and innocent villagers, whose homes, according to reports, they invade mostly in the middle of the night and set them ablaze. When the people are suddenly roused from sleep by the raging inferno and run out in confusion, they are mowed down by the waiting assailants.

And despite the volume of media reports on the gory occurrences, nothing usually happens: no one will be arrested, tried and jailed. With no one raising a hand to protect or  seek justice for them, the traumatized people will weep and get tired, quietly bury their dead, that is, if they are able to find their corpses and mourn them silently, probably, fearing that any noise from them might offend their killers and bring them back for more bloody exploits. Then they will leave their village and move elsewhere in the neighbouring communities to seek shelter since their homes have been destroyed. They have become refugees in their own country for no fault of theirs.

Aisha Buhari: Our First Lady Deserves Respect

By Dan Amor

To be candid, I have never met Dr. (Mrs.) Aisha Buhari, wife of the Nigerian ruler, President Muhammadu Buhari, neither am I one of her fans. But I detest all cynical attitudes toward her based on social pretensions. I'm highly contemptuous of any attempt to put a family seal unto a divine arrangement whose antecedent can be traced to God Himself.

*Aisha Buhari 

It is patently absurd for grown up men who are supposed to be responsible family heads in their own right to be harassing another man's wife in her husband's official home more so when the husband is the president of an independent country. The reported fracas in Aso Rock Presidential Villa penultimate week, which culminated in sporadic gun shots and arrest and detention of the aide de camp (ADC) to the President's wife, is scary and condemnable, to say the least.

It is also unfortunate that some Nigerians could open their mouth so wide to condemn the First Lady for trying to protect her nuclear family from dangerous interlopers who are threatening not only to manipulate the President but also to usurp the rights of his wife to gain access to her husband.

Miss Uwaila Omozuwa: Rape And Murder So Gruesome!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

“One life taken in cold blood is as gruesome as millions lost in a pogrom.”—Dele Giwa (Nigerian Journalist assassinated in 1986)

After five whole years of seeking admission into the institution of higher learning, Miss Vera Uwaila Omozuwa was eventually admitted to read Microbiology at the University of Benin.

*Late Uwaila Omozuwa

Obviously a very serious student, she was in no mood to joke with her studies, probably, after considering how long it took her to secure the admission. So, she would always go to the serene environment of her Church when worshippers were not around to read her books. The Church environment should be both safe and devoid of distractions. 

But on this particular day, May 27, 2020, some wicked, callous and barbarous assailants gained access to the Church auditorium where she was immersed in her books, brutally raped her and ended her life by hitting her on the head with a fire extinguisher which gave her a very deep cut. They then fled leaving her in the pool of her own blood. She was only 22 and in her first year at the university.

Is Nigeria Still Redeemable?

By DAN AMOR

Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase, "the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated.

*President Buhari 

It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its self-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions.

NNPC: Northern Nigeria Petroleum Corporation?

By Luke Onyekakeyah

The reported lamentation of the leaders of Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF), over the blatant lopsided appointments into top management positions of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), deserves attention from the Federal Government with a view to correcting it. The development makes one wonder if the organization has surreptitiously become Northern Nigeria Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

It is clear that since 1999, for instance, what used to be a pan Nigeria giant oil corporation that manages Nigeria’s “cash cow”, has been northernised by way of appointments into key positions in the organisation. The complaints and disaffection resulting from this have largely been ignored by the Federal government.

The latest appointments of 20 northerners into management positions in the NNPC while ignoring the south has raised the ante, leading to discontent as reported by ThisDay of May 17, 2020. For those looking for divisive forces threatening Nigeria, this is one of it.

Fathers As Sexual Predators

By Dan Agbese

Let’s quit feigning ignorance about this benumbingly shameful fact. A vicious form of paedophilia is rapidly creeping up on our country. Fathers have become the sexual predators of their daughters. So has the neighbour; so has the employer; and so has the admissions officer in our institutions. The cocktail of our national challenges is getting progressively more complicated. Sorry.

And so, the girl-child, the mother of our future presidents, governors, Senate presidents and 37 speakers of the federal and state legislatures and justices faces a bleak future from the sexual trauma suffered in childhood. She is condemned to carry the heavy burden of sexual shame for life. Some of the abused girl-children find it difficult to live normal lives after being so traumatised. It is horrible.

Igboland Is Not Landlocked!

By Aloy Ejimakor

It’s often said that a lie told so many times, if unchallenged, may – in course of time – begin to pass for the truth. One of such is the terrible lie, institutionally purveyed since the end of the Civil War, to the effect that Igboland is landlocked or has no access to the sea. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to debunk this lie with some simple historical and topographical evidence that are even in plain view, if you care to dig or do some physical explorations of your own.

*John Nnia Nwodo
President General, Ohaneze Ndigbo

Suffice it to say that it is a profound tragedy that entire generations of the immediate post-War Igbos never bordered to check but seemingly accepted this brazen institutional falsehood, largely intended to taunt the Igbo and put them down. A few that knew it to be false just didn’t care anymore. And that History was banned since the end of the Civil War made it worse, plus the fact that most people don’t take physical Geography that serious anymore, otherwise they would have known that Abia, Imo and Anambra States have varying short-distance paths to the Atlantic through Imo, Azumiri and Niger Rivers.

Nigeria: Wake Up, Sleeping Giant!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Tomorrow, May 29, 2020, is what used to be referred to in Nigeria as “Democracy Day,” but now it will only serve as the anniversary of President Muhammadu Buhari's regime and that of some state governors. It is usually a welcome excuse for great celebrations, chest-beating and wild claims about humongous achievements, many of which exist only in the imagination of the mostly failed leaders. 

*Nigeria Leaders: Jonathan, Obasanjo, Buhari

Even the term “Democracy Day” (which is now observed on June 12) is such an excruciating irony in a country where almost all the features that distinguish democratic societies have been brutally obliterated, leaving the populace continually trapped in destabilizing apprehension. 

There would, however, be no parties tomorrow. A hostile, dreaded   visitor called Coronavirus is town! Let’s hope, therefore, that the absence of bacchanals tomorrow will afford our leaders the conducive   atmosphere for deep, sober reflections, to determine whether they have merely added to the suffering and pain of the people or helped, even in some little way, to reduce them.             

If Nigeria is working, we will know! Those were the exact words of late Prof Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost writer and distinguished intellectual. In other words, the citizens do not need any bogus claims by government’s megaphones to realise that there is an improvement in their country’s economy because it will automatically translate to an enhancement in their lives.

Nigeria: Covid-19 And The Leadership Question

By DAN AMOR

For those of us who still believe in the geographical expression called Nigeria, at no other time that our country needs more fervent prayers than now. But the current situation also demands eternal vigilance and critical immediacy. Yet, the Coronavirus pandemic ravaging the human race since November 2019, more than anything else, poses a grave challenge to leaders across the world. While the COVID 19 pandemic has really revealed leaders with the sterner stuff who have shown the capacity to lead at very auspicious moments in the affairs of man, it has also exposed the soft underbelly of others who lack the capacity to walk their talk.

*Buhari 

It is now so apparent that Nigeria, my country, is a nation of experts without roots. We are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot even take a step. And when the culture has finished its work, the weak institutions handcuff the infirmity. But what is at the centre of the panic which is our national culture since we are not yet free to choose our leaders?

Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' Among The 20 Best Books Of All Time

"The books you read in your high School English class are not necessarily the best novels ever written. What makes for great literature, anyway? Some could argue that all your book needs in order to be considered “great” is leather-bound packaging and microscopic print, but the truth is, you really can’t judge a book by its cover.Instead, you have to judge it by what’s written inside. Is the story meaningful, honest, moving? Does it transport you to another time or place? When it comes to ranking the best novels ever written, we had to look for all of these things…and just because you love a certain book doesn’t mean it made our list."

READ FULL REPORT HERE 

Nigeria: How Not To Mismanage the Covid-19 Pandemic

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Even though by 2015, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had performed below the high expectations of many Nigerians and had rightly earned their rejection, I highly dreaded the disastrous possibility of Nigerians falling for the massive, overwhelming but vacuous propaganda of the All Progressives Congress (APC), backed by a formidable coalition of tragically naïve activists, intellectuals and opinion leaders, to seriously consider that the APC could by the widest stretch of the imagination, qualify as even a manageable alternative.

There was massive corruption in the PDP, but it was just impossible for me to buy the tasteless myth that the APC which was mostly made up of the very characters that gave the PDP its unwholesome image could, no matter the relentless efforts of their tireless spin doctors, qualify to be classed as something that has the slightest resemblance with a party of saints and an assemblage change agents, and that once a person moved from the PDP to the APC, the person would receive instant beatification from a band of holy angels waiting to perform that sacred assignment. This should make no sense even to a two-year old!

Nigeria’s Unprofitable Lockdown

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

How exactly is the lockdown helping to halt the spread of coronavirus in Nigeria? Or put another way, how is the Buhari regime which announced the lockdown in three locations, Lagos, Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), ensuring that the measure unleashed is at least achieving a reasonable percentage of the purpose for which it was declared?

*Buhari 

Has there been any thorough audit of the exercise? Who is also undertaking such an assessment in the various states that are equally on lockdown? What is the level of compliance at the various places and what percentage of the anticipated gains has so far been achieved?    

One may never get a coherent answer.  That is the problem a people must learn to live with when they are stuck with a regime that appears to derive some kind of strange animation from maintaining an icy distance from the people it claims to be governing, a leadership that seems to have become incurably estranged from the people, their problems and feelings, and appears to be trapped in abject lack of the capacity to muster any empathy and fellow-feeling either when speaking to the populace or taking actions that are sure to harshly affect their lives.

Who Is Afraid Of Ezenwo Nyesom Wike?

By DAN AMOR

Within the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway's works – some seven novels, fifty odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction — The Sun Also Rises, is something of a curious exception.

*Gov Wike 

Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and The Sea (1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is one most wholly satisfying book. Here Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for his famous understated ironic prose style. And here he also made his first marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the Hemingway "code", the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue, and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the structure of The Sun Also Rises.

Arrest Of ExxonMobil Staff: Gov Wike Is Right!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

All those people out there speculating on the motives of the Rivers State Governor, Mr. Nyesom Wike, and condemning him for ordering the arrest of the 22 ExxonMobil staff who flouted the executive order signed by the governor to stop the movement of people from other states into Rivers in order to check the spread of coronavirus in the state should hide their faces in shame and thoroughly interrogate themselves to determine whether they are not labouring under the usual debilitating inferiority complex that often pushes some “natives” to prefer to endanger their people’s lives in order to please the “White Massa”? 

Gov Wike 

If it were some “ordinary” people from Akwa-Ibom that were arrested for breaching the law in Rivers State, would there have been any uproar? Would that have earned even a footnote mention in the media? I can imagine what will be the fate of some workers of a Nigerian company operating in the United States who chose to brazenly flout a movement restriction order in the state of Texas, the home of ExxonMobil, for whatever reason!  

Addressing a press conference in Port Harcourt on Friday, April 17, Wike said: “Security agencies arrested 22 staff of Exxon Mobil who came into the state from neighbouring Akwa Ibom State in violation of the extant Executive Order restricting movement into the state. We do not know the coronavirus status of these individuals. Even though security agencies advised that they be allowed to go back to Akwa Ibom State, I insisted that the law must take its course. This is because nobody is above the law. As a responsive government, we have quarantined them in line with the relevant health protocols and they will be charged to court.” 

Certainly, this is how civilized and rule-governed societies are run. There are no set of laws for the masses and another set for some gaggle of privileged lawbreakers. 

Imo: In Search Of The ‘Hope’ In Uzodinma

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Now that Nigerians appear to have tried their best to put behind them the controversial Supreme Court judgment that made Mr. Hope Uzodinma the Governor of Imo State, the great task before him now is to hasten to convince Imo people that the apex court has not brutally forced a very bitter and impuissant pill down their throats, but, that, he is, indeed, that governor they have always hoped for, who will change the face of Imo for good! 

*Gov Uzodinma and President Buhari 

He does not have the luxury time. A delayed performance might begin to sow in the minds of the people the toxic thought that the pill they have swallowed lacks the power to solve the several debilitating maladies weighing the state down. And if their worst fears are eventually confirmed, it would then amount to another hope devastatingly betrayed (if you will permit the pun). And the cost, politically, might be too high for Mr. Uzodinma.   

Well-meaning Nigerians are becoming increasingly worried that the courts are brazenly usurping the power of the electorate to choose their leaders. They are beginning to think that the ever-swelling number of court-crowned leaders constitutes a dangerous threat to our democracy and a frustrating and discouraging experience to the masses who take the pains and defy the often very harsh sun and rain to vote. Why bother to vote when, eventually, the decision on who occupies the office will be decided by about five or seven judges – none of whom may even come from the state or constituency in question? The danger is that the people are often alienated from the leader since they are increasingly finding it difficult to convince themselves that they are being governed or represented by somebody they chose.