OPINION
Jonathan, Buhari Cuckolding in War Time
By Festus Adedayo
Last Wednesday, Muhammadu Buhari and his newfound friend, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, locked each other inside the sacristy of the Nigerian presidential Villa, christened Aso Rock. When they came out afterwards, both wore the visage of 3-year old Syrian girl, Salwa and Cuckold, a 1997 book written by Indian, Kiran Nagarkar.
Cuckold, a historical novel patterned after the narrative of Maharaj Kumar, may in a way explain the recent hot and adulterous romance between Jonathan and Buhari.In the book, Kumar had attempted to win his wife, Mira’s affections in the midst of a ravaging war in the land. Set in the Rajput kingdom of Mewar of the 16th century, a wife named Mirabai refuses to see Mewar prince, Bhoj Raj, as her husband but thinks instead of Lord Krishna as her hubby.
Originally derived from the bird called cuckoo which has the tendency of laying its eggs in other birds’ nests, right from the Middle Ages, cuckolding became an allusion to a man or woman who has sex with an already married partner, sometimes out of wedlock and at other times, as a fetish where some married partners derive voyeuristic joy in watching their spouse engage in sexual liaison with another.In 2010, Salwa caught the headlines after a trending video recording of her playing a game and laughing rambunctiously as warplanes dropped bombs very close to her home in Idlib, Syria. Idlib was Syria’s final major rebel-held stronghold region where Turkish-backed rebels and Syrian government forces fought in an atrocious battle to destroy each other. The world was aghast at what was perceived as Salwa’s emotion-dead response to destruction and death. It was later that her father, Abdullah Mohammad, told the world that he taught Salwa wartime laughter; that, rather than being scared at the sight and sound of deafening, frightening and destructive air strikes, she should deaden her fright with laughter, as a counterpoise and coping mechanism. He purchased fireworks for her and got her immersed in its frightening noise. With this, Abdullah taught Salwa that both – bombs and fireworks – were synonymous and loud noises, rather than creating fright, could be funny. It helped Salwa stay calm as cannons and bombs wreaked their havocs.
Dressed resplendently in blue colour traditional Ijaw attire, with a black bowler hat to match as picture from the presidency depicts, Jonathan and Buhari both cut the image of two unequally yoked afflictions besieging a single household. Traditional Yoruba call such Ile njo, ole nja – a household on fire and at the same time invaded by burglars – which keep onlookers guessing as to the depth of the unwanted guests’ incestuous relationship. Buhari was also dressed in a cocaine-white babanriga and cap to match. They both saluted each other in the COVID-19 elbow-jamming manner. Barely disguised but hidden behind their visage was a cheerfulness that made them look like a girl who titivates her hair with sequins on her first date.
What is the relationship between laughter and war? Put differently, is laughter permissible at times of war, when there is so much death and destruction? In all histories of war, this unequally yoked binary has always maintained an uneasy relationship. Kaiser, the German imperial power in the First World War, would not hear of such incestuous relationship between war and laughter. In a telegram to the Mayor of Berlin during the war, he demanded seriousness and self-constraints. Indeed, the Kaiser and German military of WW1 pronounced urban laughter a taboo during the war. The bleakness of war should make impossible all joy, they said. What manner of amusement can there be when death and suffering are going on at the war front? How can humour be legitimate in the city in times of war? This was why Carl Braun, also known as Carl Hobner, ran into trouble with the Berlin police in October, 1914 when he humorously mimicked German generals and dignitaries while the war was going on. For the Kaiser, pubs, amusement parks, theatres and cinemas should all be closed in war time.
That was not for Jonathan and his ‘fiend,’ the president. Judging by the discourses on parade in the political arena, Buhari and Jonathan, two hitherto sworn political enemies, must have come together to discuss 2023. They have held a couple of such. On the superficial, however, Jonathan, ECOWAS’ special envoy, had struttled into his former abode at the presidential palace to discuss the crises-ridden West-African country of Mali, with Buhari. But pray, are Mali’s crises more than Nigeria’s and who is the Nigerian problem being reported to?
But why would Buhari and Jonathan be discussing 2023 when there is war in Nigeria? Make no mistake about it: Nigeria is in a time of war. Shrouded official figures of Boko Haram killings of Nigerians and their soldiers number hundreds; bandits slaughter scores daily in the Northwest; farmers cannot go to till the land for fear of being strafed to death by bandits’ AK-47 bullets; in Niger State, Boko Haram has ceded Nigeria’s territory to itself, pegging girls’ marriageable age at 12. Nigeria is at war. Her economy, even at the thick of the Biafran war, possessed more verve than the economy under Buhari. The Nigerian Naira is periodically sighted at red light districts, in undisguised dalliance with the Zimbabwean dollar and Congolese Franc, the three barely clad and smiling seductively like coquettes of nil worth that they are. Hopelessness had never been this proximate to more than half of Nigerians in almost a century. Should Nigerian leaders then be exchanging mutual political conviviality, like imperial powers partitioning Africa at the 1884 scramble for the black continent, ceding out and receiving presidential power, in this time of war?
With the 2023 election in the neighbourhood of a little over 12 months ahead now, permutations, alignments and projections are being shuffled like stock traders do on the floor of the stock exchange. Grapevines are rife with claims that President Jonathan is being lured by the rank of his old political adversaries to run for the Nigerian presidency again. On the face value, this proposition sounds very stupid, illogical and otiose. Why would those who ganged up to make the Ijaw-born ex-president’s name worthless a few years ago, be the same people he is embroiled in playing tombola with today?
Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, took the dalliance between Buhari and Jonathan beyond hearsay when he warned Jonathan recently not to yield to the pressure to contest the presidency under the APC, same party that nailed his coffin in 2015. Speaking to the BBC, he said, “If I see the former President, I will tell him what I heard. I will tell him, don’t go anywhere because these people want to destroy your reputation.”
The calculation is said to be one of the dirty power gimmicks of the North to swiftly return to power if it eventually gets supplanted by a southerner in 2023. Surveying the horizon with a clean but selfish toothcomb, Ahmadu Bello’s progenies were said to have discovered, to their chagrin, that unless someone constitutionally barred from a second term was sneaked into Aso Rock, their fated birthright of Nigeria’s presidency could suffer on the sidelines for another eight grueling years. The most fitting sucker who can act as stand-in and take the bullet for such infernal project was a man the same Northern elders had tar-brushed as clueless, feckless and a recklessly irredeemable drunk whose life was incomplete without shots of liquor.
With the connivance of Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s octopodal media machine, by the time Jonathan was going into the 2015 presidential election, the Buhari/Tinubu machine had mortally damaged his brand, rendering the name Jonathan as worthless as a degree from Trump University. The theatrics of dollar-baiting Yoruba traditional rulers who pointed effete traditional insignia at Jonathan’s head, with him kneeling down in their midst, ostensibly for traditional invocation for his success at the polls, was by them a mere alupaida – fraudulent stunt. His wife, Patience, was visited the most visceral denigration in history, so much that she had less worth than a horoscope. Today, other than a recent unexplained taciturnity she recoiled into, there was no embarrassing infraction committed by Jonathan’s wife that Buhari’s voluble Captain of Zi Oza Room has not. But, is it cluelessness, lust for power or outright unintelligence that will make a man, as the Yoruba will say, return to bid a hostile host good evening, in the same unwelcoming home where he was booed out and forced to say good night awhile ago?
Aside the fact that the Nigerian politician’s heart is reputed to be painted in red colour like a mass of scarlet berries, these politicians are certified gang of brand conmen. We were living witnesses to how then General Buhari, who we all knew for his intolerance to voices of dissent, with an Antarctica-like frozen views on national development, suddenly became branded as a born-again democrat. They put on him borrowed robes, forced him to wear agbada and Igbo Ishiagu, apparels of two people he never disguised his disdain for, while forcing him to dance to the adulterous music of Wasiu Ayinde on the campaign rostrum. Here was a man Nasir el-Rufai, in 2010, referred to as “an almost-70 principal (who) should retire,” a man he said was “perpetually unelectable” and who suddenly got deodorized and presented to the people as Angel Gabriel. El-Rufai, in that same statement, warned Nigerians that “a Buhari, the new Democrat, tolerant of views different from his own, is yet to evolve.”
As we were wondering how APC, PDP will navigate us into this potentially doomed Jonathan mis-presidency, another artful dodger climbed up the rostrum. Serial presidential aspirant, Turakin Adamawa, Atiku Abubakar, last week dismissed the zoning of presidential ticket debate as response to the current Nigerian leadership crisis. He made this known at the 94th National Executive Committee (NEC) of the PDP held last Thursday. “Where the president comes from has never been the problem of Nigeria, neither will it be the solution. There is no such thing as the president from Southern Nigeria or president from Northern Nigeria. There is only one president from Nigeria, by Nigeria and for Nigeria,” he said.
In the ecology of Yoruba’s dismissive estimation of people who fail to dispense with old analogies and embrace recent discourses, such persons are seen as being busy engaged with culinary masturbation by eating an agbonrin esin – one-year old venison. With this thesis that is irrelevant to the reality of today, Abubakar is apparently devouring this old, uninspiring agbonrin esin. In an earlier piece, I prophesied that Buhari may be the last Nigerian president. I didn’t mean that Nigeria may not exist, post-2023 but that we can never have a president who will think Nigerian or a Nigerian thinking at the presidency any longer. Buhari has so mortally destroyed that thesis of “where the president comes from has never been the problem of Nigeria” with his unexampled nepotism in office, so much that where the president comes from matters greatly now. In any case, shouldn’t Nigeria have now moved out of this perennial Atiku Abubakar presidential hustling to something more ennobling?
If you add this to Jonathan and Buhari’s embarrassing cuckolding in this time of war, you will have the complete picture of a Nigerian circus that has just begun yet another season of our anomie.
Malami’s State of Emergency and Chiwetalu Agu’s arrest
Either out of acute ignorance of the law, diffidence towards it, naivety or a consuming passion to appear hyperactive in the eyes of Aso Rock, the Nigerian security establishment will not stop exuding sickening optics in its operations, to the shuddering embarrassment of the world. Last week, it was another time for the advertisement of this gross lack in mental capacity. Nollywood star, Chiwetalu Agu, was arrested by some officers of the Nigerian Army at the Upper Iweka, Onitsha, Anambra State. His sin and as could be seen in a viral video, was adorning flowing apparel that had Biafra insignia on it.
In the video, Agu stood in a moving traffic in the commercial city, beside a bus painted green, the Nigerian colour and which had written on it, Chiwetalu Films. Shortly after, a soldier appeared, clutching a gun, in a menacing mode, his hand clutched to the rifle’s butt. All of a sudden, other soldiers appeared, held Agu roughly, even as he almost fell, dragging the actor like a sack of tomatoes, ultimately pulling and heaving him into a truck. He must have fallen a couple of times in the process. Before zooming off in a commando style with their prized victim, the soldiers fired repeatedly in the sky which resulted in a melee as people scampered for dear lives. Agu was said to have come to Onitsha on a charitable mission of sharing food items to the less privileged.
Later on, the Nigerian Army issued the raison d’être for this sickening assault. Agu, it said, was inciting the public and soliciting support for the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, (IPOB). In a statement issued by the Director of Army Public Relations, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, the Nigerian Army denied this globally viewed scene of brutalisation by its men, claiming that Agu was gently taken into custody.
“Dressed in a very well known attire of the proscribed group, Chiwetalu Agu was picked up for questioning while inciting members of the public to join the proscribed group. Though he attempted putting up some resistance when troops made effort to take him into custody, he was not assaulted or subjected to brutalization,” Nwachukwu said. The Nigerian Army then urged that people’s expression of their rights “must be done within the confines of the law, bearing in mind the imperative for peace, and national security.”
Released after 24 hours in the Army’s custody, the Department of State Services (DSS) will not be left out of the binge to impress Aso Rock. It reportedly re-arrested Agu last Friday. This was confirmed in a statement by the DSS Spokesman, Peter Afunaya, who said on Friday that “Army brought him to us. Justice will take its course.”
The day before Agu’s arrest, specifically Wednesday last week, Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, riled the country with another of his celebrated badly-rehearsed statements that brim with sickening flavor of partisanship. Speaking to the press after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, Malami said that, in response to the upswing in cases of violent attacks on individuals and government facilities in Anambra, with the approaching governorship election in the state, “you cannot out rule possibilities, inclusive of the possibility of declaration or state of emergency.”
One nexus links Chiwetalu’s arrest and Malami’s unconscionable statement: they cannot be supported by logic and common sense. Oduduwa is an insignia that Sunday Igboho and his separatist crew use as mascot. If the FG descends into another of its jaundiced decision to outlaw it, Yoruba people shouldn’t use the insignia of Oduduwa? What part of the Nigerian constitution forbids anyone wearing clothes or the colour combination that they desire? What evidence did the Army have that Agu incited the public on the side of IPOB? Agu has been known to always go nostalgic in references to Biafra. Yes, the Federal Government claimed it had outlawed IPOB, but did it outlaw Biafra? Biafra is a phoenix that cannot die, as long as the people in that geographical area remember their grueling fate in the hands of Nigerian soldiers.
Again, Agu is an actor and the Upper Iweka show might jolly well be a rehearsal for another film, as indicated by the vehicle he brought to the alleged locus incuo. More fundamentally, why has the Army never felt that Sheik Gumi, who even accused it of systemic decimation of Islamic faithful, had breached “the imperative for peace and national security” thus necessitating the arrest of that campaigner for bloodthirsty hounds?
It is same partisanship that juts out of Malami’s emotive outburst. In the Southeast of Nigeria today, Imo State is where anarchy and total breakdown of law and order are mostly pervasive. That is a state superintended over by one of Aso Rock’s provincial lickspittles. How come the federal government has not declared a state of emergency there? A sizeable part of Niger State is in the hands of Boko Haram, while the president’s home state of Katsina appears to be Thomas Hobbes’ projection in his state of nature thesis. How come these states haven’t fallen victim of the emergency rule?
While most of these theoretical postulations by government are not wrong in themselves, the absence of equity in their operationality is the bother. In 1999/2000 when Gani Adams’ OPC was constituting a nuisance, Olusegun Obasanjo wielded the big stick, slamming him and Fredrick Fasehun, his own kinsmen, in jail for months. Buhari cannot be hounding IPOB and ethnic separatists while mollycoddling his bandit brothers who he has stubbornly refused to label terrorists.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
By Femi Fani-Kayode
In an article titled “Is Nigeria fuelling Israel’s genocide against Palestinians?”, which was published in Businessday on 30th October, one Suraya Dadoo, who wrote in from South Africa, opened his contribution by quoting our Honourable Minister of Foreign Affairs, my friend and brother, Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar, who he attributed the following words to.
“There is no justification for the carnage that is going on in Gaza… the complete disregard for the proportionality of force that is being meted out on innocent civilians.
This carnage is completely out of hand and totally unacceptable. There is no way to explain the double standards; it has to stop.”He went further by quoting our nation’s number two citizen, Vice President Kashim Shettima’s words at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in September, where he said the following:
Both the Minister and the Vice President have done us proud with their courageous words and bold stand and it is a reflection of the fact that the Tinubu administration represents the thinking and has expressed the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians and have opted to tread the right path when it comes to the tragic events in Gaza and the pitiful plight of the Palestinian people.
Dadoo went further by writing the following, “The Nigerian government has consistently condemned Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and has been particularly outspoken against Israel since October 7. Historically, Nigeria has been a strong supporter of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and Nigeria was central in efforts to ensure that Israel was not granted observer status at the African Union (AU). According to sources who were at the October 2021 meeting of the AU executive council attended by Africa’s foreign ministers in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, Nigeria’s then Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama took the lead in objecting to Israel’s accreditation and urged other member states to do the same.”
Again, this is comforting but he follows it by getting to the crux of his essay and the heart of the matter by dropping the following clanger: “While the Nigerian government has strongly condemned Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza it also stands accused of fuelling the Israeli war machine that had already killed, at the time of writing, more than 40,000 Palestinians through direct violence and bombing.”
To substantiate his point he wrote, “According to a recently released report titled “Behind the Barrel: New Insights into the Countries and Companies Behind Israel’s Fuel Supply,” Nigeria accounts for 9 percent of the total crude oil supplied to Israel between October 21, 2023, and July 12, 2024. Researchers analysed satellite imagery, ship positions, shipping logs, commodity trade flows, information from port authorities, and financial and media reports to track 65 oil and fuel shipments to Israel in that period.”
He concludes by alleging that,”Over 133 kilotons of Nigerian crude were delivered to Israel from Chevron, Eni, Exxon, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Gabonese crude accounted for 22 percent, and the Republic of the Congo supplied 6 percent, but it is Nigeria’s contribution that has raised eyebrows given the country’s vocal criticism of Israel.”
Dodoo’s allegation, if proven to be true, is deeply troubling and needs to be taken very seriously indeed lest we leave ourselves open to his grave charge of complicity in the genocide that is being unleashed on Gaza by the Zionists.
The matter can be resolved by simply banning all crude oil shipments from Nigeria to Israel.
I hereby call on our President, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to do precisely that and take an even stronger stance against the Zionists by banning all arms purchases from them and terminating any military and/or intelligence advice or services that the Israelis are offering or providing us with.
If he could find the courage to implement a number of bold and much needed fiscal, economic and constitutional reforms and policies such as the removal of the oil subsidy, the floating of the naira, the establishment of autonomy for the local government areas, the implementation of the students loan fund, the numerous tax reforms and most important of all the refusal to go to war against Niger Republic despite the enormous pressure that the Western powers, led by France and the United States of America, put on him to do so earlier this year, he can certainly muster the same will to kick the Zionists out of Nigeria, nullify their pervasive influence in our country and sub-region and sever all trade, economic and diplomatic ties and relations with them.
General Yakubu Gowon, our revered former Head of State, did this in 1973 when he was in power and as Chairman of the then OAU (AU) in order to punish the Jewish State for its attack on the Palestinians during the Yom Kippur War.
For a number of years before then and specifically during our three year civil war, Gowon had viewed Israel with much distrust and suspicion given the covert support it gave to the Biafran secessionists and its complicity in the attempt to dismember and break up our beloved country.
However the straw did not break the camel’s back until 1973 after which the final break took place and diplomatic relations between our two countries were not restored until September 1992 by the then Head of State, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
I am constrained to say that now is the time to break diplomatic ties with Israel again.
This is the right and proper thing to do in the light of its insatiable compulsion and appetite for mass murder, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide and given its insane and psychotic disposition for murdering helpless and defenceless women and children and for killing babies.
Again, this is the right and proper thing to do given the fact that it has not only illegally occupied the land of the Palestinian people for over 76 years and slaughtered and incarcerated millions of the people but has also unleashed what can best be described as the second holocaust against it over the last one year, killing over 60,000 in Gaza alone and thousands more in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria!
If the world could go to war with Nazi Germany in 1936 as a consequence of the first holocaust, every civilised nation ought to, at the very least, be able to break diplomatic ties with Zionist Israel as a consequence of the second.
Morality, decency and justice demands no less and those nations that insist on applauding the atrocities of the Jewish State and selling weapons of mass destruction to it are not only complicit in its war crimes but are also from the pit of hell and in the service of shaitan.
The Holy Bible says there can be no fellowship between light and darkness. It says we must either choose God or Belial.
It also compels us to resist evil and to fight for the weak, the poor, the vulnerable and the oppressed.
The Holy Quran does the same and is emphatic on the importance of justice for all and support for the less privileged and the vulnerable.
Nigeria can and must NEVER be seen to be complicit in the bestial barbarity that is going on in Gaza or to have relations with the beasts that have relentlessly unleashed it.
Though we have many challenges, ours is a nation of decent, God-fearing, just and right-thinking people who have a long history of standing for the oppressed all over Africa and contributing to the efforts of numerous liberation struggles.
Let us prove to the world once again that that is who and what we are by openly and loudly challenging the barbarity, lunacy and thuggery of the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, the African Union and all other relevant fora and calling it out for its continuous violations of international law, its disdain for an international rules-based system and its racist, fascist and ethnocentric disposition.
Let us expose its contempt for humanity and human life, its total and complete adoption, espousal and implementation of apartheid as a fundamental principle and cardinal policy in its system of government and its religious fanaticism and proselytising bigotry.
Let us vigorously and aggressively resist its hatred for Arabs and Africans, appalling treatment of Christians and Muslims, rejection of the two-state solution, desire to ethnically cleanse, wipe out and totally eradicate and eliminate the Palestinian race, its intention to establish a ‘Greater Israel’ whose borders would stretch from Egypt to Iran and its heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
These are concrete and cogent steps that we as a people and nation can take to contribute our quota to the collective fight against the tyranny and oppression of the Zionists and I believe that we are still big and strong enough to take them.
May God guide and protect us in this noble endeavour and may history and posterity be kind to us.
By Ehichioya Ezomon
Rivers State Governor Siminalayi Fubara’s made the world to believe that his predecessor and Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, Chief Nyesom Wike, is the architect and purveyor of the political crisis in the state. He’s used every opportune moment to drum this narrative for the consumption of a sympathetic public.
Fubara struck a similar cord lately, at the heat of the contentious and bloody October 5, 2024, local government council election that’s resisted and boycotted by the Wike faction of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state.
Appearing on a Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’ on Monday, October 7, Fubara advised Wike to let go of his grip on the Rivers polity, “for the sake of the good people of Rivers State, and the love that you (Wike) have always professed for the state.
”On the alleged breach of a “gentleman’s agreement” he’d entered into with Wike to secure his “anointing and endorsement” as the PDP candidate for the March 18, 2023, governorship, Fubara said he’d kept all “understanding” with Wike, and lounged into his talking point of how he’d repeatedly knelt down for Wike for peace to reign in Rivers.
“There is nothing I have not done on this earth for peace to reign. I can tell you the number of times I have knelt to beg (Wike) that, let’s allow this issue to go. I have done everything,” Fubara said, even as continuously states, “I will not worship any human being but God” – indicating alleged Wike’s demand he (Fubara) should worship him, a charge Wike’s denied.
Fubara says he appreciates the fact that Wike played a pivotal role in his governorship, but that it’s God that used Wike as a vessel to fulfil His purpose, and so, only God deserves his (Fubara’s) worship, and not any human. He echoed this sentiment on May 16, 2024, during the inauguration of Egbeda internal roads, in Emohua local government area of Rivers.
Fubara said: “God can do anything He wants to do when He wants to do it. It is only for us to realise that God will not come down from Heaven but will pass through one man or woman to achieve His purpose. So, for that reason, when we act, we act as humans; human vessels that God has used, and not seeing yourself as God.
“I want to say this clearly, that we appreciate the role our leaders, most especially the immediate past governor (Wike) played. But that is not enough for me to worship a human being. I can’t do that.”
However, on May 11, 2024, in Ogu-Bolo, Rivers State, at a grand reception in honour of Chief George Thompson Sekibo for his 20 years of public service, Wike said he isn’t God, and as such, had never demanded that anybody should worship him. “Nobody can worship man. All of us believe that it is only God we will worship. (But) as politicians, we appreciate people who have helped us,” Wike said.
Asked on the Channels TV’s programme what his message to Wike would be if they met, Fubara said: “I’ll tell him that it has gotten to a point where he needs to let go. We need peace in this state. You don’t necessarily need to win all the fights; at times, you just let go for the sake of the good people of Rivers State and the love that you have always professed for the state.”
Noting that “election periods are over and it’s time for governance,” Fubara urged Wike to give peace a chance. “What I am appealing is: Everyone should sheathe their swords. Even to the Minister, my oga (my boss), there is no need to destroy this state. When it comes to the election period, you can fight and do whatever but now is the time for governance. We need all the support,” Fubara said.
“He (Wike) once ruled this state and the state was an envy of every other state. Another person (Fubara) is there now, (and) what we need is the support. After four years or eight years, who knows? I will also leave and someone else will take over. That should be the spirit. Fubara will leave tomorrow. Who knows who is going to come? It might be through him or another person but we need to secure the state.”
But does Fubara really desire peace in Rivers State? It doesn’t seem so! Otherwise, he should quit the baiting, the insulting, the denigrating, the rhetoric, and the labelling of Wike as “the enemy of Rivers State” – all done by Fubara to curry sympathy and secure the approval of the gaming public. You can’t be talking peace and at the same time be fanning the embers of war!
Fubara can stoop to conquer by embracing genuine reconciliation with Wike. For instance, what stops the governor from telling those beating the drums of war for him that, “Enough is enough, I’m going to make peace with Wike for the sake of Rivers State and its people?”
This may not work due to the personal and partisan differences among the former governors and the incumbent. For example, Odili aligns with Fubara and alienates Amaechi and Wike; Amaechi’s sours on Odili, Wike and Fubara; Wike’s beef with Odili, Amaechi and Fubara; and Fubara and Wike are on a war path.
In such a scenario, who’ll call for the “sit-at-table” peace meeting? President Bola Tinubu would’ve fitted the bill, but he literally burnt his fingers the last time he attempted a truce between Fubara and Wike. The agreement, witnessed and signed by Odili, Fubara and Wike, among others, collapsed almost immediately it’s hashed out, with Fubara, who initially said the agreement “wasn’t a death sentence,” turning round to lebel it as political and not constitutional.
So, here’s a simple approach that’ll not only put Wike on his back foot, and induce him to return to the basic, but also push him to his wit’s end! Fubara should select some of the elders and leaders of the divide in Rivers, including the former governors, and inform Wike that he’s coming with a delegation on an agreed date, to fully reconcile with him. The ball will then be centrally placed in Wike’s court to either accept or refuse Fubara’s expressed desire for armistice between them.
Fubara’s offer of peace should be widely publicised in the media – different from his claimed behind-the-scences kneeling down to beg Wike – for maximum pressure and effect on Wike, and it’ll be well and good if the overture comes through! If doesn’t – in the event that Wike declines the invitation to reconcile, his current and intended political antics will be exposed as being the real masquerade behind the political turmoil in Rivers State, and Fubara will be vindicated at last.
All told, the “feat” Fubara achieved with the conduct of the local government council election hasn’t guaranteed a win over the war with Wike. Instead, he’s merely won the battle – a pyrrhic victory of some sorts – while the war remains. It’s still a dicey situation in which “a child doesn’t know when sleep takes food from their mouth” – depicting the futility of the “clever person” attempting to hold on to something that’s slipping away from them.
Fubara strives strenuously to exonerate himself from the crisis he’s helped engineer and sustain for a year now. That Rivers is going through the grinding mill is because of the governor’s failure to use tact and diplomacy in handling and dealing with Wike’s alleged overbearing influence on his government.
Agreed that Wike – amid strong opposition and resistance from even political leaders from Fubara’s homestead – worked on the recommendation of some Rivers leaders, and took Fubara from the civil service to the Government House, for which Fubara should be grateful, and accord Wike the respect he deserves within the ambit of personal relationship and official conduct.
Reciprocally, Wike should give Fubara the space to freely run his government, and not breath down his neck, as doing so portrays him as a “godfather” that exerts maximum loyalty from and punishment on their surrogates. That’s what Wike’s become, and as especially sold by Fubara to the public, which views the governor as the underdog, and backs his duel with Wike in the supremacy contest to control the political structure, power and resources of Rivers State.
But in his quest to crush and humiliate Wike over his appetite for “godfatherism,” Fubara’s committed numerous unforced errors, as he listens and tries to satisfy his supporters, who pressure him to man up and “show Wike that you’re the Governor of Rivers State.” It’s time Fubara ditched their selfish advice, and chart a different course that’ll genuinely ensure peace and security in Rivers!
Ezomon, Journalist and Media Consultant, writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
By Taiwo Adisa
One of the major actors in the June 12, 1993 election debacle, Professor Humphrey Nwosu, breathed his last on Thursday, October 24, in the United States of America, at the age of 83. He had served as the Chairman of the National Election Commission (NEC), now the Independent National Electoral Commission, between 1989 and 1993, his tenure terminated by the fiendish exchanges occasioned by the savage annulment of the election.
Professor Nwosu was a Professor of Political Science who was named the Chairman of the electoral body by former military leader General Ibrahim Babangida in circumstances similar to how former President Goodluck Jonathan named Professor Attahiru Jega into that same position on June 8, 2020.
Both IBB and Jonathan had previously not met with the men they named as the nation’s chief electoral officers. Nwosu served creditably, even though the military denied the nation the fruits of his service as NEC Chairman.
While in office, he was the executor of Babangida’s transition as it galloped from one bumpy end to another. The man was, however, determined to get something out of the assignment. He showed he was in office and in power in his determination to improvise a model into practical life mechanically.
He left no one in doubt that he was out to give back to the country of his birth from the pool of the political theories he had read and taught in the university. Working in the shadows of Babangida’s Political Bureau Report, which was the foundation of the regime’s unwinding transition programme, Nwosu applied his theoretical craft and modelled the Option A4 (Open Ballot System) and the Modified Open Ballot System.
With IBB’s regime having adopted a two-party system, it seemed a perfect fit for the elections and the results turned in at different intervals to the satisfaction of Nigerians. There was the local government election, state elections and then the National Assembly elections. At a stage, the nation was treated to a Diarchy, with a full-fledged National Assembly making laws for a military ruler. Everything looked set for the June 12, 1993, presidential poll, which was to crown a tedious transition programme that started in 1986.
Nwosu was upbeat that the law was on his side, despite the serpentine spirit donned by the infamous Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) of Senator Arthur Nzeribe and Abimbola Davies, lurking. Nwosu was prevented from announcing the presidential election in full, as the regime cited a midnight judgment secured by the ABN. Even at that, the whole nation was merely awaiting the official confirmation of what they already knew, Chief MKO Abiola, candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) had defeated Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC).
It was an election globally confirmed as the freest and fairest in the nation’s history but the Babangida junta denied Nwosu the accolades, it denied Chief Abiola the chance to savour his victory and drew back the hands of Nigeria’s democratic clock.
For years, Nwosu kept mute on the circumstances that surrounded the testy period of the annulled election but in June 2008, he spoke to TheNEWS magazine, just ahead of the public presentation of the book that chronicled his public service experience. He first told the magazine that he had a sense of history when the appointment fell on his lap and that he believed there was a need to produce a practical situation from the theories.
He said: “I felt I had to do my best to this nation to also convince the person who appointed me that I could do my best for Nigeria and satisfy my conscience and my constituency-the university community. You know, when members of the academic community are given a public assignment; people say they’re just talking theory and that you have to blend theory with practice.”
He described the June 12, 1993 election as a special moment in the nation’s history and said: “So you’ll find that June 12 as a movement was indeed the day Nigerians opted for a democratic political order. They didn’t care, and the parties cut across ethnic, state, and regional boundaries. And Nigerians were highly mobilized and they expressed their choices freely without interference. There was no stuffing of ballot boxes, and there was no manipulation, intimidation, or harassment. Nigerians came out as a body, just like people in the United States and Britain, and voted freely. No intimidation, no one lost his life anywhere, it was God-ordained.”
Indeed, the annulment of the election, which was announced by Babangida on June 23, 1993, was like a prison sentence for Nigeria’s democratic process. Alarm bells rang across the nation. There were threats of war. Many died. Many got maimed and countless went missing as protests engulfed the nation. The nation was on tenterhooks for years. With Nigeria on the brink of disintegration, power changed hands quickly.
General Sani Abacha replaced the Ernest Shonekan contraption left by a “stepping aside” General Babangida. He initially dangled the carrot before the political class but later unleashed his iron-fisted fangs. He battled the pro-democracy agitators with crude despotism. MKO Abiola, who had declared himself president, was arrested, and his wife Kudirat was killed, just as many top pro-democracy campaigners.
No doubt, the aftermath of the annulled June 12 was a broken regime and a fractured nation, culminating in the birth of a wobbling democracy. Democracy in its true form, having been dented with hefty blows in the series of leadership change from Babangida to Shonekan to Sani Abacha, whose death in 1998 paved the way for General Abdulsalami Abubakar to midwife the current Republic within eleven months.
As stated by Nwosu above, most of the kudos for the turnout of the June 12 election were largely due to his modelling efforts. He fashioned out Option A4, which ushered in the freest poll in the annals of Nigeria’s elections. In the interview published by The NEWS, Nwosu justified the decision by the Babangida administration to adopt a two-party structure and declared that a multi-party system would not yield the desired democratic objectives. He said that mushroom political parties cannot defend democracy as they would not be able to muster the structure across the country.
With what we have seen in recent years, Nwosu was right. Though the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, had fought for the democratisation of the political party registration process, the fact remains that the multiplicity of parties may not necessarily serve the democratic cause. These days, many political parties are there for political jobs. They either withdraw in favour of the highest bidder a few days before the election, or they are the first to address the media to endorse the outcome of elections, all for a fee.
Incidentally, Prof Nwosu had recognised such shenanigans long before his demise and had equally recommended a revisit of his electoral models. He told TheNEWS: “I feel we should revisit the electoral reforms, modified open ballot system and option A4. We should go back to the two-party structure. We may even allow a third party for those who feel they cannot be accommodated in the two.
You could see in the days of SDP and NRC that you can have integrated parties that look to value consensus, parties that raise national consciousness, parties that have spread all over the country, and parties that cut across ethnic, and religious groupings. I am seriously addressing this issue because I believe in it, and I think that some Nigerians believe in it.”
In this era of troubled elections, I believe that Nwosu’s models should be revisited. His Option A4 should serve as our electoral compass going forward. The modified system and all that Nwosu brought to the table needed to be re-examined by the National Assembly, such that they could give the nation an electoral law that would work for all.
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