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Does Our President-Elect Intend To Keep His By Femi Aribisala Word?, Buhari asked for the vote and got the vote. But now that the election has been won, it is excuses galore! During the presidential election campaign, General Buhari observed in his “Manifesto and Vision for Nigeria” that: “The general trust level of politics, politicians and political leaders is at an all-time low. One may ask why? And we can as well understand why after years of broken promises.” But now that the election is over, Vanguard reports that, in a confession to APC governors: “President-elect, Major- General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), has said that he is currently at a loss on how best to tell Nigerians that his promise of turning the economy around quickly upon assumption of office on May 29 may not be feasible after all.” In effect, our president-elect himself provides the latest edition of the broken promises he derides in his manifesto. Many of those promises were made in complete disregard of the parlous state of the Nigerian economy given dwindling oil prices. Father Christmas During the election, Buhari promised that under his administration, the Nigerian economy would achieve GDP growth-rate of 10-12% annually. He would create a Social Welfare Programme providing 5,000 naira monthly for the 25 million poorest Nigerians; provide allowances for unemployed Youth Corps graduates for twelve months; provide one meal a day for all primary school pupils; and create one million jobs for Igbo youths by revamping the huge coal deposits in Enugu State. He would also bolster the Nigerian middle-class by an additional four million new home-owners benefiting from a national mortgage of single-digit interest- rates; generate, transmit and distribute electricity on a 24/7 basis; and build 5,000 km of super-highway and up to 6,800 km of modern railway all by 2019, among other absolutely wonderful things. But when APC governors went crying to him that their treasuries are empty, in spite of the fact that they either emptied them themselves, or are in no position to determine their status because they are yet to take over the reins of office; Buhari pleaded for understanding. He said: “The expectation is too high and I have started nervously to explain to people that Rome was not built in a day. For this to be corrected, please, give the incoming government a chance.” However, the expectation is high because Buhari and the APC built them up during the campaign. They should blame themselves if they are now victims of their own deceitful success. PDP Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh observed that: “The APC has successfully used propaganda and lies to get to power. Now, let us see how they will use the same strategies to sustain it.” Apparently, many of Buhari’s promises during the election were never intended for fulfilment. Many of them were made for the singular purpose of winning the election. Having won the election, Buhari clearly has no more use for them. Therefore, he has been busy discarding them one-by-one. Recently, he advised Nigerians on a TV Continental interview that, unlike the Quran and the Bible, the APC position during the election is now subject to change. One chance At the APC South-East rally at Dan Anyiam Stadium in Owerri, Buhari declared that he would make the naira equal to the dollar if voted into office. He continued: “It is sad that the value of the naira has dropped to more than 230 to one dollar. This does not speak well for the nation’s economy.” But now that he is president-elect, Buhari no longer talks about naira-dollar parity. All he does is complain about the devaluation of the naira. When a Channels TV presenter asked him during the election campaign how he would manage the economy in the face of dwindling oil prices, he replied that he would first stabilise the oil market. But instead of telling us how he proposes to do this miracle now that he is president- elect, all Buhari does is complain to the newly-elected legislators of the Senate and House of Representatives that the decline in Nigeria’s revenues due to falling oil prices poses great danger to his development agenda. Buhari even promised during the campaign to kill corruption in Nigeria. He said: “If we don’t kill corruption in Nigeria, corruption will kill us. So, the choice before us is to resolve to kill corruption and free our country from the firm grip of corrupt men and women.” However, Buhari is no longer talking about killing corruption. All we are getting from him is that he and his ministers will declare their assets, and corrupt officials will be prosecuted. Surely Buhari knows that in no country in the world has corruption ever been killed; least of all in Nigeria. When he said he would kill corruption, he was merely using hyperbole to pull the wool over the eyes of Nigerians. But now the time for hyperbole is over. However, Bola Tinubu does not seem to have received the memo to that effect from APC HQ. Speaking after the election at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomosho, Tinubu declared that the APC would eradicate poverty in Nigeria. He said: “A progressive government must turn its face from the austerity policies of the outgoing administration that tried to manage poverty, but not end it. Such policies serve only to deepen and prolong the hardship of the average person.” APC eradication of poverty is yet another pie-in-the-sky. There is no template from any APC-controlled state in this regard. On the contrary, virtually all of them are in arrears with workers’ salaries for several months. Even Jesus the Messiah admits that poverty cannot be eliminated in this world. He says categorically: “You will always have poor people with you.” (Matthew 26:11). Read Buhari’s lips At a Town-Hall meeting in Abuja in March 2015 during the presidential campaign, Buhari made a solemn promise to bring back home the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls. He said: “I will give all it takes to ensure that our girls kidnapped from Chibok are rescued and reintegrated with their families.” However, with the election over, Buhari is now the paragon of caution and “double- speak.” In a speech made during the one-year anniversary of the Chibok kidnapping, Buhari said: “We do not know if the Chibok girls can be rescued. Their whereabouts remain unknown. As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them.” What are we to make of this volte face from our president-elect who nevertheless fashions himself as a man of integrity? In an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN during the campaign, Buhari boasted that he would defeat Boko Haram within two months if elected. Hear him: “We know how they started and where they are now and we will rapidly give attention to security in the country. And I believe we will ef¬fectively deal with them in two months when we get into office.” But now that he has been elected, Buhari categorically denies ever making such a promise. He now says in an interview with journalists: “I think I am too experienced in internal security to give two months deadline on Boko Haram. I don’t think I would have made that statement. I didn’t.” However, the record of his interview with Christiane Amanpour speaks for itself. It shows our president-elect can be economical with the truth. Anti-corruption flip-flops In order not to scare off dodgy members of his party with his anti-corruption rhetoric, Buhari promised to let corrupt sleeping dogs lie if elected. In his Manifesto, he says: “I, Muhammadu Buhari, have resolved that the task ahead of me is that of securing our nation and prospering our people, not looking backward to the failed policies and promises of the past.” At the North-West APC rally in Kaduna, Buhari declared: “Whoever that is indicted of corruption between 1999 to the time of swearing-in, would be pardoned. I am going to draw a line, anybody who involves himself in corruption after I assume office, will face the music.” This means as long as you steal money between 1999 and 2015, you have nothing to fear under a Buhari presidency. But now that he has been elected, Buhari is singing a different tune. He now says he will revisit the issue of the allegedly missing $20 billion from NNPC accounts. At a meeting with APC stakeholders from Adamawa, Buhari insisted that: “This issue is not over yet. Once we assume office, we will order a fresh probe into the matter. We will not allow people to steal money meant for Nigerians to buy shares and stash away in foreign lands.” This shows our president-elect is not a man who believes in keeping his word. He says whatever is expedient for him to say at any given moment. With so many failed promises, even before the inauguration of his government, it is clear that Buhari is in for a very short honeymoon. Nigerians are not likely to accept having excuses for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Excuses galore Buhari asked for the vote and got the vote. But now that the election has been won, it is excuses galore! However, Nigerians voted for change: they did not vote for excuses. When you go to a restaurant, you don’t go there to listen to excuses. You go there to eat food. It is really not the business of the clientele to know the difficulties encountered in cooking it. Buhari asked repeatedly to be president, making all sorts of promises. Now he is president-elect, we need no excuses from him. If everything is so bleak and bad, why did he ask for the job? Why did he make all those highfalutin promises to a gullible electorate? What Fela said about Buhari’s first-coming is equally applicable to his second-coming. He said: “The people wey no sabi dey jubilate, the people wey sabi dey shake their head.” Buhari discouraged Nigerians from being patient with Goodluck Jonathan. It is unrealistic for him to now expect Nigerians to be patient for him. What he promised during the election was magic. What he needs to provide now is that magic. We want to see the magic and we want to see it now. This demand is necessary in order to ensure that Nigerians will not fall for this same trick any time soon in the future. We must hold Buhari and the APC accountable for every single one of the empty promises they made during the election campaign. http://scannewsnigeria.com/opinion/does-our-president-elect-intend-to-keep-his-word/

Article :Wole Soyinka and the Igbo Question (1) Posted by: admin May 12, 2015 in Opinion BY HUHUONLINE The controversy that has excited intense public recriminations over statements by Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, to the effect that Igbos are champions of stomach politics, bears closer examination. The offensive comments are in the public domain and need no re-telling, not the least for the reason that they are so unedifying and most embarrassing to the foremost dramatist. Although Soyinka has come out to angrily deny making any such comments “regarding the Ndigbo voting pattern in the last elections,” this apparently, is an afterthought of a man who spoke before thinking. Even now, there is need to refocus on the implications of the overwhelming Igbo support for President Goodluck Jonathan in the wake of what evidently is a well- orchestrated campaign of vilification against the Igbos by certain groups, poised to hijack and imbue the incoming Buhari administration with the mentality that “this is our turn.” This is unacceptable. It is Buhari’s duty to protect the nation from cant and chicanery in pursuance of sectional interests. This is the challenge of leadership. From the public debate the issue has generated, no one is challenging Soyinka’s right to free speech. Far from it! The main grouse, and validly so, remains that, there is a concerted effort to cast the Igbo vote for Jonathan as a treasonable offence, for which they must be punished. Caught in a seemingly, even if unintended clannish grandstanding, Soyinka did not say anything new. If anything, his open celebration of bigotry only diminished his person. Without saying whether he was misquoted or that his remarks at the Harvard lecture were taken out of context, Soyinka said anyone who believes the “imbecilic pronouncements” credited to him is a moron and mentally retarded. Be that as it may; the fact is that Igbophobia – the systemic exclusion of Igbos from the commanding heights of authority in the nation, has been the hallmark of governance in Nigeria from the end of the civil war to the present. However, in substance and manner, the reaction of Ndigbo was hasty, equally imprudent, in a way that advertises a herd mentality; a pious tendency towards self-centered pedestrianism, which reinforces the stereotype of the Igbos as garrulous, clannish, over-bearing, and always ready to rally in furtherance of an Igbo hegemonic agenda. The result is that, in the face of such extreme provocation, the Igbos failed to demonstrate maturity and political sagacity. The anger, name-calling and insultive grandiloquence that characterized reactions to Soyinka, was unnecessary. It is bad enough that Soyinka finds himself in this controversy; it is doubly embarrassing for him to openly express such contempt for public opinion even if there was a gap between what he said and what the media transmitted, as he now claims. Calling people morons and mentally retarded is insultive and unbecoming of a man of Soyinka’s standing. The latest controversy comes in the wake of similar unedifying comments by the Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, shortly before the governorship and state assembly elections. Even though the palace, like Soyinka tried to walk back the unfortunate statements, made to some Igbo notables, who were the Oba’s guests, the royal faux pas went viral and generated enough bad blood to threaten the unity and peaceful co-existence between the Igbos and the Yorubas in cosmopolitan Lagos and across the country. The offensive statements tainted the Oba’s throne and portrayed him as a belligerent rabble-rouser. The Igbos had every reason to take umbrage at Oba Akiolu’s wish for the “settlers” to support his preferred gubernatorial candidate, failing which; the Igbos would be drowned in the lagoon. Before the Igbos crucify Soyinka, it is worth reminding them that their anger, however justified is misdirected. The allegations against the Igbos and their vote for Jonathan notwithstanding, the reactions of anger can make sensational headlines in the media, but it certainly will not resolve the “Igbo problem” which, to all intents and purposes has been institutionalized. The angry reaction was not even good politics. If at all Soyinka’s acerbic anti-Igbo remarks needed a response, Ndigbo should have formally given a measured one, which would have indicated seriousness commensurate to Soyinka’s weighty allegations, discomforting as such may have been. It is amazing just how anyone who loves this country and cares for its people can, reasonably, pretend not to realize that between the three major ethnic groups – Igbos, Yorubas and Hausa/Fulani – the Igbos have continued to be marginalized and treated with disdain as third class citizens in Nigeria. The travails Ndigbo has had to endure from sporadic outbreaks of anti-Igbo sentiments across Nigeria speaks directly to the bankrupt state of Ndigbo leadership and their failure to learn from the popular Igbo saying: “onye na amaghi ebe mmiri bidoro mawa ya, agaghi ama ebe o kwusiri” (He who does not know when the rain began to beat him would not know when the rain stops). The rain began to beat Ndigbo in 1914 when Lord Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates into the contraption called Nigeria. The Igbos became drenched in acid rain by systemic massacres: Jos (1945), Kano (1953) and the September 29, 1966 massacre in which thousands of Igbo men, women and children were slaughtered. This led to the civil war, which saw mass starvation and anti-Igbo genocide. And the bloody rain has continued to beat Ndigbo, resulting in anti-Igbo massacres – Kano (1980), Maiduguri (1982), Yola (1984), Gombe (1985), Kaduna (1986), Bauchi (1991), Funtua (1993), Kano (1994), Damboa (2000) and Apo 6 (2005). The ongoing nihilistic slaughter of Igbo people by Boko Haram is yet to be documented. But there is no question that a disproportionate percentage of the thousands of Boko Haram victims are Igbo people. The political expediency that dictated the emergence of the Hausa/Fulani-Yoruba axis of power has been consolidated by the overbearing disposition and insatiable greed of Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba political elite, who by deliberate and questionable policies have whimsically and arbitrarily emasculated the Igbos from political relevance in the commanding heights of authority in the federal government and its agencies. Unarguably, either by design or omission, these policies have become institutionalized, with Ndigbo getting the short end of the stick. The numbers don’t lie. An analysis of the six zones comprising the federation has the following breakdown in number of states: Northwest (7), Northeast (6), North- central (6), Southwest (6), South-south (6) and the Igbo-dominated Southeast (5). Local governments by design are the machinery through which governance is brought directly to the grassroots. It is the tier of government whose functions are calculated to impact directly on the people. Here again, the numbers don’t lie; Northwest (186), Northeast (112), North-central (115), Southwest (138), South-south (123) and Southeast (95). The federal constituencies are so designed in such a way that the transfer of resources is anchored on proportionality. Again the numbers don’t lie: Northwest (92), Northeast (48), North- central (49), Southwest (71), South-south (55) and Southeast (43). Even the Senate, where logic demanded equal representation as obtained in the USA, whose presidential system Nigeria copied, the Southeast is last with just 15 Senatorial districts; the Southwest, South-south, North-central and Northeast each have 18 districts while the Northwest has 21. These constitutionally entrenched structural injustices have far-reaching implications beyond questions of marginalization. These numbers represent the blatant reality that Ndigbo has refused to confront, preferring to revel in distractions about who said what against the Igbos. Forty-five years after the end of the civil war, the Southeast zone bears the unmistakable characteristics of a conquered and occupied territory. This is a national shame not just for Ndigbo, but for Nigeria! http://scannewsnigeria.com/opinion/editorial-wole-soyinka-and-the-igbo-question-1/

Good Job! - The media towards election in Nigeria by Afolabi Oluwaseun It is through that the media is the fourth arms of government which can neither be disputed nor elected into governance still they (media) serve as the watch dog for the government. I think we are getting their; "Democracy and not demonstration of crazyness" by giving the media freedom to perform their job and not being criminally censored, also allowing the society to perform their civic rights yep we are getting there. The media. Who are meant to educate, inform and entertain the society has taken a step forward in their normal ways of delivering these functions withe the collaboration of the new media which transfer messages, ideas, information through digital techniques and data network has helped in giving us a democratic elections in Nigeria compare to the mass media, anybody can be journalist (citizen journalist ) in New Media and it has helped to express people's will via Internet. So far the mass media and the new media has not been appreciated for the great job done, though that is what they are meant to offer but this has been delivered by the media perfectly. The mass media include; both print and broadcast and the new media is the the internet which consist of the social networks like facebook, twitter, blog, et al. To both the Journalists, cub journalist and citizen journalists, you all have put great effort in moving the nation forward. Towards the credible election of April 2015, the media has played magnificent and vital role in pre election, election and post election activities in our great nation Nigeria. The media which serve as the voice of the voiceless has helped in implementing the will of the people. Lets flashback to other elections held in Nigeria, this is still the freest and fairest election, in those past elections the strength of he media is notbas much as this may be because they are babies but now that the know the influence of media in the society is important. The media have dedicated to be agent of change. Even before the announcement of the election results from the presidential to the state house of assembly, we already know the winner we are just waiting for formality to be announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission. Though there are some looping holes in the election, which has totally reduced compare to the last elections with more effort from the media the holes will be covered inba gradual process and democracy will take over the nation. I won't drop my ball point without congratulating three individuals; the president elect General Muhammadu Buhari, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan for accepting defeat and the Independent National Electoral Commission chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega for organising and conducting credible and democratic elections. You all, the Media and Nigerians have set a pace for other countries to follow both in Africa and the whole universe. Looking forward in peaceful transition of power. follow on twitter www.twitter/aphorismcity