Clay Richie

Today, President Muhammadu Buhari and United States of America’s President Donald Trump will hold a bilateral meeting at the White House. The meeting of the two leaders is important because it underscores Nigeria–U.S. longstanding friendship – a friendship that dates back to 1960 when the U.S. established diplomatic relations with Nigeria after it gained independence from Britain. Though that friendship was negatively affected by decades of military rule; however, since the return of democracy in 1999, relations between the two countries have improved tremendously, particularly in the areas of trade and regional security.

Time changes everything. We're in a politically turbulent age. Young leaders around the world are disrupting the old order. So, where will the political earth shake next? The answer could be – indeed, should be – Nigeria. The world's youngest leaders hail from across the globe. Nigeria and of course Africa, take a back stage as no current leader in the continent is below age of 40.

The failed recall of Senator Dino Melaye on Saturday provides an opportunity for lessons to be drawn from the implementation of the recall constitutional provisions. Out of 189,870 signatories to the petition for Melaye’s recall, only 18,742 were verified by the Independent National Electoral Commission. This is a paltry 5.34 per cent of the total number of registered voters in the senatorial district and therefore did not satisfy the requirement of the law demanding a simple majority of the signatures of voters registered to vote in the constituency.

Contrary to the lie that the constantly fallacious Buhari administration published in their press release, President Muhammadu Buhari will not be the first African leader US President Donald Trump will meet at the White House. President Trump met Egypt's Al-Sisi at the White House on April 2, 2017.

President Muhammadu Buhari recently approved $1 billion for procurement of security equipment. Many concerns were expressed about the announcement. These included the approval of such colossal sum by the president without authorization by the National Assembly, and the rationale behind such huge expenditure to combat an organization that the government claimed had been “technically defeated”. Some were concerned that the money was simply Buhari’s re-election budget masqueraded as funds for arms. Of course, the cynicism of many Nigerians stemmed from a telepathic understanding that the fund might be embezzled by an assorted selection of parasites in governments. The situation is in fact much more complex and the actors more heterogeneous.

Around 9am on Friday, April 20, 2018, I grabbed my phone to check my messages. My wife and I had taken an early morning walk and I had been separated from my phone for over an hour. It was inevitable that there would be many missed calls and messages patiently waiting for my attention. The first message I saw was from Imam Imam, spokesman of Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal of Sokoto state and my former colleague at THISDAY. It came in at 8:23am. He wrote: “Oga good morning. Are you available for a chat? Or are you busy?” Although I always prefer WhatsApp chats and SMS to phone calls so that I can multi-task, I chose to call him immediately. It was always fun talking with him.

Late Isiaka Adeleke was a former governor of Osun State. He became a senator representing Osun West Senatorial District election in the Nigerian Senate. He died on the 23rd of April 2017. As expected, there was a need to replace him in the senate.

Of late, the Pharisee called Professor Yemi Osinbajo has been on a roll with his scalding attacks on the immediate-past government. Many are wondering if his pleasant posture when he was the acting president was an adopted persona for personal political gain. Now, as the 2019 election approaches with all its permutations, amid the failure of his party to deliver on its electoral promises, his attacks have grown in intensity. He wants to be seen as some sort of hero and the personification of virtue and ethics for a new Nigeria. But he is not.

Journalism is one profession that every Tom, Dick, and Harry pretends to know how to practise; so was Festus Keyamo, SAN appointed Director, Strategic Communication (whatever that means!) for President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election bid. Their good grief! But in trying to explain why he took up the appointment (as if any serious-minded person needs such feigned justification), Keyamo elected to drag the name of our most venerable Chief Gani Fawehinmi in the mud.

As I contemplate my lecture in a few days in Paris on leadership at the University of Schiller, as part of the graduation of the university, where I have been invited to speak, I am saddened by how hard it is to find home-grown examples on good leadership. This is an issue of grave importance to me as, in my 80-plus years, I have seen my country, Nigeria, flourish under good leadership but I am also seeing it turn to near ruins as a result of poor leadership.

In what has now become an annual ritual, Nigeria has once more scored a not so disappointing low in the observance of respect for the fundamental rights of the citizenry in the latest of the many global reports about the country in the current dispensation.

I thank the Royal Institute of International Affairs for giving me this platform to speak to such a distinguished audience. I specifically want to thank Dr. Alex Vines for inviting me to give this address. I particularly want to thank Nigerian nationals who are present here today. Your love for Nigeria is evident in that you have left your regular pursuits to be here to interact with lovers of Nigeria on issues that, if implemented, will lead to the progress of Nigeria. Your presence inspires me.

In a piece on leadership contributed for Forbes magazine in August last year, Victor Lipman wrote: “A leader’s words always matter. Tone matters. Fact matters. Nuance matters. Discipline matters. With extreme power comes extreme responsibility.”

The US government’s 2017 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Nigeria must be a source of concern to President Buhari and the country in general. The 48-page executive summary of the report, which was released recently by the country’s State Department (the federal executive department that advises the President and represents the US in international affairs and foreign policy issues), was generally thumbs down for the Buhari government on human rights practices. The full executive summary can be accessed via this link.

In love, opposites attract; in politics birds of the same feather flock together. President Muhammadu Buhari deserves Femi Adesina as much as Goodluck Jonathan deserved Doyin Okupe and Reuben Abati. Donald Trump deserves his Sanders. That is how it works.

Many Nigerians wonder why people who run for office shout about anti-corruption before they get into office and when they get in, they become quiet.  If I were to ask many of you, you would probably say the further down the list you go the more corrupt the allegations against them. President Muhammadu Buhari was a strong advocate of anti-corruption. However, when he got into office, he failed to be effective.   Recently, a list of looters were published by the Buhari regime and it only listed members of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and not his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

As a sort of New Year gift to the online media community, Nigerian security agents arrested Tim and Daniel Elombah, the publisher and editor of elombah.com, for allegedly publishing a content the police hierarchy considered offensive. That would not be the first time a journalist or publisher would be arrested for publishing content online in Nigeria. In the last few years, several citizens have been illegally detained for online content some powerful individual or institutions found “offensive”. For instance, a popular blogger Abusidiqu was arrested in 2016 by operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), a law enforcement agency in Nigeria. According to a source, Abusidiqu’s arrest was connected to his posts on EFCC Boss, Ibrahim Magu. According to the spokesperson of the Agency, Abusidiqu was arrested for offences bordering on cyberstalking.

“Wherever possible, government should invest in citizen capabilities to provide for themselves.” - Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO, New America President Muhammadu Buhari who seeks re-election in 2019 criticized Nigerian youths last week at a business conference in London that “A lot of them haven't been to school and they are claiming, you know, that Nigeria has been an oil producing country therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, health care, education, free.”

It is obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari does not always filter his words before they come out. If he filters them at all he does not fully appreciate the connotative and denotative meanings of the words he uses. All words have meanings and can be subjected to literal or metaphorical interpretations.

At a business forum during the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London, President Muhammadu Buhari was asked: “President Buhari, there is great interest in your thoughts on many issues, on investments in the North East, on the continental free trade agreement … em, feel free to take your pick, but would you like to take the microphone and leave us with the final thought from you?”

A strong indication of both the quality and failure of politics in Nigeria, as the people look forward to the next general elections in 2019, is the manner in which virtually “every” Nigerian believes that he or she is good enough to be President of Nigeria. This may speak to a deepening of political consciousness, but it is also a reflection of the people’s anxiety and frustration about how the office and position of the President of Nigeria seems to have been mishandled and demystified. The process of that demystification has taken different shapes and tones since the return to civilian rule in 1999, but now everything seems to have gone so bad, far beyond expectation.  My mechanic couldn’t have phrased this national dilemma better. He came to see me the other day, full of excitement.

I was driving to the office on Thursday last week when I run into a terrible traffic hold up at what Abuja people call Berger, the combined flyover and roundabout in front of construction giant Julius Berger’s head office. It was more than the normal traffic slow down; that one was a standstill. Coming in from the Garki side, I was unhappy that the traffic policeman took ages to tell us to proceed, until I came close to the roundabout and saw that every approach to it was similarly chocked up. Even when the traffic cop finally allowed us to proceed, we only moved on at a pace slower than a snail’s.

Harvard, a renowned University in the world can be said to have mocked Nigeria when she asked in her assignment to  students, why Nigeria as a country has failed to thrive from 1960 to 1999, in respect to relative China and India, despite its endowment in human and natural resources.

In an earlier article where I faced the agony of iterating Nigeria’s bleak socioeconomic and political environment, I lay out certain critical elements of social anomie and political listlessness that characterizes Nigeria. And this state of the nation is all the more tragic because it seems to have become aggravated since the democratic experiment commenced in 1999. And the four democratic leadership from then till now have battled unsuccessfully to get Nigeria into shape.

Something baffles about the mode of responses that comes out of the Nigerian presidency in recent years. Most of the times, you smell the aura of infallibility and the critic-is-always-wrong perception.  When you juxtapose that with the reality of life; only God is infallible, you cannot but wonder, where the Villa originates such feelings.

Pius Adesanmi is always looking for trouble. Imagine tweeting about the paunches of our service chiefs. Children raised in Yagbaland should be forgiven for their ignorance of what goes on in Officer’s Mess and Mammy Markets. I’ll let Adesanmi in on a secret; people don’t go to those places to push abs. They go there to push green bottles, consume hot plates of steaming peppersoup and if you’re as uncharitable as Alozie Ogugbuaja, to plan coups.

Dear President Muhammadu Buhari, I hope this meets you well. I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Simon. Simon Kolawole. Never mind. We will come to that later. Let us briefly journey into history for proper context into why I have chosen to openly write you this morning. I first heard of your name in the evening of December 31, 1983 when you were named the military head of state. Earlier in the day, Brigadier Sani Abacha had woken us up with the announcement of the overthrow of the civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. The economy had been in bad shape. Prices of basic commodities had gone out of hand. Life was so hard. We were tired of Shagari. And we were happy to see his back.

When the senate was invaded last week and the Mace stolen by hoodlums led by the Leader of Buhari Support Group, who is also a suspended Senator, a major pillar of our democracy was desecrated under the devious attack.

August last year, I made a post on my Facebook page with the title, ‘The Argument for Buhari’. The post acquired a life of its own with a sizeable number of people sharing on Facebook and circulating via Whatsapp. I later developed it to a full length opinion article for a few online publications. This is a sequel to the earlier article. Now that the President has told Nigerians that he would seek another term in office in the 2019 general elections, I make a new argument for Buhari.

Fellow Nigerians, these are not the best of times for our dear President, Muhammadu Buhari. And it must be much worse for his media handlers. Let me state matter-of-factly, from the onset, that President Buhari gets into regular trouble, indeed, too frequently, because he has invested heavily in a media team but lacks a public relations team. In Nigeria, most leaders fail to realise that being a good journalist, Editor, Publisher, Broadcaster, and what have you, does not make you a good or excellent public relations guru. The other problem is I’m not sure the President is surrounded by those bold or brave enough to look him straight in the eye to tell him the honest truth. His earlier persona as a military ruler has also not helped matters in this respect. The fear of a military dictator is the beginning of wisdom, according to the view of an average Nigerian.

On account of dejavu alone President Mohammadu Buhari chose the wrong moment to lay bare the open secret of his ambition for a second term in office. In terms of symbolic association, departing Abuja for London in the past one and half years evokes all the wrong memories.

Afeez Baruwa could be on his last mile to jail. Or he could be going home a free man. Three years ago, the former lecturer in the Department of Accounting at the University of Lagos cornered an 18-year-old girl. The girl’s father, a friend of Baruwa’s, had sent her to the lecturer for help to gain admission. Baruwa apparently had other plans: he allegedly seized the poor girl, overpowered her and raped her in his office.

Nigerian democracy advances in fits and starts, a feeble step forward, a lull, then a huge step backwards into infamy. As President Muhammadu Buhari was projecting Nigeria on the world stage, at the 25th Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the United Kingdom, a handful of thugs on a reprehensible assignment invaded the hallowed, upper chambers of the National Assembly, and made away with the Mace, the ancient symbol of legislative authority and imprimatur.

“We campaigned on three major issues – to secure the country, revive the economy and fight corruption. We have elections next year, politicians are already pre-occupied with the polls, but I am bothered more about security and the economy.”

One reality Nigeria is facing in contemporary time is the blurring of the lines in the nation’s quest to tame corruption, the one evil that has been proven to be at the root of every other one of our problems as a nation. It gets bad to a point where the accuser easily becomes the accused and, in a nation where the collective memory barely transcends a four-day cycle, the table can turn on someone intent on doing good to an extent that their public scouring and crucifixion is a given.

Given their backgrounds in the industry, the relationship between Dr Edmund Dakorou as Minister of State for Energy and Mr Funso Kupolokun as the Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was always going to be difficult. And so it proved. By 2005, it had become clear that the duo could not work together in harmony and their hostility towards each other had become known not only within the oil and gas sector but also in the media.

The only time our political leaders say something close to the truth is when they are meeting with either foreign journalists or foreign political leaders. If President Buhari hadn’t travelled to the United Kingdom, we would not have known the ‘truth’ behind the menace of Fulani herdsmen that’s ravaging the length and breadth of our country. Some months ago, Mr. President said that Benue people should embrace Fulani herdsmen—begging them in the name of God, because they are brothers, but a few days ago, he told a foreigner that Fulani herdsmen are foreigners, mentioning the name of a dead President—who can no longer speak to defend himself.

On Friday, the 13th of April 2018, Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja made a landmark pronouncement which, stripped of legal language, means when a minister acts as directed by the president, he or she cannot be held liable for the action. In other words, the minister is only carrying out an order of the president. Justice Nyako declared that by the provisions of sections 5(1), 147, 148 and 150 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended), the executive powers of the federation were vested in the President which he could exercise either personally or through any of his appointed ministers. This is the first judicial interpretation of these sections of the Constitution to the best of my knowledge.

I am not one of those mischievous Nigerians throwing jabs at President Muhammadu Buhari for accusing Muammar Gaddafi of breeding and arming the killer herdsmen now rampaging all over the country.

“Let all things be done decently and in order.” – 1Corinthians 14:40 Ever attended any event populated by top government officials, party big wigs, the CEOs of blue chip companies, their royal majesties and highnesses, the ex-this and ex-that, the contenders and pretenders to wealth and riches, in short Nigeria’s political, business and royal elite accompanied by their sidekicks – wives, concubines and everybody in-between?

His Lordship Justice Binta Nyako at the Federal High Court sitting in the Federal Capital Territory last Friday, gave an instructive, landmark judgment in the matter between Mohammed Bello Adoke and the Attorney General of the Federation on the extent of Presidential powers.

The All Progressives Congress and President Muhammadu Buhari are smart thinkers. Having reviewed their three years in office and come to the realisation that there is no major achievement to flaunt in the build-up to the 2019 election, they have decided to make corruption, which is not tangible and easy to measure, the centre of their campaign. Interestingly, the Peoples Democratic Party has fallen for this strategy.

In the light of many eyesore and ear-sore episodes which have characterised contemporary every day lived experiences of Nigerians, it is practically impossible to allow our dead leaders of thought to rest in peace; I need to invoke the spirit of the unusual being, (Abami eda), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, for a perspective on Authority Stealing. The tragedy of our history is that we allow history to repeat itself; perhaps, because the political leadership deliberately silenced the teaching of history for a long time. Our individual lives are fraught with the same sin and this explains why it is convenient for us to transport this into public life. How can one explain the verbal vituperation between the incumbent All Progressives Congress  and alleged looters of the Peoples Democratic Party other than a shameful and open display of weak prosecutorial will of the former against the tactical condemnation of the condemners’ approach of the latter. It follows that the Umbrella groomed and p...

It was the worst-kept secret in the land. I mean who did not know that President Muhammadu Buhari was going to contest next year’s presidential election? We all knew it was only a matter of time before he threw his hat into the ring. Political offices are alluring, perhaps not anywhere more than Nigeria where with a bevy of planes at someone’s beck and call enough to compete with an airline and other trappings of power. It is therefore not surprising that none in contemporary time walked away into the sunset serving only one term.

The Minister of Information, Mr. Lai Mohammed, needs a new tailor badly. The garb of a minister of the federal republic ought to fit better than the rough tunic of a casual party entertainer that the man seems so fond of. More seriously, I presume that Mr. Mohammed is paid to speak for the government and people of Nigeria irrespective of our party affiliations. His core assignments ought to include making Nigeria look good or at least better at home and abroad. While he reserves the right to love his party more than his nation, he has no business exploiting his elevated ministerial podium to deepen our national image deficits.

Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers state, has been completely taken over by soot, an airborne contaminant which is a mass of impure carbon particles resulting from the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons.

Despite declines in political and civil liberties on the continent, regular elections – an indispensable foundation of democracy – signal that democracy is gradually taking root in Africa. The frequency of elections on the continent present an undeniable opportunity for citizens to assert their sovereignty and negotiate a new social contract with the ruling political elite. The outcome of recent elections in Liberia and Sierra Leone are an affirmation that though elections provide a mechanism for settling inter-elite rivalries, they embolden citizens to dislodge non-performing governments and send to retirement corrupt, autocratic and imprudent politicians from public office.

Finally, President Muhammadu Buhari has confirmed what has been known to many for nearly three years: he wants to remain in power for four more years. According to Mr. Buhari, this decision is owed not to his personal desire, but to popular clamour.

Abuja disease is a peculiar affliction in Nigerian politics. It refers to the tendency of an actor with otherwise modest endowment or from humble station to transmute to a monstrous creature once he/she enters the nation’s capital and begins to frequent the power circles.

Since President Muhammadu Buhari met with the Archbishop of Canterbury in London on Wednesday, and spoke on the likely impact of gunmen trained by former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, on the killings by herdsmen in Nigeria, some people have virtually flown off the handle, ululating as if wailing was going out of fashion.