Clay Richie

With the bill seeking an amendment to the Nigerian Constitution with a view to accommodating state and community policing passing the second reading at the House of Representatives last Tuesday, it has become evident that the coming of state police is a matter of time. What a relief this would be considering the large scale killings that have been recorded in the country.

When we wrote much earlier that the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s ruling party was a coalition of strange bedfellows and a one-chance special purpose vehicle to get rid of President Goodluck Jonathan by all and any means possible, we were accused of sour grapes. When we argued even much earlier that Nigeria’s Presidential seat of power was jinxed and that there was and there is a spiritual side to power and politics in Nigeria, we were asked to shut up. The new power brokers were so much at home with their taken authority they boasted that no demons could touch them and that they were so self-secure, they were even snoring inside the Villa. Al- hamdulillahi, they have been snoring since then.

Lies are not good, but they don't constitute the greatest sin. False propaganda is atrocious, but it is not the greatest sin.

This is such an entertaining time to be an avid follower of Nigerian politics. The word ‘entertaining’ has been deliberately chosen. It is not an intellectually stimulating or politically refreshing or ideologically renewing time to be Nigerian and politically conscious. But, surely, until another four years, Nigerians are not going to get the regular doses of political entertainment available from now till the February 2019.

On Friday, July 20, 2018, I had the privilege of declaring my intention to recontest for the governorship of my state of Abia atAba. I have taken the liberty to share excerpts of my speech at the ceremony. Today, I stand before you once again as I did four years ago, to declare my intention to contest for the governorship of our state. In 2015, it was not an easy decision, given the position I occupied as the Managing Director of one of the largest banks in Nigeria, earning very decent living. But the call to service; to liberate our people from the shackles of poor governance and the need to give our people a worthy sense of belonging made me decide to quit my job, to join the turbulence of politics in order to lead my people out of the land of captivity.

The Court of Appeal sitting in Kaduna will this Thursday, August 2, hear how a high court’s order failed to prevent a bulldozer from demolishing a property at No.11B Sambo Road, Kaduna, on February 20, this year. The plaintiff, Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi, will want to know whether Nigerian law is not meant to be obeyed by people in high places.

On 22 July 2018 unknown gunmen blocked the Kaduna-Abuja road in Gidan Busa village, they shot sporadically at any vehicle in sight and in the process killed an army officer, his daughter, policemen and other defenceless Nigerians. Others Nigerians were abducted as these bandits wrecked havoc for over an hour without hinderance before fleeing. This is a typical day in the life of the Nigerian. Nigerians are defencelessand the country is now in  a state of anomy.

Often times, especially at moments of political turmoil like this, Nigerian politicians easily mouth old-time saying that nothing on the surface of the earth is new; that the new is often a reincarnation of the old. So when on Tuesday last week, police laid siege to the home of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu as prelude to the bigger drama of 14 Senators and 34 members of the House of Representatives decamping from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that same day, two memorable events in Nigeria’s political calendar became a refrain on the lips of the politicians.

At times, I could be mischievous. When security agents barricaded Government House, Ado Ekiti, ahead of the July 14 governorship election — and Governor Ayo Fayose released his hit single, “I’m in Pains” — a friend, with whom I had been engaged in a fierce debate over the nature of restructuring Nigeria needs, quickly sent me a message. He said: “Simon, I hope you now agree with me that we need state police. If there was state police, that nonsense would not have happened!” It did not cross his mind that governors could also use state police to crush their opponents — the same way they use state electoral commissions to win 100% of council elections.

At first, he came with chaos. He appointed dead men to serve in his government. He looked the other way as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and Department of State Service — two agencies under his watch — went into a duel. He told women their place is in the kitchen. He acquiesced to ridiculing statement by former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, that “Nigeria is fantastically corrupt.” He went on Awol for months, spending taxpayers money in London to heal his sickness without accountability.

Far too many things break the heart about Nigeria but two of them take the cake. One is the inhibited selfishness of the country’s political elite while the other is the naivety or docility of the citizenry.

Fellow Nigerians, I thought the ancient tradition of nailing people considered enemies of persons or the State to the cross had long gone into antiquity and extinction, but I was wrong. The most famous crucifixion in human history was that of our Lord Jesus Christ, of course other lesser mortals have been crucified including the thieves who died on either side of Jesus Christ on the Appointed Day. I have decided to borrow this imagery and metaphor to describe what is currently happening to Nigeria’s Senate President, Dr Abubakar Bukola Saraki (ABS), at the moment. And it is so tragic. Before I go into the meat of my epistle, please, permit me to provide some background information on what I want to call the ABS saga.

“It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity.”– Horace Like Nelson Mandela said out of his own abhorrent persecution, courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. In other words, the brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear by confronting it.

“As I said in my first appearance at the CCT, this is a politically-motivated case. The case was trumped up in the first instance because of my emergence as the President of the Senate, against the wishes of certain forces. Ordinarily, I doubt anyone would be interested in the asset declaration form I filled over 15 years ago. As many have rightly observed, it is plain to see that the anti-corruption fight is being prosecuted with vindictiveness, to target perceived political opponents. I believe in the need to fight corruption, but I will never be party to the selective application of the law or the rhetoric of an insincere anti-corruption fight”-Senate President Bukola Saraki on the occasion of his discharge and acquittal by the Supreme Court

The Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, thinks he has found the medicine for public opinion: listen with blocked ears. It worked for him last year when the Abuja airport was shut down for six weeks for runway repairs. The announcement of the closure sparked public outrage and many critics, including me, hammered him for ruling out other alternatives, especially with the potential risk that the completion date may have been understated.

The use of the word, ‘change’ as a political slogan or mantra has been extensive and, in the 2015 general election in Nigeria, we had a fair share of it. The concern however is that mantras and slogans are not easily converted into concrete actions. As Tim Blixseth noted, “many great ideas go unexecuted, and many great executioners are without ideas. One without the other is worthless.”

With all due respect to members of the security and safety community in Nigeria, the title of this article is without prejudice to them as l have no interest in ridiculing or making light of the critical role that they play and must continue to play in securing lives and properties in our society.

Let nobody be deceived, none of the actors in the game of political brinksmanship going on within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is thinking about the people of Nigeria: It is all about retaining powers and privileges. Has anybody, for instance, wondered why neither the executive nor the legislative arm of government has intervened on the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) certificate scandal involving the Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun? That is simply because their interest is the same on that sordid matter.

As it was in 2014, so it is in 2018. This is not a cheery observation to make given the Nigerian condition. Few months to the 2015 elections there was a political ferment that even a casual observer of the Nigerian scene would not fail to notice. The All Progressives Congress (APC) had emerged in February 2013 as a fusion of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a significant slice of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The opposition APC was hurriedly packaged to engage the PDP, which had been in power for 16 years, in a war of attrition.

It was with trepidation I drove out of my house on Monday morning. As one of those who bore the brunt of last week’s traffic tsunami on the Apapa-Oshodi expressway, I hesitated before summoning courage to go to work. Good enough that the Lagos State government eventually lived up to her responsibility by taming the monster in an operation that lasted 72 hours, but what some of us saw last week must have left terrible impression on our psyche.

By the passing of each day, President Muhammadu Buhari’s integrity− his only known Unique Selling Point (USP) faces daunting test −at best the President is facing an integrity test. This is arguably not the best of times for one to be a Buharist. It is an unenviable task for anyone to attempt to market the product, ‘Buhari’ putting integrity forward as his USP at this point in time.

Passengers and stakeholders are anxiously waiting for the maiden flight of Nigeria Air on December 24. The national carrier was unveiled at the Farborough Air Show in London. The take-off of the airline expected to fly into 81 routes on domestic, regional and intercontinental routes, is, however, paved with turbulence.

It is more than two weeks now since His Lordship Justice Ijeoma L. Ojukwu of the Federal High Court, Abuja, gave clear, positive and unambiguous orders in the matter between Col Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (rtd) as applicant and three persons – the Director General, State Security Services, the State Security Services and the Attorney General of the Federation as respondents. His Lordship affirmed that the continued detention of the respondent by the operatives of the second respondent, under the instruction of the first respondent since 29th December 2015, without granting him administrative bail, “is a violation of his fundamental right to liberty under Section 35 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999”. The Court grants Dasuki bail, with clear conditions that must be fulfilled, and even goes further to add that “where there is any interview with the Applicant by the Respondents in respect of those allegations, the Applicant shall not be detained and such inte...

Every Nigerian knows that money buys elections, that votes come with a price tag. Elections constitute an essential element of participatory democracy. It’s a process to ensure the peaceful and orderly transfer of power from one leadership to another. It’s a democratic tool to effect a political change.

Mr. Wale Tinubu, the chief executive of Oando Plc, and his deputy, Mofe Boyo, must be squirming uncomfortably in their underwear. Despite their attempt to turn the consequential but partial award of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) on its head, it was abundantly clear that the declaration of the arbitration tribunal consisting of Mr. Harry Matovu, QC, Prof. Marco Frigessi di Rattalma and Mr. David Mildon, QC, was unequivocal in its pronouncement that Ocean and Oil Development Partners, a firm registered in the British Virgin Islands (OODP BVI), is indebted to Ansbury Investments Inc. to the tune of $600 million while Whitmore Asset Management Limited is indebted to the Ansbury to the tune of $80 million. Both sums make up the shareholder loans given by Ansbury to OODP BVI and Whitmore for the acquisition and exploitation of ConocoPhillips’ upstream assets in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, elections can be likened to a war. Politicians, whose only trade yields interest every four years, suspend commonsense in their hour of desperation. They throw sanity into the wastebasket and rehearse the same old lies. They promise to build bridges where there are no rivers. In the midst of the chaos, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), by law is expected to provide leadership.

In exactly two months less one day from today, two men will engage in a fight whose prize is the Osun State governorship seat. Actually, ‘fight’ puts it really mildly; elections in Nigeria are bitterly contested. With sights of soldiers, policemen, civil defence officer, polling booths are almost like battlefields.

It emerged yesterday against the earlier supposition that Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State values his selfish political destiny over and above the unremitting killings and the worsening humanitarian turmoil President Muhammadu Buhari's administration visited on Nigerians for doing nothing about Fulani herders' genocide — the type never witnessed since the end of the country's Civil War.

Anytime Senator Hadi Sirika, minister of state for aviation, spoke about setting up a “national carrier”, I always switched off. Even though I like his ideas — and I still salute his single-mindedness in closing down the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, for a critical runway reconstruction last year — I just could not see eye-to-eye with him on the matter of a national carrier. It was going to be a waste of time and resources, I argued. I had evidence. For decades, the Nigerian government has satisfactorily shown that it cannot run any business professionally. There is no single commercial entity run by the government that does well. We always end up burning money.

The Nigerian government is making its third attempt at a national carrier with operations expected to launch in December 2018. Officially named Nigeria Air, the airline's logo and livery were unveiled at the Farnborough Air Show in London to mixed reactions at home.

Fellow Nigerians, permit me to say how flattered I was when the man of God, Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly, described me as one of the pen prophets in Nigeria and included humble me amongst the columnists he reads regularly. I can’t thank him enough for the extra-special lengths he went to make my book launch a huge success. To whom much is given, much is certainly expected. To qualify to be a prophet means most if not all my prophecies must be as accurate as possible. This is the main reason I have decided to project into the future again, and once more tell our President the truth cronies will never tell him and his kitchen cabinet.

When last February President Muhammadu Buhari saddled the former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu, with the task of reconciling all aggrieved members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) across the country, I scoffed at the idea and stated then that it was a futile exercise. The reasons were not far-fetched: Buhari by his actions had no genuine desire at reconciling the party members; with Tinubu as the chief aggrieved member, leading such efforts was a misnomer because he needed to be reconciled with some of the party members. I predicted that by the end of his brief, the party would be more divided than before.

The pastor of the Household of God International Ministries, Reverend Chris Okotie, has asked the 68 political parties, especially the two major ones, to roll over and adopt him as their consensus candidate in next year’s presidential election.

In its early years, the independent nation of ours then, was jolted at the news of a young man filled with some eerie sort of idealism, storming the Western Region Broadcasting Service at gunpoint, holding up the speech of Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the then Premier of the Western Region and broadcasting his, demanding the cancellation of the recently held sham-like elections, which had fraudulently returned Akintola’s NNDP against the wishes of the electorate then.

As I was taken through the different classrooms that have become a temporary shelter for hundreds of men, women and children, I could not but reflect on how a general climate of insecurity has practically turned Nigeria into one huge refugee camp. And the more the traumatised people of Tabanni, Allikiru, Gaidan Kare, Kursa, Dankilawa, Ruwan Tsamiya and Gidan Barebari villages in Rabah Local Government of Sokoto State shared their tragic experiences with me on Tuesday, the more convinced I became that President Muhammadu Buhari needs to do more than meaningless preachments on how his “security teams crack their brains to put an end to this horrendous violence.”

The buzz created by the signing on July 9, 2018, of a Memorandum of Understanding between the PDP on the one hand and over 30 political parties on the other hand (some media organizations put the number of parties that signed the MOU at over 40) has not fizzled out, when the Ekiti State governorship election, with its hype and razzmatazz, beckoned. For some people, the Ekiti election was to test the strength of that grand electoral alliance while for others, it was to presage what we should expect in the 2019 presidential election. So is there anything we can glimpse from the Ekiti election about the potency of the PDP’s electoral alliance with some 30 or so political parties?  Can we learn anything from it about the shape of things to expect in 2019? While answers to these questions may not be straightforward, there are at least observations that could guide us in the search for answers:

I’ve seen him address the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Seen him speak at AU (African Union) summits. Seen him address the European Parliament at Salzburg, France. Watched him speak to the world a number of times at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). And on Tuesday, January 17, 2018, he stood ramrod straight to address the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands. It was a time one felt tremendously proud to be Nigerian.

It is now almost two weeks that our finance minister was accused of forging an NYSC exemption certificate, and the only official communication by the voluble information minister on behalf of the Federal Government, is that whatever the NYSC authority says is what the government says too. By the way, one hopes the anachronistic position of an information minister in the 21st century will soon be a thing of the past.

The International criminal court in the Hague, Netherlands is a global legal forum whereby the most atrocious types of crimes against humanity which are left unattended to in their nations of origin are prosecuted.

The root of evil is money but we cannot do without it. We call such a necessary demon that we have to love, care for, keep well and even find a room for it to be separated from theft. We just don’t know that the evil that money causes is not what we cannot control, but it has been fashioned in a way that we misunderstand the reason for its existence and we use it without control. Ekiti election has come and gone, leaving people with the speculations that they have allowed to enter the little space in the mind. Speculations are good, but when it tends to deviate from one side, always to favor the other, it is really good to face it openly and get the fact. What you need to know is that the winning was a building planted on the innocence and ignorance of the inhabitants. Ekiti state can be said to be known based on observation, as a home of educated illiterates, sandwiched with ruler ship spirit of shameless dramatists. It is only funny why a demon still seeks for justification whil...

One of the usual features on Nigerian social media is the nostalgic passion with which Nigerians often distribute pictures of the old Nigeria Airways and how that company once considered one of the best in Africa was mismanaged and made to fail. Established in 1958, it was liquidated in 2003. I have seen pictures of old tickets, images of Nigeria Airways pilots and crew, and for anyone who travelled with Nigeria Airways, you cannot but be moved to pity.  Pity yes, because while Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa can no longer manage an airline of its own, the African skies are dominated by such airlines as Ethiopian airlines, Air Maroc, Kenya Airways, and South African airlines. Rwanda has a functional airline too. There is also Air Namibia.

Exactly 20 years ago, Nigeria had an opportunity. The end of military rule was in sight with the death of Sani Abacha, and the time was ripe to fundamentally remake the character of the Nigerian state.Some of those who had fought military rule positioned themselves to take advantage of that opportunity by getting involved in party politics at all levels.

“When Fayose won in 2014, the whole of Ekiti erupted with joy. In 2018 the APC “won” and all the streets of Ekiti are looking so gloomy. The people are sad because their will has been truncated” – Adeolu Daramola. My friend and brother, Governor Peter Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state, is not infallible. He is not an angel and like every other mortal, he has his own fair share of faults, excesses and shortcomings.

The build-up to the just-concluded Ekiti governorship election was highly dramatic. Act One, Scene One: Minister of Labour, Dr. Chris Ngige, urges the electorate to vote for Governor Ayodele Fayose.

SOME 8-year ago, the briskly moving revolutionary dynamo and tedious beard spotting personage had a "pact" with the people of State of Osun. As a dealer in hope with a mission to rekindle in his people the vanishing virtue of humility, industry and self worth in the 'Land of Virtuous' for which Osun and Yoruba people are known, Governor Rauf Aregbesola neither fail none falter.

“There is no difference where aims are concerned, between a terrorist with a gun and bombs in his hand and a terrorist who has dollars, euros and interest rates” Recep Tayyip Erdogan The ordinary person on the street may not appreciate the importance of interest rates to day to day existence, or even their implication to the peace and security of a country. The following account of what happened in Turkey not too long ago, may help bring this matter into sharper focus.

I Ve written this before; how not to spend Abacha loot. It was on the heels of a statement credited to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, which indicated that the $322 million (about N100 billion) would be spent on the “poorest of the poor.” The Vice President had said earlier in the year that in line with the Memorandum of Understanding signed between Nigeria and the Switzerland authorities, the money would be deployed for social investment schemes.

There comes a time in the life of every country when all men and women of conscience must rise up to be counted. Nigeria, without doubt, is at that junction now.

It would not be contradictory to say that the person and character of Atiku Abubakar is a recurring feature. His roles are glaring and dot our democratic process for close to three decades now. The meeting of Atiku with retired Major General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua during   President Ibrahim Babangida’s era, was the beginning of a friendship between the two men who left a lasting impression on both individuals and the Nigerian nation.

Fellow Nigerians, let me put it as simple as possible, with God all things are possible. Mine has been a life of miracles, too numerous to mention, or believe by doubting Thomases. The story of my foray into the world and business of journalism is as dramatic as it is surreal. My dream was always to be a teacher, marry a teacher, and live happily thereafter. But I couldn’t secure a teaching appointment and it was joblessness and desperation that drove me in a different direction. Though I bagged a first degree in Yoruba language from the then University of Ife in 1982, and completed a Master’s degree in Literature-in-English much later in 1988, it never occurred to me that I would eventually end up being a journalist, writer and publisher. This is why it is often said that “man proposes but God disposes.”