Don’t cry for Bola Tinubu by Femi Aribisala

By Femi Aribisala

MANY monuments have been built in honour of the man Bola Tinubu.  He is acclaimed as the political genius of our times who not only engineered the taming of the PDP juggernaut, he caged it and confined it to the backwaters of Otuoke.  Since the APC defeat of the PDP in the presidential election, Tinubu the tactician has been feted, celebrated and praised to high heavens.  But all these encomiums have proved to be highly exaggerated.

Bola Tinubu

The truth of the matter is that Tinubu, the veritable Jagaban of Borgu, is a master of political illusion.  He is remarkable for the distinction of characteristically pulling defeat out of the jaws of putative victory.  He mid-wifed the birth of the APC, only to be shut out of its vice-presidential sweepstakes.  He engineered APC”s victory at the centre, only to see his arch-enemies take over the posts of Speaker and Senate President in the National Assembly.  He piggy-backed Buhari to the presidency, only to be shut out of a say in the president’s cabinet nominees.

Tinubu is called the National Leader of the APC when there is no such post in the party’s Constitution.  When a critical meeting of APC bigwigs was called to address the party’s imbroglio in the National Assembly, the “National Leader” could not attend because, in actual fact, he is not even a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party.

Sowing and reaping

In 2011, Tinubu was hailed for cutting his nose to spite his face.  The PDP nominated his kinswoman, Mulikat Akande, as Speaker of the National Assembly.  However, Tinubu conspired with recalcitrant PDP party-members to frustrate the plans of their party for his South-west homestead.  Instead, he engineered the election of Sokoto’s Aminu Tambuwal, an APC  wolf in PDP sheep’s clothing, as Speaker.

In 2015, Tinubu received payback for these shenanigans again to the detriment of his native South-West.  The same Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto he schemed into the position of Speaker in 2011, repaid Tinubu by frustrating his efforts to install his Lagos acolyte, Femi Gbajabiamila, as Speaker in 2015.  Taking a leaf straight out of Tinubu’s 2011 playbook, Tambuwal conspired with opposition PDP members to install another Northern PDP turncoat, Yakubu Dogara, as Speaker.

Tinubu’s comeuppance here is particularly savage because it was actually Gbajabiamila who reportedly convinced Tinubu that Tambuwal would readily act as traitor to  his PDP party in 2011.  It is therefore veritable poetic justice that the same Tambuwal became an equally ready tool of the PDP in the frustration of Gbajabiamila’s ambitions and the interests of Tinubu and the APC in 2015.

Moreover, Tinubu was repaid for his 2011 manipulations with interest.  The same treachery employed to Tinubu’s political disadvantage in the House was also duplicated in the Senate.  Bukola Saraki, another PDP turncoat, refused to abide by the dictates of APC Central, firmly controlled by Tinubu’s ACN.  He snatched the position of Senate President without official APC approval, but with the support of the opposition PDP.  So doing, he sidelined both Tinubu’s first-choice of George Akume, as well as his second-choice of Ahmed Lawan.

Crumbled cookie

Just as Tinubu was licking his wounds at the denial of his “rightful inheritance” in the National Assembly after the APC victory at the polls, the news came that his political cookie had equally crumbled at Aso Rock.  It had been popularly alleged that Tinubu’s portion in Buhari’s presidency would not be limited to the appointment of his political godson as vice-president, but would also include the  allocation of no less than nine choice ministerial nominees to the discretion of the Jagaban of Borgu.

But by the time Buhari unfurled his ministerial list two weeks ago, the alleged dedicated slots had shrunk to zero.  Many of us had warned in the heady days of the formation of the APC that those insistent that power must return to the North would be determined to checkmate Tinubu if and when the election was won.  We warned Tinubu that even as he cannot conceivably be accepted nationally to rule Nigeria as president, even so can he not rule Nigeria by proxy.  We warned him that the North would never allow Buhari to be his Man Friday in Aso Rock.

However, Tinubu was too far gone to listen.  It would now appear that he even failed to take out insurance policies against such probable eventualities.

But once elected, Buhari started a romance with Babatunde Fashola and Kayode Fayemi designed clearly to sideline the Jagaban.  While these former governors were previously members of Tinubu’s inner-circle, they had since run out of patience with the heavy handedness of their boss.  Therefore, during the election campaign, both of them campaigned for Buhari above and beyond the call of party duty.

Fashola, in particular, was clearly fed up with being under Tinubu’s political shadow.  In the struggle for who would be the APC governorship candidate in Lagos State, Tinubu did not allow Fashola to choose his successor, in the ignoble tradition of Nigerian governors.  While Fashola favoured Dapo Sasore, the former Attorney General of Lagos State, Tinubu railroaded in Akinwunmi Ambode as the APC candidate.

While again, in the ignoble tradition of Nigerian politics, governors promptly transform themselves into Senators when their term as governor ends, this option was closed off to Fashola because Tinubu had already installed his wife as the Senator from Fashola’s constitutency.  The only option left for Fashola politically was presidential ministerial appointment and, even there, Tinubu had put up a road block against him.

Tinubu prefers to nominate political nonentities for higher office in the South-West, so that he would be the only Iroko tree in the forests of the region.  Therefore his candidates for ministerial appointment from Lagos were his little nationally-known former commissioners, Wale Edun and Yemi Cadosso, who could pose no threats whatsoever to his ascribed South-West political supremacy.

Alarm bells:But when Fashola and Fayemi accompanied Buhari to the G7 meeting in Germany in June 2015, alarm bells started ringing in Tinubu’s Bourdillon Road mansion in Lagos.  This was clearly a signial that these former governors were intent on by-passing the official godfather of the South-West by applying to be members of Buhari’s kitchen cabinet on their own recognisance.

The Tinubu brigade would have none of this.  Therefore, a campaign of calumny was launched to cut Fashola in particular to dimunitive size.  Suddenly, the “memo” was sent out implying the former governor had developed political leprosy.  When two books were launched simultaneously celebrating his achievements as governor, none of his APC colleagues from Lagos dared to attend for fear of entering the bad books of the dreaded Jagaban.

In order to nail the coffin on Fashola’s ministerial aspirations, it was leaked to the press that a whopping 78 million naira of public money was spent on the construction of his personal website.  139 million naira was also alleged to have been spent on two boreholes constructed in Government House, Lagos during his tenure.  The intention here was to ensure that Fashola becomes ineligible for ministerial consideration on grounds that he would not pass Buhari’s anti-corruption integrity test.

However, Buhari was apparently unimpressed by these political shenanigans.  When his list of ministerial nominees were unfurled, Fashola and Fayemi featured prominently among Buhari’s “first eleven.”  None of Tinubu’s nominees made the list.  Other nominees from the South-West were precisely the kind of people Tinubu did not want in Buhari’s team; people who would not be indebted to Tinubu but  to Buhari.

While Buhari completely ignored Tinubu’s candidates, he included that of another South-West bigwig.  Obasanjo’s favourite-son, Prince Olagusoye Oyinlola, former governor of Osun State, was included in Buhari’s list.  Thereby, the president asserted the saliency of Obasanjo’s South-West influence in Aso Rock over that of the Jagaban.  He even pointedly appointed Obasanjo as his special envoy to Guinea-Bissau.

This is certainly not what Tinubu bargained for when he decided to pitch his tent with Buhari and the APC.  If he were to be furthermore overlooked in the appointment of BOT chairman of the APC, the marginalisation of the Jagaban in the post-election APC would be complete.

Comeuppance: Some of us saw this coming.  In the heady early days of the APC coalition, we warned that Tinubu would be used and dumped.  But we were labelled as PDP lapdogs and charlatans.  That is why I say today: let no one cry for Bola Tinubu.

Anyone who hears Tinubu’s recent vicious attack on Saraki would realise these are the tokens of a frustrated man.  Tinubu could not attack the President, therefore he poured all his venom on the Senate President.  He accused him of indiscipline and disloyalty; the very things he celebrated in the PDP rebels who joined forces with him against their party in 2011.

Face saving device

The recent declaration that Buhari appointed Babachir Lawal as Secretary to the Government of the Federation at the instance of Tinubu is a face-saving device.  The Tinubu camp forgot to tell us this until now.  At the time of new SGF’s appointment, all the uproar was about the Northern lopsidedness in Buhari’s choices.

Observing the sidelining of Tinubu by Buhari, Senator Femi Okunroumu said: “I am having a good laugh. This is what I expected. In any case, Tinubu is stretching his luck too far as he wants to dictate who will rule Nigeria. Tinubu’s wings need to be clipped. With the ministerial list, Tinubu has been dumped. He should not just be dumped, he should be disgraced.”

On his part, Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, said: “APC is not a party; it is a gang  of people whose sole aim was to remove Dr. Goodluck Jonathan as president. In a  real party, you share the spoils of office before elections not  after elections. This is what  is  happening in APC. We warned our people, but they failed to listen.”

In the new politics of today’s APC, it is better to be the enemy of Bola Tinubu than to be his friend.  The enemies of Tinubu become Senate presidents; they become Speakers of the House of Representatives; they become ministers of the Federal government.  But the friends of Tinubu are sent to Siberia.

The Jagaban of Borgu himself has been slain politically upon his high places.  How are the mighty fallen!

Don’t cry for Bola Tinubu by Femi Aribisala

Beware of Celebrity Pastors and Mega-Churches

According to Jesus, many of the so-called churches today that are large and famous are actually spiritually dead.

In many churches today, pastors are preoccupied with the size of their congregation. Some take a census every church-service. Others keep statistics of the number of people who answer their altar-calls. When pastors meet socially, how big their church is determines their social status and prestige; ensuring that many are prone to exaggerate their numbers. The bigger the church, the more highfalutin and celebrated the pastor.

Femi Aribisala

However, the wisdom of God is contrarian, she shouts in the street; she lifts her voice in the public square: “No king is saved by the multitude of an army; a mighty man is not delivered by great strength. A horse is a vain hope for safety; neither shall it deliver any by its great strength.” (Psalm 33:16-17).

Let me apply this scripture more precisely to the context of mega-churches. No man is saved by the size of a church, neither is the wicked delivered by the great charisma of a pastor. When we are preoccupied with size in churches, we are guilty of trusting in the multitude of our mighty men. (Hosea 10:13).

First become last

“This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts. Who are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you shall become a plain!’” (Zechariah 4:6-7).

One of the great mountains before Zerubbabel was Solomon’s temple. Those charged with rebuilding it were concerned the new temple would not have the splendor and majesty of the old. But God is not concerned with size and other physical attributes. Through Haggai, he declares: “The glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former.” (Haggai 2:9). Accordingly, Zechariah asks: “Who has despised the day of small things.” (Zechariah 4:10).

Indeed, according to God’s kingdom dynamics, “every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low.” (Isaiah 40:4). God says: “All the trees of the field will know that I, Yahweh, have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree flourish.” (Ezekiel 17:24).

This indicates in the day of the Lord, we are likely to discover that the big church is small in the sight of the Lord and the small church is big. Before Zerubbabel, even the great mountain of Solomon’s temple becomes a plain.

Preference for small things

In the kingdom of God, good things come in small congregations. Jesus says: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.” (Matthew 18:20). In effect, we don’t need to be in the thousands and tens of thousands in order to feel the presence of God. But because Jesus says where two or three are gathered, and not where at least two or three are gathered, he is actually expressing a preference for small gatherings.

According to Jesus, the appropriate size of a church is not “mega” or “big,” but “little.” Thus, he reassures the small congregation: “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32). It is the “little flock” and not the big flock that the Father has decided to give the kingdom. Mega-church pastors are akin to the Israel of old: “Israel has forgotten his maker, and builds temples.” (Hosea 8:14).

As a matter of fact, the large size of a church is eloquent testimony of spiritual deficiency. Jesus says: “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who go in through it. Because narrow is the gate and constricted is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13).

It is the stone the builders reject that becomes the headstone. (Psalm 118:22). This prophecy is bad news for mega-church pastors because they are currently the accepted stones. Indeed, according to Jesus, “the first will become last and the last first.” (Mark 30:31). This means today’s “first-class” pastors will ultimately turn out to be “last-class.”

Few are chosen

Because the gospel is naturally unattractive to the large flock, Jesus says: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:14). Therefore, numerical church-growth is an unrealistic index of success in ministry. When we are focused on the numbers game, we become ashamed of the words of Jesus, and readily sacrifice his doctrine on the altar of attracting a large following.

Indeed, God is contemptuous of size; he prefers the mini to the mega. He says: “Woe to the multitude of many people who make a noise like the roar of the seas, and to the rushing of nations that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters! The nations will rush like the rushing of many waters; but God will rebuke them and they will flee far away, and be chased like the chaff of the mountains before the wind, like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.” (Isaiah 17:12-14).

David got into trouble with God because of his preoccupation with numbers. When pride moved him to conduct a census in Israel in order to determine the size of his kingdom, God responded by decimating it with pestilence, killing seventy thousand men. (2 Samuel 24:1-15). Jesus himself was not the product of a big church but of little Bethlehem Ephrathah. (Micah 5:2).

Fake pastors: dead churches

Speaking to his disciples, Jesus provides this simple kingdom dynamic as their mark of distinction: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:19).

Therefore, the very fact that the world loves mega-pastors indicates there is something wrong with them. If something is very popular, it is not of God. The evil spiritual “ruler of this world” will not allow what is godly to be well-liked. Therefore, Jesus says: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.” (Luke 6:26). Mega-pastors are in trouble with the Lord because all men love them.

The people of this world do not like the doctrine of Jesus. Neither do mega-pastors otherwise they would be mini. If the general public like what a pastor preaches, it is a sure sign it is not of God. God and men hardly ever see eye to eye. Jesus says: “That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” (Luke 16:15).

This shows the true Church of Christ is inevitably anathema to the world. Jesus insists his kingdom is not of this world. (John 18:36). Therefore, his Church cannot be worldly; neither will his disciples preach the world in order to attract a crowd.

According to Jesus, many of the so-called churches today that are large and famous are actually spiritually dead. He declares: “To the angel of the church in Sardis write, ‘These things says he who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars: ‘I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.’” (Revelation 3:1).

Beware of Celebrity Pastors and Mega-Churches

Why I’m not proud to call Buhari my president — Aribisala

Charles Kumolu

Dr. Femi Aribisala, a pastor and Vanguard columnist, in this interaction with Vanguard editors, ventilates his passion for President Goodluck Jonathan and explains his position on the person and politics of the president-elect, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. Excerpts:

What is your perspective on the just concluded presidential election?

This has been the most important political campaign I have witnessed in Nigeria. And the campaign will, to some extent, define the presidency. There were things that needed to be said, emphasized and brought to Buhari’s attention because we needed to remind him that some things would not be acceptable if he becomes the president. Buhari was made to go through a lot of phases. There were some things like the Muslim-Muslim ticket which some of us made so much noise about and they just had to drop it at some point. There were other things that Buhari did which he would not normally do because we made so much noise about his antecedents. Sometimes people simplistically define the process by the result. No! The whole debate is to make him understand that it is not what he had before. It was to make him realize that this is a democratic framework. It was also to sensitize him that certain things would not be acceptable.

How did you come about your claim that INEC rigged the election for Buhari?

There are certain things that are interesting about this election. The first one is that it is one of the most keenly contested elections that we have had in this country. It involved more people. But 10 million less people voted than last time, which gives us some idea as to how true some of the figures we have been having before had been. But the question is: Where did the decline of 10 million come from? I discovered that it came disproportionately in certain areas than it did in others. And to some extent, if you look at the PVC distribution, you can project the election. It is because Buhari could campaign in the South, but the North did not permit same kind of liberty for the president. The president was stoned in Buachi and he was threatened. By the time the pattern of PVC distribution became very known even in war-torn states, it was easy to know that it had been front-loaded. When you then analyze the election result itself, you will discover that some places just had an incredible suppression of voters in spite of high level of interest. Some people had an incredible number of voters. And I am still interested in why more people voted in the governorship election in Katsina than the presidential election.

On alleged gang- up against President Jonathan

If Buhari had contested in the United States, there is no way that he could win. It is impossible. We know his antecedents. Nigeria doesn’t even teach history in schools. Once you bring up the antecedents, the very idea of having such a person gunning for a position, not even talk of the presidency, would have nullified his candidacy. I was not just writing about Buhari because he tried to arrest me. There were all sorts of things that he did and for which he never apologised. Buhari took ownership of those things. And he never asked for forgiveness. At different points in the history of Nigeria, he was given an opportunity to do that. We set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but he refused to do it. You don’t forgive a man who does not repent.

With regards to President Jonathan, I had a problem with the gang-up. And I think it is wrong for two major tribes to gang up against someone from the minority. Why should a President be called clueless? I don’t think that someone will get away with calling Obasanjo clueless. Somehow I feel that the South-South is entitled to have their son as president and we were acting as if we were doing them a favour. If it was not providence that threw up Goodluck Jonathan, I wonder if we would have considered having a South-South president. In the interest of national unity, the North-West producing the president again does not balance any equation in Nigeria. If we are talking about a president from the North, we should be talking about the North-East. I was offended that from the beginning, some people insisted that there would be a civil war if the man ran. They also insisted that they would create a problem if the man ran. And I said that Nigeria belongs to every one of us. So that was an issue to me.

Wole Soyinka had vowed not to support Buhari but a few weeks to the election, he asked Nigerians to forget the past and move on. Are you not being unfair to Buhari given the circumstances we found ourselves?

I said you only forgive somebody who repents. Buhari has never asked anyone to forgive him. So you are jumping into conclusion that we have a new Buhari? And the fact that he has won the election has not won him forgiveness. We are going to see if Buhari has changed. And I have said that if he has changed, he will do more than just wearing a suit. He will come out and apologise for things done and overdone. He said he took responsibility which is different from apologising. The man who admitted stealing a cow is different from the one who said forgive me for stealing a cow. Buhari is a very deliberate man.

I am not persuaded by the election campaign that Buhari is going to be a very competent president. I have not seen any competence in him. There was nothing in the campaign that was of substance that impressed me. No new ideas came from Buhari or the APC. Most of the people in APC are PDP people. So I am not persuaded that we are in for any new thing. But I hope you are right.

 

Beyond Buhari, you are also not a friend of Bola Tinubu. What are your reasons?

I wonder why anybody will be a fan of Bola Tinubu especially if you live in Lagos. He is not a democrat. I don’t like Bola Tinubu because he has monopolised Lagos politics. To some extent, Ekiti governorship election was lost because of him. I live in Lekki and every day I have to pay toll fare and I wish I was not doing that. APC is in control of the media to a very large extent. Governor Fashola has gotten an easy pass with the media. It is easy for a Lagos State governor to be seen to be good because he has resources. In the light of the resources of the state, only 10 percent of the people have access to potable water, the same percentage has access to educational structures. In order for the APC to survive, the resources of this state had to be commandeered for political purposes. So, you can see the end justifies the means.

I think it will be foolish of Tinubu to take AIT to court over the Lion of Bourdillion case because if he does, the kind of things that would be revealed about him would be shocking. This godfather business is undemocratic. Let people choose their leaders. One person cannot sit somewhere and decide what is best for everybody. I don’t believe that elections are free and fair in Lagos. I do not believe that Jimi Agbaje lost this election. It was APC’s manipulation that brought out the governorship election result. That is my own opinion.

Not many Nigerians are asking Buhari to apologise. What exactly do you want him to apologise for?

It is part of my problem with the media at the moment. We are being given the impression that Buhari won by a landslide. Please let us look at what INEC declared. 12.8 million people voted for Goodluck Jonathan. So don’t assume that they don’t have their reasons or that the people that want him to apologise don’t exist. I maintain that it is very easy to say that we don’t want to look at the past because we want to look at the future. But we need to understand the past in order to move to the future.

So, Buhari needed to apologise. He needed to ask for forgiveness because he killed people through extra-judicial means, he jailed people for telling the truth, he kept people in jail even when kangaroo courts that he set up said they were not guilty. He manipulated the judiciary into jailing some people. I could go on and on. That is why I said that if we were a serious democracy, he would never have gotten away with it. There is a reason Buhari was not nominated by the northerners. They voted for Kwankwaso and Atiku at the primaries. Buhari got his candidacy through Tinubu. We don’t have to pretend that Buhari is well liked because he has won, it seems to be like that but we should know that he only has the plurality of 2.5 million votes.

In your penultimate column you claimed the emphasis on the alleged rigging was in the South-South and South-East, but the PDP was beaten in areas where they had strengths like Niger, Kaduna and other places. You think the resentment was not real?

I mentioned those areas as well. I mentioned Kano, Jigawa, Katsina and Bauchi. I said the results from these places were inflated. We have video recordings of underage voting. There is a problem with the election because if we accept what the PVCs are saying that 17.1 million registered for the election in the North-West alone, the zone will determine future elections. If they decide that they want somebody to be president, by the time we will be looking at the result and they will come up with 9.1 million from Kano, the whole equation would change.

What can you get from Imo and Anambra? So, if the North-West vote is more than the South-South and South-East, there is going to be a problem. There will be a problem if we don’t get the proper census of Nigeria. They used to tell us that Kano was bigger than Lagos. Jigawa was split from Kano and Kano is still supposedly bigger than Lagos. In this last election, about 3.1 million people voted in Kano and Jigawa. And 1.4 million people voted in Lagos. That is twice the number of the people in Lagos. I don’t believe these figures. If you do, fine. I am entitled to my opinion.

You said you don’t like Tinubu because of the reasons you adduced, but when the books would be written, it would be said that Tinubu contributed significantly to Buhari’s emergence as a democratically elected president. What do you make of that?

I don’t agree that Tinubu made Buhari the president. Let’s get the facts right. Tinubu made Buhari the presidential candidate of the APC. But in the presidential election, Buhari did not win Tinubu’s votes. And that is part of the problem. All the discussion before was that everything would be determined in the South-West, but Tinubu did not deliver the South-West. The margin of defeat in the presidential election was not much in Lagos. Tinubu, to some extent at the presidential level, is expendable. And that is the problem. You can actually not choose a president just from the North. It interests me that while the campaign was going on, all the northerners making noise that it was their turn disappeared.

They did not campaign with Buhari. The people campaigning were Tinubu, Amaechi, Fashola. I bet you that the northerners are going to come out come May 29. And you will see it happen. Don’t think that the people that had been clamouring for power to return to the North in the past six years, were doing that for Tinubu to inherit. I don’t believe that. They have an agenda. That is why I said the story is not told because the election has taken place, the story will unfold when the administration comes on board.

 Are you saying that you are impressed with Jonathan’s performance?

Yes I am. I think APC ran a fantastic campaign. They hired Obama’s people and they controlled so many different things. So, a lot of things were simply propaganda. And part of the problem with the PDP was that they had it so easy for so long that they did not know how to campaign anymore. So, they thought that it was just going to be another cake work, and this was a different issue for them. Many of the things that Jonathan did, his people like Reuben Abati did not talk about it. People just did not know anything until some spirited efforts were made at the last-minute during the extension. That was when they now told people what had happened. But within the framework of Nigerian presidency, Jonathan is a good president if you compare him with others who had occupied that position.

 You are talking about the North being the decider with the way things are now. What then do you think the South-East and South-South can do?

Within the framework of the democratic experiment in Nigeria, the North has been the part of Nigeria that has held the country together. The South-East is neither here nor there. The civil war is still an issue. The South-West doesn’t often show an inclination to take a national outlook. The North voted for Abiola. But the problem with this particular election is that we have an APC that is very sectarian in outlook. APC is not a national party like the PDP. APC is an aggregation of sectarian parties that came together simply to get power at the centre. And in order to do that, they had to distort the process. That is why I said that northerners were intimidated and told that they must vote for Buhari. And this is bad for democracy. When politics gets to the sectarian level, it becomes a problem. And we have allowed it to define and determine this election.

There was no level-playing ground. Buhari could go anywhere in the South and nobody threatened him, but anytime Jonathan wanted to campaign in the North, bombs will explode. We can’t say we are not aware of it. And this tendency will not help this democracy. But we must talk about it. Even though we will say that we are glad that we have missed the bullets of rioters, we need to talk about it.

The truth is that if Jonathan had won, there would have been conflagration because you have a party that only accepts victory. And there is nothing democratic about that. Buhari lost three times, he never congratulated the winners. Jonathan lost once and conceded defeat. Thank God for that. But if Buhari had won, we would have been in trouble. And democracy is not like that. It should not be like that. That is why people who say I am an intractable opponent of Buhari are mistaking my passion. Why can I hate them? In the final analysis, Buhari is now the president-elect, he is going to be my president because the people have spoken. We must ensure that the culture of our democracy is such that a party can field a candidate in the North and not be intimidated with all kinds of sentiments that are going to be introduced. So, this was, in many respects, a flawed election.

Looking forward, do you think this man has the capacity to do the job because many people voted for him because he is seen to be incorruptible? In your view, do you think this man will deliver on the expectations?

In my view, I am pessimistic. I don’t think Buhari can move the economy forward because he has no understanding of economics. I tell people that I am waiting for our currency to be equal to the dollar which is one of the things he promised.

One has to see who his advisers are. Again, one has to deal with his antecedents. If there was a change in Buhari, we should have known it in the last three months. It should have come out from his pronouncements during the campaign, but there was nothing there. He said he is going to give N5,000 to 20 million poor people in Nigeria and that is N120 billion which he is going to give away in a situation where the country is cash strapped. I am going to see how this is going to happen. Buhari does not understand how to tame corruption. He did not succeed the last time.

There are certain tendencies in the man that tells me he does not understand how to tame corruption because we are talking of a change campaign. But who are the people around him? They are not changed people. It is paradoxical that now, the party chairman is saying they don’t want defectors anymore. But how did they come to where they are? I don’t see these changes coming with Buhari. This was a rhetoric that was convenient for the purpose of winning an election. It has succeeded, but don’t let us ascribe more to it. It is going to have some grand gestures but, in the final analysis, will be meaningless.

 

Don’t you think Nigeria needs a strong leader that can look at influential people in the society and insist that the right things be done? It was so bad that even after the Immigration recruitment tragedy that the Minister of Interior, instead of being sanctioned, was given a national award?

That is not the problem now. Buhari is not the type of person that I would like to call my president. I don’t even agree that he is a strong leader. He is not very intelligent, he is not very articulate and I don’t even agree that he is a strong leader. Most of the positions he held, his deputies were in charge. People run circles around him. Part of the problem with democracy is that we don’t necessarily have the best choices. You have to choose between bad choices or some bad choices. I don’t see anything that will, ordinarily, make me to want Buhari as my president. I don’t see how he is an improvement on Jonathan for whatever it is that you think of Jonathan.

Are you not expressing preconceived biased. People are saying Jonathan saved the country from crisis but that he did not do us proud as president, a situation that Chad and Niger now assist us to combat internal security challenges. Are you saying that you have not recognised personal failings on the side of Jonathan and that you don’t see anything good in Buhari?

Buhari left the army 30 years ago; a lot has changed in 30 years. Maitasine were bow and arrow people. But Boko Haram is a completely different kettle of fish. And his approach to the campaign does not seem to recognise that. Part of the problem is that we could not run after Boko Haram so that the borders of Chad, Cameroon and Niger are not violated. And they only became receptive to that when Boko Haram became a problem to them. And that was recently. If we could have surrounded them, it would have been easier for us.

Why didn’t we?

 

We couldn’t because they could run into Cameroon. The issue about Nigeria is that we are such a big country relating to our neighbours. We have traditionally bent over backwards to tell our neighbours that we have no territorial ambitions and intentions, which could account for the fact that we gave away Bakassi to Cameroon. No country gives away its territory to another country. The tendency in Nigeria is not one that we will begin to violate the territorial integrity of our neigbours. And Goodluck Jonathan is not that kind of person. A situation where, in the middle of an election, Britain and America will begin to interfere does not mean well.

 

Isn’t that part of the president’s failure?

 

It is not. It shows you that they have been biased against this country. The Americans refused to sell arms to the government and the government had to go looking in other places. Boko Haram is a different thing. It took the Americans 10 years to get Osama Bin Laden.

 

But America violated another country’s territory to get him?

 

That is different. The government invited them and they got a United Nations resolution to back it up. It is so bad that when you read the papers today, you don’t hear about the Jonathan people. They have all disappeared. I am insisting on Jonathan because he is important. The voices of his people have not disappeared. We are going to come back and hold this government to task.

They have made all sorts of noise about Boko Haram, I want to see how Buhari, a retired general, would handle the situation. I want to see him destroy Boko Haram. I want to see how long it would take him. I want to see how long he is going to get the Chibok girls back. Ezekwesili has been making noise about that and I tweeted her to suggest how to get these girls back. We would see how Buhari will do the magic.

 

Does it mean that you don’t see anything wrong in Jonathan? The Americans say nice guys don’t win ball games. The president may be a nice chap, but his niceness diminished Nigeria’s standing and reputation. Don’t you think he was too nice for the job?

 

Jonathan has lots of faults. Jonathan had a peculiar problem. He knew that he could not win an election in Nigeria without the North because he is from a minority area. So he bent over backwards with many things.

That is why some of us were interested in his second term because then he would not need any of these people. Some people in the South-South said he did not even do anything in the South. Most of the things he did were in the North yet all he got were four million votes. There were a number of things he did for political expediency. If he fought insurgency in a particular way, people like Buhari would have risen against him. And if he did not fight insurgency, they would have said that he is incompetent. He had to play both sides and clearly the approach that he took did not work. It failed him but that should not prevent us from recognising the dilemma that he was in. He was a president that had his eyes on second term and he felt that he needed to placate some people but it did not work.

 

Do you think that it was politically savvy of him?

 

It was his prerogative to have decided not to even run. But he thought he was going to get the votes. In 2011, he got eight million votes from the North and Buhari got 12 million. In 2015, he got four million votes from the North. It was not unrealistic for him to still think that he could still get votes from the North. In 2011, Jonathan got 37 percent of the votes in Katsina. Given the fact that PDP had foothold in the North, it was not unrealistic for him to expect that he could still use the party structure and the governors to get an appreciable amount of votes from the North. But in a place like Bauchi, which is under PDP, practically no vote came from there. Jigawa is under PDP but it was like PDP was non-existent in those states.

However, our democracy is in trouble because the numbers have already been manipulated according to the pattern of PVC distribution. It was not manipulated for not just this election, but the next one. Therefore, we will have a situation where same people will decide again that the North will produce the president as long as we are dealing with these so-called PVCs. They have permanently ensured that one region has supremacy over others. Let us not pretend that it is not what has been achieved. So we need to address that now. We need to start talking about it now.

What is the problem with the PVC?

The problem with the PVC is that nine million people are registering to vote in war-torn Borno. Where are they getting these people? How are they getting 17.1 million people in the North-West? And 15 million in the South-South and the South-East. We have to determine who gets the PVCs. At the point of registering for the PVC, we need to know the nationality of those registering. We need to know if they are Chadians, Nigerians, children or adults. It is quite significant for me that these PVCs failed in the election in some places.

Why should the PVC fail in the South? Buhari did not have any problem of voting but the PVC did not recognise the number one citizen of the country. The failure rate of the PVC in the South-South and South-East was high. In the middle of the election, the rules of the game were changed and the PVC was not needed anymore. By the time we got to the governorship election, the PVC worked better. And I ask: Why did it work better? I believe that the PVC was programmed to fail.

Is this not just prejudice?

I wrote an article in Vanguard before the election where I said I don’t believe.

 

Why I’m not proud to call Buhari my president — Aribisala

Why Buhari will not agree to a debate with Jonathan

By Femi Aribisala

IN all my years of studying elections, I have never seen a campaign as bogus as that of Muhammadu Buhari. It is amazing that, for a man who is running for election as president for a marathon fourth time, Buhari is so bereft of ideas as to how he would do anything if he were to become president. Campaigning in 35 states, Buhari has spoken for a total of less than 60 minutes in all. Surely, he wants to be president; but he clearly has no presidential agenda.

Buhari

Buhari’s blueprint for the presidency is similar to his Cambridge/WASC certificate; it is yet to be discovered. It is an article of faith of things hoped for by his admirers, the evidence of things neither seen nor articulated. No man becomes president of Nigeria on the basis of vain platitudes. No man becomes president as a result of social media blogs and soundbites. No man becomes president by giving two-minute speeches in craftily-packaged rallies, one minute of which is spent introducing his entourage.

Empty promises

What would Buhari do differently to fight Boko Haram? He would study the situation and restore morale to the military. What would he do to restore the economy? He would increase the international price of oil single-hahnded. What would he do to create jobs? He would build interstate highways in the middle of a drastic slump in Nigeria’s income in order to energise motor-mechanics and bukaterias.

Buhari says: “I will revive and reactivate our minimally performing refineries to optimum capacity.” How does he propose to do this? “I will provide one meal a day for children in public primary schools.” Where is the money to do this? “I will generate, transmit and distribute electricity on a 24/7 basis whilst simultaneously ensuring the development of sustainable/renewable energy by 2019.” Is he now going to nationalise the GENCOS and the DISCOS?

“I will make direct cash transfer of 5,000 naira to the 25 million poorest and most vulnerable citizens, if they immunize children and enrol them in school.” My o my! Did Buhari do the maths before coming out with this pie in the sky? This amounts to a 125 billion naira handout; nearly equal to the entire annual income of Edo State.

Style without substance

Goodluck Jonathan’s APC opponents like to denigrate him as “clueless.” But what shall we say of Muhammadu Buhari, a general who did not know the name of his running-mate; calling him Yemi Osunbade instead of Yemi Osinbajo. Buhari referred to Imo State as Ibo State. In an interview on CNN, he called INEC the Independent Nigerian Electoral Commission. He also called his party the All Progressives Confidence. No wonder President Jonathan observed that Buhari cannot remember his own phone-number.

Let’s face it: General Buhari has become an embarrassment to the APC. He should not be allowed to become a Nigerian embarrassment. An absent-minded old man is not the kind of person we need as president. Electing Buhari amounts to jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.

Buhari’s campaign elevates make-believe over reality. It asserts the primacy of propaganda over commonsense. It proclaims the superiority of fiction over facts. Buhari and the APC need to be told some home-truths. You don’t build roads by attacking Goodluck Jonathan. You don’t create jobs by attacking the PDP. You don’t destroy the Boko Haram by undermining the authority of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. You don’t proclaim a mantra of anti-corruption slogans, while being surrounded and funded by corrupt politicians.

Shouting change changes nothing. Change is championed by the young, and not by a 72 year-old retired soldier receiving cheers from a coterie of dyed-in-the-wool political dinosaurs. How can Buhari represent change from the PDP, when a large chunk of his change-sloganising APC members are poached PDP turncoats? How does Buhari’s endorsement by Obasanjo, a former PDP president, commend him as an agent of change from the PDP?

Counterfeit change

Instead of change, Buhari’s agenda is the “same old same old” of the mundane and the sub-standard. I challenge APC supporters to point out one; just one, single original idea that has emanated from him. The truth is that it does not exist. Buhari is the master of the fluff and the bluster. He will fight corruption, but he cannot say how. He will revive the economy, but cannot say how. He will end the Boko Haram insurgency in no time at all, but he cannot say how.

In effect, Buhari is asking Nigerians to elect him on the basis of some voodoo that he will only concoct after the election. Nigerians should not fall for this ploy. Buhari is an old has-been: banking on the forgetfulness of Nigerians and on our disregard for history. The APC has spent far more time strategizing on how to manipulate public opinion than on policy-formulation. Its manifesto is shallow and phony; a very poor cousin to Goodluck Jonathan’s well-articulated and unfolding transformation agenda.

On the basis of his performance in office, President Jonathan has done much better than any of his predecessors. His legacy is there for all to see in agriculture, aviation, road construction, education, health (especially Guinea Worm, Polio and Ebola eradication), railways, electricity and political reform through the National Conference. Those who are insisting he should not be given a second-term need to come up with cogent reasons why we need to change the stewardship of an economy recording one of the highest growth-rates in the world.

No wonder therefore that Buhari is running away from a presidential debate. His reticence confirms the view that he has nothing concrete to offer. Every excuse he and his handlers come up with only further exposes their vacuity. One thing is for sure; Buhari cannot agree to a debate because his campaign is all smoke and mirrors.

Chartham house

Indeed, nothing exemplifies the bankruptcy of the APC presidential campaign more than the decision of Buhari to deliver a vapid speech in London, rather than engage Jonathan in a presidential debate in Nigeria. I am still looking for someone to explain to me the relevance of Buhari’s London junket to a Nigerian presidential election. Britons don’t vote in Nigerian elections. Even Nigerians living abroad don’t vote. So what was the point of that charade?

Instead of giving a speech at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, Buhari chose the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in far-away London. Nevertheless, nobody would mistake Buhari for a scholar. The APC presidential candidate has never written a book. He does not even have an article in a journal or newspaper to his name. We have yet to sort out the nagging issue of his missing school-leaving certificate. Indeed, his trip might have made more sense if it had involved a dash to Cambridge to secure a bona fide copy of his fictitious 1961 WASC results.

Buhari’s Chartham House speech was intellectually empty. It was full of bells and whistles signifying absolutely nothing. There was nothing newsworthy in it. It only made the news abroad because there was protest against him in the streets. From beginning to end, his speech was a flimsy rationalization of his dubious transition from dictator to democrat; and from coup-plotter against democracy, to presidential candidate in a democratic election.

Buhari is certainly not a Maitama Sule or a Barack Obama. By no stretch of the imagination can he be called an orator. His delivery was poor and laboured. His heavily-accented diction mutilated the English language, as usual. It did not help that he read his prepared text word-for-word; scarsely looking up at his audience. It is too late now to advise his handlers that he should have been hidden behind tele-prompters.

Questions begging for answers

There were elephants in the room at Chartham House; nagging questions begging for answers. How would Buhari react as president if a military coup were to be undertaken against his government? Would he accept this in good faith, since he was also guilty of the same offence? The truth of the matter is that, as a former coup-plotter, Buhari does not have the moral right to seek election as president under a democratic dispensation.

How can he justify jailing Odumegwu Ojukwu in 1984, even though Ojukwu did not hold any political office? How can he justify jailing septuagenarian Pa Michael Ajasin, an honest and upright governor of Ondo State that did not steal any public funds? How can he justify seizing Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s passport, thereby preventing the old man from seeking medical attention abroad; while he sent his own wife and children for medical treatment in the United States?

How can he justify killing Nigerians for committing a crime that did not attract the death penalty when they committed it? How can he justify the jailing of journalists, even for writing truthful reports? Buhari is determined to avoid addressing such probing questions. But such questions are precisely what a political campaign is designed to answer. Frankly, Buhari’s past record is malicious and indefensible. He can keep running away from it, but he cannot hide from it.

Questionable health

One question was answered fulsomely at Chartham House: Buhari does not have the good health or stamina required for the job of president. After campaigning for barely one month, he needed a long rest in London. He literally disappeared for two weeks to recharge his batteries, bang in the middle of an election campaign. This is nothing short of bizarre. A man who cannot withstand the rigours of a one-month presidential campaign is not fit to be president of Nigeria.

Ekiti governor, Ayo Fayose, put it succinctly: “A man who campaigned for four weeks, speaking for less than one hour in all the rallies put together and needed to rest for 15 days should just stay at home and be playing with his grandchildren rather than struggling to take up a job that he does not have the required mental and physical strength to do.”

When Buhari finally returned back home, APC was foolish enough to organise a so-called One Million Man March (attended by barely one hundred thousand people) in Lagos; when it knew its presidential candidate was too old to march. Buhari was glaringly absent from the event. To use the local expression, “he was nowhere to be found.”

 

Why Buhari will not agree to a debate with Jonathan

The end of Buhari’s presidential candidacy

1

By Femi Aribisala

IF Nigeria is a nation of laws and of the rule of law, the presidential candidacy of Muhammadu Buhari should end this week. The reason is well-known to all. Buhari swore an oath on his INEC application that his credentials are with the military. This turned out to be a lie.

Buhari

The military has come out to deny that it has Buhari’s credentials. That means Buhari committed perjury instead of fulfilling INEC requirements. For this reason, he must be disqualified from contesting the presidential election.

The matter has been taken to court and the courts should decide the matter this week. I am not a lawyer, but from my layman’s perspective, this is an open and shut case. Buhari lied willfully. As a former military secretary of the Nigerian Army, he knew that the military does not keep any credentials of its service-men. Nevertheless, he lied on oath that his credentials are with the military. He must face the penalty for this perjury. There can be debate about whether, and for how long, he should go to jail. However, there can be no question about his resultant ineligibility to contest: he must be disqualified.

To overlook this infraction is to succumb to Buhari’s appraisal that Nigeria is corrupt. If we are going to deal with corruption, we must not fail to deal with the likes of Buhari, who are contemptuous of the laws of the land. Buhari’s false affidavit is corruption. The disqualification of Buhari by the courts will be a testament to the determination of the judiciary to show zero tolerance for corruption in the coming new dispensation.

Some of us have watched APC make a song and dance about the possibility of postponing the 2015 elections. The party brought out all its big guns to tell us that the election cannot be postponed. They insisted that if it is postponed all hell would break lose. Well, the election has been postponed and nothing has happened. It has been postponed and the APC can do nothing about it. It was postponed according to the law.

Similarly, the heavens will not fall with the lawful disqualification of Buhari.   Of all those APC could present as its presidential candidate, it chose a man without the appropriate credentials. APC has nobody to blame but itself for this fiasco. It has forfeited its chance of presenting a candidate for the 2015 presidential election. The contest should now be between the remaining 13 presidential candidates. Shikenan!

JEGA MUST GO IMMEDIATELY

The excuse used to force Attahiru Jega to postpone the elections is the inability to provide effective security given the insurgency in the North-East. However, there is little likelihood that the security situation will improve within the next six weeks of the postponement. So, strictly-speaking, security has nothing to do with the postponement. One major reason for the postponement was to prevent INEC from compromising the election.

INEC has long ceased to be a disinterested umpire in this election. The evidence is now overwhelming that INEC is determined to bias the election in favour of Muhammadu Buhari and the APC. This is evident in INEC’s determination to go ahead with the election in spite of the fact that out of 68 million registered voters, over 20 million have yet to receive their permanent voter’s cards (PVCs).

It is remarkable that, in announcing the postponement, Jega conveniently forgot to mention the nagging issue of the inadequacies of INEC in providing voters with their PVCs. It is also remarkable that Jega briefed the Council of State that INEC was ready to conduct the elections. This was one big lie. You cannot be ready to conduct elections when there is a cacophony of complaints, especially in the South, that people are unable to claim their PVCs. Given the time it took INEC to distribute 40 million PVCs, it could not have realistically expected to be able to distribute the outstanding 20 million in just one week?

INEC rigmarole

What is even more sinister is INEC’s willful determination to disenfranchise select geopolitical regions which represent areas of strength for Goodluck Jonathan. Credible Alternative Alliance, an independent political interest organization led by former Kaduna State governor, Balarabe Musa, observed in INEC activities: “a criminal gross disparity of voter spread designed to tilt the election to a pre-determined outcome.”

It said: “Voters in the zones that tend to support President Goodluck Jonathan are massively disenfranchised by the application of the so-called PVCs debacle, 40% to 50% of voters in these regions who are lawfully and duly registered to vote will be denied their right to vote by INEC. That is nearly half of the support base of the President, simply nullified by administrative failure prior to the election. By comparison, the zones that tend to support Buhari are handed a massive voter advantage, nearly 80% of his support base will be allowed to cast their votes by INEC.”

“In an election, which many say will be won or lost by a slim margin, to now disenfranchise 20 million voters through a questionable and unlawful rule by INEC is not acceptable by any measure. CAA condemns in its entirety this attempt by INEC to undermine our nascent democracy through this criminal enterprise to determine the outcome of this election before the ballot is cast.”

This position is corroborated by different observers in the field. INEC needs to explain how more people in the war-torn North-East have collected their PVCs than in the South-West, South-South and South-East. In the APC strongholds of the North-West and the North-East, 80.18% and 81.09% collection rates were recorded respectively. In the North-Central, the figure was 69.89%. However, the figures in the South were significantly lower than these. In the South-East, it was 59.22%. South-South: 66.66%; and South-West 43.15%.

Since INEC under Jega is no longer an independent umpire but is now clearly working for the opposition, Jega should be sent on compulsory leave and a temporary chairman should be nominated to handle the elections. Jega can no longer be trusted.

THE MISCHIEF OF FORMER CBN GOVERNOR, LAMIDO SANUSI

Former Central Bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, caused uproar when he declared that $49.8 billion of Nigeria’s oil money was missing, allegedly diverted by the NNPC. For a Central Bank governor, the statement was not only irresponsible, it was downright mischievous. If it were not that Nigeria is an innumerate society where we have little or no understanding of figures, it would have been obvious that, for the size of the Nigerian economy, it was impossible for such a large sum to be missing.

However, the allegation fell into the narrative of the opposition APC party which was determined to portray the Jonathan Administration as the most corrupt in the history of Nigeria. There was a lot of hue and cry in the press about the missing money; after all, the claim was made by the Central Bank governor no less. However, the governor seemed to have plucked the missing figure out of thin air.

Soon, it was not $49.8 billion at all, but $10.8 billion. Then again, it was no longer $10.8 billion but $20 billion. It should have been clear from all this that the CBN governor was just fibbing. But in Nigeria, we are socialissed to believe the worst.

School-certificate economics

General Buhari, the APC presidential candidate, has used this fictitious $20 billion dollars to preach his own school-certificate economics on the campaign stump. He said: “$20 Billion at N210 to $1.00 is equal to N4.2 trillion- nearly a year’s federal budget.”

If so, how can Buhari believe an amount nearly equal to Nigeria’s annual federal budget could possibly be missing? No matter how corrupt a nation can be, it is ridiculous to presume that public officers would go ahead and steal the entire annual federal budget? Haba! Buhari then used this malarkey to formulate his own voodoo economics.

He said: “If it is true that this sum cannot be accounted for, this is grossest form of corruption. Just think at N5 million per vehicle, this money would have bought 840,000 patrol vehicles; (this would have improved security in every town and village in the country). At N13.5 million for a high capacity bus this money would have bought 311,000 buses; (this would have revolutionised the transport and production side of the economy).”

It is this kind of rudimentary economics that Buhari has been presenting as an excuse for an economic policy to Nigerians in this election season. Just listen to this vain platitude from our eminent retired general. He says: “The monies we realised from anti-corruption campaign will be adequately used to improve education in the country.” Now that is an economic policy that is practically meaningless.

Forensic audit

Because of the nuisance value of men like Buhari, the Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was constrained to ask for a forensic audit of NNPC accounts in order to put the matter to rest. She chose PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC); one of the big four auditors in the world, along with Deloitte, EY and KPMG.

PwC has now provided a conclusive report that shows Sanusi’s allegation of a missing $20 billion is one big fabrication. This matter needs to be emphasized now that the report is out. Lamido Sanusi lied. The Central Bank governor deliberately cried wolf when he jolly well knew there was no wolf. He was just determined to malign and discredit the government; and he was playing a script to the benefit of the opposition APC.

This then lends credence to the PDP allegation that Sanusi was an APC mole in the government. Indeed, the PDP claims Sanusi gave the APC 1 billion naira of Central Bank money to open its offices nationwide. It also maintains that a fraudulent N48 billion contract was awarded by Sanusi’s CBN to a leader of the APC, while a further N5 billion was paid to another APC member as consultancy fee. So much for APC’s anti-corruption hogwash!

 

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The end of Buhari’s presidential candidacy

Jonathan is superior Presidential Material to Buhari by Femi Aribisala

Between 1983 and 1985, Peter Onu of Nigeria was Acting Secretary-General of the OAU. At the 1985 Summit in Addis Ababa, statesmen like Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, lobbied for his election as substantive Secretary-General. However, there was a major stumbling block to Peter Onu’s candidature: his Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari, was campaigning against him.

Jonathan vs Buhari

Buhari claimed: “This generation of Nigerians and indeed future generations have no other country than Nigeria.” But when the crunch came, his allegiance to Nigeria disappeared. In the election of the OAU Secretary-General in 1985, Buhari voted against Nigeria and for Niger instead. He secured the election of Ide Oumarou, a Fulani man from Niger; as opposed to an Igbo man from Nigeria. By so doing, Buhari became the first and only Head of State in the history of modern international relations to vote against his country in favour of his tribe.

Years later, General Buhari marched all the way from Daura to Ibadan to demand of Oyo State Governor, Lam Adeshina: “Why are your people killing my people?” Again, he was not referring to Nigerians as his people. Instead, he was an advocate for the rights of murderous Fulani herdsmen who killed Yoruba farmers that objected to their cattle grazing on their land and damaging their crops. This same Buhari who voted against Nigeria in 1985, and said in 2003: “Muslims should only vote those who will promote Islam,” is now shopping for votes nationwide. He should be rejected outright.

Ignorance running riot

If APC had wanted to be taken seriously, it would have come up with a better presidential material than Buhari. There is something anomalous about a party whose mantra is change, recycling a 73 year old man as its candidate for the president of modern Nigeria. Buhari has little or no understanding of public policy. That is why APC will always come up with some excuse or the other not to have him participate in a debate with Jonathan. Buhari fought corruption by imposing ridiculous 300-year sentences on offenders. He fought exam malpractices by imposing 24-year prison sentences on school children.

He dealt with indiscipline by flogging people to queue at bus-stops. He dealt with food shortages by sending soldiers to break into private warehouses and shops. He fought trade imbalances by taking Nigeria back to the stone age of trade by barter (counter-trade). He sought to extradite a Nigerian from Britain by drugging and crating him.

There is so much about Buhari ending the Boko Haram insurgency as he did the Maitatsine insurgency in the 1980s. But the General needs to be advised that Boko Haram is not Maitatsine. Maitatsine was in two towns: Boko Haram is in three states with spillover effects into others. Maitatsine fought with bows and arrows: Boko Haram fights with sophisticated weapons. Maitatsine was a local insurgency, Boko Haram is an international phenomenon.

Anti-corruption hypocrisy: Buhari does not know what corruption means and how to fight it. He became Nigeria’s Head of State through the corruption of a coup d’état and he then tried to fight corruption with corruption. Imposing retroactive decrees and killing Nigerians under them is corruption. Putting an Igbo vice-president in Kirikiri, while placing the Fulani president under palatial house arrest, is corruption. Detaining people like Michael Ajasin in jail, even after they were discharged and acquitted by kangaroo courts, is corruption. Jailing journalists for telling the truth is corruption.

Putting pressure on a judge in order to jail Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is corruption. Shepherding 53 suitcases of contraband unchecked through Customs during a currency change exercise is corruption. Swearing an affidavit that your school-leaving certificate is with the military when it is not, is corruption.

Transforming Nigeria: Buhari’s shameful past is dwarfed by the achievements of Goodluck Jonathan. Under Jonathan, Nigeria has emerged as by far the largest economy in Africa with a GDP of $503 billion; nearly double the previous estimates. South Africa now comes a distant second with $350 billion. With the unbundling of PHCN after 52 years of gridlock, and with now the realizable target of 20,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020, Nigeria’s GDP will soon double that of South Africa.

CNN Money projects that the fastest growing economy in the world in 2015 will be China (7.3% growth rate); followed by Qatar (7.1%); and then followed by Nigeria (7%). This belies all the misinformation about the Nigerian economy dished out by the APC and attests to the astute management of the economy by the Jonathan administration. The seemingly ambitious Vision 20 2020, proclaimed under the Abacha regime to make Nigeria one of the 20 largest economies in the world by 2020 is now well in sight. Today, Nigeria is already the 23rd largest economy in the world. Kudos to Jonathan, we have overtaken such European countries as Austria and Belgium.

Life expectancy In 2010,

when Jonathan became acting president, life expectancy in Nigeria was 47 years. Today, it is 54 years; an improvement of seven years. Adroit application of SURE-P funds has reduced the maternal mortality ratio in Nigeria by 26%. Under Jonathan, Nigeria has become Guinea Worm-free; a disease previously affecting 800,000 Nigerians yearly. In the last six months, there has been no new case of polio in Nigeria. If this goes on for another two and a half years, Nigeria will be declared polio-free.

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, hailed Nigeria’s fight against polio as one of the great world achievements of 2014. He said: “The infrastructure Nigeria has built to fight polio actually made it easier for them to swiftly contain Ebola. The fact that Nigeria is now Ebola-free is a great example of how doing the work to fight things like fighting polio also leaves countries better prepared to deal with outbreaks of other diseases.”

Investors’ haven: In the last three years, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has ranked Nigeria as the number one country for foreign investments in Africa. We also receive more home-remittances than any other African country; a vote of confidence in our economy by Nigerians living abroad. They remitted $23 billion in 2013, a figure far more than the $18 billion received by Egypt; the country with the second highest home remittance in Africa. It is a testament to Goodluck Jonathan’s adroit management of the Nigerian economy that the richest African is now a Nigerian.

In 2010, when Jonathan came to power, Aliko Dangote was the 463rd richest man in the world, with a total fortune of $2.1 billion. Today, he is the 23rd richest man in the world, with a total fortune of $25 billion. Dangote’s billions are “made in Nigeria.” Indeed, under Jonathan, Nigeria now has the fourth highest rate of returns on investments in the world, according to UNCTAD.

Crisis of unemployment

The big challenge has to do with jobs. Every year, another 1.8 million people are offloaded into the job market. However, while the APC says Buhari will create 720,000 jobs a year if elected, Jonathan created 1.6 million jobs in 2013. He has established such innovative programmes as Nagropreneurs and YOUWIN that support young farmers and entrepreneurs with grants, training and mentorship. He has also instituted internship schemes to enhance the capacity of university graduates to secure gainful employment.

The unemployment problem is compounded by the more than doubling of the education budget under Jonathan. Every Nigerian child now has the opportunity to go to school. Indeed, there has been a 10 million increase in school enrolment in Nigeria under this government. There has also been a 75% increase in O’ Level credit pass in Maths and English. Jonathan established 125 Almajiri schools in 13 northern states. He also established 14 new federal universities. There is now a federal university in every state. Indeed, the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls derives from the disenchantment of the Boko Haram that many Northern girls are now going to school.

Dealing with corruption: According to Transparency International, Nigeria has not become more corrupt under Goodluck Jonathan. Out of 178 countries ranked in 2010, Nigeria was the 134th most corrupt country. In 2014, Nigeria was ranked 136th. Unlike Buhari, Jonathan understands that corruption has to be attacked institutionally, from the roots. Therefore, he proposed the abrogation of the petroleum subsidy; one of the biggest avenues for corruption in government. However, Nigerians refused. Jonathan has sanitized the corruption in fertilizer distribution. The Minister of Agriculture, Akinwumi Adesina, lamented that between 1980 and 2010, Nigeria lost 776 billion naira to corrupt fertilizer racketeering.

Fertiliser  racketeering

That effectively came to an end under Jonathan. Through the innovative e-wallet system, farmers are given cell-phones through which they now have direct and easy access to government-provided fertilizer, chemicals and seedlings. Jonathan has also sanitised the banking system by removing dinosaur managing directors, recovering indigent loans and using AMCON to mop up bad loans. By instituting e-payment systems, he sanitized the civil service by removing 50,000 ghost-workers in one fell swoop. He has equally got rid of ghost voters from the electoral register; over 1 million ghost voters were removed from the Zamfara INEC register alone. Under Jonathan, we have had free and fair elections one after the other; in Edo, Anambra, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun.

Agriculture has been transformed under this administration. Thanks to Jonathan, agriculture now accounts for 22% of Nigeria’s GDP, more than oil and gas which only account for 15.9%. Under Jonathan, Nigeria has recorded a more than 50% reduction in food imports. Prior to his presidency, we had a food import bill of 1.4 trillion naira. But now, it is less than N700 billion. With the innovation of dry season rice-farming, Nigeria has reached 60% self-sufficiency in rice production. According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Nigeria is now the largest producer of cassava in the world. The Jonathan government built six strategically-located perishable cargo airports in Ilorin, Jalingo, Jos, Lagos, Makurdi andYola; in close proximity to Nigeria’s food baskets.

It is remarkable that Northern farmers were able to donate five million tubers of yam in order to raise 5 billion naira for Buhari’s presidential election campaign. If Jonathan’s transformation agenda in agriculture was not working as planned, they would not have been able to do this.

Jonathan is superior Presidential Material to Buhari by Femi Aribisala

Time to Get Rid of Tinubu’s Cronies in Lagos

By Femi Aribisala

Bola Tinubu is not a democrat, has never been a democrat and will never be a democrat.

There is a popular Yoruba song that says: “Eko o gba gbere rara o.” It means: “Lagos does not take any nonsense whatsoever.” It is high time for Lagos to fulfil the intent of this song by putting a stop to commandeering of the political processes in the state by Bola Tinubu and his cronies.

Bola Tinubu arriving yesterday

Enough is enough. The domination of Lagos politics by one man has gone on for too long. Lagos must be wrested from the control of Bola Tinubu who has enslaved the politicians in the state and privatised its resources for the last 16 years. Senator Femi Okurounmu, a Yoruba Afenifere leader and co-coordinator of the recently concluded National Conference, said early this year: “Now that the Yoruba people have known that the APC is worse than PDP- in corruption, impunity and lack of internal democracy- we have to vote against APC.”

Divided house

The shenanigans of Tinubu at the just concluded APC gubernatorial primaries in Lagos provide strong confirmation of the veracity of the Senator’s position. Nobody should be fooled; the primaries were nothing but one big charade. Those of us who have insisted that there is nothing progressive or democratic about the APC were sadly proved right once again. Tinubu frustrated every pretension to democracy in the elections and manipulated his cronies into office; all in the interest of sustaining his domination of Lagos politics.

In the process, he has sown the seed of his own downfall. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Tinubu has effectively divided the APC in Lagos. It is now up to the PDP to capitalise on his high-handedness by coming up with a candidate that can be sold to Lagosians. If it does, the days of slavery to Tinubu in Lagos will certainly come to an end on 29th May, 2015.

We have seen this before. In 1991, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) seemed to have Lagos under lock and key. In the House of Assembly election, the SDP won an overwhelming 26 of the 30 seats. However, it lost the election of governor to the National Republican Convention (NRC). Sir Michael Otedola became governor of Lagos as a result of conflict and split within the SDP and he was the beneficiary of the resultant protest vote.

The evidence suggests that, thanks to Tinubu’s high jinks, history might repeat itself in 2015 with the probable loss of Lagos by the ruling APC to the opposition PDP.

Mafia godfather

Bola Tinubu is a political leopard that cannot change its skin. The man is not a democrat, has never been a democrat and will never be a democrat. The truth of the matter is that democracy does not suit Tinubu’s the political agenda. In a moment of Nebuchadnezzar exuberance before the Ekiti poll, Tinubu declared: “Nobody, no one under the sun, under the United Nations Human Rights Charter, can stop Bola Tinubu’s ambition.”

After what we witnessed on Thursday at the APC primaries for the prospective governor of Lagos, it is clear that the onus is now on the Lagos electorate to put a stop to Tinubu pomposity in Lagos.

Tinubu never even found it necessary to pretend in the past to be a democrat. According to his own choice of expression, he fashioned his political style in Lagos State and, indeed, the entire South-West, grandiloquently as “godfatherism,” claiming: “godfatherism is biblical, which is why Christians refer to God as their father.”

However, Tinubu’s “godfatherism” is more akin to that of unscrupulous mafia dons in Sicily. It is certainly anathema to democratic norms and principles. Tinubu’s “godfatherism” means candidates for public office of his political party are not elected by popular vote but selected from Tinubu’s bedroom in Bourdillon Road and then imposed on the party. They are then held under a tight leash by the Jagaban and are required to do his bidding on pain of being summarily replaced or impeached.

Bisi Akande, former chairman of Tinubu’s legacy ACN party, declared unapologetically that democracy had no place in the internal arrangements of the ACN. “Anyone that is not comfortable with that should go and contest in another political party,” he said.

Anti-democratic APC

Nothing has really changed in this stance beyond the fact that ACN has since metamorphosed into the APC. The first test was the so-called election of the chairman of the party. Recognising that his choice candidate might not be elected in a free and fair democratic poll, Tinubu engaged in backroom deals whereby, instead of electing a new APC chairman, Odigie-Oyegun was rigged into the office.

APC governors went along with this charade out of fear Tinubu might otherwise lose interest in the new party and deny it valuable South-West support. The lie was sold to the convention that all other candidates had agreed to step down for Odigie-Oyegun. As a result, he was declared the new consensus chairman of the party.

Unfortunately for Tinubu, he had to contend in the APC with new people who were not beholden to him and refused to be subservient to him. Thus, Tom Ikimi blew the whistle on him, insisting he never dropped out of the race for Oyegun but was forced out because, at that time, Tinubu had designs for a Muslim/Muslim APC presidential ticket, with him as the vice-presidential candidate. Ali Modu Sheriff was even reported to have been so incensed by Tinubu at an APC NEC meeting that he threatened to beat him up. Both of these men have since left the APC.

Sharp practices

With these antecedents, it is not surprising therefore that the APC primary for the party’s gubernatorial candidate for Lagos State was yet another sham orchestrated by Tinubu. Long before the election, Tinubu had unveiled Akinwumi Ambode as his preferred candidate. Oba Rilwan Akiolu, who Tinubu arrogantly announced is one of the very few Obas worth his salt in the entire South-West, had already publicly endorsed Tinubu’s irrefutable choice.

But there were already rumblings that some were not going to take this lying down this time. Muiz Banire, one of Tinubu’s former acolytes, declared publicly that the imposition of a candidate on the APC should be resisted. He said: “I want to encourage our people, particularly APC people, to shine their eyes. They must shine their eyes this time around and not allow anybody to pull the wool over them. They have their votes, their rights, and they must go all out to ensure that we have and enjoy free, transparent, and just primaries.”

But this was not to be. Tinubu manipulated the process from beginning to end. Delegates were not chosen from the 20 local governments recognised by the APC constitution. Instead of direct primaries in the different local government wards, indirect primaries were held, enabling the powers-that-be to select their preferred disciples and give them voting instructions. To that end, the delegate list was not made known to any of the candidates, except favourite-son Ambode.

Once the results started to be declared, the other contestants realised they had been conned. They all stormed out of the venue in protest; leaving only Ambode and Ganiyu Solomon. Tokunbo Wahab, one of the aggrieved candidates, declared: “I can say categorically, that what happened today was not a primary but a pre-orchestrated drama. We shall be making our positions known to the party and INEC within the next few hours and we shall pursue this to a logical, legal conclusion.”

It should be clear to any but the most politically naive that in a truly free and fair election, Ambode is no competition for many of the other contestants. Ambode is not a politician, and he is an unknown political quantity in Lagos. How then can he prevail over far more popular and better–known politicians in APC, including Ganiyu Solomon, a serving Senator; Adeyemi Ikuforiji, a long-standing Speaker of the House of Assembly; and other household names like Femi Hamzat, the State Commissioner for Works.

The results themselves gave the lie to the entire process. Political lightweight Ambode received a whopping 3,735 votes; while Hamzat could only manage 1201 votes; Ganiyu Solomon 272 votes and Adeyemi Ikuforiji 182 votes.

Tinubu pleaded with aspirants to accept the contrived outcome, saying: “You are 12 aspirants and like the 12 tribes of Israel you have some differences but you must remain one and united.” Someone needs to inform the Jagaban that the 12 tribes of Israel were not united. As a matter of fact, they split, with two tribes becoming the kingdom of Judah and the remaining ten the kingdom of Israel.

Emasculated governor

Tinubu’s machinations are all about power and control. By choosing a candidate without grassroots support, Tinubu is ensuring that he would not be a threat to him if he becomes governor. Moreover, he would not be able to rely on his own independent sources of power outside of Tinubu. That way, the man would be at Tinubu’s beck and call. This ensures that Tinubu would emasculate the governor; making him entirely dependent on him without having a significant political structure of his own.

If the governor grows wings after a few years in office, the threat of impeachment by Tinubu’s henchmen in the House of Assembly would be held as a sword of Damocles around his neck to keep him back in line. Through the same flawed process, Tinubu loyalists also swept the APC House of Assembly primaries, even as his supporters swept the election in the 20 LGAs and 30 LCDAs. With this clean sweep, Tinubu’s continued control of the state legislature is assured should the APC candidates prevail at the polls in February.

It is therefore imperative for the Lagos electorate to throw out Tinibu and his gang lock, stock and barrel in the coming elections. For too long, Lagos has been run as the personal estate of one over-bearing man. This must come to an end. Come February 2015, Lagos voters must send Tinubu into early retirement, recognising that a vote for APC again is a vote for political slavery to the whims and caprices of one insatiable godfather.

 

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Time to Get Rid of Tinubu’s Cronies in Lagos

Aminu Tambuwal is a Traitor

By Femi Aribisala

Nigerians voted for a PDP Speaker, but got an APC wolf in PDP sheep’s clothing.

It is customary to refer to members of the House of Representatives as “honorable.”  In which case, the appropriate title for the current Speaker might be the Right Honorable Aminu Tambuwal.  But the activities of the Speaker over the last four years, capped by his recent defection to the APC, shows that such a title would be grossly misplaced if applied to him.

Tambuwal, Tinubu

There is nothing honorable about Tambuwal pretence for the better part of three years that he is a PDP member, when in actual fact he has been nothing of the sort.  There is nothing honorable about the way Tambuwal has despised the Constitution he was sworn to protect.  There is nothing honorable about the wayTambuwal has betrayed the trust of the Nigerian electorate, as expressed in the 2011 election.  I can find no better or more precise language with which to describe Tambuwal than that he is a traitor.

Tambuwal’s treachery

Tambuwal is a serial defector of dishonorable repute.  He defected from the ANPP to the DPP, then to back to the ANPP, then to the PDP and now to the APC.  He is a traitor for defecting from the PDP to the APC without first resigning from the House.  He is the representative of a constituency in Sokoto comprising a majority of PDP voters.  They elected him to represent them as a PDP legislator.  He has now betrayed their trust by defecting to the opposition APC.  This is nothing short of treachery.  His constituents did not elect an APC man to represent them.

Tambuwal has shown that he is not a man of high principles.  He is just another 419 politician.  Nigeria is operating a democratic system largely borrowed from the United States.  The Speaker of the House of Representatives comes from the majority party in the House.  That party is the PDP.  Tambuwal was elected under the PDP platform.  However, he has been operating as an opposition APC man disguised treacherously as a PDP man.

The job of the Speaker is to spearhead the legislative programme of the government in the House.  A Speaker who is in cahoots with the opposition is, in effect, a traitor to his party and to the government.  That has been the case with Aminu Tambuwal.  If Nigerian voters wanted the House of Representatives to have a Speaker who is from a different party from the President, they would have given the opposition a majority in the House of Representatives.  They did not.  They gave the PDP, the president’s party, the majority.  Tambuwal’s shenanigans in the last four years have been designed to frustrate the express will of the Nigerian electorate.

ACN treachery

Aminu Tambuwal became Speaker by aligning himself with the selfish ambitions of Bola Tinubu and his ACN opposition party.  Tinubu claims to be a leader of the Yorubas, but when the PDP zoned the position of Speaker to South-West Yorubas, Tinubu decided that the interests of the Yorubas would not serve his personal political ambitions.  A Yoruba Speaker would provide another focal point for Yoruba leadership apart from the Asiwaju; therefore the ACN decided to frustrate the candidature of their kith and kin, Mulikat Akande.

To do this successfully, they needed a traitor from the PDP who would go against the directives of his party, while remaining a member of the PDP, and challenge the party’s chosen candidate to become Speaker.  They found that traitor in Aminu Tambuwal.  Here is how it worked.  Tinubu used his political muscle to convince gullible Yoruba legislators to vote against a Yoruba woman, Mulikat Akande, in a post that was specifically designed by the PDP as a benefit for Yorubas.  He then got these same “mumu” Yoruba politicians to vote instead for Aminu Tambuwal; a scion of the Sokoto Caliphate with a Hausa/Fulani agenda.

This is something that could never have happened the other way around.  It is inconceivable that a Hausa/ Fulani legislator would be persuaded to give something that has been zoned to Hausa/Fulanis to a Yoruba man.  To put it bluntly, the Hausas/Fulanis are not that stupid.  But what does that tell us about Yoruba politicians?  They are slave traders.  They have no qualms about selling their own people into slavery.  They have no qualms about throwing other Yorubas under the bus.

With the Yoruba politicians gullible enough to agree to be sold, yet again, into Northern slavery, at the treacherous plotting of their self-proclaimed godfather, it was not difficult to find Northerners from the PDP who gladly joined in this treachery to put another Hausa/Fulani into office as Speaker.  Aminu Tambuwal was that choice.

False pretences

There are two quick lessons to learn from this.  The first is that as Bola Tinubu and the ACN betrayed the Yorubas with the election of Tambuwal of Sokoto as Speaker of the House, so also are they determined to sell Yorubas into slavery again by their current alliance with the North-West and the Sokoto Caliphate through the APC.  As there was nothing in Tambuwal’s Speakership for the Yorubas, so will there be nothing for the Yorubas in a North-West APC presidency.  Yoruba voters really need to “shine their eyes.”

The other issue has to do with Aminu Tambuwal.  Tambuwal became a Speaker under false pretences.  Although he continued to parade himself as a member of the PDP, he was in actual fact no longer a member of the party.  He shunned the party and became a mouthpiece of the opposition, all the while still pretending that he belonged to the PDP.  Clearly, the honorable thing for Tambuwal to do, since he had clearly lost his affection for the PDP, was to resign from the party.  However, Right Honorable Aminu Tambuwal did not do this because he is not an honorable man.

Violating the Constitution

Tambuwal’s other disaffected PDP colleagues were more honorable than him.  37 of them defected to the APC.  But Tambuwal remained in the PDP in order to retain his job as Speaker.  As long as he continued to claim he belonged to the PDP, even though he really no longer liked the party, he could continue to enjoy his rights and privileges as the Speaker.  Tambuwal did not care what Nigerians think about his treachery.  We voted for a PDP Speaker, but got an APC wolf in PDP sheep’s clothing.

Tambuwal’s treachery also meant he had to violate the Constitution of Nigeria which, as Speaker, he was sworn to protect.  Section 68 (g) of the 1999 Constitution says: “A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the House of which he is a member if being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected; provided that his membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored.”

This required the Speaker to declare the seats of the 37 PDP House members who defected as vacant.  There was no division in the PDP; its members simply defected to another party.  But given that Tambuwal was really an APC man in PDP disguise, he refused to fulfil his constitutional duty as Speaker to declare the seats vacant, in spite of the proclamation of the courts.  He betrayed his duty as a PDP Speaker to protect the interests of the PDP.  He denied the PDP seats that rightfully belonged to the PDP.  He violated the will of Nigerian voters who elected the PDP traitors.

Tambuwal’s defection

Tambuwal’s last act of treachery was his outright defection to the APC.  He waited for the majority leader of the House to move for adjournment until 3rd December, 2014, before reading his defection letter.  Having long manipulated the system to his selfish advantage, Tambuwal has now discovered that others can also manipulate the system to his disadvantage.

The police have been instructed to withdraw his security detail as Speaker, on the grounds that, with his defection, he is no longer a member of the House and thereby no longer the Speaker.  In truth, the Speaker of the House of Representatives cannot come from the minority party.  Tambuwal has now resorted to the courts.  But this is the same Tambuwal who failed to declare the 37 seats of PDP defectors vacant, in spite of a court decision to that effect.  People like Tambuwal who violate the verdict of the courts and show no respect for the courts don’t deserve protection by the courts.

If Tambuwal, as Speaker, can ignore the verdict of the courts; then Jonathan, as President, can equally ignore it.  In this dog-eat-dog game that Tambuwal initiated, he deserves no sympathy whatsoever.  He will quickly discover that a president has far greater nuisance value than a Speaker.  If the president decides to make life difficult for Tambuwal, and I see no reason why not, then Tambwal is in for interesting times before his demotion to Sokoto Governor’s lodge.

He can be thrown out of his government house.  He can then take the government to court, but the case might not be decided until June 2015.  Tambuwal cannot have his cake and eat it.  He cannot manipulate the system and then go to court to challenge others for also manipulating it.  He started this nonsense.  He deserves the repercussions.  He should have done the honorable thing a long time ago.  Resign as Speaker; and leave the House of Representatives.

If Tambuwal thinks Buhari and Co will give the presidential ticket of the APC to a former PDP man, he should think again.  If he thinks Northerners will elect a North-West Sokoto man as president in 2015, he should think again.  If he thinks Yorubas will vote a member of the Sokoto Caliphate as president in the current political environment of Nigeria, then he should dream on.

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Aminu Tambuwal is a Traitor