WHY DO YOU SUPPORT GEJ RE-ELECTION.......PLS READ AND MOVE FORWARD WITH NIGERIA, NOT BACKWARD. Prince Bello Kolawole Muyideen This country, my brother... Why I support Jonathan’s re-election I have lived quite some age, witnessed governments come and go, experienced both civil and military rules, enjoyed some good times and suffered some bad times flowing from the policies and programmes of successive governments and I believe that I am knowledgeable enough in the history of our nation to make very informed judgment on the times that we live in and the challenge before us as a people. I know too well that our country had been run down, socially, politically and economically, owing, especially, to the incompetency of successive military leaderships who were really not trained for governance and nation building, on the one hand, and the fallouts of our political contradictions, policy summersaults, strife and struggles in our nationhood. I know that the Yaradua/Jonathan regime inherited a thoroughly battered socio-economy in which virtually nothing was working as all the critical infrastructure and sectors had been destroyed and vandalized, and that the challenge of re-building our nation was going to be a tough task requiring redirection with very strategic thinking, programming and great political will to renegotiate the bends to bring our nation out of the woods. The critics of Jonathan seem to be saying that six years is enough to rebuild a nation which had suffered immense battering for over 45 years out of the 55 years of our independence. This, to me, is a cruelly unrealistic and unfair judgment, especially when it is being propagated mostly by many who had hands in the despoliation of our nation. For several years, we have run a mono economy based on crude oil and nothing was done to diversify the base of the economy to inspire industrialization and technological development. I recall the days of oil boom in the 1970s when the then government said the problem of our country was not about money but how to spend it. It has long shown that indeed the leadership then did not know how to spend it. I recall the issue of Udoji, for instance, when the nation had so much money and the government decided to just increase salaries rather than investing in agriculture and industrial/technological development. The fallout out of the policy resulted in sharp inflation even as the increase in salary now attracted people towards looking for government jobs rather than enterprise. This led to huge urban drift while the agric fields were abandoned. This period was followed by successive military governments which experimented with various forms of fiscal policies which they did not understand. We had such eras as tightening of belt, austerity measure, SAP, devaluation of the Naira resulting from its parity with the dollar in the 1980s to steady depreciation through the years while the governments kept experimenting, albeit, ineffectively. Obviously, from these points, the nation was no longer talking about development but mere survival. This state ran through from the Buhari, IBB, Abacha, Abdusallam and Obasanjo regimes and was inherited by Yaradua and Jonathan. Given this background, I am very convinced that the Jonathan government reasonably understands the critical deficits in infrastructure and challenges that have come to face our nation and is sincerely and evidently applying itself to re-working the nation and his efforts is proving effective to the repairs. I am in no doubt that we have yet to achieve half of the standards required for us to be where we should be but I am impressed with the works being done towards getting us to that destination. This can be seen in the activities of the Jonathan government across various critical sectors that form the pillars of a good socio-economy. On roads, for instance, I have traveled and I can see that there is much work going on various critical federal roads. I know the state of the roads before Jonathan. I know when the road from Lagos to Abuja became a problem; I know when we were diverting into the bushes on Shagamu-Benin expressway and the toll of accidents, deaths and hardship that trailed those ugly times; I know when the East=West road, from Warri to Port Harcourt was most terrible. Today, there is a great improvement with work still ongoing on these roads and many more across the nation. Some are in different degrees of completion but the level of hardship that we hitherto suffered on those roads have been sufficiently reduced. On the Shagamu-Benin express, a lot has been achieved especially on the worst sections of Ore-Benin and work is progressing towards the Ogun areas towards Ijebu- ode and Shagamu. There is ongoing work on the Lagos-Ibadan road; ditto for Ibadan-Ilorin; ditto for Abuja-Lokoja; ditto for various roads in the North like Numan-Yola, Mokwa etc etc. It is not realistic to expect that all the roads will be completed at once. Even the issue of funding cannot permit this as there are also various other competing challenges that require such intervention. What is important is that government is working on these roads; steady progress is being made; and the travel and safety experience is progressively improving. Many of us who travel regularly and those who traveled during the Yuletide can testify to this. By the records, we have about 35,000 kilometres of federal roads out of which only about 4,500 kilometres were motorable before Jonathan came in. So far about 25,000 kilometres of the roads have been rehabilitated and work is still on to meet up with the remaining about 10,000 kilometres. While the government is not claiming 100% achievement in this area, it is obvious that so much has been achieved and more is still being done. The issue of fuel supply is another area that the Jonathan government has done well. Our refineries had been run down through successive governments and I know that we started importing fuel and increasing pump price, perhaps in the mid 1980s, and steadily so through the administrations of IBB, Abacha, Abdusallam, OBJ, Yaradua and into Jonathan’s. One of the reasons is that government got tired of continuously throwing money for Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) while those in charge kept pilfering away the money. At a point, the issue of TAM became a major drain on the national account given the importance of petroleum and the challenge on government to continue to provide. The cost and process of importing fuel had led to frequent cases of fuel scarcity and the untold hardship on Nigerians, not only in the struggle to get fuel but also in the inflation it brought to bear on the cost of transportation and cost of commodities. There was even the incident of the importation of bad fuel which reportedly damaged many people’s vehicles during the Abacha regime. I also recall the constant war between the government of Obasanjo and the leadership of the Labour congress on fuel scarcity and price increase. I also know that it was out of the proceeds of increase in the price of fuel that the Petroleum Task Fund (PTF) which Buhari headed under Abacha was formed. The point here is that fuel scarcity, pump price increase and importation of fuel has a history that involves virtually all successive governments and leaders from the mid-80s. In the Jonathan administration, the story has been substantially different. In a stretch of over three years now, the issue of fuel scarcity is looking like a thing of the past as government has ensured that there is steady supply of products and the hardship of fuel queues and black market price has been reasonably handled. This achievement is however not without the usual huge cost of fuel subsidy and its debilitating effect on our national recurrent budget vis-à-vis the percentage left for capital projects. There is certainly a challenge in continuing this way but the onus is on us to understand the dynamics and take a national decision on the imperatives of deregulation. We have continued to have the conversation on the need for the deregulation of the downstream sector but we have also been afraid that deregulation might mean higher pump price from the dictates of market forces. We witnessed the deregulation protests of 2012 and the expectations by some people for a Nigerian Spring but, clearly, the arguments against tend to be more of politics and propaganda than of good reason. With close to 30% of our budget going for fuel subsidy alone, and recurrent expenditure taking close to 70% of the whole, there is really no way we can develop faster than we are doing. One of the major problems of this nation is the issue of mixed economy by which government took on the responsibility and the business of everything. Government took on the business of aviation with Nigerian Airways; the business of Shipping with Nigerian National Shipping Line; the business of Telecommunication with NITEL; the business of transportation with Nigerian Railways; the business of Power Supply with NEPA; the business of agriculture with supply of fertilizer; the business of education; the business of petroleum with government refineries; the business of producing cars; etc etc and we have all come to see that government really has no business in running these businesses. We have come to agree that its duty instead is establishing the required critical infrastructure, setting up the policies, monitoring and enforcing regulations and providing the enabling environment for investors to engage in these businesses. That way it can free up funds and concentrate on critical social infrastructure. But the Nigerian government over time undertook to bit more than it can chew and given the attitude of non-commitment by civil service, corruption and incompetence, these businesses have been run aground. You can name all of them. They have collapsed over time and talking about having government to return to those businesses does not seem reasonable and realistic. It amounts to lying to ourselves. All over the world, we can see governments striving to shed weight, to leave the business terrain for businessmen and investors while providing the environment and regulations for the businesses to thrive and provide employment. The Jonathan government is also striving towards this ideal. The Telecoms sector in Nigeria will continue to be an example. We all know what it used to be with NITEL. Now, the story of communication in Nigeria is much more different and despite minor service complaints, Nigerians now enjoy better communication in both social and business affairs. In power supply, we all also know the story of “Up NEPA!” That phrase was not introduced during Jonathan. It was a symbol of the poor state of power supply in Nigeria. It has been established, even as testified by Obasanjo, that curiously, there were no new investments and upgrading of the power sector since from the early 80s. It was no surprise therefore that with population and demand increase on electricity, there was bound to be a yawning deficit. This situation was underscored by during the Obasanjo/Atiku regime when the government declared an emergency on electricity with our beloved Bola Ige to lead the charge. It is obvious that the government then did not clearly understand the real problems and even when a whopping $16billion dollars was expended by Obasanjo to revive NEPA and ensure electricity supply, the enormity of the decay and the incident of corruption, as we came later to understand, undermined the process. Today, the Jonathan government has taken the bull by the horn to re-organise the sector with the effective unbundling of NEPA/PHCN and the involvement of investors. Accordingly, there is a lot of work going on in the power sector with Independent Power production/generation plants being set up in different parts of the country. So also, there is action on power distribution and transmission. The generation currently revolves 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts and the supply is around 3,500 to 4,500 megawatts as against the about 1,500 megawatts that we used to have before 2011. There are differing experiences by different communities on power supply. While some people testify that the situation has improved in the area, others genuinely are complaining. But it is important to emphasise that government is seriously doing many visible things about the optimizing the generation, distribution and supply and work evidently in progress. There has also been more roll outs of the pre-paid metre system to save consumers the usual trouble with NEPA billing. NEPA workers who constrained the process of unbundling NEPA and re-organising the sector following labour fears have been reasonably sorted out and action is going on to improve the electricity situation in Nigeria. The various investments and ongoing works on the power sector are to produce a better supply situation before the end of the year even as the Jonathan government is aiming for 10,000 megawatts in the medium term and about 20,000 by 2020. I am thus convinced that the government is doing well. This action needs also to be taken in the petroleum downstream sector to equally inspire investments in refineries and bring about the effective utilisation of our local crude for petroleum refining and thus ensure supply availability, competition and price efficiency. The Jonathan government has also done tremendously well in agriculture. We all know the place of agriculture in our national economy before the advent of oil. The various regional governments took agriculture very seriously and we know that economies of all the regions were driven by agriculture. In the West under Awalowo, it was cocoa; in the North, under Ahmadu Bello, it was groundnut, rice and other produce; in the East and Midwest it was palm oil and rubber. Nigerian presented a strong and virile economy. Rather than transit from production to agro-processing and manufacturing, we saw that the leadership of the military from 1966 relegated agriculture to the background and brought the nation to rely on the mono-economy of crude oil. It is to the extent that even the states have been positioned not to aspire to develop the potentials of their traditional economies and raw material base, but merely to rely of federal allocations proceeding from crude oil sales. This is unlike the old regional governments that developed their economic bases and thus provided employment and development. The Obasanjo military government attempted to address this anomaly in the late 1970s with the Operation Feed the Nation, OFN, but not much was achieved by it. Perhaps the biggest gain in that programme would be Obasanjo Farms Nigeria Limited (OFN). Still in realization of the need to revive agriculture, the Shagari government also introduced the Green Revolution to encourage agriculture. That government was overthrown by Gen Mohammadu Buhari and since then and through the governments of Buhari, IBB, Abacaha and OBJ, the nation was returned to the reliance on oil and federal allocations with no meaningful programme to revamp agriculture. Today, the story is much different. The government of Jonathan has paid great attention to agriculture and domestic food production has improved. Real farmers all over Nigeria testify to the new impetus given to them under the management of the Minister of Agriculture. Today, the amount of food import has been reduced from about N1.1 trillion per annum to about N700billion. It was interesting to see that after the great flood of 2012, the government through its programmes in agriculture was able to avert the food scarcity that should have followed. Today, in the North alone, there are about six million farmers captured and catered for in the governments agricultural development programme. We have other numbers in the South West, the east and the South South areas on different forms of agriculture – fish farming, cassava production, rice production, poultry farming etc etc.. To sustain the system, the government introduced the E-Wallet Programme to enable direct out reach for the support of farmers. Through this programme, farmers now receive fertilizers, seedlings and agric loans more directly and the middle men that used to divert, hoard, inflate price and orchestrate scarcity in the supply of fertilizers have been cut off. The banks have also developed greater confidence in agricultural lending with just one of the banks providing as much as N16billion on agricultural loans in 2013. To support all season cultivation, Jonathan has also built new dams and revamped old ones for irrigation and general water supply, as well as expanding the silos and storage systems to guard against wastes and losses. Clearly, things are looking up in agriculture under Jonathan. Again, we certainly have not arrived at where we should be given the so much neglect of the sector before now and the much re-jigging that needs to be done to re-position the sector but every evidence points to the fact that the government is doing the right things to improve the sector and results are beginning to show. We only need to sustain the efforts. The Jonathan government has equally made similar interventions on various other sectors including manufacturing and housing. There have been conversations on the national Automative Industry and many companies have signed up to start various forms of motor assemblies in Nigeria. Some are already producing. The point is that we must re-negotiate Nigeria out of a mass importer of used cars from Europe and America. If we don’t, we will continue to be a dumping ground and our industries will not grow. We will continue to create jobs for overseas countries whose industries will continue to churn out new cars while the used ones are sent to Nigeria. A nation cannot grow that way and Jonathan, with the new automotive policy is well in order in this regard. There may be issues on interim measures to ensure that people can still manage to buy cars before the assemblies are fully operational but these are minor issues compared to the rationale and overall objective of the automotive policy. When these assemblies stand firm, they will also generate employment like other industries which are also enjoying government intervention. Talking about employment, we have seen reasonable benefits from the SURE-P programme and the YOUWIN programme. The SURE-P has provided for over loans, vehicles and other supports for 200,000 transporters across the nation. In Abuja area alone, over 22,000 transporters were supported. The SURE-P also has a graduate training programme in which graduates are attached to some companies to acquire experience to improve their employability while government pays them during the internship. There are about 4,000 graduates in this net. There is also the skills acquisition programme with about 6,000 participants. Under the YOUWIN programme, government the Jonathan government set aside fund to support young entrepreneurs between ages 18 and 45. So far, about 44,000 persons have been supported with loans of between N1m and N10M to improve on their businesses or pursue their new business ideas. The fund is sourced by government but managed by independent financial institutions and there are no sentiments about accessing the fund based on merit. This programme needs to be continued because it redirects our youths towards industry and progressively increases our employment capacity. Education is another critical sector in which the Jonathan government is doing well. We all know what led to the proliferation of private schools and when that development became prominent in our society. I trace it mostly to the eras of IBB and Abacha when schools frequently closed for long months and parents resorted to private schools. We also know that the dispute between ASUU and government and the unhonoured agreements that brought about incidents of ASUU strike were made and disregarded through those regimes and into the OBJ government. When ASUU struck again under Jonathan, the cumulative bill of their demand, for university education alone, was in about N1.6trillion, about 40% of our national budget. Agreed that many of the points of demand by ASUU was towards the betterment of the educational system, it was also untenable to expect the government to release that money in one budget year to the universities alone. However, understanding and committing to the importance and to resolve the dispute, the Jonathan government agreed to provide N1.2 trillion for the universities in about two years. The government provided an initial sum of N200 billion with elected further to be providing N20 billion every quarter to service the universities. With is, it is expected that the issues have been reasonably resolved and there has indeed been calm. It is to be empahsised and noted that Jonathan accepted the principle of the continuum of government and is discharging the agreements entered into with ASUU but were not honoured by previous governments. The point to note is that if those governments that entered the MOU with ASUU had taken reasonably steps to make the provisions required, the situation of our education would not be as bad as Jonathan inherited it, still he has taken bold steps towards meeting up. We also met a situation where there little space for admission into universities. While we have close to 1.5 million students applying for university education yearly, the schools have a capacity of about 500,000 with about one million students left in the lurch. The Jonathan government has responded to this need by establishing more federal universities in Dutse, Dutsin Ma, Kashere, Lafia, Lokoja, Ndufu-Alike-Ikwo, Otuoke, Oye Ekiti and Wukari. These universities have taken off gradually and are expected to grow with time to contribute to the capacity to accommodate new students. Interestingly, despite the pressure from ASUU on various demands and in comparison with the cost of education in private universities, the government has continued to maintain a very low tuition for students to ensure access to education for children of all classes of parents. In the same vein, the government has continued to maintain its universal Basic Education programme with funds set aside to partner with and support state governments on primary and secondary education. The Almajiri schools programme is also another important introduction of the Jonathan government. Whereas successive governments had accepted the Almajiri system that confines children, especially in the North, to growing up without education, the Jonathan government has come to reject this culture and has therefore set up the Almajiri schools to capture and re-direct the development of children in the affected areas. So far about 125 Almajiri schools have been established and this is certainly bound to change the social, educational and youth development landscape in the North forever. It will also impact on the quality of life and the employability of the Almajiri who hitherto grew up like urchins. No doubt, this is a very significant development in our society. The Railway System is another area that the government of Jonathan has paid reasonable attention. There is no argument about the importance of effective rail transportation and mass transit system for any nation. The advanced nations of the world, US, Germany, UK, France, China, Japan etc rely heavily on their rail system. Unfortunately, for 30 years, the Nigerian rail system was left comatose. Even the attempt by the Jakande administration to establish a metroline (city light rail for mass transit in lagos) was cancelled by the government of Gen. Mohammadu Buhari in 1983 due to lack of understanding of the importance. Today, the Nigerian railways is receiving very serious attention from Jonathan. They The government has launched two Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) train sets and six air-conditioned passengers’ coaches in Lagos to increase the railway rolling stock as part of the transport sector development plan for the nation. The plan includes the rehabilitation of the existing narrow gauge, the construction of new standard gauge rail line and maintenance. The idea is to bring Nigeria at par with modern railway services available globally by constantly upgrading the rolling stock for passengers and freights. With this, significant work has been achieved in the 2119 kilometres Eastern Line rehabilitation comprising the 463 km rail line from Port Harcourt to Makurdi; 1,016 km rail line from Makurdi to Kuru, including spur line to Jos and Kafanchan and 640 km rail line from Kuru to Maiduguri. The Lagos-Jebba rail lines has also been revitalized and the government has launched Mass Transit Train Service (MTTS) in Lagos with about 11 trains, carrying close to 15,000 passengers daily within the Lagos metropolis. This has considerably reduced transportation cost in the affected areas. For instance, a returned trip from Agege – Ebute Metta under the MTTS now costs less than N150, as against the more than N3,000 it would have cost by taxi, while it now costs about N180 only by train service from Lagos to Abeokuta. The resuscitation of the train service has also reduced the cost of transportation from Lagos to Kano, which now costs less than N1,800 as against between N4,000 and N5,000 by car or bus. There is ongoing work on the Lagos-Maiduguri standard gauge the completion of which will make it cheaper and faster to move goods and services from Lagos to the north-eastern part of the country. Appreciable progress had been made in the completion of the 1,657km Eastern line from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri. The government has also procured 25 new locomotives from General Electric and refurbished 366 coaches and wagons, in addition to the 20 units of oil tank wagons, five railroad emergency vehicles, 60 tonnes overhead workshop cranes and three rail inspection vehicles. The Iddo terminus station, Ebute Metta junction station, Ilorin station, Kaduna junction station, Kano station, Port Harcourt station, Enugu station, Jos station and Gombe station were also being remodeled. Track laying of the Abuja-Kaduna fast train line is on, signifying the commencement of the modernisation of the railway system in the country. The Kaduna-Abuja rail project is the first segment of the Lagos to Kano standard gauge rail line and when completed it will enable people to live in Kaduna and work in Abuja. The project had reached 68 per cent completion, including earthworks, hydraulic structures, railway bridges; box bridges, precast T-beams for bridges; and over pass bridges. The Jonathan government has also proposed seven new standard gauge lines for Public-Private Partnership. These include 322km Lagos-Benin City line; 500km Benin-Abakiliki line; 673km Benin- Obudu Cattle Ranch line; 615km Lagos-Abuja high speed line; 520km Zaria-Birnin- Koni line; 533km Ega nyi-Otukpo and the Ega nyi-Abuja lines. These projects are also coming with huge employment opportunities. Currently CECC has about 4,000 Nigerians employed on its parts of the projects and could increase to about 6,000 employees who would be trained in various skills relating to the operations and maintenance of facilities when most of the lines are operational. The government has also set aside funds to fast-track the completion of the Abuja Rail Mass Transit project.An estimated 700,000 passengers are projected to ride the Abuja Light Rail (ALR) on daily basis, when the first phase of the project takes off in 2015 and there are plans to link the FCT rail line with neighbouring states with standard gauge lines and to extend the city light rail to the satellite towns, particularly Nyanya, Mararaba and Karu to reduce vehicular gridlock. This ongoing revival of the national rail system is a great hallmark for the development of our nation. I should not bother to talk about sports because the performance of Jonathan government in the subsector, starting from his convocation of a presidential retreat on sports is visible for all to see. We sure did not qualify for the 2015 nations Cup but it is a big deal that we came to win the nations Cup in 2013 after about 19 years. We also won the U-17 in Dubai same year. We did well in the last commonwealth games but most importantly, the government has given a whole new meaning, support and reward to performing athletes. The long troubling NFF Bill has been passed by the senate and there are ongoing reforms in the national league to make it better and more rewarding for players and clubs as real business. The president has allowed these processes of re-engineering to prevail and corporate organizations are finding new confidence in our sports. There is of course the challenge of insurgency. Some people believe that Jonathan is not doing enough to combat the insurgents. Fingers have been pointed to the capacity of the military. But the issues in the challenge of the insurgency are quite clear, except for those who are bent on taking political advantage of the unfortunate situation. In the first place, it must be understood that Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism is a global challenge that is not limited to Nigeria. The jihadists are simply rejecting modernism both in education, politics, government and commerce and there are suicidally bent on it the achievement of a new world Islamic caliphate under a Sharia system. We have the development, attacks and holds of al Qaeda, the Talibans, Al Shabaab, Janjaweed, Nostra in many parts of the world and then Boko Haram in Nigeria. We have seen how the US and NATO couldn’t defeat and dislodge the Talibans in Afghanistan. We are seeing the ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Libya and how the US States with its mighty military partners comprising the UK, Germany, France and NATO forces and ally of over 30 nations have still not fully dislodged them in Iraq and Syria. We are currently seeing the export of fundamentalist terrorism to mainland Europe and the enlistment of well catered for European, American and Australian citizens to fight on the side of the terrorists. That of course should counter the argument that the incidence of terrorism stems from unemployment and social inequality. No. Far from it, fundamentalist terrorism is simply Islamic jihad. There had been jihads before. We all know the build up to insurgency in Nigeria. We know the days of Maitatsine, Kano riots and right from the 1980s. We know when some leadership of this country toyed with the idea of designating the nation as an Islamic country. We know how various governors in the North gave vent to the idea of Sharia government for political exigency and how the government of OBJ failed to check the surge. We know what happened in Yobe and Borno, how those governments could not reasonably check the emergence of the fundamentalist sect of Yusuf and Shekau. We know when we called on Islamic leaders, Northern traditional and political leaders to speak up and take a stand to discourage the rise of Boko Haram in the North and how some of them erroneously believed its raise will give some of them political advantage. However, the onus of defending the nation, militarily rests on the government but the first line of any defence is citizenship vigilance and commitment to safety and peace. As a people, we failed collectively, in this aspect. Some people have described their expectation in the fight against the insurgents to the extent of having Jonathan to personally go to the war front because he is Commander –in-Chief which is just a mere mockery of a serious situation. So much has been said and expected of our military but we have come to see that we really didn’t have a military with the capacity to immediately fight off the insurgents. Just like many sectors of our economy had been neglected by successive governments before now, so also had our military not been left out in the decay. It is obvious that after the civil war and through the governments of Gowon, Murtala, Buhari, IBB, Abacha and OBJ, the military leadership in Nigeria was more involved in government, politics and business rather than building us a strong and well equipped military. All the defence budgets through those years were looted and it did not show because Nigeria had not been challenged with any reasonable external or internal attack of the magnitude of Boko Haram. For the much part, it was just by mere propaganda that they kept telling us that our military was very good simply because they participated in peace-keeping missions with the commands, supplies and equipment of the United Nations. This same propaganda applies to the police. We know when we began to mock that the armed robbers were more equipped than our police. It certainly was long before Jonathan. There is no doubt that we may have knowledgeable officers and men but knowledge without equipment in military affairs is as empty. So, after many years, we are faced with our first major military challenge and we seem to be in agreement that we have not a well equipped military, afterall. It is common knowledge that a strong military is not built overnight. Nations take time, investment and continues research top build its military. Iran for instance has been involved for years in the building of nuclear capacity with a view to shoring up its military power. Our past generals who even seized government as heads of state did not do this. Under the circumstance, it cannot be reasonably expected that we would trash down Boko Haram at once, not even with conspirators in the system. The government of Jonathan is therefore doing its best to fight the challenge. The government has kept a steady investment towards up scaling the capacity of the military even as we can see that Boko Haram is also well and heavily funded through its international link with the very rich global fundamentalist jihadist family. It was also curious that even when government sought approval to seek loan to further equip the military under the challenge, the conversation was reduced to mere politics. I have also taken time to listen to and study the issues surrounding the Chibok girls. Truly, there are many questions to be asked. There were obvious cases of undue stubbornness by the Borno govt not to reason along with the federal agencies even as there seems to be high collusion by even the school authority and some members of public in the unfortunate incident. These unfortunate attitudes notwithstanding, the Jonathan government has accepted the challenge and is doing fairly well in fighting the insurgency. Before now, bombings were all over the place – Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, Jos etc in regular frequency - but it seems well reduced now to mostly the three states of the North East. There were hue and cry for the removal of Azazi as National Security Adviser and he was removed and Sambo Dasuki has been brought in. The Chief of Defence Staff is from Adamawa and his area is affected. It is expected that these men would appreciated the seriousness of the situation and act as real soldiers as the government continues to provide the funding for needed equipment and maintenance of the soldiers. The government has also elicited and asked for various international supports to combat the insurgents. The government has also called for collaboration from neighbouring countries and there are a number of joint operations and border watch. I find it curious that politicians can be mocking at the nation under such insurgent attack and saying that they have the answer to stop the insurgents but which they can only reveal when elected. Assuming, for the purpose of argument without conceding that they are telling the truth, that they have the answer, is it not curious that they can endure the mass killing of citizens while waiting to be elected before they can contribute to help resolve a national tragedy of this nature? But what really is the solution that they will bring? Is it that they have a relationship with the insurgents and merely by their election the insurgents will drop their aims, objectives and attacks? If they do have such relationship, is it right that they are not applying it now in the interest of the nation? But we all know that it is all mere talk. I have also followed the propaganda of corruption against the government and what I call the scam of anti-corruption propaganda by the opposition. I have followed the conversation on corruption in this country and I know that the charge is essentially a propaganda perfected by the military goons against democratic and civil leadership in this country and there is a visible, recurrent tread. In 1966 when Ironsi seized power, his charge was that the Tafawa Balewa/Azikiwe Govt was corrupt. We have since discovered that Balewa and Zik had no modicum of corruption. Theirs was just a new government which was struggling with the political currents of self governance. The NPC in a bid to make majority to control govt entered some agreement with the Akintola faction of the Action Congress and the prospect of the NPC controlling the Western house of assembly led to the political crisis. This is simply what Ironsi and co took advantage of but it was always fashionable to deceive the public with the talk of fighting corruption because that is what the people like to hear. At the end, the action of Ironsi set this nation into war and into several years of military rule from Gowon to Murtala to Obasanjo. When Murtala overthrew Gowon, he also came with the propaganda of coming to fight corruption. He blackmailed the civil service as most corrupt and sacked many of our very good hands which consequently created a huge problem for the civil service. This was a military government taking over from another military government but laying the charge of corruption against the civil folks. It was the same propaganda that Buhari brought in 1983 to oust the civil government of Shagari in just our second attempt at democracy and civil rule. The issues then were quite simple. The Shagari govt inherited a disjointed nation following the policy inadequacies of the Murtala/Obasanjo regimes. It was also a new government that was just grappling with the new and expensive presidential system of government and the bill on governance was excessive with various new states, local governments and state houses of assemblies and national assembly all newly created with huge recurrent overheads. It was also a period of global economy recession and there had also been draught in between 1982 and 1983 and there was therefore some difficulties in food supply. These things were even testified to by Buhari in his broadcast but he also took advantage of the political currents of the times, like Nzeogwu did with Balewa, to seize government and the charge of corruption, again, against the civil leadership was just propaganda. Like it happened in 1966, after the declaration of the republic in 1963 and political parties were struggling for power to control the centre, so also did the NPN connect with elements in the South West to ally with them. They sought to take Ondo and Oyo and this also led to political riots and Buhari seized the moment. That he jailed all the governors and VP Ekwueme was just to use military force to drive home propaganda. At the end, we have seen the life of virtually all those governors and we know that there were innocent notwithstanding the drama Buhari made of them. These were leaders who did many great things for the states and the states were running very well. Lagos was exemplary under Lateef Jakande who built perhaps most of number of low and medium cost houses that survives a huge population of Lagosians today. He built schools, built roads and opened up new areas. He planned a metro line for Lagos but Buhari arrested all that development. The same can be said in different degrees for other governors, like Pa Adekunle ajasin of Ondo, Bisi Onabanjo of Ogun, Ambrose Alli of Bendel, Bola Ige of Oyo, all of whom reintroduced free education and set up the state universities like LASU, Ekpoma etc. Others are Sam Mbakwe, Jim Nwobodo, Abubakar Rimi, Solomon Lar, Aper Aku etc etc; great leaders who were mentored by the Awolowos. Azikiwes, Ahmadu Bello and Balewa and who drove development with sincerity and passion but were stopped by Buhari. We have seen the life and the families and estates of these men and we know that they were lied against. The situation was so bad that even the Nigeria Bar Association dissociated and called off its lawyers from the Buhari military Tribunals but he still went on to jail them just to carve the image of a tough anti-corruption fighter for himself. The same Buhari was prominent in Abacha’s government, reputedly the most corrupt in Nigeria history, and Buhari did not see corruption in it. Still on the scam of anti-corruption crusading, it is to be noted that the Obasanjo civilian rule also directed the propaganda against the civil leadership. All the governors except Obasanjo and his military friends like Danjuma who were in the government were tainted as corrupt. The total objective is to continuously keep civil leadership under blackmail and public pressure while the military family keeps strutting around as the saints. It is also seen how Buhari destroyed the functioning of the second republic and how Abacha seized Abiola’s mandate to destroy our second attempt at the third republic and Buhari joined him. We have managed to survive the fourth republic because the military brought Obasanjo, one of their own who in turn handed over to Umaru Yaradua, younger brother of Musa Yaradua who was his Chief of Staff and who was killed in Abacha’s prison during the struggle for power, post Abiola annulment.. We have also seen that since power came to Jonathan, the military aristocrats and Obasanjo, Buhari et al have remained uneasy and are retooling their propaganda to create disaffection for Jonathan. It is agreed that there have been cases of possible excesses by persons in government even under Jonathan. But, it can also be seen that Jonathan is taking very informed and strategic steps to fight corruption but not by the dramatic and insincere way that Buhari and Obasanjo would do. The first and most important line of fighting corruption is making sure that access to money by government officials is reduced. We have seen the government introduce the Procurement Act. This reduces impunity and arbitrariness in the pricing and award of contracts. This is a critical step in preventing and fighting corruption. We have also seen the passage of the Freedom of Information Act which exposes government to the challenge of providing information on their operations and finances under the pain of the law. This is very strategic for transparency if Nigerians can take advantage of it and invoke it on public officials rather than just pointing at one man and pretending that his removal solves all the problems. Such propaganda is even the biggest con deception on society. The judiciary has been given its powers to discharge its duties given also that under rule of law, human and citizenship right, and democracy, any accused person will have to be proven so by the courts and not the president. It was the president who first indicated that he was not comfortable with the expenditure on fuel subsidy saying that he suspected fraud. The issues were subjected to probe and various persons including children of highly placed party members were mentioned and under prosecution. It is left for the judiciary to do its bit and for members of the bench to raise the alarm should there be any undue influence on them by the executive to twist the arms of the law. It was the government that also exposed the fraud in the pension system leading to several probes, investigations, arrests and prosecution. We have seen the government’s E-Wallet system that cuts off middle men and channels fertilizers and loans directly to farmers to hem off the huge fraud that used to obtain in the fertilizer supply chain. The government salary system is currently so automated that any attempt at introducing ghost workers or diverting salary immediately shuts down the system and sparks off an alarm. These are more intelligence and institutional ways for fighting corruption rather than the rabble rouse of Obasanjo and Buhari and of recent Sanusi who obviously was on an agenda of propaganda and for the most part did not really know what he meant to say. At the end, the national assembly has investigated the spurious charges of missing NNPC fund and ascertained that it was all a ruse. I have also followed those who have formed and provide the platform of opposition against Jonathan and, obviously, many of them are the real persons that represent corruption in this country. Sometimes, you wonder: ‘see who is talking!’ but we see that they are just aligning with what they have come to understand as the disposition of the military goons, and have decided, as a matter of expediency, to compromise, collaborate and take political advantage of it. I believe that deep in their heart, they know that there are not offering Nigerians any good deal with their candidate. These and many more reasons are why I choose to remain with Jonathan and I will urge you to come along because it is the only reasonably thing to do besides the pancake of a certain old monger who never meant well and still does not mean well for this nation. Unlike ·
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 13:25:34 +0000
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