PDP Will Continue To Sink, By Femi Fani-Kayode
…The PDP will continue to sink because it is a political party that has lost it’s bearing and it’s soul and it has mortgaged it’s conscience. It has also lost the source and strength of it’s inspiration and moral authority in the distinguished person of President Olusegun Obasanjo who really was the glue that bound the party together and kept it going against all odds. Though Obasanjo remains in the PDP he has also wisely opted out of participating in it’s affairs. This is a manifestation of his disgust with the President (Goodluck Jonathan) and the former National Chairman and he has now become the official ”navigator” of the newly emerging power in the field of Nigerian politics which is known as the APC. Frankly speaking the PDP has become a party that is beyond redemption and the removal of Tukur cannot change that. I say this because no sensible person will go back to a stinking carcass simply because the head of the dead animal has been cut off and thrown away. A carcass remains a carcass whether you cut off it’s head, legs or any other part of it’s body or not. Whichever way, it remains as dead as a dodo and it only awaits a formal burial. The truth is that the vultures are already feeding fat on the rotting and decaying cadavar of the PDP and whether anyone likes to hear it or not the truth is that that party can never be whole again. As I said 8 months ago it is a party that has been rejected by God and whose leaders are suffering God’s judgement for their unjust, gluttonous, wicked, foul and evil ways.
In the same way I have to say that no matter how commendable and honourable in intention the recent changes in our military High Command may be they will achieve nothing either and, in practical terms, they will serve absolutely no purpose. This is because the morale of the army is very low due to the massive losses that they have recorded in the war against Boko Haram and because they have a Commander in Chief who does not care about their welfare, does not ”give a damn” about their fortunes and does not have the guts to lead and inspire them with strength and courage. Worst still he has refused to arm and equip them properly or give them a free hand to fight and prosecute the war against terror with the ruthless precision and decisive resolve that is required. They say that if an army of sheep is led by a lion it will win every battle. In the same vein they also say that if an army of lions is led by a sheep it cannot win any battle. The latter is the case in Nigeria. In our military we have an army of lions who are well-trained, professional, strong, courageous, ready to go and capable of doing anything that is required of them as long as they are properly-led, well-armed, well-equipped, well-motivated, well-supplied, adequately encouraged, thoroughly inspired and well-supported.
However that same army of noble and courageous lions is led by a sheep who, by his own words, has told the world that he is not a lion, he is not a warrior, he is not a fighter and that he is not a king. If anyone has any doubts about that permit me to refer you to my essay titled ”A President Without Balls” and the two updated versions of the same essay titled ”The Gutless Eunuch and Spirit of the Jagaban” and ”The Gutless Eunuch and the Lion King” respectively. They can all be found on my website-www.femifanikayode.org or you can just google them. To have such a man as Commander-in-Chief actually encourages and tempts the enemy to attack us because weakness and a reluctance to lock horns and engage and to be strong, forceful and decisive when provoked or attacked always attracts aggression. As long as such a weak and uninspiring man remains the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces please be ready for more casualties and more losses regardless of how lion-like, courageous or professional our soldiers may be.
However there is hope. If Goodluck Jonathan wants his fortunes and the fortunes of his party to change and if he wants peace to return to our shores he simply has to do twelve things. Firstly he has to resign as President forthwith and undertake to stay out of Nigerian politics for the next ten years and confine himself to fishing in Otueke. Secondly, if he cannot step down, he must give a public undertaking to the Nigerian people that he will not run for re-election in 2015 and tell them that if he changes his mind and decides to do so at the last minute they should stone him. Thirdly he must go and prostrate flat on the floor with his face touching the ground before seven of the most respected and distinguished men in this country and tell them that he is very sorry for the mess he has created and he must refuse to get up until they swear by the Holy Bible or Holy Koran that they have truly forgiven him for destroying our country. Those men are President Olusegun Obasanjo, General Ibrahim Babangida, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, General TY Danjuma, General Muhammadu Buhari, Vice President Atku Abubakar and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Fourthly he must write an open letter of apology to the 36 Governors of the Federation, the Senate President, the Speaker of the House and the Chief Justice of the Federation for his manipulative ways and the gross incompetence and ineptitude that he has displayed whilst running the affairs of this country over the last three years.
Fifthly he must write a letter of condolence and pay a token fee of compensation as restitution to the families of every single one of the 7000 innocent Nigerians that have been killed by Boko Haram in the last three years. Sixthly he must take off the kid gloves, stop interfering and give the military the green light to use all necessary means to prosecute the war against Boko Haram and he must win that war. Seventhly he must dismantle the death squads and the group of deadly snippers that he has allegedly commissioned to create havoc and he must tear up the list of one thousand opposition figures that he has been accused of drawing up for elimination by Obasanjo and others. Eighthly he must remove one Esho Jinadu who is better known as Mr. Buruju Kashamu (a rather strange name that does not have it’s origins in yorubaland but instead sounds like a low quality brand of Indian tea) as the leader of the PDP in the south-west and honour the demand of the American Courts and the ruling of the Nigerian Federal High Court and Court of Appeal by extraditing him to the United States of America to answer serious charges of drug smuggling in that country forthwith. Ninthly he must direct his Ijaw supremacist kinsmen to desist from threatening the lives of other Nigerians that oppose his government and who keep threatening brimstone and fire and the dismemberment of Nigeria if he is not allowed to come back in 2015.
Tenthly he must undertake to stop serving kai kai at the Presidential Villa and he must dispense with the services of one Mama Brandy, a well-known Ijaw ”prayer warrior” and spiritualist. Eleventh, he must pull down every satanic alter that may have been erected in the Presidency and consecrate and re-dedicate the whole place to the Living God. And twelfthly he must give a public undertaking that the other four Presidents that run this country with him and that act as his ”Co-Presidents” will also step down with him forthwith or, if he insists on staying till 2015, give an undertaking that he will fire them with immediate effect and bar them from playing any role whatsover in the running of the affairs of our country from now on. Those four co-Presidents are, in order of seniority, 1. Dame Patience Jonathan (the First Lady) 2. Allison Dizeani Madueke (the Hon. Minister of Petroleum Resources) 3. Stella Oduah (the not so Hon. Minister of Aviation) and 4. Ngozie Okonjo-Iweala (the Hon. Minister of Finance and the Co-ordinating Minister). President Goodluck Jonathan, even though he is the public face of the small cabal of co-Presidents that presently rules Nigeria and even though he is the one that was given a lawful mandate from the Nigerian people in 2011 to lead our country, comes a distant fifth in the pecking order. He is co-President number 5 and woe betide him if he crosses the line and tries to challenge the position or usurp the duties of any of his four seniors. That is the sordid and degenerate level that our country has been reduced to by this little man from Otueke.
Yet it is not too late. If our President can find the courage to take these twelve steps peace will return to Nigeria immediately and our people will once again have hope. The problem that we have in our country today is not an ageing former Party National Chairman called Bamanga Tukur who had lost touch with reality, who never knew how to play the game and who did not know when to call it quits. And neither was it a set of tired and exhausted army commanders and Service Chiefs who did their best but who received no real and tangible support or encouragement from their Commander-in-Chief in the field of battle. The problem that we have is the President himself- a President who prides himself on his own weakness and incompetence and whose love of false prophets and strange women knows no bounds and has no end. A President who is as confused and as clueless as the comic character called Chancey Gardner in the celebrated 1970’s Peter Seller’s Hollywood blockbuster titled ”Being There”.
A President who does not understand the meaning of the word ”class” or ”honesty” and who breaks his own word consistently. A President who has abdicated his responsibilities, destroyed his own political party, divided his own country, alienated his own friends, humiliated his own mentor, abandoned his own people, brought ridicule to his own faith, cowers before his own officials, betrays his own governors, scorns the international community and breaks his solemn oath to protect and defend the Nigerian people. A President who does not even have the nerve or the guts to call to order any of the numerous Jezebels that control him. He is the problem we have in our country today and until he resigns, is impeached or is voted out of power nothing will change and Nigeria will continue to go from bad to worse. That is what you get when you vote for a man who never wore shoes to school. May God deliver our country.
Fani-Kayode in 2014.
[myad]
Understanding MultiChoice’s New Price Regime, By Caroline Oghuma
Without doubt, I have a dog in this fight.
As the spokesperson for DStv, there should be no garlands for guessing the dog I am backing. Like everybody else, I have followed the public response to the new price regime announced by MultiChoice with keen interest. That is expected.
What I have been able to take away from the debate, a very robust one, is that our subscribers is that they are unhappy with the fact that they will have to pay more for our services.
As a user of other services, including those unrelated to pay-TV, I cannot claim to have combusted with joy each time prices go up. Nobody I know of does that.
Here at MultiChoice Nigeria, the announcement of a new price regime was made with a great deal of reluctance. We are not happy to see subscribers angry because they are the ones whose goodwill has kept us going.
As such, anything that has the potential of depleting our deposit of goodwill among subscribers is something we have done and we will continue to do our best to avoid.
Sometimes, though, the best of our efforts are not good enough. I will explain. It is a fact that MultiChoice Nigeria has had the same price regime for two years. What I am saying is that our subscription rates have not increased in two years. That is not the case in other countries on the continent, where price increase have been an annual occurrence.
During this period, prices of countless goods and services have gone up by as much as 50 per cent. While I am in no position to explain the peculiarities of each of increases in the prices of other goods and services, I am fairly certain that market conditions and a few other factors have a hand in compelling such.
It is the same with us at MultiChoice, where we have been left with no choice than to do what we have done to keep serving you better. To keep doing that requires us to remain a going concern.
That we are unlikely to remain, without a new price regime that reflects the present economic situation and operating environment. MultiChoice, I make bold to say, is a social institution. If it suffers ill-health, its partners are not likely to fare better.
Think of local content creators, suppliers of various items, installers, retailers, agents and those directly employed by the company. The government also loses in tax revenues. Can we, as a country, afford this?
I understand the public anger, but I seek an understanding of the situation in which we operate as an organisation.
Much of the anger is founded on the incorrect belief that we do as we please because we are a monopoly. We are certainly not one. We are in a field where competition exists and has always existed.
StarSat, one of our competitors, recently won the rights to broadcast matches of the German Bundesliga.
I am also certain that Nigerians know that Consat, ACTV, MyTV and Montage TV among others are not MultiChoice subsidiaries.
Before now, we had FSTV, CTL and HiTv, all defunct.
HiTv, in actuality, won widespread applause when it wrested the rights to some premium sporting content from MultiChoice. That success turned out to be a fleeting one because those rights had been obtained at stratospheric costs and was fatally undermined by an unsustainable, albeit lower price regime.
We know that MultiChoice got on the scene before everybody else. We are also happy that we got a rich bouquet of the content that has made you happy over the years.
This has nothing to do with the absence of competition, as evidenced by HiTv, but with a desire to have you better served on our platform.
To make our services more accessible, we also designed bouquets suitable for various income brackets. That is hardly the trait of a dyed-in-the-wool monopolist.
When prices go up, there is a need to reflect and understand what might have provoked such. Prices of commodities like toothpaste, bread, beer and phones as well as of professional services have risen in the last two years, most probably, because providers of such-especially those in low-margin businesses- have been left with no other option. There are limits to financial hoop-jumping.
And very crucially, the content we buy and bring to your homes, including those AfricaMagic movies and series, are paid for in dollars. It may surprise you to learn that local television content is paid for in dollars, but that is the truth. Our content purchase is done centrally-by our parent company in South Africa.
As we all know, the naira, our local, currency, is currently not enjoying the best of spells in its value to the dollar. The implication of this is that MultiChoice has to look for naira in far greater amount than it used to if it wants to continue buying and delivering to-tier television content to you. The same thing happening to the naira is happening to South Africa’s Rand and other currencies on the continent.
Closely related to this is a surge in the cost of acquiring television content. This, on a regular basis, is the product of the feisty competition among television companies involved in the bidding for rights. It was this type of competition that caused a 70 per cent hike in the cost of the broadcast rights to England’s Barclays Premier League.
The two outfits involved, Sky and BT, wanted the rights so badly and had to pay top dollar. The deal, which runs from next year to 2019, cost over 5billion pounds, with Sky paying 4.176billion pounds.
Already, it has hinted that its subscribers will have to pay more to view matches on its platform. It also means any overseas broadcaster seeking to include the Barclays Premier League in its offering will have to pay more to do so.
Premium content, as I hinted earlier, is not sold on the cheap anywhere in the world. It why it carries the tag “premium”.
What we have done has been done has been forced on us by pay-television economics, not an abuse of our pre-eminent position, as has been suggested. In the world of television economics, a fraction of the fee paid as subscription by the subscriber goes to the providers of content or channel owners as what is called “affiliate fees.” Affiliate fees represent a compensation to content providers and they are the oil that keeps the wheel of content development rolling. Thus, the subscription paid by a subscriber is for programming (the watched channels) and the distribution (infrastructure and profits for cable companies) and is shared with the content owner or distributor. Content is usually sold on a per subscriber basis, with channels broadcasting the most watched content attracting greater cost of acquisition of such.
As much as we would have loved to keep our subscription at the same level, the prevailing economic situation makes that impossible.
Oghuma is the Public Relations Manager of DStv. [myad]