We’ll Release Chibok Girls Alive If…Nigeria Army Chief Reports Boko Haram As Saying
Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh has announced that the military has gone into a cease-fire agreement with members of the proscribed Boko Haram and that the Islamist militant group has indicated its willingness to discuss issues including the release of more than 200 female students of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Borno state whom they abducted in April this year.
“A cease-fire agreement has been concluded between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Jamatu Ahlis Sunna Li Daawa Wal Jihad,” Air Marshall Alex Badeh said today in e-mailed statement, referring to Boko Haram.
“I have accordingly directed the service chiefs to ensure immediate compliance with this development.
“From the discussions, they indicated their desire for and willingness to discuss and resolve all associated issues. They also assured that the school girls and other people in their captivity are alive and well.”
In the past, Boko Haram have twice refuted claims it had agreed a cease-fire deal after authorities announce an agreement had been reached. [myad]
Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo state has made it categorically clear that he is not going to contest the Presidency of Nigeria in the 2015 election as being speculated in many quarters across the country.
TAN’s Fraud And President Jonathan’s Ambition, By Erasmus Ikhide
There is every reason to be apprehensive as the 2015 presidential election approaches. Not majorly because Nigeria as we know it might shrink on the pages of the world map as has been loudly predicted but because certain group like Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) is poised to re-write the electoral law on the auspices of the presidency. A cursory look at TAN as an organization, it’s agenda and the forcible pimpernels who drive the group cast a slur on the dithering state of affairs on the presidency.
TAN’s banal, lawless and propulsive avowal to continue its campaign for the re-election of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 against the grains of electoral laws which stipulate 90 days period of open campaigns clearly corroborated earlier indices that President Jonathan values his Aso Rock tenancy than the security of Nigerians and the safety of the adducted Chibok girls. The foul mouthed Methuselah or Olisa Metuh, the PDP propagandist Secretary barely belaboured his vanquished self that his party, the PDP and the presidency have no hands in TAN’s re-election campaigns for the president. How evasive can that be?
The fact that key government officials, including the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the PDP Governors and serving ministers such as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, are part of the jamboree, moving from one geopolitical zone to the other collecting signatures, suggests that TAN is an organ of the PDP and President Jonathan’s campaign organization.
The presidency is not alone in the revolting TAN saga. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which has a responsibility to regulate all electoral activities, including political campaigns, has seemingly capitulated. INEC has become a pathetic aberration, a helpless umpire, driven primitively like a puppet by its master. With its compulsive silence, INEC has squandered the public trust it enjoys over the relatively free, and largely commendation Ekiti and Osun elections a few months ago.
The cynicisms arising from INEC’s inability to rein in TAN, the PDP and the presidency to play by the electoral rules is such that dampened INEC’s assurances that it is capable of securing and guaranteeing a level playing field for all political parties as the 2015 elections approaches. INEC must rise to the occasion and responsibly too, through official pronouncements and other punitive measures as a precursor towards the disbandment of any violating political parties or outright disqualification of erring candidate from contesting in the 2015 election.
Nigerians are at a loss as to why INEC has not invoked the relevant electoral laws and bring sanction to bear on TAN, PDP and president Jonathan for doing violence to the rule of the game and the nation’s constitution he swore to protect. President Jonathan owes it as a duty to Nigerians and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to uphold every letter in the statue book. He owes it as a duty to disentangle himself from TAN’s falsehood, repulsive insult and the open mockery of the people’s sensibilities.
Given the enormous resources at the disposal of the presidency and its robot TAN, the people’s future and hope have been mangled by needless propaganda and violation of the ethical foundation of integrity – the bases of democracy. Our freedom from all forms of political manipulations are not guaranteed unless all democratic institutions perform their functions well. But these institutions are unable to do so because there is no independent check on the Presidency’s violation of democratic rules. The malfeasance and gross abuse and barefaced aggression against the electoral laws by president Jonathan and his hirelings is highly proverbial. Any further doubts that TAN’s campaigns and president Jonathan acceptance and funding of the group has not blunted the edge of the taunted rule of law?
The absurdity in TAN’s campaigns for president Jonathan’s re-election is multifarious. Aside the illegality of the campaigns whose time is premature, the falsehood of president Jonathan out performing his predecessors, even his equation with the like of Obama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, among others in TAN’s bizarre, comical and desultory advertisement; it is the dramatisation of Jonathan’s failure to rescue the Chibok girls, and proceeded to use the same # tag and slogan as an anchor for his presidential restoration beyond 2015!
Is anyone conscious of the #BRING BACK JONATHAN 2015 banners donning TAN’s campaign venues across the country and its desecration of the struggle to free the Chibok girls held hostage by the Boko Haram militias over the last six months? Is it not possible for perceptive Nigerians to see through facade the wall of deception mounted by the president and the cacophony of voices represented by TAN? Can’t we root out this obscenity that has spiralled intermittently with us since the beginning of this Fourth Republic?
It is safe to say that the attempt by TAN and their incredible followers to make a caricature of the nation is propelled by president Jonathan’s relentless funding of the roughish and irritable group. This captures Karl Marx’s exposition on materialism; that class interest, greed and hidden motives are the driving forces of vaunting ambition. For as Marx said, ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’
This is one of the clearest exposition of Marx’s materialist conception of history since most modern day philosophers agreed that economic factors play a crucial role in the shaping of social,cultural and political life.
Briefly put – there is another anecdotal and ironical angle to TAN. The sponsors of TAN are majorly peopled by Southeast extraction of the country. Sadly enough, there is no road to Eastern Nigeria! A trip to Anambra State recently to pay the last respect to the Great One of Agulu, Dr Dora Akunyili invokes the 2012 River Niger horror flood and exploitation of the Eastern people’s emotive consciousness. Death toll from the flooding after heavy rain and the release of water from a dam in Cameroon rose to 70, with some 120,000 people displaced, 61,000 quartered in 30 camps across the state.
After spending six hours on the same spot in a stretch of less than 50 metres before River Niger head bridge and overlooking Onitsha, you could see property damage and how human suffering laid bare along the river course before entering the city. I was struck by the squalor of those forced by poverty to live near River Niger and the shanty town hugging its banks. It was a decent to hell! The misery in all its horror and destitution engulfing countless homes did not sufficiently attract the attention of TAN and president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. This degree of privation which the people are grappling are the consequences president Jonathan’s miss-governance and anti people’s policies.
To make the case more harrowing for the citizens, there is already serious squabble over the non-payment of compensation by the government without which construction works on the Second Niger Bridge would not commence construction. Yet, TAN in daily advertisements in virtually all television stations anchored by Chief Zebrudia, continued deception by inundating Southeastern people and Nigerians at large with denuding falsehood. This deceit is further justified by the inclusion of Azikiwe and Ebele amongst the leader’s name.
Painfully and pitifully, this is the Charlotte and hogwash Eastern Nigeria and other ethnically blindfolded Nigerians celebrate as governance. To make matters worse, the TAN campaigns are propelled by dishonest characters whose sources of stupendous wealth are questionable. Also, from available evidence, some of the key personalities from the private sector associated with TAN at the highest levels are facing one case of corruption or the other with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). This is one of the absurdities of president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that makes a mountain out of the anti-corruption mole hill.
There is nothing wrong for president Goodluck Jonathan to seek to elongate his tenancy in Aso Rock, as long as the Constitution of the Republic allows it, as it were. But everything is wrong when such elongation is prated on deceptive premises; roughish permutations of ethnocentric manipulation, exploitation of the people’s emotive weakness, and the oppressive greed of the oligarchs.
Erasmus, a public affairs analyst wrote in from Lagos, Nigeria. Tell: 234-805-622-5515
[myad]