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MKO Abiola And June 12: Is Nigeria’s Democracy Dead Or Alive?

MKO Abiola won the 1993 presidential election. The election was the freest and the fairest election held in Nigeria. The tooth-gap dictator-butcher IBB dastardly murdered both the winner and our democracy

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MKO Abiola won the 1993 presidential election. The election was the freest and the fairest election held in Nigeria. The tooth-gap dictator-butcher IBB dastardly murdered both the winner and our democracy. Ever since, we’re yet to recover from the shock and trauma. June 12 uprooted our democracy. It was the end of our democracy.

If we cannot imagine a future for democracy, it means the demise of our democracy is assured. With the invocation and consecration of June 12 and the coming out of new, young, vibrant, radical, and progressive aspirants for president in 2019 to challenge the old, backward and destroyers of our nation and people, there’s hope and faith to institute new forms of democratic governance.

The annulment of June 12 should spark a Democratic Revolution that would dethrone the monarchical and colonial 18th and 19th centuries type of governance we call democracy. The collective will and interests of our people have been subverted and replaced with competing and contradictory obligation to ptotect the cabals and the oligarchy.

As 2019 beckons, June 12 provides us the rare opportunity to end the corporate takeover and the decimation of our democratic institutions. Indeed, this election year should motivate and galvanize us to conceive and cultivate more radically democratic institutions for 2019 that center on the welfare and well being of our people, rather than on the few political prodigals, prostitutes, and parasites.

June 12 should be a catalyst to speed up our experiment in 2019 with radical participatory democracy. June 12 should end politics of etnonationalism, bigotry, and authoritarianism. It should flush plutocracy, autocracy from our democratic institutions and all vestiges of ancient evils.

If we’re to immotarlize MKO, we should move from being three nations: separate, hostile, and unequal to one unified democratic nation that will ensure new forms and practices of popular sovereignty at the local, state, and federal where no Nigerian is excluded, discriminated, and disenfranchised.

In memory of MKO, June 12 should serve as a new education in democracy. In 2019, we should forge active democracy that gets the job done like kabuki democracy and karaoke democracy terms used to explain modern Japanese politics. We should rid ourselves and our system of what Fidel Castro called garbage democracy in representation and operation. In 2019. We should also purge our democracy of what is known as somnolent democracy a term used to describe countries with dovcile citizens.

To be sure, our democracy is not dead but alive and thriving, our new democracy in 2019 should lead to more inclusion, equality, self-rule, autonomy, non-violence, fairness, justice, economic security, and pursuit of happiness within our states, between our states, and in our lives. In short, our new democracy in 2019 should guarantee peace, progress, and prosperity. I believe this is the best way to honor and immortalize MKO, June 12, and our democracy.

Anything short of this means killing MKO all over again by denying him the rest and peace he well deserves.
Let’s go there!

Commentator… Bayo Oluwasanmi

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Strictly Personal

As African leaders give excuses, peers reach for the skies, By Tee Ngugi

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Many Africans might have missed an event that should have been at the centre of the news. On August 23, 2023, India landed a spacecraft on the moon, making history as the fourth country to do so.

India is in exalted company. The other countries in that rarefied club are Russia, the US and China. India did not just land a spacecraft on the moon, it landed the craft near the south pole of the moon — the only country to achieve such a feat.

The reporting on this in the African press missed the significance of India’s achievement. Most media reported it as if it was another routine space mission by another power. First, any landing on the moon or any missions into space by any country are not routine.

They demonstrate the most advanced science and technology and their economic might. They showcase meticulous organisation, steely political will to achieve national ambitions, and an extraordinary sense of patriotism among citizens to make their country great.

Read: India becomes first nation to land spacecraft near Moon’s south pole

There is another reason why this news should have dominated our airwaves and discourse. India was colonised for more years than most African countries. India, like African countries, is multiethnic and multireligious. India, like Africa, has suffered from social strife. India, like many African countries, has gone to war with neighbouring countries. India, just like us, has to deal with disabling outdated traditional customs and beliefs.

And yet it did not use any of these characteristics as an excuse not to reach, quite literally, for the skies.

Further, India suffers from Monsoons and volcanic activity from which, for the most part, we are spared. It has a huge population, which many African countries do not. Yet it did not use these as excuses not to compete with, and sometimes beat, the best.

Perhaps we let this event pass without much commentary because we felt ashamed. Ghana became independent in 1957, 10 years after India.

Decades later, India had expanded its railway network to become the largest in the world. Ghana just expanded the railway left by the British the other day. As Ghana’s economy collapsed, India’s rose steadily. As Ghana’s education system stagnated, India advanced in science and technology, enabling it to explode a nuclear device in 1974, 27 years after Independence.

As Ghana’s heath system collapsed, India advanced theirs. Today, India has very advanced medical science and health system. Our leaders, after collapsing our health systems, seek treatment in India. India has expanded its GDP to become the fifth largest in the world. Ghana’s GDP is $80 billion, below that of Luxembourg, a tiny country of less than a million people.

Ghana is, of course, representative of the African post-independence experience of mismanagement, thievery and collapse. Will India’s example wean us from our “Pathological Excuse Syndrome” (PES)? Unlikely.

The Kenya Kwanza regime has churned out more excuses in one year than all previous regimes combined.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.

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Strictly Personal

What a beautiful summit! Now to vague promises by rich North, Joachim Buwembo

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In an average lifetime, an African is expected to get involved in and attend many weddings (and funerals). First, you attend those of your elders, which leaves you hoping that yours too will not only come one day but that it will also be more glamorous.

Then there were those weddings (and funerals) of your contemporaries for which you have to pay the ‘African tax’, partly out of fear and hope that when your turn comes, people will contribute generously since you will have been known to be a generous contributor yourself.

Finally, you have to attend weddings of the younger generations, including virtual ones like the ones that were held during the Covid-19 lockdown, or those being staged in different countries where the wedding couples live.

In my idealistic opinion, one shortcoming of many wedding formats and texts is the vague and often immeasurable nature of the promises made.

Fine, the specifics and details could darken the joyful, colourful ceremony and even bog it down, but in a separate, written and signed agreement, things should be spelt out. This would probably even make divorce proceedings less messy.

How for instance is love measured? What does providing for and protecting include? And comfort? At least “until death do us part” is fair for it specifies an event and so no one can compel a surviving spouse to be buried with a dead partner (and you know how many relatives would love to do that and then take over the house and other valuables). But one can argue their way out of the other wedding promises.

The climax of wedding injustices comes from the preachers who urge the partners to always forgive the other party for whatever crimes they commit. If courts operated in the same spirit, all murderers and robbers would walk free to continue murdering and robbing more victims while counting on systemic forgiveness.

The text of the declaration at the end of the big Nairobi climate summit for Africa brought to mind a glittering wedding, whose success is measured first on its having been held at all, the number of guests, the size of the cake and the courses of the meal. Africans should hope that future climate summits are not measured the way a bride measures a wedding (including how less beautiful her lady friends looked), but in tangible, countable outcomes.

At the Nairobi climate summit, we Africans demanded specifics from the rich countries with which we are justifiably angry. We were accurate on what they owe and should pay in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Then we also made our ‘commitments’ but were careful enough to remain non-committal. We promised policy formulations, the right investments and job creation.

Somehow, we did not say how many jobs and by when. This was a climate summit, for God’s sake, and the heads of state who have armies of researchers at their disposal should have specified, or at least estimated, the number of jobs to be created in the provision and application of clean energy.

Was there any commitment to investing in the conversion of the continent’s ‘abundant rare’ earth minerals into mobility batteries that reduce pollution rather than “exporting jobs” to already rich countries for a pittance? Was there a commitment to how many megawatts of hydroelectric power will be committed to the electrification of railways by which year?

We remained silent on acres or square kilometres in reforestation. We mentioned the carbon sinks of the Congo and the savannah but did not specify how we shall protect them. In short, we did not put any figures or timelines on our ‘commitments’.

The Africa Climate Summit was thus like a wedding which the bride sees as an achievement in itself, that she has been taken down the aisle (even if the guy turns out to be a wife beater and drunkard).

For Kenya, again staging the inaugural summit in itself was a success, for beating the other potential brides on the continent – Morocco, South Africa, Egypt and lately Rwanda – from a tourism promotion point of view.

All the same, we rejoice for the very good effort by Kenya and do hope that subsequent such summits will have explicit deliverables and timelines on which the Africans can hold their leaders to account.

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