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Yes, Aisha Buhari eats from poor people’s money! By Festus Adebayo

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Though the wife of the Nigerian president, Aisha Buhari, has discontinued her defamation case against Aminu Adamu, the final year student of the Federal University, Dutse, Jigawa State, the court of public opinion cannot afford to throw the issue into the dustbin. In what was the Nigerian First Lady’s most recent controversy, having allegedly ordered the arrest and detention of the university student, massive flaks against her and the futility of continuing the matter, it was said, must have necessitated the withdrawal of the apparently dead-on-arrival matter.

Aside from the above, the concept of the First Lady and its implications for the social health of society today deserves to be re-examined. The cliché, “behind every great man is a great woman” has led political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers to look intently into the texture of the characters of spouses of rulers of the world. This is because, mere concentration on political actors and their policies have failed to unravel, in many cases, why they behave the way they do. With the arrest, detention, and alleged torture of Adamu on the orders of Mrs. Buhari, the question of who Aisha Buhari really is has been more compelling. Is she a villain dressed in the robe of power or a victim of the icing on the cake of power?

On a Twitter post, Adamu had attributed the bloat in the physique of the First Lady to and symbolizing excessive romance with the Nigerian national pot of soup. Adamu had specifically tweeted: Su mama anchi kudin talkawa ankoshi, which translates to “the mother has gotten fat on masses money.” He accompanied this tweet with a puffed-up picture of the First Lady. Piqued by what she must have considered a plebeian audacity, Aisha was reported to have ordered the young man’s arrest and his rough parceling to the Nigerian presidential villa, where he was allegedly tortured and remanded in prison,

The truth is that the First Lady and the Nigeria Police who charged Adamu for defamation by his tweet, perhaps due to the many decades of military rule, do not understand the proper concept of democracy; nor do they have a whiff of what representative democracy is all about. When purged of all the unnecessary icing of its highfalutin definition, representative democracy, which we practice in Nigeria, is a give-and-take concept. Also known as indirect democracy, it is a type of democracy where elected people act to represent a group of people. It is a system practiced by nearly all western-styled democracies, its typical examples being the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Broken down to its granules, in representative democracy, the people, aware of the disorder it would have meant for everybody to be in parliament and Government Houses at the same time, place the power to govern them in the hands of their representatives who they elect in a periodic election ritual.

Representative democracy has its origin in the Roman Republic, which was the first known state in the Western world to practice it. Romans sold this system to the world in which, though supreme power lay in the hands of the people, they ceded this power to their elected representatives who then wield the power on their behalf. In most instances, these are representatives who are felt to have superior knowledge of administering society or who possess some rare qualities that are not found in the generality of the people. The people however reserve the power and right to withdraw such powers in the form of recall from the parliament and impeachment of this erring representative by their representatives in the parliament.

To focus the attention of these representatives on the business of governance, the people make available to them some measure of comfort which they get from their consolidated national pool, their national patrimony. The house built in the people’s name and with their resources, which is christened Government House, is made available to these representatives to live in, free of charge. The ones who could not live in this house are rewarded in cash called Housing Allowance. It is not because they are more entitled to live therein than the people who they represent. They also eat free food, paid for the patrimony of the people. For their time which is sacrificed, they are paid salaries and other allowances. The health and well-being of these representatives are the bothers of the state. Thus, in many democracies, they are treated free of charge from the pool of the people’s money. In fact, so that they are not distracted, the state also pays for their children’s schooling and their wives’ comfort. The representative needed not to be distracted looking for food, and shelter, and bothering about the wellbeing of his spouse. So the state caters to virtually all the family members of the representative.

In the 2023 budget estimate, the offices of Aisha’s husband, President Buhari, and his Vice-President, will spend the sum of N11.92 billion on local and foreign trips, as well as on the presidential air fleet. It is inclusive of the sum of N1.58bn which was earmarked for aircraft maintenance and another N1.60bn which was allocated for the overhaul of the Gulfstream GV and CL605 aircraft engines of the presidential office. In the same vein, the Office of the President was slated to spend N2.49bn on local and foreign trips, and the Vice-President’s office, N846.61m. Fuelling of these aircraft, according to the budget, will cost the Nigerian taxpayers which comprised the poor and the rich, the sum of N250m, while N650m will be spent to purchase a new mobile helicopter landing pad.

In the same budget, the sum of N40.45m was penciled for the construction and equipping of a new presidential kitchen and a total of N508.71m to be spent on foodstuffs and refreshments, an amount which stands at N331.79m and N176.92m for the offices of the President and Vice-President respectively. I am not aware that the above sums emanated from the private wealth of Mrs. Buhari’s husband or from the proceeds of his cows in Daura. She can only be allowed to claim that she had not eaten the poor people of Nigeria’s money if any of the amounts earmarked for the Villa feeding and comfort does not have her participation in them in the last seven and half years.

It was this same Mrs. Buhari whose daughter, Hanan stirred the hornet’s nest when she was conveyed by the Presidential jet to attend the Durbar in Bauchi. By Nigerian governmental convention, it is only the President, First Lady, Vice-President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, former Presidents, and a Presidential delegation, are allowed to use the Presidential jet. It will also be recalled that, in that year’s budget, the amount voted for the Presidential jets was N8.5bn. Hanan, who graduated in Photography from Ravensbourne University, London, was said to have gone to Bauchi on a special invitation as a special guest of honour of the Emir of Bauchi, Rilwanu Adamu.

Photographs of her Hanan disembarking from the presidential plane and being welcomed by Gombe State officials went viral around this time. The Emir was said to have invited her to the Durbar so that she could take photographs of the celebration, Bauchi architecture, as well as some other cultural sites in the state. While Mrs. Buhari’s daughter was engaged in this unconscionable abuse of office and waste of taxpayers’ money by this act, it beggars belief that the same woman would be miffed by the allegation that she was chopping poor Nigerian people’s money. Before getting into office, her husband, then Major General Buhari, was trenchant in his criticism of the Goodluck Jonathan government and the ones before him, for expending public funds on unjustifiable things.

For all our food and the comfort of our collective home called Aso Villa where she lives, all we ask from the First Lady is tolerance. She would only have had a defence in court if she could present verifiable and irrefutable evidence that she spends her personally earned money and not money belonging to the poor and the rich of Nigeria, to feed herself in the last seven and half years plus. If she could not, she would lack every right to litigate against a 24-year-old Nigerian who claimed that the Nigerian people’s money, with which she feeds, must have been responsible for her bloated physique. She might however have had a defence if she could provide evidence to show that she recently acquired sheppopotamus-size image – apologies for the nil discretion in an earlier statement by Prof Wole Soyinka so describing Mrs. Goodluck Jonathan – was as a result of a health challenge and not from proceeds of Nigerian people’s money which she chops legitimately.

With an apparent dearth of Paparazzi journalism in Nigeria, the type that unearthed several hidden details of Princess Diana’s liaison with her Arab consort, Dodi Fayed, scholars must rise to the people’s rescue and begin to piece Aso Villa jigsaws together. Perhaps by so doing, they could arrive at the current frame of mind and fitting psychoanalysis of the office of the First Lady under Buhari. Except for photo-op sessions, there have been allegations of no love lost between Aisha and the Nigerian president. Specific suggestions have even sidled into public discourse that the First Lady does not enjoy spousal attention from her husband.

The first absurd manifestation of this in the public was Mrs. Buhari’s open antagonism and criticisms of her husband’s government in the early years of the administration. This was so notoriously manifest that many people concluded that if indeed the couple lived together as husband and wife and indeed shared affection, she could have offered those pieces of advice in the presidential closet. In 2019, while appearing on a Lagos television show, Aisha was asked why she was always criticizing her husband in the public rather than having “pillow talk” conversations with him that symbolizes spousal affinity and interaction, she replied, “there is no pillow in the villa. No,” She however attributed this to their busy schedule.

Again, the brawl at the Villa between her and the leader of Aso Rock’s cabal, Mamman Daura, revealed an ugly underbelly of the relationship between Aisha and her husband. What came to the limelight was that the two live in different apartments in the Villa. The brawl between Daura’s daughter and the First Lady showed that there was an attempt to de-room Mrs. Buhari in favour of Daura’s daughter. On top of this, a couple of years ago, the First Lady packed her belongings out of her «matrimonial home» and made the UAE her home. These absurd revelations should interest scholars of the social health of Nigeria’s seat of power.

The psycho-analysis would need to be made of these mis-matrimonial manifestations in the First Family, so as to decipher whether Mrs. Buhari’s current fly-off the handle had a direct correlation to her matrimonial frustration. It was the same despotic disposition that Ondo State people saw in Feyi George, wife of their military governor, Naval Officer Olabode George, in the 1990s. The “couple” had left office before it came to the fore that that marriage was for the press and in actual fact, the two actors were miles apart and merely acting marriage. Scholars would thus need to help us unravel whether Nigerians are witnessing another marriage of convenience between Aisha and her husband, the Nigerian president. If this is it, we may then begin to see a connection or corollary between some disjunctive manifestations in power at Aso Rock and this spousal spat.

No woman would live with a fib that intent analysis of Aso Rock matrimony portrays as a presidential family without an occasional urge to bare the fangs of a tiger. It is not unlikely that what the world saw in the Adamu tackling was an attempt to grasp at a straw which the “power wielder” mis-perceived as power through that unnecessary anger at Adamu. This is because Mrs. Buhari looks too charming and matronly to behave in a manner that could only have been advertised by Mrs. Idi Amin Dada.

What Mrs. Buhari did with Adamu was a crude and naked abuse of power. If she wasn’t wrong by her act, then our fathers and mothers who died in the bid to dethrone military rule and embrace democracy died in vain. People died and were maimed for us to be where we are today, the courtyard of free speech. Free speech can only be checkmated by defamation and not the baring of a wolf’s claws. It is the antithesis to use the democratic office to harass anyone like a despot. Why what Aisha Buhari did to Adamu was an oxymoronic tragedy to the Nigerian people that, by that act, she got our people to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Strictly Personal

Help! There’s a dangerous, secret plot to save the EAC from imminent death, By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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In an interview with NTV Keny, at the start of the week, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame painted a rather bleak picture of the East African Community (EAC).

 

He suggested the saga of the East African Regional Force (EACRF) to the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which was kicked out ignominiously by a disgruntled government in Kinshasa, was a low point. He said to date, no one has even bothered to formally brief the EAC heads of state on what happened.

 

This debacle, coming on the back of numerous ugly trade and diplomatic spats, despite the latest expansion to include Somalia as the eighth member of the bloc, does not inspire a lot of confidence about the EAC’s future. In Kampala, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni, once the choir leader of the EAC, no longer gets so excited about it.

 

Good East Africans are looking on with alarm. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-East-African Ugandan lawyer wrote to say he has conceived of a plan that will get regional leaders to fall into each other’s arms and turbo charge unification.

 

He plans to arouse patriotic East Africans to establish a radical revolutionary front called the East African Liberation and Unification Front (Ealuf) to work regionally to pressure the governments in Nairobi, Dodoma, Kampala, Kigali, Kinshasa, Juba, Gitega (the newish Burundi political capital), and Mogadishu with an alternative political structure. Ealuf will look to create an East African Peoples Republic.

 

It will have an agenda to abolish all restrictions on travel across borders, have zero tax rates for regional trade, create a regional digital currency, and create a roaring common market, among other things.

 

He believes the leaders will come together at 6G speed, and work hand in hand to stop the ideas espoused by Ealuf from gaining political traction, with its grand vision of a truly meaningful borderless East Africa. In the process, they will move forward with integration to Ealuf.

 

It is likely too, that they will not come together to collectively save their jobs. They might form an East African Emergency Unity Summit (EAEUS), to fight back. President Museveni might want to chair it as the region’s “elder statesman”, having been in power for nearly 40 years.

 

However, some leaders would oppose him, saying he has eaten for long at the top, and should let a younger leader, “new blood”, like Burundi President Évariste Ndayishimiye, or Kenya’s William Ruto, lead it. They will accuse him of scheming to install himself as the East African supreme leader, and clinging on to power until one of his grandchildren was ready to take over from him.

 

Museveni will push back, citing their inexperience. Some will demand that South Sudan President Salva Kiir pay all the arrears his country owes the EAC before it gets full rights in EAEUS. DRC President Felix Tshisekedi will push to exclude President Kagame from taking a seat until Rwanda stops its support for M23 rebels. President Kagame will tell him to go and swim with crocodiles in the Congo River.

 

Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud will complain that the other leaders are disrespecting him because he is an EAC newbie, and until they change their attitude, he is staying in Mogadishu.

 

As they squabble, some groups might see an opportunity. Al Shabaab might reform, disavow violence, elect new moderate leaders and seek to ally with the regional integration activists as Ealuf-Horn of Africa.

 

In M23 allies with some of the 120 rebel groups and form Ealuf-Congo Basin. A bid by externally based Ugandan groups like a rump Lord’s Resistance Army emerging from the forests of the Central African Republic, and the Allied Democratic Forces in the eastern DRC is rejected, because they have failed to demonstrate good faith credentials.

 

Meanwhile, Ealuf is spreading like wildfire. Large numbers of Ealuf are reported to have hired boats near Entebbe in Uganda, and Mwanza in Tanzania sailing fast on Lake Victoria and converging on Kisumu, where local integrationist forces have mobilised and turned the city into a hotbed of East African unification. In DRC, bands are composing new songs praising the new people’s unification efforts. Young people are organising to link their hands along the half of the 770-kilometre Kenya-Tanzania.

 

All over East Africa, there are reports of high school boys and girls disappearing in large numbers to join Ealuf cadre training camps.

 

Traders are staging solidarity rallies and vowing to divert the taxes they pay to states to Ealuf, and stories of market women all over the region raising money and sending food to the heroic mobilisers are spreading far and wide.

 

International comrades from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia are arriving in large numbers in East Africa and joining. Word leaks that some of the EAC presidents are sending out feelers, seeking to meet with Ealuf to cut deals. There are rumours that they are paying some Ealuf leaders big money to defect. The hardliners in Ealuf reject the olive branches, and there is some division in the ranks and a witch hunt for the “traitors,” who are eating money from the presidents.

 

Ealuf recovers and marches on. EAEUS reaches out with an official offer to sit down and dialogue with Ealuf about the formation of an East African Amalgamation. Whether they stick together or get divided, the leaders lose. But Ealuf has only won the first round. This is not over by any means.

 

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3

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Strictly Personal

Is Nigeria’s security challenge intractable? By Jide Ojo

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Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution says the security and welfare of citizens shall be the primary purpose of the government. Quite unfortunately, successive administrations have failed to meet these requirements, and the current Bola Tinubu administration is equally failing. Right now, instead of people’s standard of living improving, it is depreciating and everybody is worried about the intolerable level of insecurity in this country.

This newspaper, in its editorial of Monday, March 11, 2024, chronicled the spate of mass abductions that have recently taken place in the country. It stated, “Within the past week, Boko Haram insurgents and bandits have successfully abducted over 404 Nigerians across three North-East and North-West states. This is unparalleled and ominous for the rest of the fragile country. For the President, it calls for a swift re-evaluation of the subsisting national security strategies, which appear ineffective against the hordes from hell perpetrating this criminality.”

It went further, “Indeed, it is the familiar Salafist modus operandi all over again: The predation on women, pupils, and other soft targets. Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday. This is less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren were abducted from the LEA Primary School in Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State. A few days before the Kaduna incident, over 200 female internally displaced persons were forcefully taken away by terrorists in three IDP camps in Borno State. The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gamboru Ngala, while fetching firewood in the bush to sell.” The PUNCH submitted that, “Data indicates that about 1,548 schoolchildren have been abducted in 11 separate incidents of mass abduction by terrorists and bandits in northern Nigeria between April 2014 and June 2021.”

What are the implications of insecurity in Nigeria? First, it hampers economic growth and development. Many businesses have shut down due to these ceaseless kidnappings, banditry and insurgencies. Many of those internally displaced have lost their means of livelihood and have become economically dependent on the government and charity organisations. Thus, rather than contributing to economic growth, they become liabilities. There is now low investor’ confidence in Nigeria, as no foreign investor will want to come and set up business in a volatile country like ours unless they are into the sales and marketing of security gadgets and bulletproof vehicles.

Insecurity is also one of the drivers of the ‘japa’ phenomenon, as many Nigerians besiege embassies of foreign countries to flee their fatherland. Many don’t even bother to go to embassies; they simply embark on a hazardous journey of being trafficked through the desert and the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to irregularly migrate to Europe for safety and a better life.

I saw a journalist friend of mine sometime in January after a long while. As we chatted, I asked how he was coping with the astronomic rise in the cost of living. He sighed and said it had not been easy. I then complimented him on living in his own house in Abuja when I, who had been in Abuja for over 20 years, still lived in a rented apartment.  He corrected me and said he had fled his house in the Bwari area of Abuja due to the incessant raids of kidnappers in his community and is now living in a rented apartment like me. That’s how insecurity has also impacted family life. Imagine the pain of having to relocate from your home, not because of any natural disaster like an earthquake or flood but due to the activities of bandits.

Food inflation, which has risen above 35 percent, is also a result of food production shortages linked to the activities of bandits who not only demand access and harvest fees from farmers but routinely raid farm settlements to abduct, maim and kill the farmers who are feeding the nation.  Health-wise, many Nigerians are suffering from panic attacks, paranoia, schizophrenia and trauma as a result of the scary news of abductions and acts of terrorism being daily reported in the media. Many of us could no longer sleep with our eyes closed. In many communities, people now live in fortresses and under self-imposed curfews. As described by the renowned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book titled Leviathan “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It is not as if the federal and state governments have been standing akimbo, watching helplessly. Funding for security and defence has increased exponentially. According to the earlier referenced editorial of this newspaper published on Monday, “The Federal Government, as part of efforts to keep the country secure, disbursed N231.27 billion to procure arms and ammunition for security agencies and officers between 2020 and 2024. This is beside the yearly budgets of the Ministry of Defence and eight other forces between 2020 and 2022, put at N11.72 billion, N10.78 billion, and N9.64 billion, respectively. More recently, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the government procured N5 trillion worth of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles for the security forces, per the NBS report ‘Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics.’ This is in addition to other security hardware.”

The Muhammadu Buhari administration established the Police Equipment Trust Fund just as a handful of states have similarly done. Many states have established vigilantes or state-owned security agencies, with the latest being Zamfara State, which early in the year established Community Protection Guards. Recall that the six south-west states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo and Osun, on January 9, 2020, established Amotekun to fight insecurity. Consideration has been given to the establishment of state police, with a committee set up to come up with a framework.

With all these aforementioned initiatives, why is Nigeria still largely insecure? The answer to this can be found in the hardware solutions without a significant component of the software solutions. I daresay that even the hardware efforts have been largely ineffective due to a lack of sufficient well-trained and motivated security personnel. We have not also adopted technology-driven security solutions. There are several modern tech gadgets such as satellite orbiters, drones, CCTV, scanners, jammers, communication gadgets and forensic laboratories, that Nigerian security forces do not have or have in insufficient quantities.

On the software side, unless and until we frontally tackle the challenges of unemployment, poverty and hunger, whatever hardware equipment we acquire will not resolve our security challenge. These variables drive crimes and criminality. People will not blink an eyelid to commit crimes if they are starving. The popular adage is also that an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. If people are not gainfully employed and are poor, they will constitute a nuisance and danger to the rest of society.

I think the time has come for the Nigerian president to seek international assistance to bring the security challenge effectively under control. We should also mobilise our able-bodied retired security personnel to help combat the increasing insecurity. There is also a need to do something about our porous borders, where small arms and light weapons are indiscriminately smuggled into the country and used by bandits to terrorise innocent Nigerians.

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