Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tinubu loses Vice Presidential slot, pledges to support Buhari, Osinbajo

oa,
Nature supports change because the essence of existence is change. If there is no change life will be boring and it an be most frustrating. 
APC cannot be 'hamburger' because it represents change.  That's why APC is hamburger with cheese. 
PDP has been in power for about sixteen years and its style of leadership is well known. The need for change is now. 
We have seen a bit of APC activities in Lagos State.  Osun State. Edo State among others and people appreciate what they have seen and wish it could be spread nation-wide. 
The taste of the pudding is in the eating. 
 
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
Professor of Philosophy
Adekunle Ajasin University
Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State
Nigeria
Cellphone: 08033041371
                   08024670952

On Dec 23, 2014, at 10:13 PM, "Anunoby, Ogugua" <AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

What if APC is another "hambuger"? Some Nigerians seem to believe that it most likely is or less. One skull for a similar skull is not a value deal. There is neither value creation nor value added. Comparison or change for its own sake is usually not advisable. Either one is more likely a losing proposition. Why create and pay the associated costs? Either one would be too much of a leap in the dark.

 

oa

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Segun Ogungbemi
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 2:15 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tinubu loses Vice Presidential slot, pledges to support Buhari, Osinbajo

 

Thanks for the post. I cannot understand why Ikhide got blindfolded to facts and evidences that are indubitable. 

Nigeria needs to change gear from PDP to APC for a comparison. We cannot be eating hamburger all the time. We need to eat hamburger with cheese. Let us have a taste of hamburger with cheese of APC come 2015. 

Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D

Professor of Philosophy

Adekunle Ajasin University

Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State

Nigeria

Cellphone: 08033041371

                   08024670952


On Dec 23, 2014, at 7:03 PM, Ibigbolade Aderibigbe <gbolaade.aderibigbe@gmail.com> wrote:

Of course prof. There is no doubt whatsoever.  Ikhide is a full-time MEGAPHONE of PDP- period!!!

 

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Segun Ogungbemi <seguno2013@gmail.com> wrote:

Ikhide 

Are you a paid PDP agent? 

Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D

Professor of Philosophy

Adekunle Ajasin University

Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State

Nigeria

Cellphone: 08033041371

                   08024670952


On Dec 19, 2014, at 11:57 PM, "'Ikhide' via USA Africa Dialogue Series" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

 

Let me speak one more time in the name of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Obafemi Awolowo, Tai Solarin, and Ambrose Alli, good men traumatized in "General" Buhari's Gulag. We are being dishonest and I will not shy away from what must be said.  I return to the ethnicity factor. It is particularly telling that Yoruba intellectuals have praised to high heavens, the Buhari pretend-candidacy and have stayed silent about Tinubu. Those that have rightly criticized Buhari as unfit for leadership have no record either of publicly taking Tinubu to task. My theory is that to the extent that he is doing their job, they will be silent about his misdeed and criminal acts. Tinubu is a convicted felon, parades around with forged academic credentials and is probably one of the top ten most corrupt leaders Nigeria has ever been cursed to know. You will not hear any of this from a Yoruba thinker, certainly not publicly. Those that complain of ehnic baiting have been loudly silent about the crass ethnic baiting and manipulation that the Buhari pretend-candidacy is all about. Having failed to install himself as vice-president, Tinubu installed a lackey to that position. That lackey is Yoruba. Tinubu wants a Yoruba presidency next, after pretending to give it to the Hausa/Fulani. I honestly don't have a problem with that - as long as it is not Tinubu or his lackey.

 

Why are the Yoruba tolerating and celebrating Muhammadu Buhari, an ethnic and religious bigot? I come to the conclusion that they are doing it for parochial and self-serving reasons, it is macchiavellian. Otherwise, they would shudder at the thought of installing Buhari, a man that treated Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Tai Solarin and Obafemi Awolowo, great icons of Nigeria like wretched criminals in a gulag. This is what Awolowo said of Buhari: "During the period of my house arrest ordered by Major General Buhari when he ousted Shagari's administration, I had a restriction within my room for 24 hours a day, and for somebody who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that was absolutely intolerable." I can imagine Awolowo and Solarin weeping in their graves at the perfidy of these new "leaders."

 

This is all academic of course; my sense is that the PDP will remain in Aso Rock. I find that incredibly distressing. Goodluck Jonathan is not fit for the office of the presidency. But Tinubu er Buhari in Aso Rock would be even worse. The graft would continue unabated, with no serious attempt at making structural changes. It is tragic that we have come to this point where we have to choose between two evils, we should own a huge responsibility in the mess. What is our purpose? Are mere words enough? Obviously not. We have been complicit in the rot. For 15 years we have sat around either as part of the corruption or as silent, lazy witnesses to a looming conflagration. And the intellectual dishonesty is galling. One Jaye Gaskiya is on this list, a "comrade" who writes and says all the right things, but guess what, he was one of the many intellectuals that joined criminals lile Alaiyemeiseigha and Ibori at the recently concluded CONfab a glorified town hall meeting that gulped millions and millions of dollars. When I ask for a little bit of introspection, folks get all defensive and abusive. The truth hurts I imagine.

 

We are being lazy and cowardly, we don't have it in us to fight our enemies. It is therefore my sincere hope that the PDP retains power. They will take us faster than the APC to that point where our backs will be against the wall and we will have to fight our traducers. Right now, Tinubu is playing the ethnic card, baiting us callously by dangling before us an ethnic and religious bigot with a history of rank hatred for those not from his side of the world - as change agent. Awolowo would have had something to say about that. I knew Awolowo, Tinubu is no Awolowo.

 

PS. I am not Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, I am a minority within the Edo minority group. a double minority. I just want the best for Nigeria. I was born in Lagos and lived in places like Moor Plantation and Ibadan, there really is no incentive for me to engage in ethnic-baiting, whatever that means. It is just that I have no hesitation in having certain conversations. Buhari is bad for Nigeria. The good news is that we will have no opportunity to suffer his nonsense. Tinubu is bad for Nigeria. This is a man who forfeited almost $500,000 for his complicity in drug trafficking in the US, come on... You don't hear our public intellectuals talking about it. What is wrong with us?

The APC has more than an image problem. The APC is the problem.

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

 

 

 

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:38 AM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tinubu loses Vice Presidential slot, pledges to support Buhari, Osinbajo

 

Ayo, fair enough. We can acknowledge and applaud Tinubu's role in helping to build a credible, competitive opposition and his role in fighting Abacha's tyranny while also holding him accountable. The two narratives can co-exist. Unfortunately, too many of our compatriots want us to overlook Tinubu's past, present, and ongoing sins and simply advance him as the savior of our democracy or as a selfless, heroic political figure. I don't deny that, like all humans, he has some redeeming qualities to him, which should go to the credit column of the ledger, but the debit column of the same ledger should also be populated with his many sins.

 

The bottom line, as my friend, Pius Adesanmi always reminds us, is that in Nigeria it is not a choice between good and bad (PDP bad and APC good), but between bad and less bad.

 

On that score, unless one wants to sit out the election in disgust because of two bad choices, a decision that I can respect, I think that the reasonable thing to do is to take a chance on change, given our dire circumstances. 

 

The truth is that Jonathan has been largely a disaster, and it's not just his handling or non-handling of the insurgency. On a whole slew of issues, the man has shown time and again that he simply has no game plan. The economy is on the verge of recession and the Naira is in free fall. This is not entirely Jonathan's fault, as much of it flows from the vagaries of oil prices and the fluctuations of international commodities markets. Even so, a responsible government would have kept the Excess Crude Account (ECA) rainy day savings intact and not spent most of it--even under the prodding of rapacious governors, as Finance Minister Okonjo-Iweala claims. For all his villainy, OBJ was smart enough to leave a $40 billion ECA fund for his successors. Yar'adua recklessly spend it down and Jonathan has almost depleted it. As of a few days ago, the balance in that rainy day account was $3.1 billion. Alas, the rainy days are here and oil prices continue to tumble, but our rainy day funds are gone and we have no where to turn to. Electricity supply and distribution remain anaemic in spite of the much touted privatization and deregulation (sorry, my good friend and brother Dr. Sam Amadi, but the testimony on power supply on the ground ain't pretty). Major road projects have either been neglected or abandoned. Healthcare has not improved under GEJ's watch. Quite frankly, there is little to say in favor of Jonathan.

 

Which is why, as I said on my Facebook wall a few days ago, even though I am deeply troubled by Buhari's captivity to characters like Tinubu, Amaechi, and others who funded and engineered his way to the nomination, and gave him a running mate beholden to them to boot, if I had the vote, which I, like all diasporans don't have, I would vote for Buhari. I would do this in the hope that, like Obasanjo who managed to extricate himself from the grip of Babangida, TY Danjuma, and others who funded and orchestrated his ascendance, and become his own man, Buhari, the rough retired soldier that he is, will do likewise with his godfather/funders like Tinubu and Amaechi. To use a boxing analogy, I would hit and hope--hit the change button and hope that Buhari finds the spine to be his own man outside the overbearing influence of the odious characters around him.

 

Moreover, for me, personal integrity, which is Buhari's strong suit, and which Goodluck "stealing is not corruption" Jonathan lacks, counts a great deal. Especially in a country as ravaged by corruption as Nigeria. Like most African peoples, we are oriented towards authority and tend to take moral and ethical cues from our leaders, so even though having leaders who set the right tone at the top may not cure our corruption ailment it will trickle down and scare some of those inclined towards corruption straight.

 

People talk about Buhari's military dictatorship history and his regime's human rights violations, but most Nigerians didn't seem to have held that against Obasanjo when he ran for president, so it should not be a deal breaker for Buhari either. 

 

People also accuse Buhari of being a religious bigot and a Sharia fanatic. But as I stated in a recent write-up, Buhari is not, in my opinion, an Islamic extremist. He passionately supports sharia as a moral system recommended for Muslims, but, like most non-politicians, he has been inarticulate and inadvertently controversial in expressing this commitment, leading to both innocent and mischievous misrepresentations of his views outside his Northern Muslim constituency. A man who spent many years in a multiethnic and multi religious army and in different governments would have had a hard time being a religious bigot. Buhari's main problem in this regard, as one prominent Northern commentator told me, is that 1) the man lacks exposure to a broader world and to other worldviews;  2) the main frame of reference in his speeches is his northern Islamic community and identity and he has a hard time transcending this; and 3) he is surrounded by yes men who have not counseled him on the need to "nationalize" his persona, outlook, and utterances: 4) as a former soldier, he is too blunt and does not do political speak. All of these mean that when he speaks, he often imagines a parochial, homogeneous Northern Muslim Hausa-Fulani audience, instead of a national, multiethnic and multi religious one. He tells them what they expect an upright, devout Muslim to say on such topics. He is then shocked when his in-house utterances find their way to other constituencies, acquire new, more sinister meanings and are then used mischievously to portray him as a bigot. 

 

His handlers in several election cycles were content to market him as a northern grassroots champion, alienating other parts of the country and stunting his appeal as a national candidate. All of this has changed with the latest campaign. I have it on good authority

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