Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Lola Shoneyin's False Testament

..



Professor Ochonu, thank you for that brilliant contribution. I
couldn't have put it better. Cheers!



….

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 9:41 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
> For what it's worth, and while acknowledging the right of Lola Shoneyin to
> support whichever candidate she likes for whatever reason, I thought
> Kennedy's piece may have been intemperate in spots but that it posed an
> important, legitimate question and highlighted an outright lie in Shoneyin's
> piece. Shoneyin's ethic is suspect here because she says in the piece that
> she has been traveling with Mr. Buhari's campaign throughout the country,
> essentially shadowing the candidate and other APC top officials. I, too,
> wondered about the capacity in which she embedded herself with the
> campaign--as a journalist employed by a media house (not sure she is
> affiliated with any media outfit at the moment; she worked with the defunct
> Next) or as someone drafted or employed by the campaign to write stories or
> issue press releases on its behalf? If the latter is the case then
> Shoneyin's piece should not be taken seriously. Moreover, she would be
> guilty of not fully disclosing the nature of her relationship to the
> campaign. It would have been helpful to disclose why and how you were
> embedded in the campaign. In situations where the line between the observer
> and the observed is murky as in this case, full disclosure is imperative.
>
> Kennedy also called Shoneyin out on her endorsing repetition of the
> story--one among many such election time urban legends--about Buhari
> rejecting his full pension and asking for 10 percent of it. At best she was
> sloppy for not verifying the veracity of the story before anchoring one of
> her key arguments on it. At worst, she was guilty of intentionally peddling
> falsehood. I was dubious about the story when it first made the rounds on
> Nigerian cyberspace. It turns out that, like the fictitious quote attributed
> to Obasanjo about him preferring to be jailed by Buhari instead of allowing
> Jonathan to destroy Nigeria, this story is a fabrication with no evidence
> whatsoever. Simon Kolawole, Thisday columnist, debunked it a few weeks ago
> in his column. Below is the relevant portion.
>
>
> There is even another social media rumour that Buhari does not collect his
> full pension. A Blackberry broadcast I got a while ago said while all former
> heads of state collect N27 million per month as pension, Buhari rejected the
> "bogus amount" and asked to be paid only 10% of it. The person who
> originated the rumour said he personally went to the Ministry of Finance to
> confirm the figure. But, in fact, the total pension package is N2,909,122.75
> per quarter — as confirmed to me by a former head of state. The breakdown:
> pension, N878,676.20; upkeep, N1,050,000; salaries of personal staff,
> N845,446.50; telephone, N75,000; and postal services, N60,000. Buhari never
> rejected any part of it. For goodness sake, it is his legal right. Why would
> he not collect it?
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Ayo Obe <ayo.m.o.obe@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Kennedy,
>>
>> We have made different political choices. Some have made them very
>> easily, while others have made them with a great deal of difficulty.
>>
>> Some hope that these elections will lead to the break up of Nigeria, some
>> fear it. Many hope that we will come through these elections and - whatever
>> the result - that we will move forward as a nation. It was partly with my
>> mind on that future, and how we live with each other afterwards, that I
>> wrote.
>>
>> It's not that you disagreed with Lola Shoneyin, it was that you attacked
>> her personally and went on to impugn her motives - implying that she must be
>> writing because she is being paid to do so (outside any payment from the
>> newspaper that published her article). Even on this forum I have seen so
>> much intemperate and heated language, appeals to primordial sentiments, with
>> wild abuse from and to people whom I should otherwise have thought to be -
>> if not the best of friends - at least people who could conduct civilised
>> discourse. Maybe it is the remove at which the internet places us: my law
>> partner's group has endorsed President Jonathan for re-election while he
>> knows that I have decided to vote for Buhari. It no more makes me a
>> "Buharist" than it makes him a "Jonathonian". But I wonder what sort of
>> partnership we would have if we exchanged the kind of language that has been
>> flying to and fro about this election? Well, fortunately we both know that
>> our decisions aren't motivated by money, very much to the contrary.
>>
>> Although you will know that I am the same mixture of saint and sinner that
>> most of us are (including the candidates in the coming election), I want to
>> thank you for your kind words and for your memories of a dark period. I
>> would not want to live through such times again, yet I know that we did live
>> through them. Maybe that's why I feel that even in the unlikely event of
>> Buhari attempting all that you anticipate as the standard-bearer of "Islamic
>> fundamentalists" and "Hausa-Fulani ethnic jingoists" Nigerians can handle
>> him. What we face in the North-East - with our government's myopic
>> let-them-kill-themselves desultory response - not so much.
>>
>> Ayo
>> I invite you to follow me on Twitter @naijama
>>
>> On Feb 3, 2015, at 2:05 PM, "kemetulu@googlemail.com"
>> <kemetulu@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ..
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Ms Ayo Obe,
>>
>>
>>
>> I am writing this, not to take you on publicly for your comment here about
>> me, but to explain to you why I wouldn't do so, even as I vehemently
>> disagree with your assessment of my piece, my conduct and the view I have
>> expressed in response to Lola Shoneyin. I will never publicly take you on,
>> because you are an inspiration to me. You may not know it, but you have been
>> my benefactor and supporter in public affairs at a dark time in our nation.
>> People like you are not many in our nation and no matter what I think of
>> what you say about me or any other person publicly, the best I can do is to
>> privately express myself to you. I will never take you on publicly.
>>
>>
>>
>> The reason is this: In 1996, after months of a grueling struggle against
>> the Abacha government, I led leaders of 250 families of Harvey/Moore Road
>> Resettlement Quarters to your office in Surelere. At the time, you had just
>> taken over from Mr Olisa Agbakoba at the CLO and I was leading the community
>> elders to your office to say thank you for the support your organization,
>> amongst others had given us.
>>
>>
>>
>> Let me briefly give a background to this. In early 1996, the Abacha
>> government decided they wanted to take the land housing about 250 families
>> on Harvey/Moore Road Yaba, behind the Atan Cemetery. Abacha's military boys
>> under the then Minister of Works, Abdulkarim "Bulldozer" Adisa went to work
>> and issued the residents a quit notice to vacate the place in 30 days. I was
>> not a resident there, but I had friends living in the area who were
>> discussing the issue when I paid them a visit.
>>
>>
>>
>> I became interested and decided to go to the community to ask questions
>> and see things for myself. I got there and the place was in total chaos as
>> old and young where in panic. This was a community set up in 1948 to
>> resettle people who were moved from central Lagos when the colonial
>> government took their homes to develop the place as our federal capital.
>> They were dumped on the Harvey/Moore Road grounds at a time the whole place
>> was just a bush with only the fenceless Atan Cemetery as neighbours. The
>> government promised to build a fitting place for them elsewhere, but never
>> did. These families got on with life and lived in this place as best as they
>> could until 1996 when Abacha decided he was rooting them out. The point was
>> that at this time, the land had become choice land. With water taking over
>> the choice lands of Ikoyi, the military boys were looking for something else
>> and this land appealed to them, because it was in Yaba, which is the only
>> place without a slum in Lagos and it had now become a centre of development
>> with University of Lagos, Yaba College of Technology and the Herbert
>> Macaulay Road and so on bordering it. Abacha and Adisa care less about due
>> process and at the time when Adisa was feared all over Nigeria for the
>> destruction he was wrecking on communities through his demolition programme,
>> the Harvey/Moore Road people thought they had no chance. In fact, by the
>> time I got there, many people had fled in fear.
>>
>>
>>
>> To cut a long story short, I took on the battle on their behalf and I
>> involved your organization, CLO, Shelter Rights Initiative under Eze
>> Onyekwere and the Centre for Housing Rights and Eviction, Switzerland. I
>> organized an underground media campaign that had the world and the Nigerian
>> human rights community giving us support. I recall that people like Anselm
>> Odinkalu, young Chido Onumah, Franco Olize and a host of other people in the
>> human rights, media and international community showed support. But it was
>> the CLO that mostly stood by us as the Abacha terror machine took us on.
>>
>>
>>
>> As the arrowhead of the people's fight, I was specially targeted by the
>> Abacha forces with the aim of suborning me or just taking me out. At the
>> time, I was working as a Special Correspondent and Member of the Saturday
>> Editorial at the Guardian, but Abacha's security forces laid siege there. I
>> was sleeping in the cemetery at night and coming out in the day to lead the
>> campaign. When they began demolition of the houses where the people had
>> barricaded themselves in defiantly, it was Buhari's PTF bulldozers they were
>> using. When I was eventually arrested, it was a PTF vehicle they used to
>> ferry me, bound up to Alaka Police Station where I was tied to a chair and
>> tortured. When they then attempted to convince me of the futility of
>> fighting Abacha and I kept telling them I was not NADECO, but part of a
>> community only fighting to have roof over our head, they threatened to blow
>> me up and pour acid on my body. Of course, I was part of the pro-democracy
>> movement as the leader of the Public Awareness Network (PAN) and Lagos
>> Mainland Committee for SDP Awareness, two organizations registered with the
>> Beko-led Campaign for Democracy (CD) and I was also a founding member of the
>> Gani-Fawehinmi-led National Conscience Party (NPC). But revealing such
>> information at that point would have been sure death, so I stuck to the
>> story that all we were asking was a roof over our head and that we were not
>> politicians or pro-democracy. Even though the people knew my pro-democracy
>> activities, they protected me from the security forces when they were
>> questioned.
>>
>>
>>
>> When I did not budge, it gave the community fillip and they stood their
>> ground. Upon my release, I joined them and intensified the campaign. The CLO
>> pursued the case at the Federal High Court on our behalf and it was through
>> their effort we got the first injunction barring the Abacha government from
>> demolishing the homes, which bought us time to intensify the media campaign.
>> By the time they were breaching it and demolishing, we had gained enough
>> public sympathy to ensure they just couldn't ignore us.
>>
>>
>>
>> In the end, we won. Shortly before I left for England the following year,
>> they entered into negotiation with us and I led the community to those
>> negotiations at the Federal Ministry of Works, while one Dr Oduma and his
>> team of ministry officials represented the Ministry. In the end, they were
>> forced to rebuild the place for the people who refused all attempts to
>> manipulate them. Even those who had ran away in fear returned and those who
>> didn't return were paid compensation. Today, if you go to Harvey/Moore Road,
>> you will see the medium-sized high-rises that are monuments to that
>> struggle. The people regained a better home without paying a kobo! I am
>> proud of the role I played there. I was not paid. I was not a rich man, but
>> I put my time and resources to the fight, because I believed in it. I was
>> offered a flat free by the Ministry of Works negotiators in recognition of
>> my effort, but I rejected it. I did not do it, because I wanted to get a
>> house. I did it, because I believed in the justness of the cause. It was a
>> struggle you and your organization supported and to which I am eternally
>> grateful.
>>
>>
>>
>> So, I cannot come out in public and disagree with you, no matter what you
>> say about me, because people like you, Olisa Agbakoba, Gani Fawehinmi, Fela
>> Anikulapo Kuti, Beko Ransom-Kuti, Alao Aka-Bashorun, Dr Frederick Fasheun,
>> Chima Ubani, Anselm Odinkalu, Eze Onyekwere and a few others like you that
>> stood in the gap for our people during the locust years are my own political
>> gods. If you were the one flying the APC presidential banner today, I would
>> give my life to have you sit in Aso Rock. But a Buhari? Never!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ….
>>
>>
>> On Monday, February 2, 2015 at 1:54:21 PM UTC+1, Ayo Obe wrote:
>>>
>>> I think it is appropriate to cite Soludo's own response to the ad hominem
>>> attacks on him for his article about the challenges Nigeria will face after
>>> the elections:
>>>
>>> "I am not bothered about the personal abuses: I actually expected worse.
>>> What name has the government not called President Obasanjo or any person who
>>> has dared to disagree with it of late? Anyone who disagrees with the
>>> government must either be 'insane' or have a 'character' deficiency or must
>>> be 'looking for a job' or 'without honour', or a 'charlatan'. Yesterday,
>>> Sanusi alleged that $20 billion was missing and he was accused of gross
>>> financial mismanagement, recklessness and poor governance to the point of
>>> being the first governor of central bank to be suspended from office. Today,
>>> he is the good one; and for daring to award an "F" grade for our economic
>>> performance, Soludo has become the 'worst' and 'without character' or
>>> perhaps 'looking for position' (Lol!). Some days ago, a former president was
>>> called 'a motor park tout' and 'un-statesmanly' just for disagreeing. This
>>> "how dare you criticise us" mind-set of the government is dangerous for our
>>> democracy."
>>>
>>>
>>> We see this at work in Kennedy Emetulu's article.
>>>
>>> While there are some die-hard Buhari supporters and some die-hard
>>> Jonathan supporters, you also have voters who have had to weigh both
>>> candidates to make a hard decision about who to support. While Buhari's
>>> refusal to debate for what seem to me to be specious reasons weighs against
>>> him for me, on the other side I place these kind of attacks on a person just
>>> because she expressed her political opinion (which the writer patronisingly
>>> sneers that she is not qualified to do!) that have contributed to a stream
>>> of invective with a decidedly primordial bent - after which we are supposed
>>> to do what? Pretend that nothing has happened? Forget all the abuse heaped
>>> on one's ethnic group, one's accent, one's religion, one's family?
>>>
>>> The Emetulus of this world would do better if they would understand that
>>> voters who say #IHaveDecided are (a) aware that Jonathan has achieved some
>>> results in some areas of national governance (b) aware that Buhari ruled as
>>> a military dictator and took some unacceptable decisions during the 20
>>> months or so that he was in power. We also know that Buhari is a Muslim and
>>> a Fulani, just as we have increasingly had it rammed down our throat that
>>> Jonathan is a Christian and an Ijaw. So what's new?
>>>
>>> Ayo
>>> I invite you to follow me on Twitter @naijama
>>>
>>> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:31 AM, 'Kennedy Emetulu' via USA Africa Dialogue
>>> Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> ..
>>>
>>>
>>> Lola Shoneyin's False Testament
>>>
>>> I like Lola Shoneyin. I like her for her literary work, but political
>>> commentary is way over her head. After reading her piece of kindergarten PR
>>> titled: "How my father's jailer can offer Nigeria a fresh start", published
>>> in the London Guardian of Saturday, 31 January 2015, I sincerely advise her
>>> to stick to her day job. Of course, any literary writer can write anything
>>> and use the fact that he/she is a writer to launder such in the
>>> international media, but when all is said and done, whatever they write will
>>> have to walk the plank of intellectual inquiry. Let's just say Lola failed
>>> woefully here.
>>>
>>> First, the fact that Lola's father today embraces his erstwhile tormentor
>>> is not a new phenomenon. People can do this as a way of showing forgiveness
>>> or moving on from the trauma or the experience. But whatever the case, you
>>> don't get many people later embracing their tormentors, which is why you
>>> will not get many people that Muhammadu Buhari had tortured celebrating the
>>> fact he's looking to return to govern Nigeria again.
>>>
>>> However, while we will not question the personal or psychological reasons
>>> behind her father's decision to embrace Buhari, we cannot but question the
>>> public reasons proffered here by Lola, because we are talking the same
>>> country in which we all have a stake. Lola says she was 10 years at the time
>>> Buhari was military head of state, I was 20 and in university and by the
>>> time he was overthrown, I was out of university already. So, my account of
>>> Buhari's time as head of state is no fairy-tale; it's experience. For old
>>> enough British readers, let me remind them that the fellow Lola Shoneyin is
>>> rooting for here is the same person who as Nigeria's military head of state
>>> on Thursday, 5th of July, 1984 criminally undermined British extradition
>>> laws by attempting the kidnap of Dr Umaru Dikko, a Nigerian exile living at
>>> the time in London. If you think such a man should be trusted, then trust
>>> Lola Shoneyin's account!
>>>
>>> Honestly, Lola needs to review her account of events and admit that there
>>> is no logic to her story and the relationship between the account of her
>>> family or father's misfortune under the Buhari regime and the support and
>>> supposed credibility she and her father are giving the Buhari presidential
>>> run today. If she wants us to believe that she and her father are supporting
>>> Buhari today, because he is the only face or one of the few faces of
>>> anti-corruption known to Nigerians today, then her story about her father
>>> not being guilty of the charges that took him to Buhari's gulag in 1984
>>> cannot be true. I mean, if her father went to prison on trumped-up charges,
>>> then Buhari is not only corrupt to let that happen, he is also a tyrant for
>>> putting an innocent man in jail. If Buhari is not corrupt and he's no
>>> tyrant, then her father was a corrupt criminal duly put in jail by Buhari
>>> after a fair judicial process had found him guilty upon a consideration of
>>> all the evidence. In that context, we can accept that her father's
>>> happy-clappy return from prison and his rededication to Buhari's cause today
>>> is an admission that he was a thief now reformed and now prepared to carry
>>> the Buhari anti-corruption message to the rest of Nigeria.
>>>
>>> If we understand the above distinction, then Lola needs to admit that it
>>> cannot be both. It's either her dad was corrupt, in which case his support
>>> for Buhari can be understood, having served time and reformed himself and
>>> reconciled himself to the truth that Buhari did him justice or he was and is
>>> still not corrupt, in which case we would have expected him to stand firm
>>> against a corrupt and tyrannical Buhari who jailed him and turned his life
>>> and that of his family upside down, despite him being innocent of the
>>> charges.
>>>
>>> But, while opinion is free, facts are sacred. Lola's fact-free
>>> endorsement of the present Buhari political misadventure is only good enough
>>> for her and those gorging up on the new Buhari gravy train. I mean, which
>>> opposition governor in Nigeria is being starved of funds or harassed for not
>>> doing the bidding of the first lady? Is Lola by any chance talking of Rotimi
>>> Amaechi, the governor of the first lady's home state of Rivers State who
>>> chose to insult her and the President? Okay, whatever the political
>>> differences between them, was Rotimi Amaechi ever starved of funds? Isn't
>>> this same Amaechi today a byword for corruption in Nigeria? Isn't he the
>>> same man who rather than pay salaries of public workers, fleeced the state
>>> of public funds which he poured into the Buhari campaign in his quest to be
>>> the vice presidential candidate? Is she talking of the same APC governors
>>> that have stolen their people blind? So, where did they get all this money
>>> they're throwing around in their campaign to make Buhari president? Would
>>> any person truly serious about fighting corruption be associating with Bola
>>> Tinubu, possibly the most corrupt politician in Nigeria?
>>>
>>> Lola disappointed me greatly when she repeated a lie that has been
>>> severally disproved, which is that Buhari wrote to the minister of finance
>>> "requesting that he only receive 10% of the allowance that all past
>>> presidents receive on a monthly basis". When and where did this happen?
>>> Which finance m inister did he write and where is a copy of that letter? Did
>>> Buhari himself state this? Did the Ministry of Finance confirm this and is
>>> there a record available today to indicate he receives only 10% of this
>>> allowance? Of course, all this is a lie! This is an urban legend planted on
>>> the social network by some Buhari supporters without any basis whatsoever,
>>> yet Lola finds it convenient to state it as fact!
>>>
>>> So, what are the facts? Buhari's anti-corruption toga is borrowed, if not
>>> stolen. As Federal Commissioner for Petroleum in a military government in
>>> the late seventies, the records show that he presided over the stealing of
>>> $3 billion of Nigeria's money. After a public demand that the issue be
>>> probed, Buhari was indicted by the Senate of the Second Republic, but he
>>> then returned at the head of a military coup to sack that government and the
>>> first thing he did when he took over as the leader of that military junta
>>> was to ransack the Senate and destroy all papers and resolutions relating to
>>> the stolen money.
>>>
>>> The above was not the only issue that exposed Buhari's corruption. For
>>> instance, Buhari was one of the henchmen of the murderous General Sani
>>> Abacha regime. At the time, he was given charge of a hurriedly-created
>>> outfit called Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), which had at its disposal vast
>>> sums of public money that Buhari and his cohorts syphoned and for which he
>>> was indicted by an official inquiry set up by then President Olusegun
>>> Obasanjo, despite the attempt by that same Obasanjo to shield him today as
>>> part of the military old boys' conspiracy to oust President Jonathan. So,
>>> despite this manic frenzy to airbrush Buhari's very poor public record with
>>> regard to corruption, there is enough information out there for those yet to
>>> be informed to look up. I dealt with some of this in an article titled:
>>> "Buharists and their Stockholm Syndrome":
>>>
>>>
>>> http://saharareporters.com/2014/11/02/buharists-and-their-stockholm-syndrome
>>>
>>> Now, here is the truth that anyone interested in Nigerian politics today
>>> should know. Buhari is the candidate of the Islamist fundamentalists and the
>>> Hausa-Fulani ethnic jingoists who think power should return to the North
>>> (despite the fact that they've had it for about 40 years of our 54 years of
>>> flag independence and have achieved nothing with it). More crucially, he is
>>> the candidate of the industrial-military complex that had held Nigeria down
>>> for 45 years before the election of President Goodluck Jonathan who rightly
>>> removed their prebendal hands from the national throat. They have now all
>>> ganged up in the APC as a majoritarian oligarchy, using propaganda and false
>>> narratives about national development to undermine the great work President
>>> Goodluck Jonathan has been doing, including helping to sabotage our war
>>> against Islamist terrorism in the North –East with the aim of removing
>>> Jonathan as president. But they will fail. They will fail, because Nigeria
>>> is God's project and no amalgam of liars, thieves and murderers will return
>>> to lord it over us again now that we have crossed our Red Sea.
>>>
>>> Discerning Nigerians know that the change we crave is already here and we
>>> are experiencing it for real under President Goodluck Jonathan. We know
>>> this, because change is not an event. It's a process and as a process it
>>> takes time. But those who have been part of it can attest to it, despite the
>>> lies being vigorously put out there by the opposition. Of course, post-1999
>>> Nigerian democracy has been short-circuited by the military types or people
>>> with strong relationship with the military, like Obasanjo and Umaru Yar'Adua
>>> who had ruled the country since return to civilian rule. But Jonathan is the
>>> first president since the end of the First Republic without ties to the
>>> industrial-military complex. Thus the change he has brought to Nigerian
>>> politics is mainly in temperament.
>>>
>>> Unlike many African leaders, Jonathan has resisted the urge to use the
>>> big stick, even when it is in his personal interest to do so. He has
>>> accepted the opposition casting him as clueless and without any serious
>>> achievements, even as he quietly changes the political topography and
>>> culture while investing heavily in agriculture, manufacturing,
>>> infrastructural development, power generation, transport, education and so
>>> on. They've shouted wolf over the election, accusing him of having rigging
>>> intentions, even as he continues to allow Independent National Electoral
>>> Commission (INEC) to be strengthened institutionally to the extent that the
>>> ruling party losing elections is the norm as the judiciary became less
>>> burdened by electoral disputations. It is his quiet internal revolution
>>> within the PDP that took power from the predatory members of the
>>> industrial-military complex and which led to all the hoopla within the PDP
>>> and the flurry of decampments to the ACP by characters who want a new
>>> vehicle to retain power or seize power to continue with their impunity.
>>>
>>> For instance, one of the greatest achievements of the Jonathan government
>>> is in agriculture, but it wasn't easy. For those who do not know, in time
>>> past, large-scale farming was a preserve of military generals who use it as
>>> a cover to acquire vast lands and create a fertilizer cartel to milk the
>>> nation dry. But Jonathan comes and democratized the fertilizer distribution
>>> process and freed it of the corruption of the generals with the attendant
>>> result being the achievement of great success in our agricultural sector for
>>> the first time since we abandoned it almost half a century ago and the
>>> generals are not happy. So, when we see the old political generals running
>>> to the APC and shouting change, we know the beat they are dancing to. They
>>> think with their colleague Buhari in power they will return Nigeria to the
>>> days when they used agriculture to fleece the nation without producing
>>> anything. They are dead wrong.
>>>
>>> So, despite Lola's fairytales, Nigerians know the truth. They know that
>>> the leading lights within the APC rabble shouting change today are part of
>>> the architecture of the Nigerian problem. They are no less corrupt and no
>>> less inept than those they rail against. They can see that what Jonathan has
>>> done is to establish the condition for the growth of a viable opposition in
>>> order to strengthen our democracy and give Nigerians real alternatives. This
>>> is clearly something an Obasanjo or a Yar'Adua would never allow. But
>>> Jonathan knows it is imperative for national growth. Yet, that's all he can
>>> do. He cannot people the opposition with the right characters. They also
>>> have to fall or stand on their records, antecedents and processes.
>>>
>>> Today, Nigerians can see that Buhari is all gloss, no substance. His
>>> campaign has the best media and campaign advisers from America, Europe and
>>> Australia, all oiled by Arab money and money stolen from public coffers by
>>> Bola Tinubu and the APC governors backing him, but they still cannot do
>>> magic with a candidate that is damaged goods. The hoopla over him lying on
>>> oath about his qualifications has exposed his corruption and the fact that
>>> he has been a leech on the state. His refusal to take part in a public
>>> debate with President Jonathan has confirmed the suspicion of many that he
>>> really has nothing to offer. I mean, not that this needs any type of
>>> confirmation, as he is clearly a glorified illiterate who knows nothing
>>> about modern governance. To think that 72-year old Buhari is the symbol of
>>> change that the APC proposes for Nigeria in 2015 is mindboggling. But we
>>> know he's just a stalking horse for their scheme to take the nation back to
>>> the hounds.
>>>
>>> Curiously, Lola says he's been travelling with the Buhari campaign team
>>> for the last three weeks before she penned her piece and that this was
>>> because she had a personal need to understand this Buhari man who's run for
>>> office a record three times. Yet, Lola would not tell us in what capacity
>>> she was hanging around the campaign. Is she or was she a paid or unpaid
>>> adviser to the campaign? Wouldn't a full disclosure be in order? She says in
>>> that time, he's had several conversations with him and "have come to
>>> understand what the mass hysteria is all about and why Nigerians would vote
>>> for this soft-spoken but highly principled 72-year-old". Really? So, what
>>> did they talk about and why is Lola not sharing that with the rest of the
>>> world? What is it Nigerians and the world don't know about this man that
>>> Nigerians have rejected at the polls for the past 12 years? One would expect
>>> that Lola would be eager to share with us the man's vision of national
>>> development, but she's chosen to keep all that close to her chest while
>>> selling us blind messianism.
>>>
>>> Merely telling us that Buhari "has surrounded himself with a brilliant,
>>> savvy team of young Nigerians" and that she much enjoys "the passion with
>>> which he talks about his three main priorities: unemployment, insecurity and
>>> education" is a fudge. Who are the members of this savvy team of young
>>> Nigerians and what have they done in this campaign to exhibit their
>>> brilliance. Is it the poor advice he received over the certificate debacle
>>> or him doing a runner from the debate? The only passion Buhari has is in his
>>> desperation to be president, but he exhibits none when he speaks of
>>> unemployment, insecurity and education, because up till now, Nigerians have
>>> no idea what he would do about these except his repetitive declaration of
>>> fighting this or fighting that without any exposition or expatiation apropos
>>> to the issues.
>>>
>>> The fact that Lola thinks she can pull the wool over our eyes about
>>> Buhari's lack of political and intellectual gravitas is the tragedy of her
>>> piece. Worse still is the fraudulent idea of offering us Buhari as the
>>> nation's opportunity of a fresh start. How does an old dictator who still
>>> stridently justify all the atrocities he committed as a military Head of
>>> State and who arrogantly says he regrets no decision he took or any effect
>>> of any such decisions or actions qualify as the harbinger of a fresh start?
>>> How does a man who's threatened to send people to Kirikiri Maximum Security
>>> Prison without due process in a democracy represent anything but a dinosaur?
>>> Does a 72-years old man who thinks he has the power to singularly stabilize
>>> oil price have what it takes to lead Nigeria in 2015? I don't think so. The
>>> joke has gone too far already and we can't wait for February 14 to come, so
>>> we show the world that majority of us Nigerians are not suffering from
>>> amnesia or Stockholm syndrome.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ...
>>
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>
>
>
>
> --
> There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's
> greed.
>
>
> ---Mohandas Gandhi
>
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