The fate of the kidnapped Chibok Girls is still centre stage.
In his latest appearance in BBC Hardtalk Shehu Sani floats some interesting ideas.
But back to business, and this is classic.
Kennedy Emetulu might as well have rhetorically started his diatribe against Muhammadu Buhari with the " I've come to bury Caesar, not to praise him!" opening gambit. True to form, first, the author of the piece Kennedy Emetulu intimates us about his true intentions with these words :"Also, I have refrained from making this article into a candidates' achievement itemization piece."
And then he sets off one at a time, to itemize all of what he sees as Muhammadu Buhari's shortcomings, a very long catalogue of sins:
"Should I start with the scandal of the N2.8 billion NNPC money that got stolen under his watch as Petroleum Minister and head of NNPC in 1978? Let's bear in mind that the value of that money in hard currency at the time was more than $3 billion. Under intense public pressure, the Shehu Shagari government, which shortly took over thereafter from the military, set up a Senate probe which traced the money to a London Midland Bank account belonging to Buhari from where the money again got missing."
IS THAT A FACT?
Poor Muhammadu Buhari ! But as the Qur'an says "And Allah is the Rich, and ye are the poor. And if you turn away He will exchange you for some other"
Kennedy Emetulu presses more charges: "Buhari has been most vocal in his anti-Jonathan and anti-government stance, which some people are interpreting, rightly or wrongly, as a pro-Boko Haram stance"
"His loss during the last presidential election led to killings and disturbances up North that claimed over a thousand lives,including the lives of many young members of the National Youth Service Corps(NYSC) and people haven't forgotten that this is something he's yet to condemn till this day."
"He has since continued to make inciting statements unbecoming of a statesman over the forthcoming election"
"The Buhari government jailed the politicians and persons they consider threats to their government
without due process"
"It was a sad period in our national history as many innocent people were simply put in the gulag and wasted. People like Professor Ambrose Alli and Bisi Onabanjo, the former governors of the old Bendel State and Ogun State respectively didn't last long after they were released before they died. People like Adekunle Ajasin, the former governor of Ondo State, Sam Mbakwe, former governor of Imo State and Olu Awotesu who was the Minister of State for Agriculture lived with life-long health effects from their incarceration until they passed on."
Dear Sam Mbakwe.
- O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth -
May his soul rest in peace.
Dear all.
Kennedy Emetulu continues : "Really, this is not the place to get into the detail of how he unfairly treated Southern opposition politicians of those days as opposed to NPN politicians from the North, but suffice it to say when the Buhari regime was overthrown and the gates of the NSO dungeon was flung open, Nigerians were shocked when they saw over a hundred people come out, a lot of them mere skeletal remains of their former selves"
After which it is the Kaduna Mafia under the spotlight
I'm looking forward to the next instalment promised here:
"Then the regime's secret attempt to smuggle Umaru Dikko (a former Minister of Transport in the ousted Shagari government) back from London in a crate sealed the regime's fate internationally and embarrassed Nigeria greatly in the comity of nations. This affair, which I shall discuss in more detail later, further exposed the vacuousness and viciousness of the regime."
There's this line : after such knowledge what forgiveness
In the final analysis speaking for myself, I can only agree with Professor Segun Ogungbemi who has said that "All that has been said negatively against Buhari needs to be investigated." and that "Secondly, Buhari needs to defend himself at well organized debates." although, if only 25% of those charges being made against him are true ,it would be sufficiently difficult for him being thusly nailed to the past to free himself enough to give himself sufficient space to manoeuvre into the future...
In another thread we read that "GEJ may lose south east Support". The question is, does the South East have an alternative to GEJ?
Always wishing the best for all mankind, and Nigeria
On Sunday, 2 November 2014 22:42:34 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
...This is all just talk. With the plummeting of the price of Nigeria's main export commodity, oil there is reason to worry on behalf of the teeming millions (180 million Nigerians) and so would you if you listened to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on the falling oil prices
Is any change needed in Nigeria and if so, who is more likely to set the process in motion, the old rearguard ? More of the same? I don't know and that's why I ask.
The Buharists that I know and that I can quote ( all of them are nationalists – i.e. they believe in Nigeria) have not identified themselves as Marxists or liberal free market capitalists. Adherents of such economic policies do not take offence when they are labelled by their proper names. Sweden's current Left Party leader Jonas Sjöstedt has "Not for sale" as his motto, he is opposed to profiteering when it comes to delivering social security and ensuring the social welfare policies of the Swedish nation.
Dear Kennedy Emetulu I have done as you said, I have "gently read it" your piece – all of it and
I cannot see any relevance or justification for the fanciful title of your piece. At least "their Stockholm Syndrome" as you describe it, is not self evident or self explanatory. I know what the Stockholm syndrome as from time to time, it is variously applied elsewhere to cover other situations - I was physically and mentally in Stockholm when that hostage-taking and the complete bank scene was played out in front of the whole nation and I too avidly followed it on TV, and some years later I read - in book form ,the first person reflections of the reformed bank robber Clark Olofsson
Hack writers may say what they like or are paid to write about Muhammadu Buhari but he has not kidnapped anybody nor are the people who presently sympathise with him former hostages and that includes those who may be prepared to die for him...
For whatever reasons, plausible or implausible, President Goodluck Jonathan chickened out of the 2011 Nigerian Presidential debate. You can't imagine an incumbent US president & commander-in-chief lacking the testicular fortitude to turn up for such a crucial debate to defend his record and to articulate some vision and the American electorate stomaching it, thinking it's OK for him to lead the nation an din the case of Nigeria , should Goodluck Jonathan chicken out of the next Presidential debate that the majority of Nigerians should choose him as president for four more lacklustre or even more difficult years ahead, do you?
I watched the Kenyan presidential election debate and was most impressed by Uhuru Kenyatta ( said so in this forum). So what's wrong with Goodluck Jonathan ? Let's hope that there will be a presidential election debate this time and that he will show up to defend his record and to tell the nation what feasible plans he has for the future to as you say talk about " the soul of the nation and the future of the country"
You may regurgitate all the follies of the past – about corruption ad nauseam or even ad infinitum but the topic that is most crucial and uppermost in everybody's mind just now is the glaring failure of Mr. President, his government and his military to return even just one of the 270 girls that were kidnapped on the night of the 14th to the 15th of April this year. (Comparisons are inevitable and I can't imagine Goodluck Jonathan's good friend Benjamin Netanyahu having the gumption to go for re-election if 270 Israeli schoolgirls had been kidnapped by any of the local terrorist organisations in his vicinity, even if we are to admit that the Nigerian landscape is a little different)
This is already getting too long, so I'll be back with a few more paragraphs but for now please permit me to question what you so confidently assert, that " Predictably, the first act of Buhari and his cohorts upon seizing power was to ransack the Senate and destroy all the papers relating to the N2.8 billion probe"
Is that a fact? I was in Nigeria and following developments closely. Do you remember the then Senate President Joseph Wayas, leaving Nigeria in drag disguise, dressed as a nun?
( to be continued)
On Sunday, 2 November 2014 15:48:05 UTC+1, Kennedy Emetulu wrote:…Buharists and their Stockholm SyndromeFirst, let me quickly make an apology. I apologize for using the term "Buharists" to describe those invested in voting for General Muhammadu Buhari in the forthcoming presidential election if he is presented as the flag-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC). I make the apology duly noting that those who are opposed to the reelection of President Goodluck Jonathan and a lot of who are Buhari supporters have taken to describing those in support of Jonathan's reelection derogatorily as "Jonathanians", especially in social network exchanges. I mean, it is not in doubt that if you open a Buhari supporter's dictionary, a Jonathanian is that specie of homo sapiens who is so stupid as to not see the virtues of voting for General Buhari, the anti-corruption demigod who is ready to return us to some Eldorado that the Otueke man supposedly yanked us from. The revolutionary fervor of these people cannot be challenged. You just have to shut up when they are talking and cursing Jonathan and you, the Jonathanian. Yeah, that's just the way it is. So, if I must call them "Buharists", I must apologize, because I don't want to rouse their anger against me. I'm not worthy.Seriously, this article is an adaptation of a response I made to someone with whom I was having an exchange on the social network. While it is partly a response to the fellow's posts in the course of our exchange, I have adapted it into an article that is a broader response to Buharists in the form of a case against the Muhammadu Buhari candidacy for President based on his antecedents. In dealing with the latter, I have opted to be detailed. To that extent, I'll plead that if anybody interested in reading it finds it too long, they should please forgive me and exercise some patience. I humbly suggest such persons don't read it all at once. They can take their time to gently, gently read it for days and respond whenever they like or not respond if they choose not to. But, please, please, I urge everyone to just accept it as part of my continuing contribution to the political discussions surrounding Buhari's candidacy.Now, before I continue, let me make a caveat. I am not supporting President Goodluck Jonathan because he's from the South-South just as I know that some Northerners supporting Muhammadu Buhari are not doing so, because he's from the North. Jonathan contested four years ago and even though I supported and took part in the campaign for him to replace Umaru Yar'Adua as President I did so only because that was what the Constitution required, not because he's from the South-South. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, as an Ezon, he is as close to me culturally as a Yoruba, Fulani, Bachama or an Idoma or Hausa. The truth is candidates and voters are entitled to come from different or the same section of the country, but what determines if they are being sectional or sentimental is the quality and nature of their arguments in support of their candidacy or candidate. I don't play that kind of politics and I encourage those who want to engage me not to play that kind of politics too, because once I notice that ethnic politics is your game, I'll ignore you and move on.Also, I have refrained from making this article into a candidates' achievement itemization piece. This is deliberate. I've had a running debate with some friends who were insisting that I list the achievements of Jonathan or make a case for him to be President all because they felt I have had a lot to say about Buhari and why he isn't fit to be President, but I have consistently explained to them that I will indeed make a comprehensive case for Jonathan's reelection at a latter date when he has formally declared and when the APC has finally chosen their own flag-bearer. It might just be that all the attention on Buhari is precipitate, even though most expect him to clinch the APC ticket. The reason I'm doing this now is because Buhari has declared his candidacy and bought his party's presidential form, so we can at this point take a closer look at him. Those who are keen on taking a closer look at Jonathan now that he has also collected his own party form are free to do so. We will judge each candidate on the basis of the facts we present and opinions we share therefrom.In any case, no matter how discussants have framed the debate in the past and how they hope to frame it between now and the general election, my point was and still is that people have different ideas about how to sell Jonathan or Buhari as a candidate. For instance, I keep telling people that the election would not be a referendum on performance, but a referendum on the soul of the nation and the future of the country. By this I mean voters would not be judging Jonathan mainly on one or more of his achievements in office, but more on whether he or the other candidate is the one more trusted to keep Nigeria one and relatively peaceful and prosperous. In this regard, while some people are not happy with some aspects of Jonathan and his government's response to the Boko Haram menace, not many people are blaming him for it. In fact, most Nigerians actually blame the opposition for it. Indeed, despite the opposition's attempt to talk and act with selective amnesia over Boko Haram by giving the impression it all started with Jonathan, Nigerians know that it came to a head under President Umaru Yar'Adua when he attempted to put them down by humiliating them with extrajudicial killings, including the extrajudicial killing of their leader, Mohammed Yusuf. For some of us more informed, we know that it was this episode which was transmitted live around the world that later gave Boko Haram its international 'credibility' with Global Jihad, the platform under which it operates today.But ordinary Nigerians, most of who would comprise the voting public, are not very good with seemingly complex analytics. There are those who look at the political situation now and think amongst the opposition are the sponsors of Boko Haram; there are those who think that Boko Haram is the military wing of the opposition and there are those who believe its present campaign is aimed at ensuring a Northern candidate emerges President in 2015 based on some medieval feudalist agenda that does not serve the interest of the ordinary Northerner or Nigerian, but an agenda that only serves the selfish interest of the same cast of characters that have been ruining the North and Nigeria with bad leadership since the beginning of time! Unfortunately, this is the nature of Nigerian politics where people routinely use their ethnic background and/or professed religion as some form of advantage and selling point in certain constituencies. Buhari has used his Hausa-Fulani ethnic card, his Northern origin and professed religion so effectively that he is today regarded as the biggest defender of Northern political interest as opposed to national interest. Being clearly the biggest beast in the opposition, his mentality is massively reflected in their response to national issues. For instance, in trying to cash in on the Boko Haram menace, the opposition has acted as though this national security issue is a Jonathan problem, rather than a national problem. Amongst them, Buhari has been most vocal in his anti-Jonathan and anti-government stance, which some people are interpreting, rightly or wrongly, as a pro-Boko Haram stance. His antecedents do not help. His loss during the last presidential election led to killings and disturbances up North that claimed over a thousand lives, including the lives of many young members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and people haven't forgotten that this is something he's yet to condemn till this day.He has since continued to make inciting statements unbecoming of a statesman over the forthcoming election, quite apart from being one of the loudest voices against government's approach to the Boko Haram crisis when he says things like government should stop killing Boko Haram members and when he criticizes the army and so on. Unfortunately for him, this is going to be the overall focus of electoral choice. It is my contention that Buhari will lose, because not many Nigerians trust him as a statesman, not many Nigerians think he would do enough to keep Nigeria secular, democratic and united. He's been contesting for over a decade yet you can't get anything by way of policy from him or ideas on national security or the economy. It's just not there! For me, listening to him talk and articulate his 'vision' is a painful exercise. He does not have it and there's no surprise there. He knew very little when he came in as head of state and he's done nothing since then to show he's educated or improved himself.Now, some are lapping up the fable that if Buhari comes in as President, corruption and embezzlement in high places would come to an end. But I think this is like the story of the child and Santa Clause. That reality does not exist now or in the future, because the reality of who Buhari is has been shown to us through his real actions, not by the pictures and images being put out there by his spin-doctors and uncritical supporters. Should I start with the scandal of the N2.8 billion NNPC money that got stolen under his watch as Petroleum Minister and head of NNPC in 1978? Let's bear in mind that the value of that money in hard currency at the time was more than $3 billion. Under intense public pressure, the Shehu Shagari government, which shortly took over thereafter from the military, set up a Senate probe which traced the money to a London Midland Bank account belonging to Buhari from where the money again got missing. No less than a person of the then Senate Majority Leader and Chairman of the Senate probe panel, Dr Olusola Saraki revealed this in an interview with Vera Ifudu of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). When Ifudu reported this, she was clandestinely sacked by the NTA, but the lady went to court and presented all the evidence and won in a case of wrongful dismissal. Saraki till his death never denied what he told the lady. In the end, they settled Ifudu with a big payout to buy her silence.But the public pressure for the government to release the report of the probe never ceased during the Second Republic. Indeed, the Shagari government had made all arrangements to release the probe report (which reportedly indicted Buhari over the missing money) after the Christmas and New Year holiday of December 1983 and January 1984, but on December 31st 1983, Buhari conveniently struck in a coup that ousted the civilian government. I know that it's common to hear Buhari supporters claim he was never part of the coup that brought him to power, but they can tell that to the marines. No one risks their lives planning a coup only to hand over to others who are not part of it. No, the coup planners always have it worked out before execution those going to occupy what position, not least the position of head of state. Anyone who chooses to believe anything otherwise is free to continue to believe whatever it is they want to believe.Predictably, the first act of Buhari and his cohorts upon seizing power was to ransack the Senate and destroy all the papers relating to the N2.8 billion probe and then they followed that up with indiscriminate arrest of politicians on the ostensible excuse of corruption, considering there was indeed serious corruption at the time and the national mood was against the excesses of the politicians. The Buhari government jailed the politicians and persons they consider threats to their government without due process. It was precisely because there was no due process that the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) of the time boycotted the Buhari military tribunals meant to try the politicians. It was a sad period in our national history as many innocent people were simply put in the gulag and wasted. People like Professor Ambrose Alli and Bisi Onabanjo, the former governors of the old Bendel State and Ogun State respectively didn't last long after they were released before they died. People like Adekunle Ajasin, the former governor of Ondo State, Sam Mbakwe, former governor of Imo State and Olu Awotesu who was the Minister of State for Agriculture lived with life-long health effects from their incarceration until they passed on. People have written plenty on the unfairness of the treatment of the time in terms of how politicians from the North and South were treated by Buhari, something that was exemplified with Shagari being under house arrest and the squeaky clean Alex Ekwueme banged up in Kirikiri Maximum Prison.Really, this is not the place to get into the detail of how he unfairly treated Southern opposition politicians of those days as opposed to NPN politicians from the North, but suffice it to say when the Buhari regime was overthrown and the gates of the NSO dungeon was flung open, Nigerians were shocked when they saw over a hundred people come out, a lot of them mere skeletal remains of their former selves, like something from the Japanese World War II prison camp. That is why when sometimes I listen to some young people today eulogizing Buhari, I just wish they knew how the Nigerian people spontaneously celebrated the overthrow of his government, because of how much hell they saw under his yoke! Indeed, it was his unpopularity that General Ibrahim Babangida inversely converted to the huge popularity that initially greeted him and the coup that brought him in.What the Nigerian people must know is that the whole events surrounding the N2.8 billion were part of a high-level conspiracy of corruption by the Nigerian establishment of the day against the Nigerian people. The reason everyone at the top was interested in covering it up was because it was money that was stolen by the military hierarchy as their own ransom payment for allowing the General Olusegun Obasanjo civil rule programme of the Second Republic to commence. There were countless reports that not everyone was happy they were handing over to civilians, but because of the commitment they had made upon the overthrow of the General Yakubu Gowon government and intense international pressure to return to civil rule, they knew they had no choice but to go. But the N2.8 billion was their last hurray! Obasanjo, Buhari, Theophilus Danjuma, Shehu Yar'Adua, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and all the military top brass at the time were in on it. It was their own 'settlement' money; this was their goodbye handshake and the incoming civilians knew this, except Obafemi Awolowo who was dreaded for his uncompromising stance. This was the reason Buhari raided Awolowo's home at the time, because the military boys wanted to be sure he didn't have anything to indict them. The only reason the civilian government set up the probe was because of the public pressure, but the military boys under Buhari saw this as a breach of their agreement to look the other way and with a wink and nod from Obasanjo and Shehu Yar'Adua, Buhari and his cohorts struck and declared their government "an offshoot of the Murtala-Obasanjo administration".While it is true that the December 31st 1983 coup that brought Buhari to power was a conspiracy between serving and retired military officers who wanted to return to power under the guise of cleansing the Aegean Stables, there was one powerful civilian group that comprised the third power bloc in this coalition. This is the Kaduna Mafia. Those conversant with old Nigerian politics would recall that the Kaduna Mafia originally developed as a collection of young civil servants, businessmen, military officers of Northern extraction vehemently opposed to the Major General Ironsi regime in reaction to the January 1966 coup. They were mostly based in Kaduna, the capital of the Old Northern Region and at the time, their thinking was that the 1966 January coup was an attempt by the South, especially the Igbo to lord it over the North. They never trusted Ironsi and always considered him part of the January 1966 coup. To them, the killings and all that happened were aimed at using the army that was dominated at the officers level by Igbo and Southerners as the new power base in response to what the South considered the Northern political domination being entrenched through electoral rigging and divide and rule tactics in the South, for instance, as witnessed in the Western Region. The Kaduna Mafia first began as the North's intellectual response to the National Question after that coup, but soon they became the inciters of Northern army officers who planned the July 1966 countercoup as revenge for the January 1966 coup.After the bloody July 1966 countercoup that saw the murders of Ironsi, Adekunle Fajuyi and several Igbo and Southern officers, the North under the intellectual direction of the Kaduna Mafia originally wanted a secession (Araba) from the rest of the country, but on the advice of their British and Western sponsors and supporters in and out of the country, they took over the central government. But considering the poisoned ethnic and religious atmosphere of the time, it was obvious that a government under the coup leader, then Major Murtala Muhammed was nigh impossible; so, they put forward a Northern Christian army officer by the name of Lt Col Yakubu Gowon. Events that surrounded the Gowon takeover and the continued pogrom against Igbo and Southerners in the North eventually led to the Civil War.But under the Gowon regime, the Kaduna Mafia couldn't wield the overwhelming power they had hoped for, because Gowon, conscious of the effects of the Civil War and desirous of rebuilding trust in the national project, brought in heavy hitters from all sections of the country to run what was essentially a national government under the economic leadership of Obafemi Awolowo, who was considered the most serious-minded politician of his day. Between then and when he resigned from the Gowon cabinet in 1971 in protest against continued military rule, the Kaduna Mafia elements within the Gowon cabinet couldn't match the coalition of national intellectual forces that Awolowo put together. It is an irony that today, many political neophytes easily fall for the lazy categorization of Awolowo as a Yoruba ethnic leader when in fact, no one has done more to keep Nigeria one and no one has done more to give the minorities North and South the opportunity to stake their claim within the Nigerian nation. But all that is another story. For now, what we need to know is that Awolowo was one of those that checkmated the Kaduna Mafia in the postwar era.However, the Kaduna Mafia gained prominence under the General Olusegun Obasanjo military administration through the events that surrounded the February 13 1976 coup that saw the killing of General Murtala Muhammed and Obasanjo's dependence on the Kaduna Mafia to win the trust of the North and consolidate power. Two members of the Obasanjo military administration were the Kaduna Mafia's links within the administration. They were Major General Shehu Yar'Adua, Obasanjo's second-in-command and Major General Buhari, the Petroleum Minister. Both were introduced to the Kaduna Mafia by the secretive Mamman Daura who was Buhari's nephew and son of Buhari's brother, Alhaji Dauda Buhari. Alhaji Dauda Buhari was the influential head of the Kaduna Pilgrim's Board whose removal by the Balarabe Musa administration was to earn Balarabe Musa special ill-treatment from Buhari when he took over government. When on October 18, 1975, General Murtala Muhammed appointed Mamman Daura and Dr Tam David West who was a Commissioner of Education in Rivers State to the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), both struck up a friendship that led to Daura introducing David West to Buhari and later his recommendation for the post of Buhari's Minister of Petroleum.During the Second Republic, the Kaduna Mafia lost some of the influence it had under the Obasanjo regime when its candidates, Adamu Ciroma and Maitama Sule lost the presidential ticket of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) to Alhaji Shehu Shagari, an old-style Ahmadu Bello acolyte who though was sympathetic to the Kaduna Mafia also dreaded their influence. In fact, the corrupt politics of the Kaduna Mafia had created opposition to them in the North amongst young radical elements under the influence of people like Aminu Kano, Abubakar Rimi, Balarabe Musa and so on and some of them even within the ruling party at the states and national levels opposed the old guard Kaduna Mafia in various political turf wars in the North. Also, the intellectual coalition originally harbingered by Obafemi Awolowo in Tivland, the Niger-Delta, Efik and Ibibioland and in the Midwest and in Borno, all have grown in influence too and were pulling their weight through their various leaders, even as members of the ruling party. Awolowo himself remained fully engaged politically and was the de facto strongest opposition to the influence of the Kaduna Mafia in politics and national affairs.Today, many commentators point to Awolowo's choice of Muhammadu Kura as his Vice Presidential candidate under the banner of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in the 1983 election as a sign that Awolowo finally compromised with the Kaduna Mafia as a means of gaining the presidency from Shehu Shagari after it was reported that Shagari's relationship with Kaduna Mafia had soured, especially with Svengalis like Umaru Dikko and Ibrahim Tahir acquiring more powers. They say the man who brokered the Awolowo-Kaduna Mafia rapprochement was the former No 2 man to Obasanjo, Major General Shehu Yar'Adua. But this account is suspect as it was a latter-day story that gained currency at a time Major General Shehu Yar'adua was himself seeking the presidency under the convoluted Ibrahim Babangida transition programme and as a means of winning the vote of the Yoruba. Kura was not a known member of the Kaduna Mafia and in fact, his politics was diametrically opposed to them. Before coming to the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), he was a member of the Ibrahim Waziri Great Nigeria People's Party (GNPP) under whose banner he contested for the Bauchi governorship in 1979, coming second behind Alhaji Tatari Ali of the NPN. At any rate, what was not in doubt within the establishment was that the coup that brought Buhari to power was secretly supported by Obasanjo and Yar'Adua who represented retired military officers and also by the Kaduna Mafia who had lost a lot of influence under the Shagari administration due to political infighting with other power blocs within the ruling NPN and who now saw Buhari's emergence as their triumphant return to the epicenter of national power.The Buhari regime lasted from December 31st 1983 to August 27, 1985. It was a government essentially run by six men. The first two of these six men were Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the Head of State and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon, the Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters and Buhari's deputy. The next four were all representatives of the Kaduna Mafia - Ambassador Mohammed Lawal Rafindadi, Buhari's kinsman and the notorious head of the Nigerian Security Organization (NSO), which Buhari converted to his secret police; Mahmud Tukur, the Minister of Industry and Commerce and the man who took over the import licence honeypot previously controlled by Umaru Dikko; Mamman Daura, Buhari's nephew who was the de facto czar of the oil sector under Buhari (while Professor Tam David West was a figurehead Petroleum Minister) and Major General Mohammed Magoro (now Senator) who was the Internal Affairs Minister then, but a close Buhari associate. Major General Shehu Yar'Adua represented the interest of Obasanjo and the retired generals who supported the coup. Obasanjo at the time could not openly come out to support the regime, because he had to keep up the pretense with the international community that having handed over to a democraticall
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