El-Rufai’s Vindication of Jonathan
You can fool gullible Nigerians, but you cannot fool the world. Jonathan didn’t hesitate to fire any of his ministers involved in conflict of interest. President Buhari on the other hand, prefers to write letters defending his own Secretary to the Governm
Recently, I had cause to read the memorandum to President Muhammadu Buhari by his mini-me, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State. All I can say is, wow! I guess President Muhammadu Buhari now believes his former boss, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, who wrote of Malam Nasir El-Rufai in his book, My Watch Volume 11 thus:
‘I recognised his weaknesses; the worst being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai.’
If only Professor John Paden had been patient enough to wait for the release of El-Rufai’s memorandum to President Muhammadu Buhari, he would not have so effusively praised the president. Having done so through his book, ‘Muhammadu Buhari - The Challenges of Leadership in Nigeria’, Padennoe comes across as a revisionist at best and a liar at worst because we now have a situation where even die-hard loyalists of the Buhari administration have come to accept the reality that Nigeria is faring much worse under the status quo than it did under the previous Peoples Democratic Party administration of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.
President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress called Dr. Goodluck Jonathan ‘clueless’ and promised change but look at the change they brought! The same Nasir ElRufai that called GEJ clueless now calls Muhammadu Buhari’s administration clueless.
The Buhari-led APC administration overturned much of the good initiatives of the Jonathan era. The former President gave us YouWIN but this administration stopped it and today, YOU LOSE as a Nigerian youth. Dr. Goodluck Jonathan brought the Presidential Special Scholarship Scheme for Innovations and Development to train first-class graduates abroad, this government stopped it so you can’t benefit, yet children of the APC elite almost exclusively school abroad. They fought Jonathan and the PDP tooth and nail over subsidy, calling it a scam, today they have increased petrol price and subsidy still remains. They said 199 to $1 under GEJ was “unacceptable”, but 500 to $1 under President Buhari is acceptable. They said the Jonathan administration did not build infrastructure, yet President Buhari commissioned Abuja-Kaduna railway built and completed by GEJ. Can you now see that we are dealing with “desperate power-seekers with empty promises” as Jonathan warned us on December 11, 2014?
In 2010, Gallup polls rated Nigeria under Goodluck Jonathan as the ‘happiest nation on earth”. In 2017 under President Muhammadu Buhari, we are not even the happiest nation in Africa. We are rated 6th happiest in Africa! In 2014, Nigeria under Jonathan had her best improvement in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, moving from 144 to 136. We have not made any improvements under the so-called anti-corruption administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
You can fool gullible Nigerians, but you cannot fool the world. Jonathan didn’t hesitate to fire any of his ministers involved in conflict of interest. President Buhari on the other hand, prefers to write letters defending his own Secretary to the Government of the Federation, a man caught RED-HANDED in the grass-cutting contract corruption. And they want us to be deceived that there is an anti-corruption war in Nigeria. I am sorry for anyone who still believes in that fairy tale!
That Nigerians believed the APC’s lies proves we are more malleable than an amoeba. A woman who believes every man ends up with empty promises and unwanted pregnancies. To those who believed/believe the APC, I have some questions for you: Where is your $1 to 1? Where is your 40 per liter petrol? Where is your job-seekers allowance? Where is your uninterrupted power? Where is the promise to lead from the front? Where is the 740,000 “immediate relief jobs for graduates”? Where are the three million jobs in three years? But the real question though is where your brain is if you actually believed these promises?
And if you are still deceived, I will urge you to undeceive yourself by reading El-Rufai’s memorandum. It is being sold by vendors on the street and I love the shortened tuition they have given it.
Where El-Rufai gave the memorandum the highfalutin title of ‘IMMEDIATE AND MEDIUM TERM IMPERATIVES FOR
PRESIDENT MUHAMMADU BUHARI’, these young vendors gave it its real title, ‘El-Rufai to Buhari: You Have Failed’! Chikena! No long turenci!
In a combination of punches which the president may find hard to survive, El-Rufai said, and I quote:
“In very blunt terms, Mr. President, our APC administration has not only failed to manage expectations of a populace that expected overnight ‘change’ but has failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance.”
Oh Mr. president, what a pity, what a pity! First your own wife warns you that she may not even campaign for you in 2019, then your political khalifa, the magajin Buhari in the person of Nasir El-Rufai, calls you a failure! If you consigned your wife to the ‘other room’ as punishment, to which room will you consign El-Rufai? Let me recommend a room for you. How about the kitchen? I am sure you have some knives there. El-Rufai will find them handy in practicing his favourite hobby-backstabbing.
Yes, I agree with Nasir El-Rufai that Buhari has failed, but then Nasir El-Rufai lacks the moral authority to say that because one, he is one of those that promoted Buhari to Nigerians and two, he has also failed in Kaduna State.
What notable thing has he achieved in Kaduna? Just as Buhari has taken Nigeria backward, Nasir El-Rufai has also taken Kaduna backward.
There was relative peace in Kaduna before El-Rufai became the governor, but is there peace today? Absolutely not. Because of his careless comments and even more careless actions, the security situation has so deteriorated in Kaduna that more people are dying in Kaduna from Fulani herdsmen than in Borno from Boko Haram.
In 2012, El-Rufai wrote an article on the back page of ThisDay and stated that Anambra State was one of the poorest states in Nigeria.
Today, in the year 2016, Anambra State is one of the richest states in Nigeria and for the past four years they have topped the list of states with the best WAEC results. Anambra does not owe workers and rejected the Federal Government’s bailout. Anambra does not borrow. Anambra exports vegetables to Europe and grows its own rice.
In contrast, under El-Rufai, Kaduna State in 2017 is by far poorer than Anambra State that el-Rufai said was one of Nigeria’s poorest states in 2012.
Kaduna owes workers salaries, Kaduna is heavily indebted and had to be bailed out by the federal government. The state economy has deteriorated badly.
Yet their governor, el-Rufai was laughing at Anambra in 2012. Today, Anambra State is laughing at him.
And to those who consider themselves to be amongst the privileged class of 97 per centers, the speedy and one-sided arrest of the perpetrators of the Ife Hausa/Yoruba clash shows that even if you think you are among the 97%, if it is not Panadol it cannot be the same as Panadol! A slave that laughs when his fellow slave is buried in a shallow grave obviously does not know that the same fate awaits him on death.
Let us consider the following trend very carefully: Shiite massacre - no arrest. Southern Kaduna killings - little or no arrest. Agatu genocide – little or no arrest. Pastor Eunice Elisha murdered in broad daylight in Kubwa - no arrest. Evangelist Bridget Agbahime beheaded in broad daylight in Kano - suspected killers discharged and acquitted on the instruction of the state Attorney General. Ife clashes - plenty of lopsided arrests. The Buhari ‘dog man’ - immediate arrest of the culprit. Is this how justice works in the new and improved Nigeria under President Muhammadu Buhari?
Why is the Ife crisis so special that a government that arrested no one when hundreds of Shiites were slaughtered has suddenly gone on an arresting spree? Are some lives more important than others in today’s Nigeria? Is it that the only time this government acts speedily is when cows and the cream of the 97% are affected?
And why the invasion of the offices of Amnesty International by so-called ‘protesters’? Amnesty International also released a damming report during the PDP administration of President Jonathan but nobody invaded their offices! Instead that government released its own intelligently written rebuttal to Amnesty International’s report and the independent observer could compare the two and come to an informed conclusion.
You do not need to defend the truth. You only need to unleash it and it will defend itself!
When you bring in protesters to protest the truth, discerning people think of those timeless words of Queen Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”!
And it is certain that the Amnesty International protesters protested too much as it has come to be revealed through pictures that cannot lie, that they were paid. If you have not seen the pictures then you need to Google them.
So sad that under a so-called anti-corruption administration, jobless people were hired to protest against Amnesty International. Are we now seeing the modus operandi that the Buhari administration will use to fulfill its campaign promises of providing 740,000 immediate relief jobs and 3,000,000 jobs in three years? Since the president returned from his ‘vacation’, there have been many pro-Buhari rallies. They accused the PDP of providing jobs for the boys meanwhile they provide jobs for protesters. Now we know the secret. Very sad!!
This episode is not the only event that puts the hypocrisy of this administration on display. Imagine my surprise to have read the headline on the Punch Newspapers on Wednesday the 22nd of March: ‘Buhari condemns fake certificates, exam fraud’!
It took mere hours for President Muhammadu Buhari to condemn the U.K. terror attack, but it took him months to comment on (not condemn, he merely commented) on the Southern Kaduna killings. When the president was ‘resting’ in London, it was Nigerians, not English people that were holding prayer vigils for him. Four people died in the U.K. Hundreds have died in Southern Kaduna. Apparently, when you have recently returned from a 6-week ‘vacation’ in the U.K., you begin to value U.K. lives more than the lives of your own citizens. I Mourn
And Another Thing: I mourn the passing of Professor Ginigeme Francis Mbanefoh, the father in-law to my dear friend and brother, Chinedu Ikegwuoha. Professor Mbanefoh was many things. He was one of the early graduates of the University of Ibadan where he remained to teach after his graduation until the Nigerian Civil War when he left UI to fight on the Biafran side. He returned to UI and remained there until 1997 when he became the Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. He died on the 8th of February, 2017. He is survived by his wife, Professor (Mrs.) Nkechi Mbenefoh, and three beautiful daughters - Ifeoma, Chukwudum and Ifunanya - a son, Odunze, two sons-in-law, Toochukwu and Chinedu. To Chukwudum, who used to excite my palate with some of the best culinary delights known to Black Africa, I say Ndo my sister. Take heart. My New Book
And One Last Thing: My new book, Apples of Gold is out. The foreword was written by former President Jonathan. It is available in US book stores and as an e-book on amazon and Barnes and Noble. Below, I give my readers a teaser of the type of Nuggets to expect in the book:
Spending to maintain your girlfriend drains blessings from you. Spending to maintain your parents rains blessings on you. No matter how pretty she is, all she can give you is pleasure. Learn to pleasure your parents if you want treasure in your life. It is impossible to succeed and be fulfilled if you don’t honour the tree from which your seed came. Parents hold the key to a blessed life on earth #RenosNuggets.