Daniel Elombah
DANIEL ELOMBAH: You were quoted as calling for the postponement of the 2011 general elections and the May 29 handover date while speaking on ‘Credible voters register’ at a conference organised by Change Nigeria Project and the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja. For some us that admire your record of service to Nigeria, that call is troubling.
NASIR El Rufai: it is up to Jega to decide....for me it is better to amend the Constitution to postpone the handover date to ensure that the adequate money, appropriate staff, communications infrastructure and trained monitoring personnel are on ground with an accurate voters register - thus leading to clean elections than rushing and repeating 2003 or 2007...i do not like the guys in NASS and many in the executive and wish they would leave tomorrow....but I am prepared to grudgingly live with them for a few more months if that will give Nigerians a chance to vote all the criminals amongst them out in clean and credible elections.
If you find this view troubling, then perhaps the status quo or its slight improvement is ok with you. Trust me, I have been closely involved in the preparations for 1998-99 elections and 2007....you need time money and people to do these things, and my assessment is that Jega has none in enough quantities. But it is up to him.
I am not in this government and will never be. I will not be a beneficiary of an extra month or more of their tenure...but will benefit ultimately if clean elections take place in Nigeria in my life time.
DANIEL ELOMBAH: Thanks for your response and the explanations. Someone wrote on FACEBOOK that as we approach 2011, "politically-expired" individuals are now desperately seeking relevance, working on behalf of their 'paymasters' but pretending to be nationalists. Mallam El-Rufai fired the 1st salvo, calling for 2011 elections to be postponed. Mallam, we know who your 'godfathers' are. If UMYA was alive, will you have asked for the election to be postponed? For how long will u continue to b a hypocrite?”
What clarifications do you have because for good or ill you are somehow perceived as being close to President Jonathan, and your statement could be taken as the president tasting the waters (The hands of Esau and the Voice of Jacob?)
NASIR El Rufai: I am not close to Jonathan and have made it clear that I will not be part of his administration. I do not advise him or speak to him on his job. I feel affronted that at my age, experience and achievements in this life, any one would think that there exists any human that can tell me what to think say or do. So this hand of Esau is just nonsense. Even when I worked for Abdussalaam and Obasanjo, I do not do what they tell me but what makes sense to me professionally and in the national interest.
I do not care who runs for president and frankly would not even advice Goodluck to run if he would listen to me. And it is not because of zoning - I have voiced my opposition to it while in government, in exile and back home in Nigeria. It is because I think we are more likely to have credible elections when the incumbent has no interest in the outcome - and that I think will what will make Jonathan the most loved President Nigeria will ever have in our history books. Besides, I think he can always contest in the future and win easily!
What I care about above everything else and every one else is that we have elections that throws bad people out of office and elects decent ones. Everything I have tried to do while in public office, exile and back home is along this singular trajectory. I believe that good elections enable an organic link between politics and governance which is currently non-existent. If we have clean elections, and by consequence accountable governance, I am quite capable of succeeding as a private citizen in Nigeria. I have done so before. I have no business with involvement in politics and desire to EVER be in government if my country functions minimally. Nigeria used to function as a state, even minimally. In the last three years, it has deteriorated beyond belief.
People like the guy you just quoted are entitled to their views. I do not care about them or owe any one any explanation. I explained to you because you cared enough to ask...It is a free country and I am not in the media, activist or education business. I am a private citizen.
With regards the timeline for credible elections, it will not be up to Goodluck to decide if Jega has enough time, qualified honest and motivated staff and the communications and logistic infrastructure to conduct clean elections. Jega and his commissioners will determine that. If Obasnjo had asked me to do the job I did in Abuja over 4 years, without resources with all the staff I inherited in MFCT in 2003 and without any flexibility to hire and fire staff, deploy IT infrastructure in time, but to do the job in one year - I would have declined his ministerial offer and gone back to my consulting business!
Knowing his pedigree, I believe Jega will give up the job unless he is certain that all the resources, personnel, infrastructure and time he needs to do a decent election are available. If he resigns because he concludes otherwise, it will be more damaging to Jonathan. My views are mine and I stand by them because having been an observer and participant in election preparations in 1998 and 2006, I have an idea of the challenges ahead. Everyone is free to disagree with me, but I leave all those imputing motives to the judgment of God and posterity.
DANIEL ELOMBAH: I am happy that you took your time to go this length to explain your stand...especially your stand on Jonathan running for the presidency. Bottom line- give INEC ten years to prepare for election, they would still be found not ready! But mount pressure on them, ensure they have all the resources they need, give them all the political and financial backing, plug all the loopholes for corruption, and you will be surprised to see that all the materials for an election will be in place.
NASIR El Rufai: It is only clean elections that will ensure political office holders wake up from their current culture of impunity. Hastily prepared, "sub-standards will not do...new voters register requires at least 4 months from the date of contracting those that can do the IT platform, then you need to display it for objections and corrections, then print between 60 and 70 million voters cards - another 2 months minimum, tell me with just these timelines, how can we have elections in January?
These are the issues....and we have not even talked about whether INEC and the ad-hoc staff have been trained and motivated etc, etc.....and Jega is not the sort of "business as usual" incompetents in sports and so on....let the man review the situation and decide....it is his call, but we must trust him and his independence to make that call.....all those commentators are neither aware of the full range of challenges he will face, nor on the hot seat...and when he fails, they will insult him and blame everything on him and his commissioners.....let them shut up and stop passing judgment.....and let him decide what works...we can only give the benefit of our experience as past participants and observers, not professional critics!
Sunday, July 18, 2010
AS WE SEE AM ON CAMERA...... WE ARE WORKING TO SERVE YOU
Hon. Emeka Okonji is representing and demonstrating his loyalty for the Governor
Guahana is doing the same, but with his mouth flute, loyalty has no boundary, see what quest for power can carve out of a man, Uduaghan you thick oh!!!
Free my man now or something go happen, see what practical youth empowerment can do, na wah, who chop dey remember, this is the meaning of youth empowerment and leadership in Niger Delta, we mean business here, don't come closer for nothing.
CONGRALUTATORY AND SOLIDARITY MESSAGE TO PRESIDENT JONATHAN FOR VISITING AKWA IBOM STATE
Ete C. Ikpatt
1.
On behalf of the overwhelming majority of progressive Akwa Ibom indigenes in the Diaspora, we congratulate and thank President Goodluck Jonathan for embarking on a very successful two days visit to our great Akwa Ibom State. From the well known hospitality of our people to the generous remarks at project sites and state functions made by Mr. President, every detail about the official visit reflects the spirit of a new Nigeria that only strong leadership does muster. We believe that a new Nigeria is evolving since the emergence of President Goodluck Jonathan.
2.
The people of Akwa Ibom State, particularly those of us in the Diaspora, rejoice in the historic homecoming of a great son of the Niger Delta รข€“ the first Nigeria President from the region. For this reason, we stand with Gov. Godswill Akpabio and Akwa Ibom royal fathers to assure Mr. President of our strong support and encouragement at this time. Akwa Ibom people are willing to stand by President Jonathan all the way through his current and future political leadership.
3.
The imperative for President Johnathan's successful and continued leadership not only draws from our yearning for good leadership in Nigeria, but is particularly predicated upon the need to restore the pride and place of Niger Deltans as equal, responsible and free Nigerians despite a long history of deprivation and neglect.
4.
We also welcome the all important, weighty and crowning presidential stamp of approval given for massive infrastructure developments, books for the free education project and good governance by the dynamic servant leadership of Governor Godswill Akpabio. It is self-evident that the current administration has exceeded the expectation of most Akwa Ibom people; our State has become the national model for quality growth and development by reason of a focused and unifying government determined to work out positive changes.
5.
Based on accomplishment by the Akpabio administration in the past three years, the bar has been significantly raised. Now, Gov. Godswill Akpabio has the foundation to build upon and ramp up to higher growth and development levels through partnership with the Federal Government as promised by President Goodluck Jonathan during the august visit. We strongly believe that Governor Godswill Akpabio will deliver more dividends of democracy for the people up to the end of his second term in 2015.
6.
We also thank the Akwa Ibom people and groups fully devoted to planning and hosting the historic event. Particularly, we thank the Hon. Commissioner of Information and Social Re-Orientation, Mr. Aniekan Umanah, and his committee for successfully planning and implementing the historic presidential state visit.
Long live the President Goodluck Jonathan !
Long live Akwa Ibom State !!
Long live the Federal Republic of Nigeria !!!
Signed:
Mr. Chris Oyobio (USA), Dr. Sonny Abia (USA) Eket Senatorial District
Dr. Victor Udo (USA), Barr. Uduak Ukpe (UK) Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District
Mr. Clement Ikpatt (USA), Mr. Mr. Jimaimah Essien (UK) Uyo Senatorial District
1.
On behalf of the overwhelming majority of progressive Akwa Ibom indigenes in the Diaspora, we congratulate and thank President Goodluck Jonathan for embarking on a very successful two days visit to our great Akwa Ibom State. From the well known hospitality of our people to the generous remarks at project sites and state functions made by Mr. President, every detail about the official visit reflects the spirit of a new Nigeria that only strong leadership does muster. We believe that a new Nigeria is evolving since the emergence of President Goodluck Jonathan.
2.
The people of Akwa Ibom State, particularly those of us in the Diaspora, rejoice in the historic homecoming of a great son of the Niger Delta รข€“ the first Nigeria President from the region. For this reason, we stand with Gov. Godswill Akpabio and Akwa Ibom royal fathers to assure Mr. President of our strong support and encouragement at this time. Akwa Ibom people are willing to stand by President Jonathan all the way through his current and future political leadership.
3.
The imperative for President Johnathan's successful and continued leadership not only draws from our yearning for good leadership in Nigeria, but is particularly predicated upon the need to restore the pride and place of Niger Deltans as equal, responsible and free Nigerians despite a long history of deprivation and neglect.
4.
We also welcome the all important, weighty and crowning presidential stamp of approval given for massive infrastructure developments, books for the free education project and good governance by the dynamic servant leadership of Governor Godswill Akpabio. It is self-evident that the current administration has exceeded the expectation of most Akwa Ibom people; our State has become the national model for quality growth and development by reason of a focused and unifying government determined to work out positive changes.
5.
Based on accomplishment by the Akpabio administration in the past three years, the bar has been significantly raised. Now, Gov. Godswill Akpabio has the foundation to build upon and ramp up to higher growth and development levels through partnership with the Federal Government as promised by President Goodluck Jonathan during the august visit. We strongly believe that Governor Godswill Akpabio will deliver more dividends of democracy for the people up to the end of his second term in 2015.
6.
We also thank the Akwa Ibom people and groups fully devoted to planning and hosting the historic event. Particularly, we thank the Hon. Commissioner of Information and Social Re-Orientation, Mr. Aniekan Umanah, and his committee for successfully planning and implementing the historic presidential state visit.
Long live the President Goodluck Jonathan !
Long live Akwa Ibom State !!
Long live the Federal Republic of Nigeria !!!
Signed:
Mr. Chris Oyobio (USA), Dr. Sonny Abia (USA) Eket Senatorial District
Dr. Victor Udo (USA), Barr. Uduak Ukpe (UK) Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District
Mr. Clement Ikpatt (USA), Mr. Mr. Jimaimah Essien (UK) Uyo Senatorial District
PHOTO-SPEAK..... EVENTS AS THEY MAKE HISTORY
Former Head of state, Governors and professionals at the public lecture organized by the Sylvester Monye foundation and the Delta State Government on the gains of the banking reforms for state development.
* An elder-stateman at Oleh putting a final blow and permanently sealing the coffin of the opposition in Delta State, and all their antics against the guber-hope of Gov. Eweta Uduaghan to contest the 2011 Election for a second term in office.
* At Oleh it was a game for the elder-statesman to finish the game of a fellow ( E.K. Clark) and demonstrate his loyalty for the Governor for more democracy dividends, at least old age needs it, what else can prompt an old age royal rumble at Oleh.
FG Has No Business Building Refineries -Jonathan
Dapo Falade and Gill Nsa-Abasi
PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan has declared that the Federal Government has no business getting involved in the building and maintenance of refineries, saying that the task should left to public private partnership venture.
He made this known in Uyo, Akwa Ibom, on Friday while responding to various issues raised by the people of the state during the townhall meting organised by the state government as part of activities lined up for the two-day presidential visit.
Rather than getting directly involved in building refineries, the president said that the government would be playing the role of a regulator, monitoring the activities of the would-be investors and other stakeholders in the oil industry.
Stating that his administration would encourage Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the task of ensuring adequate petroleum supply, Jonathan also said that to achieve optimal level in the oil sector, there was the need to arrive at an appropriate pricing system.
While expressing optimism that the country would get over the problem of perennial acute power supply, President Jonathan said that it would be out of place for him to be precise about when a fairly stable power supply would be attained.
On the problem of power supply, I cannot be exactly precise about when the country would attain a fairly stable power supply, even if I am a witch doctor. There is no doubt that we have a target, but it will be out of place to say precisely when we would get there, but we are still widely consulting all the stakeholders on the issue,he said.
The president also dashed the hopes of those who were calling for the return of primary and secondary schools to missionaries as he said that returning those schools to their original owners would be difficult.
Declaring that the Federal Government had no business in managing primary and secondary schools, he said that there was no point talking about returning some categories of schools to the missions, adding that it would be better for missions who were interested to establish new ones.
PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan has declared that the Federal Government has no business getting involved in the building and maintenance of refineries, saying that the task should left to public private partnership venture.
He made this known in Uyo, Akwa Ibom, on Friday while responding to various issues raised by the people of the state during the townhall meting organised by the state government as part of activities lined up for the two-day presidential visit.
Rather than getting directly involved in building refineries, the president said that the government would be playing the role of a regulator, monitoring the activities of the would-be investors and other stakeholders in the oil industry.
Stating that his administration would encourage Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the task of ensuring adequate petroleum supply, Jonathan also said that to achieve optimal level in the oil sector, there was the need to arrive at an appropriate pricing system.
While expressing optimism that the country would get over the problem of perennial acute power supply, President Jonathan said that it would be out of place for him to be precise about when a fairly stable power supply would be attained.
On the problem of power supply, I cannot be exactly precise about when the country would attain a fairly stable power supply, even if I am a witch doctor. There is no doubt that we have a target, but it will be out of place to say precisely when we would get there, but we are still widely consulting all the stakeholders on the issue,he said.
The president also dashed the hopes of those who were calling for the return of primary and secondary schools to missionaries as he said that returning those schools to their original owners would be difficult.
Declaring that the Federal Government had no business in managing primary and secondary schools, he said that there was no point talking about returning some categories of schools to the missions, adding that it would be better for missions who were interested to establish new ones.
Professor Ben Nwabueze And Bloody Revolution
Hon. Alex Obi-Osuala
Quoting Him In His Own Words:"I want a wholesome Transformation; This is where I disagree with T.Y Danjuma. I want a bloody revolution; We need a revolutionary change. A
bloody one and those who survive will pick up the piece; Corruption has eaten deep and everyone is involved, only a bloody revolution will remedy the situation; That's how France was saved."
Calling for such bloody revolution in Nigeria as presently constituted, will be calling for Armageddon. The intention may be good, but will certainly be wrongly
executed. There are different barrier demarcating us as a nation; we have the Religious, Ethnic,Tribal Etc, with different sectional vigilantes singing their war tones; we are too diverse for such. Every segment of Nigeria is so corrupt and so ethnotized that; emotional and sentimental passion will take over a just revolution; and turn it into ethnic cleansing.
I want to believe that Professor Nwabueze's position was made out of anger and frustration at the system that has no decorum, so rotten and retrogressive. According to him, as a member of Presidential Advisory
Council {PAC}, They had the cause to invite some members of the National Assembly to furnish them with some information, the revelation they got from this members were mind blowing.
Quoting Him In His Own Words:"I want a wholesome Transformation; This is where I disagree with T.Y Danjuma. I want a bloody revolution; We need a revolutionary change. A
bloody one and those who survive will pick up the piece; Corruption has eaten deep and everyone is involved, only a bloody revolution will remedy the situation; That's how France was saved."
Calling for such bloody revolution in Nigeria as presently constituted, will be calling for Armageddon. The intention may be good, but will certainly be wrongly
executed. There are different barrier demarcating us as a nation; we have the Religious, Ethnic,Tribal Etc, with different sectional vigilantes singing their war tones; we are too diverse for such. Every segment of Nigeria is so corrupt and so ethnotized that; emotional and sentimental passion will take over a just revolution; and turn it into ethnic cleansing.
I want to believe that Professor Nwabueze's position was made out of anger and frustration at the system that has no decorum, so rotten and retrogressive. According to him, as a member of Presidential Advisory
Council {PAC}, They had the cause to invite some members of the National Assembly to furnish them with some information, the revelation they got from this members were mind blowing.
Ekweremadu: 2011 Elections Hold in January
Christopher Isiguzo
Following the successful conclusion of the first phase of the constitutional amendment exercise, general elections would hold by January next year, said the deputy Senate Pesident, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had proposed in two separate templates it unveiled last March that, depending on the outcome of then ongoing constitution amendment process, next year’s election would hold either in January or in April.
It said if the process went through successfully, general elections would hold between January 15 and 29, 2011 and if not, they would be held between April 9 and 23, 2011.
Briefing newsmen in Enugu, Ekweremadu who is chairman of the Senate committee on Constitu-tional Amendment, said the National Assembly had removed all impediments to the successful conduct of elections by INEC having concluded the amendment exercise.
“Elections should hold in January next year because what we amended showed that the elections should hold not earlier than 150 days and not later than 180 days before May 29, 2011 and if you calculate, it means elections will hold between December 31 this year and February 1, 2011,” Ekweremadu said.
He also said that the much expected reforms in the electoral process preparatory for next year’s general elections were achieved last Friday when the state Houses of Assembly submitted their resolutions on the document transmitted to them by the leadership of the National Assembly.
According to him, with the submission, the country had achieved major electoral reforms as critical issues bordering on electoral process, which had remained the major albatross to the conduct of credible elections in the country, were effectively taken care of. He said the amended sections of the constitution took effect the moment the state assemblies assented to them in accordance with section 9 of the 1999 constitution.
“By this development, all those provisions that were provided by section 9 of the 1999 Constitution are now operational and in the days ahead, we intend to gazette it for all to see the areas that have been amended. The import of section 9 is that the amendment takes off immediately in every part of the country. You don’t require the assent of the President for it to take effect because we followed the United States of America system where we borrowed our constitution from and the provisions are similar. Once they achieve two-thirds of the approval of the legislature, the Constitution takes effect and that is what we have achieved.
“The critical issues that we wanted to address have all been achieved including the independence of INEC as contained in the 1999 Constitution. Today, you cannot be a member of INEC and be a member of a political party. The new Constitution approved that INEC should draw their funds from consolidated revenue fund, it also reduced election tribunal judges from five to three, while election petitions are to be filed within 21 days as against 30 days in the 1999 Constitution,” he said.
While urging the INEC to immediately release time-table for the next general elections, the Deputy Senate President said both the National and State legislatures had laid solid structures that would guarantee free, fair and transparent elections for the country.
According to the provisional timetable released by INEC, then under the leadership of Prof. Maurice Iwu, governorship and state legislative elections will hold on January 15, 2011 under the amended constitution, while presidential and National Assembly elections will hold January 22. Possible run-off elections will hold on January 29, 2011.
Under that time-table, party primaries was expected to have begun last May and be concluded this month. The delay in the conclusion of the constitution amendment process made the aspect of the time-table concerning party primaries unworkable.
The date of party primaries as well as the election time-table may however be tinkered with by the new INEC leadership under Prof. Attahiru Jega.
Ekweremadu, however, ruled out the possibility of the present session of the National Assembly embarking on and successfully concluding another phase of constitutional amendment especially as it concerns creation of additional states.
He said that with the electioneering process almost around the corner, it would be difficult for the process to be concluded before the expiration of their tenure by June 4 next year.
“Let me say that the issue of state creation is still alive, it’s very necessary, Nigerians want it and there is no way we can not listen to the yearnings and aspirations of the people. But the issue of whether this session of the National Assembly can really do that is another kettle of fish.
Following the successful conclusion of the first phase of the constitutional amendment exercise, general elections would hold by January next year, said the deputy Senate Pesident, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had proposed in two separate templates it unveiled last March that, depending on the outcome of then ongoing constitution amendment process, next year’s election would hold either in January or in April.
It said if the process went through successfully, general elections would hold between January 15 and 29, 2011 and if not, they would be held between April 9 and 23, 2011.
Briefing newsmen in Enugu, Ekweremadu who is chairman of the Senate committee on Constitu-tional Amendment, said the National Assembly had removed all impediments to the successful conduct of elections by INEC having concluded the amendment exercise.
“Elections should hold in January next year because what we amended showed that the elections should hold not earlier than 150 days and not later than 180 days before May 29, 2011 and if you calculate, it means elections will hold between December 31 this year and February 1, 2011,” Ekweremadu said.
He also said that the much expected reforms in the electoral process preparatory for next year’s general elections were achieved last Friday when the state Houses of Assembly submitted their resolutions on the document transmitted to them by the leadership of the National Assembly.
According to him, with the submission, the country had achieved major electoral reforms as critical issues bordering on electoral process, which had remained the major albatross to the conduct of credible elections in the country, were effectively taken care of. He said the amended sections of the constitution took effect the moment the state assemblies assented to them in accordance with section 9 of the 1999 constitution.
“By this development, all those provisions that were provided by section 9 of the 1999 Constitution are now operational and in the days ahead, we intend to gazette it for all to see the areas that have been amended. The import of section 9 is that the amendment takes off immediately in every part of the country. You don’t require the assent of the President for it to take effect because we followed the United States of America system where we borrowed our constitution from and the provisions are similar. Once they achieve two-thirds of the approval of the legislature, the Constitution takes effect and that is what we have achieved.
“The critical issues that we wanted to address have all been achieved including the independence of INEC as contained in the 1999 Constitution. Today, you cannot be a member of INEC and be a member of a political party. The new Constitution approved that INEC should draw their funds from consolidated revenue fund, it also reduced election tribunal judges from five to three, while election petitions are to be filed within 21 days as against 30 days in the 1999 Constitution,” he said.
While urging the INEC to immediately release time-table for the next general elections, the Deputy Senate President said both the National and State legislatures had laid solid structures that would guarantee free, fair and transparent elections for the country.
According to the provisional timetable released by INEC, then under the leadership of Prof. Maurice Iwu, governorship and state legislative elections will hold on January 15, 2011 under the amended constitution, while presidential and National Assembly elections will hold January 22. Possible run-off elections will hold on January 29, 2011.
Under that time-table, party primaries was expected to have begun last May and be concluded this month. The delay in the conclusion of the constitution amendment process made the aspect of the time-table concerning party primaries unworkable.
The date of party primaries as well as the election time-table may however be tinkered with by the new INEC leadership under Prof. Attahiru Jega.
Ekweremadu, however, ruled out the possibility of the present session of the National Assembly embarking on and successfully concluding another phase of constitutional amendment especially as it concerns creation of additional states.
He said that with the electioneering process almost around the corner, it would be difficult for the process to be concluded before the expiration of their tenure by June 4 next year.
“Let me say that the issue of state creation is still alive, it’s very necessary, Nigerians want it and there is no way we can not listen to the yearnings and aspirations of the people. But the issue of whether this session of the National Assembly can really do that is another kettle of fish.
EFCC Begins Investigation Into Fresh N52b In Ogun
Abayomi Fakeye
The Ogun State Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Aare Tunde Alabi has condemned the petition and eventual reports that,the state
government is making illegal deductions from federal allocations to local government areas in the state.
According to Aare Alabi all deductions from the local government allocations were those legally recommended and agreed to by the council chairmen in the
state.
"This clarification become necessary in other to ensure that the citizenry of the state including those in diaspora were not misinformed by the malicious and
satanic allegations and petitions by disgruntled politicians in the State". Aare said.
Also,Commissioner for Information and Orientation,Mr.Sina Kawonise dismissed the allegations against the state government saying they were all politically motivated.
According to Kawonise,the accusations were masterminded by desperate politicians seeking elective positions in 2011. "The allegations are untrue. It is all about the politics of 2011 and who becomes the governor,and who gets what. It is a game plan by our people in Abuja who will write frivolous petition and rush to the press. You cannot build something on nothing.
"That was how they alleged that the governor collected N30bn from land bureau when in actual fact we did not realize more than N1.2bn I 2009 when they said
the money was stolen. That was after they said the N30bn was stolen from the local government allocation,whereas total allocation to the state and the LGs was just N13.5bn in 2009.
All the facts are there. Even the same EFCC released the Director-General, Bureau of land who they kept for some weeks when they could not find anything against him. "That was how our people started before the
2007 election. It is just political game", he concluded. Note for the net sir, any comments?
The Ogun State Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Aare Tunde Alabi has condemned the petition and eventual reports that,the state
government is making illegal deductions from federal allocations to local government areas in the state.
According to Aare Alabi all deductions from the local government allocations were those legally recommended and agreed to by the council chairmen in the
state.
"This clarification become necessary in other to ensure that the citizenry of the state including those in diaspora were not misinformed by the malicious and
satanic allegations and petitions by disgruntled politicians in the State". Aare said.
Also,Commissioner for Information and Orientation,Mr.Sina Kawonise dismissed the allegations against the state government saying they were all politically motivated.
According to Kawonise,the accusations were masterminded by desperate politicians seeking elective positions in 2011. "The allegations are untrue. It is all about the politics of 2011 and who becomes the governor,and who gets what. It is a game plan by our people in Abuja who will write frivolous petition and rush to the press. You cannot build something on nothing.
"That was how they alleged that the governor collected N30bn from land bureau when in actual fact we did not realize more than N1.2bn I 2009 when they said
the money was stolen. That was after they said the N30bn was stolen from the local government allocation,whereas total allocation to the state and the LGs was just N13.5bn in 2009.
All the facts are there. Even the same EFCC released the Director-General, Bureau of land who they kept for some weeks when they could not find anything against him. "That was how our people started before the
2007 election. It is just political game", he concluded. Note for the net sir, any comments?
America divided: the politics of inequality
Godfrey Hodgson
The entrenchment of inequality in the United States damages the economy, degrades politics and corrodes the American dream. A new reality is also an epic challenge of leadership, says Godfrey Hodgson.
The economic crisis in the United States has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of its citizens. Among the most damaging is the experience of unemployment. In a country where notions of work, self-reliance, and self-improvement are fundamental to its identity, the insecurities and hardships associated with forced idleness are hard indeed to cope with.
The persistence of large-scale unemployment is a standing affront to another of America’s core ideas: that, as the country’s founding document says, all men are created equal. True, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were here pledging fidelity to a natural-rights principle than thinking of absolute or even relative economic equality.
Still, an important element in the American public philosophy has always been the idea that the United States does offer, certainly has offered, greater economic equality, and in particular greater and more equal economic opportunity. This was the American dream.
Now, that proposition has become dubious. Many Americans question whether life will be as good for their children as it was for their parents. There is much statistical evidence to suggest that the United States is neither exceptionally equal nor exceptional in its modern record of upward social mobility.
On the basis of such evidence I myself have written that “by all statistical measures . . . the United States, in terms of income and wealth, is the most unequal country in the world. While the average income in the United States is still almost the highest in the world . . . the gap between wealth and poverty is higher than anywhere else, and is growing steadily greater” (see More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century [Princeton University Press, 2006]).
Another book, by the American historian Peter Baldwin, has refined and amplified this argument “(see The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike [Oxford University Press, 2009]). He uses a wealth of statistical research to show that the United States is less exceptional than either Americans or Europeans think, and that the differences in many parameters between (for example) Mississippi and Massachusetts are greater than those between Europe and America; while the differences between northern and southern Europe are similarly comparable to those between New England and the deep south. In most demographic respects, the United States lies not at an extreme of wealth or an extreme in any cultural variation, but somewhere inside the distribution of European countries in each particular respect.
A broken contract
The former United States labor secretary during the Bill Clinton presidency, Robert Reich, dissects the historical dimensions of “widening inequality” in a forensic article:
“In 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 -- with 23.5 percent of the total” (see Robert Reich, “The Root of Economic Fragility and Political Anger”, Huffington Post, 13 July 2010).
What is important here is that Reich focuses not on the relative equality or inequality of wealth or income of American as compared with the populations of other countries, but on how a trend away from inequality, in the direction of relative equality, has been reversed. Things in this respect in America are now back where they were before the last great depression, in the 1930s.
It is a serious charge with profound political implications (“What we get from widening inequality is not only a more fragile economy but also an angrier politics.”) Since the triumph of conservative economic principles and policies, beginning in the 1980s, Reich is saying, the United States has thrown away a pearl of great price: the improvement in the condition of its citizenry that was achieved by all the efforts of the New Deal and the labour movement, the opportunity afforded by the collapse of its competitors in the second world war, and the social-democratic policies of the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Until the financial crisis of 2008, most Americans, if they noticed the growth of inequality at all, probably shrugged. Inequality, many believed, was the price paid for the dynamism of American industry and research, for the brilliant achievements of American research, and for the supposedly greater opportunity Americans enjoy of becoming, in the unforgettable phrase of Peter Mandelson, “filthy rich”.
The economic events of 2008-10 ought to have swept such complacency away (see “The week that democracy won”, 29 September 2008). So far from being exceptionally dynamic, American industry seems strangely comatose - an appearance dramatised by the collapse of the American automobile industry, the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler and the desertification of Detroit. Only the computer and information-technology industries and medical and biological research seem competitive by the standards of China, the rest of east Asia and even the more dynamic countries in Europe.
The American propensity to compare the country’s performance favourably with everyone else has reasserted itself, however, more quickly than the fortunes of General Motors. The troubles of European economies, highlighted by the judgments of New York ratings-agencies and exacerbated by New York bond-traders, have offered an enjoyable opportunity for American Schadenfreude. The fact that the dollar has recovered some of its parity against the euro has allowed many to embrace the illusion that the United States’s economic problems are over.
For the present, the Barack Obama administration’s focus in economic policy is on its rather ambitious attempts to reform (or rather to re-regulate) the financial system. This is necessary, important and - given the resistance of Wall Street - difficult, even politically hazardous. To reform Wall Street, clearly, is a necessary element in a political strategy to undo the damage that has been done. It is not, however, a sufficient one.
A lost generation
Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, makes this point in a timely and persuasive fashion (see “’The Time We Have Is Growing Short’”, New York Review of Books, 24 June 2010). Volcker is theoretically an adviser to President Obama but appears from a distance to have been blindsided by the more ancien rรฉgime of the president’s advisers (such as Larry Summers and the treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner; the latter a protรฉgรฉ of the arch-deregulator, Alan Greenspan, who predictably took advantage of the G20 meeting in Canada to patronise his European colleagues).
Volcker praises the administration’s proposals for financial reform. But he insists that the critical policy issues facing the United States “go way beyond the technicalities of law and regulation of financial authority”. The time, he says, is growing short for recognising this and for taking the necessary larger view:
“Restoring our fiscal position, dealing with Social Security and health care obligations in a responsible way, sorting out a reasonable approach towards limiting carbon omissions, and producing domestic energy without unacceptable environmental risks all take time. We’d better get started. That will require a greater sense of common purpose and political consensus than has been evidence in Washington or the country at large.”
He is right. And to this list of urgent priorities - each of which is either flatly denied or dangerously minimised by the Republicans - it is surely time to add another. That is, to reverse the trend identified by Robert Reich and restore what has always been an integral apart of the motive force of American society: a conscious political will to restore equality of opportunity (see “The next big issue: inequality in America”, 12 September 2006).
The much trumpeted research successes and highly paid professors at a couple of dozen private American universities (including a handful of well-endowed public institutions) conceal the crisis in public higher education. The most recent figures show that while a higher proportion than ever before of Americans start university courses (more than 70%), a lower-than-ever proportion (roughly 30%) graduate.
David Leonhardt comments: “Over the last few decades, the number of teenagers who enroll in college has actually been rising fairly steadily. But graduation rates have fallen. Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree - a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education - ever do so at any college, statistics suggest. The United States still leads the world in getting students to start college, notes Lawrence Katz, co-author of a recent history of education. But we no longer lead in what really matters: educational attainment” (see “Students of the Great Recession”, New York Times, 3 May 2010).
A similar process has long been growing in secondary education. For a time it was argued that the relatively poor performance of American college students (in all but the best private institution) was due to the high proportion of immigrants’ children. Again, research suggests it may have more to do with the poor quality of the average public secondary school.
The weakness of American education and especially American scientific education has long been concealed by the ability to attract gifted scholars and graduate students from China, the Indian sub-continent and western Europe. That process is getting hard because of the irrationality of the Patriot Act, which makes it harder for what Rudyard Kipling (in his American period...) called “lesser breeds” to get visas to study and work in the United States.
This is not just a fairness issue. It also directly affects the prospects of the American economy becoming more competitive.
A political choice
Americans have been slow to recognise that their country, long dedicated to the ideal of equality, is becoming a class society that in many ways resembles the inequalities of 19th-century European society, without the political regulating mechanism of class-based socialist and Labour parties.
Political logic might dictate that as the Republican Party is increasingly identified with the interests and the attitudes of the “haves”, the Democratic Party ought to see its future as the representative of the “have-nots”. Some even supposed that President Obama might be planning to lead the Democrats in that direction.
It has not happened. Obama promised a massive reform of the grotesquely expensive, wasteful and unjust healthcare system. With great difficulty, he succeeded in persuading Congress to pass a substantially weathered down, though still well worth having, version of his original plan.
In other respects, his administration has been surprisingly conservative. In part, it is now clear, this reflects his own personal instincts and attitudes. In part, it reflects political “realities”, in the sense that even modest reforms are greeted by much of the American media and therefore by a surprisingly large proportion of the voters as dangerous threats to the American constitution and way of life. Obama is nothing if not politically cautious, and while his political skills are impressive in some respects (for example, his remarkable gifts as an orator), it is clear that, in is first term, he will not achieve the substantial reforms won by a Franklin Roosevelt or a Lyndon Johnson.
That is why the outcome of the mid-term elections due in November 2010 is so vitally important, and so hard to predict. 4 July has come and gone. Traditionally, there is a political and electoral truce from Independence Day until Labor Day at the beginning of September, leaving two months for the electoral season. There are signs that that tradition is being ignored this year, partly because the mid-term prospects are at once so important and so hard to predict.
If the Democrats survive the 2010 elections without major losses, it may be that Barack Obama will move relatively boldly to tackle the problem Paul Volcker has identified. If the turbulent political waters reinforce the president’s instinct for caution, his own prospects of winning a second term must be in doubt.
In a future column, I will try to read the mid-term runes. Already, it is clear that the United States is fast approaching a exceptional set of political decisions that will have lasting consequences for its society.
The entrenchment of inequality in the United States damages the economy, degrades politics and corrodes the American dream. A new reality is also an epic challenge of leadership, says Godfrey Hodgson.
The economic crisis in the United States has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of its citizens. Among the most damaging is the experience of unemployment. In a country where notions of work, self-reliance, and self-improvement are fundamental to its identity, the insecurities and hardships associated with forced idleness are hard indeed to cope with.
The persistence of large-scale unemployment is a standing affront to another of America’s core ideas: that, as the country’s founding document says, all men are created equal. True, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were here pledging fidelity to a natural-rights principle than thinking of absolute or even relative economic equality.
Still, an important element in the American public philosophy has always been the idea that the United States does offer, certainly has offered, greater economic equality, and in particular greater and more equal economic opportunity. This was the American dream.
Now, that proposition has become dubious. Many Americans question whether life will be as good for their children as it was for their parents. There is much statistical evidence to suggest that the United States is neither exceptionally equal nor exceptional in its modern record of upward social mobility.
On the basis of such evidence I myself have written that “by all statistical measures . . . the United States, in terms of income and wealth, is the most unequal country in the world. While the average income in the United States is still almost the highest in the world . . . the gap between wealth and poverty is higher than anywhere else, and is growing steadily greater” (see More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century [Princeton University Press, 2006]).
Another book, by the American historian Peter Baldwin, has refined and amplified this argument “(see The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike [Oxford University Press, 2009]). He uses a wealth of statistical research to show that the United States is less exceptional than either Americans or Europeans think, and that the differences in many parameters between (for example) Mississippi and Massachusetts are greater than those between Europe and America; while the differences between northern and southern Europe are similarly comparable to those between New England and the deep south. In most demographic respects, the United States lies not at an extreme of wealth or an extreme in any cultural variation, but somewhere inside the distribution of European countries in each particular respect.
A broken contract
The former United States labor secretary during the Bill Clinton presidency, Robert Reich, dissects the historical dimensions of “widening inequality” in a forensic article:
“In 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 -- with 23.5 percent of the total” (see Robert Reich, “The Root of Economic Fragility and Political Anger”, Huffington Post, 13 July 2010).
What is important here is that Reich focuses not on the relative equality or inequality of wealth or income of American as compared with the populations of other countries, but on how a trend away from inequality, in the direction of relative equality, has been reversed. Things in this respect in America are now back where they were before the last great depression, in the 1930s.
It is a serious charge with profound political implications (“What we get from widening inequality is not only a more fragile economy but also an angrier politics.”) Since the triumph of conservative economic principles and policies, beginning in the 1980s, Reich is saying, the United States has thrown away a pearl of great price: the improvement in the condition of its citizenry that was achieved by all the efforts of the New Deal and the labour movement, the opportunity afforded by the collapse of its competitors in the second world war, and the social-democratic policies of the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Until the financial crisis of 2008, most Americans, if they noticed the growth of inequality at all, probably shrugged. Inequality, many believed, was the price paid for the dynamism of American industry and research, for the brilliant achievements of American research, and for the supposedly greater opportunity Americans enjoy of becoming, in the unforgettable phrase of Peter Mandelson, “filthy rich”.
The economic events of 2008-10 ought to have swept such complacency away (see “The week that democracy won”, 29 September 2008). So far from being exceptionally dynamic, American industry seems strangely comatose - an appearance dramatised by the collapse of the American automobile industry, the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler and the desertification of Detroit. Only the computer and information-technology industries and medical and biological research seem competitive by the standards of China, the rest of east Asia and even the more dynamic countries in Europe.
The American propensity to compare the country’s performance favourably with everyone else has reasserted itself, however, more quickly than the fortunes of General Motors. The troubles of European economies, highlighted by the judgments of New York ratings-agencies and exacerbated by New York bond-traders, have offered an enjoyable opportunity for American Schadenfreude. The fact that the dollar has recovered some of its parity against the euro has allowed many to embrace the illusion that the United States’s economic problems are over.
For the present, the Barack Obama administration’s focus in economic policy is on its rather ambitious attempts to reform (or rather to re-regulate) the financial system. This is necessary, important and - given the resistance of Wall Street - difficult, even politically hazardous. To reform Wall Street, clearly, is a necessary element in a political strategy to undo the damage that has been done. It is not, however, a sufficient one.
A lost generation
Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, makes this point in a timely and persuasive fashion (see “’The Time We Have Is Growing Short’”, New York Review of Books, 24 June 2010). Volcker is theoretically an adviser to President Obama but appears from a distance to have been blindsided by the more ancien rรฉgime of the president’s advisers (such as Larry Summers and the treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner; the latter a protรฉgรฉ of the arch-deregulator, Alan Greenspan, who predictably took advantage of the G20 meeting in Canada to patronise his European colleagues).
Volcker praises the administration’s proposals for financial reform. But he insists that the critical policy issues facing the United States “go way beyond the technicalities of law and regulation of financial authority”. The time, he says, is growing short for recognising this and for taking the necessary larger view:
“Restoring our fiscal position, dealing with Social Security and health care obligations in a responsible way, sorting out a reasonable approach towards limiting carbon omissions, and producing domestic energy without unacceptable environmental risks all take time. We’d better get started. That will require a greater sense of common purpose and political consensus than has been evidence in Washington or the country at large.”
He is right. And to this list of urgent priorities - each of which is either flatly denied or dangerously minimised by the Republicans - it is surely time to add another. That is, to reverse the trend identified by Robert Reich and restore what has always been an integral apart of the motive force of American society: a conscious political will to restore equality of opportunity (see “The next big issue: inequality in America”, 12 September 2006).
The much trumpeted research successes and highly paid professors at a couple of dozen private American universities (including a handful of well-endowed public institutions) conceal the crisis in public higher education. The most recent figures show that while a higher proportion than ever before of Americans start university courses (more than 70%), a lower-than-ever proportion (roughly 30%) graduate.
David Leonhardt comments: “Over the last few decades, the number of teenagers who enroll in college has actually been rising fairly steadily. But graduation rates have fallen. Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree - a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education - ever do so at any college, statistics suggest. The United States still leads the world in getting students to start college, notes Lawrence Katz, co-author of a recent history of education. But we no longer lead in what really matters: educational attainment” (see “Students of the Great Recession”, New York Times, 3 May 2010).
A similar process has long been growing in secondary education. For a time it was argued that the relatively poor performance of American college students (in all but the best private institution) was due to the high proportion of immigrants’ children. Again, research suggests it may have more to do with the poor quality of the average public secondary school.
The weakness of American education and especially American scientific education has long been concealed by the ability to attract gifted scholars and graduate students from China, the Indian sub-continent and western Europe. That process is getting hard because of the irrationality of the Patriot Act, which makes it harder for what Rudyard Kipling (in his American period...) called “lesser breeds” to get visas to study and work in the United States.
This is not just a fairness issue. It also directly affects the prospects of the American economy becoming more competitive.
A political choice
Americans have been slow to recognise that their country, long dedicated to the ideal of equality, is becoming a class society that in many ways resembles the inequalities of 19th-century European society, without the political regulating mechanism of class-based socialist and Labour parties.
Political logic might dictate that as the Republican Party is increasingly identified with the interests and the attitudes of the “haves”, the Democratic Party ought to see its future as the representative of the “have-nots”. Some even supposed that President Obama might be planning to lead the Democrats in that direction.
It has not happened. Obama promised a massive reform of the grotesquely expensive, wasteful and unjust healthcare system. With great difficulty, he succeeded in persuading Congress to pass a substantially weathered down, though still well worth having, version of his original plan.
In other respects, his administration has been surprisingly conservative. In part, it is now clear, this reflects his own personal instincts and attitudes. In part, it reflects political “realities”, in the sense that even modest reforms are greeted by much of the American media and therefore by a surprisingly large proportion of the voters as dangerous threats to the American constitution and way of life. Obama is nothing if not politically cautious, and while his political skills are impressive in some respects (for example, his remarkable gifts as an orator), it is clear that, in is first term, he will not achieve the substantial reforms won by a Franklin Roosevelt or a Lyndon Johnson.
That is why the outcome of the mid-term elections due in November 2010 is so vitally important, and so hard to predict. 4 July has come and gone. Traditionally, there is a political and electoral truce from Independence Day until Labor Day at the beginning of September, leaving two months for the electoral season. There are signs that that tradition is being ignored this year, partly because the mid-term prospects are at once so important and so hard to predict.
If the Democrats survive the 2010 elections without major losses, it may be that Barack Obama will move relatively boldly to tackle the problem Paul Volcker has identified. If the turbulent political waters reinforce the president’s instinct for caution, his own prospects of winning a second term must be in doubt.
In a future column, I will try to read the mid-term runes. Already, it is clear that the United States is fast approaching a exceptional set of political decisions that will have lasting consequences for its society.
David Mark, Onovo and the Kidnappers
Daniel Elombah
The Senate President David Mark canvassing for the declaration of emergency rule in states where the incident of kidnapping is rampant has added a new dimension to the discussion on kidnapping in the wake of the Kidnap of four journalists in Abia State.
The problem here is that David Mark earns N83 million per month but berates these Kidnappers lured into the trade by unemployment.
Also, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Mr. Ogbonna Onovo has admitted that there were lapses in the operation of policemen in the South-east but warned that it would not be tolerated any longer.
But the IGP admitted that his men were complicit in the kidnapping menace that has affected the South-East states economically and socially.
Chairman Lagos State Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), Wahab Oba, Secretary of Zone G Adolphus Okonkwo, Acting Secretary Lagos State Council Sylvester Okereke and Sola Oyeyipo were abducted last Sunday along Ikot-Ekpene- Aba road on their way from Akwa-Ibom State after an NUJ function.
Information available to elombah.com from eye witness accounts the group had just passed a police checkpoint before the incident occurred, the IGP should go beyond hypocritically lambasting the Commissioner of Police in Abia State and tell us his plan for dealing with the involvement of our policemen in this crime.
From the accounts of other journalist that escaped capture in the hands of the kidnappers, one of the guns they saw the criminals carrying was bearing police colours.
Bottom line we now have criminals neck-deep within our security services.
Instead of advancing legislations to create a modern public safety system for Nigeria as one who heads the countryรข€™s premier law making body, David Mark's recommends declaring a state of emergency which shows that the man is a heinous clown!
Of course he has his wall of security men, and drives around in bullet proof cars and doesn't care about the level of crime in the country.
Mark made his view on kidnapping known yesterday while considering a motion on the rising insecurity in the country.
รข€ลIf the federal government can declare a state of emergency in the power sector to get power back, it should as well declare a state of emergency in all these areas where we have armed robbery and kidnapping,รข€ said Mark.
He also called for the resignation of any police commissioner in whose jurisdiction kidnapping and armed robbery thrives. According to him, รข€ลA police commissioner canรข€™t sit down in a place and these things are happening; he must be told in clear terms that he has failed and if a man failed he should not remain on the seat there for us to be getting excuses from him."
But he needs to go further than mere palliatives.
The latest news is that Nigeria is inviting DETECTIVES from MOSSAD, the dreaded Israeli intelligence agency, in a last ditch effort by the Federal Government to free five journalists and two others from the camp of kidnappers.
So if these kidnappers can kidnap 4 journalist and the Police IG with his deputies relocated to Abia state and gave 24 hours mandate ,then this boys still refused to buldge and at the expiration of the mandate ,Nigeria has to import mossad; that means that very soon ,this Kidnappers will kidnap our Senators, Reps and Governors and there is nothing the police will do ,may be that time they will call CIA or MI5.
We agree with David Mark that รข€ลall those involved in kidnapping, sponsoring or supplying of arms to the perpetrators of these act must be treated like the kidnappers. Such people should be dealt with in a way and manner that would deter them from every contemplating the act againรข€.
Mark condemned the tendency to blame unemployment for the current upsurge in kidnapping in the South-east. รข€ลUnemployment is just a handy excuse by the perpetrators, " he argued. He said the South-east and South-south are not the only regions with unemployment problem in the country.
But the glaring fact is that kidnapping is not restricted to the South-East, The other parts of the country are also groaning in pain under the menace of this heinous crime.
The new favorite crime in Nigeria reared its ugly head in Kano with the kidnapping of a multi-millionaire businessman, Alhaji Salisu Mataba, at about 7.00 p.m. on Sunday, 11th July 2010.
Alhaji Mataba was abducted from his family home at Kurna Baba Line, Kano, by gunmen who were later paid รข‚¦80 million in ransom.
The FG needs to create a database of the unemployed with a view to paying some kind of stipend in addition to identifying employment opportunities.
The Federal Government should set employment quota for companies that it awards contracts. The statement credited to Senate President David Mark that unemployment is not a justification for crimes is very irresponsible when he has nothing to justify the scandalous salary of senators.
In addition to the regular and legitimate salaries and allowances of N17 million and N14.99 million which senators and reps were collecting yearly and the irregular allowance of estacodes, duty tours etc; they were also collecting N192m and N140m respectively in illicit quarterly allocation.
The Senate President David Mark alone takes N250 million quarterly or N83.33 million per month. Senate Deputy President Ike Ekweremadu gets N150 million per quarter or N50 million a month.
Surveys of salaries and benefits of public office holders from the Baltic to the Bahamas, the Americas and the Far East and everywhere else, has showed that Ministers and Federal Legislators in Nigeria are the highest paid in the world, despite the country being among the poorest in terms of per capita income, security, social provision and living standards. On the other hand, Nigerian workers are one of the lowest paid in the world.
In Nigeria, political offices are often seen as a get-rich-quick avenue because the legitimate salaries and benefits are enormous and are probably unobtainable elsewhere in the system. Another reason is that politicians can also meddle with the public funds with impunity.
Is it any wonder that this get-rich-quick by all means attitude has trickled down to the entire populace?
The result is the explosion in the incidence of kidnapping that we are witnessing today.
Rather than talk down on the people of the South-East and the South-South, The Senate president should start by cutting down on his illicit salary and curb corruption amount the members of his political class.
After that has been done, they should get down to work and enact enabling laws to give effect to such policies as:
1. Assignment of Phone SIM cards is tied to a verifiable ID such as state or National ID. The police should also have devised the technology to track GSM numbers used by the kidnappers to contact their victimsรข€™ relations.
2. The Federal Road Safety Commission needs to create a national driver license database because there is none and this is scandalous.
3. There also needs to be a national database for vehicle registration tags.
4. A proper and corrupt-free census and national ID card scheme should carefully conducted to have a verifiable address and identity of all Nigerians.
5. The states and local governments should partner with the Nigeria Police by providing infrastructural support such as transportation and buildings managed by these governments. Or better still State Police should be allowed.
6. Following from this we need to look seriously at the issue of decentralizing our police force and we should have state police. Although there are strong arguments against this, but because of the situation we now find ourselves in makes state police imperative.
7. Public safety communication centres that will receive and process emergency calls and coordinate with police command and control centres and other public safety response agencies should be provided.
8. The entire Police Force should be overhauled. A brand new Police that will make up a new enlightened and properly remunerated policemen and women should be created.
9. Community vigilante groups such as Bakkasi should be allowed and properly regulated.
Elombah.com condemn in strong terms the perennial and escalating state of insecurity across the country and we urge the security services to fish out the people behind the kidnap of the 4 journalists and bring them to justice.
We note that kidnapping, armed robbery attacks and assassinations are getting out of hand, and no part of Nigeria appears to be immune from the menace.
It is sad to note that the Police and other relevant security agencies seem to be impotent and bereft of ideas on how to contain these security lapses. Despite the gigantic annual budgetary allocations to the security agencies, no tangible result is realized and there is palpable failure of intelligence gathering.
It is equally unfortunate that criminals and kidnappers would pick their victims in Abia and pass through Imo to Anambra without being apprehended by the Police who mount road blocks at every check point.
How our Policemen be at the multitude of road-blocks and criminals and kidnappers still operate and drive through highways without being caught by the Police?
That is an indication of serious lapses in the system.
We also note that the impact of the insecurity of lives and properties is รข€ลsending waves of fear to prospective foreign investors and tourists thereby putting spanners in Nigeriaรข€™s quest for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council."
We call for the overhaul of the nationรข€™s security apparatus as we wonder why the policemen has never arrested these kidnappers on the highroad whereas these hoodlums drive with their captives on those roads strewn with police check points.
We note that there is a direct correlation between the deteriorating security situation in the country and the collapse of the economy.
We support the involvement of traditional ruler in finding a solution.
We urge all tiers of government to tackle poverty level by creating employment opportunities.
We do not support the introduction of capital punishment for kidnappers for that merely begs the solution.
The Senate President David Mark canvassing for the declaration of emergency rule in states where the incident of kidnapping is rampant has added a new dimension to the discussion on kidnapping in the wake of the Kidnap of four journalists in Abia State.
The problem here is that David Mark earns N83 million per month but berates these Kidnappers lured into the trade by unemployment.
Also, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Mr. Ogbonna Onovo has admitted that there were lapses in the operation of policemen in the South-east but warned that it would not be tolerated any longer.
But the IGP admitted that his men were complicit in the kidnapping menace that has affected the South-East states economically and socially.
Chairman Lagos State Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), Wahab Oba, Secretary of Zone G Adolphus Okonkwo, Acting Secretary Lagos State Council Sylvester Okereke and Sola Oyeyipo were abducted last Sunday along Ikot-Ekpene- Aba road on their way from Akwa-Ibom State after an NUJ function.
Information available to elombah.com from eye witness accounts the group had just passed a police checkpoint before the incident occurred, the IGP should go beyond hypocritically lambasting the Commissioner of Police in Abia State and tell us his plan for dealing with the involvement of our policemen in this crime.
From the accounts of other journalist that escaped capture in the hands of the kidnappers, one of the guns they saw the criminals carrying was bearing police colours.
Bottom line we now have criminals neck-deep within our security services.
Instead of advancing legislations to create a modern public safety system for Nigeria as one who heads the countryรข€™s premier law making body, David Mark's recommends declaring a state of emergency which shows that the man is a heinous clown!
Of course he has his wall of security men, and drives around in bullet proof cars and doesn't care about the level of crime in the country.
Mark made his view on kidnapping known yesterday while considering a motion on the rising insecurity in the country.
รข€ลIf the federal government can declare a state of emergency in the power sector to get power back, it should as well declare a state of emergency in all these areas where we have armed robbery and kidnapping,รข€ said Mark.
He also called for the resignation of any police commissioner in whose jurisdiction kidnapping and armed robbery thrives. According to him, รข€ลA police commissioner canรข€™t sit down in a place and these things are happening; he must be told in clear terms that he has failed and if a man failed he should not remain on the seat there for us to be getting excuses from him."
But he needs to go further than mere palliatives.
The latest news is that Nigeria is inviting DETECTIVES from MOSSAD, the dreaded Israeli intelligence agency, in a last ditch effort by the Federal Government to free five journalists and two others from the camp of kidnappers.
So if these kidnappers can kidnap 4 journalist and the Police IG with his deputies relocated to Abia state and gave 24 hours mandate ,then this boys still refused to buldge and at the expiration of the mandate ,Nigeria has to import mossad; that means that very soon ,this Kidnappers will kidnap our Senators, Reps and Governors and there is nothing the police will do ,may be that time they will call CIA or MI5.
We agree with David Mark that รข€ลall those involved in kidnapping, sponsoring or supplying of arms to the perpetrators of these act must be treated like the kidnappers. Such people should be dealt with in a way and manner that would deter them from every contemplating the act againรข€.
Mark condemned the tendency to blame unemployment for the current upsurge in kidnapping in the South-east. รข€ลUnemployment is just a handy excuse by the perpetrators, " he argued. He said the South-east and South-south are not the only regions with unemployment problem in the country.
But the glaring fact is that kidnapping is not restricted to the South-East, The other parts of the country are also groaning in pain under the menace of this heinous crime.
The new favorite crime in Nigeria reared its ugly head in Kano with the kidnapping of a multi-millionaire businessman, Alhaji Salisu Mataba, at about 7.00 p.m. on Sunday, 11th July 2010.
Alhaji Mataba was abducted from his family home at Kurna Baba Line, Kano, by gunmen who were later paid รข‚¦80 million in ransom.
The FG needs to create a database of the unemployed with a view to paying some kind of stipend in addition to identifying employment opportunities.
The Federal Government should set employment quota for companies that it awards contracts. The statement credited to Senate President David Mark that unemployment is not a justification for crimes is very irresponsible when he has nothing to justify the scandalous salary of senators.
In addition to the regular and legitimate salaries and allowances of N17 million and N14.99 million which senators and reps were collecting yearly and the irregular allowance of estacodes, duty tours etc; they were also collecting N192m and N140m respectively in illicit quarterly allocation.
The Senate President David Mark alone takes N250 million quarterly or N83.33 million per month. Senate Deputy President Ike Ekweremadu gets N150 million per quarter or N50 million a month.
Surveys of salaries and benefits of public office holders from the Baltic to the Bahamas, the Americas and the Far East and everywhere else, has showed that Ministers and Federal Legislators in Nigeria are the highest paid in the world, despite the country being among the poorest in terms of per capita income, security, social provision and living standards. On the other hand, Nigerian workers are one of the lowest paid in the world.
In Nigeria, political offices are often seen as a get-rich-quick avenue because the legitimate salaries and benefits are enormous and are probably unobtainable elsewhere in the system. Another reason is that politicians can also meddle with the public funds with impunity.
Is it any wonder that this get-rich-quick by all means attitude has trickled down to the entire populace?
The result is the explosion in the incidence of kidnapping that we are witnessing today.
Rather than talk down on the people of the South-East and the South-South, The Senate president should start by cutting down on his illicit salary and curb corruption amount the members of his political class.
After that has been done, they should get down to work and enact enabling laws to give effect to such policies as:
1. Assignment of Phone SIM cards is tied to a verifiable ID such as state or National ID. The police should also have devised the technology to track GSM numbers used by the kidnappers to contact their victimsรข€™ relations.
2. The Federal Road Safety Commission needs to create a national driver license database because there is none and this is scandalous.
3. There also needs to be a national database for vehicle registration tags.
4. A proper and corrupt-free census and national ID card scheme should carefully conducted to have a verifiable address and identity of all Nigerians.
5. The states and local governments should partner with the Nigeria Police by providing infrastructural support such as transportation and buildings managed by these governments. Or better still State Police should be allowed.
6. Following from this we need to look seriously at the issue of decentralizing our police force and we should have state police. Although there are strong arguments against this, but because of the situation we now find ourselves in makes state police imperative.
7. Public safety communication centres that will receive and process emergency calls and coordinate with police command and control centres and other public safety response agencies should be provided.
8. The entire Police Force should be overhauled. A brand new Police that will make up a new enlightened and properly remunerated policemen and women should be created.
9. Community vigilante groups such as Bakkasi should be allowed and properly regulated.
Elombah.com condemn in strong terms the perennial and escalating state of insecurity across the country and we urge the security services to fish out the people behind the kidnap of the 4 journalists and bring them to justice.
We note that kidnapping, armed robbery attacks and assassinations are getting out of hand, and no part of Nigeria appears to be immune from the menace.
It is sad to note that the Police and other relevant security agencies seem to be impotent and bereft of ideas on how to contain these security lapses. Despite the gigantic annual budgetary allocations to the security agencies, no tangible result is realized and there is palpable failure of intelligence gathering.
It is equally unfortunate that criminals and kidnappers would pick their victims in Abia and pass through Imo to Anambra without being apprehended by the Police who mount road blocks at every check point.
How our Policemen be at the multitude of road-blocks and criminals and kidnappers still operate and drive through highways without being caught by the Police?
That is an indication of serious lapses in the system.
We also note that the impact of the insecurity of lives and properties is รข€ลsending waves of fear to prospective foreign investors and tourists thereby putting spanners in Nigeriaรข€™s quest for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council."
We call for the overhaul of the nationรข€™s security apparatus as we wonder why the policemen has never arrested these kidnappers on the highroad whereas these hoodlums drive with their captives on those roads strewn with police check points.
We note that there is a direct correlation between the deteriorating security situation in the country and the collapse of the economy.
We support the involvement of traditional ruler in finding a solution.
We urge all tiers of government to tackle poverty level by creating employment opportunities.
We do not support the introduction of capital punishment for kidnappers for that merely begs the solution.
French scientists crack secrets of Mona Lisa
ANGELA DOLAND
The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze - a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality.
Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday.
The technique, called "sfumato," allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings.
The French researchers used a noninvasive technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study the paint layers and their chemical composition.
They brought their specially developed high-tech tool into the museum when it was closed and studied the portraits' faces, which are emblematic of sfumato. The project was developed in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.
The tool is so precise that "now we can find out the mix of pigments used by the artist for each coat of paint," Walter told The Associated Press. "And that's very, very important for understanding the technique."
The analysis of the various paintings also shows da Vinci was constantly trying out new methods, Walter said. In the "Mona Lisa," da Vinci used manganese oxide in his shadings. In others, he used copper. Often he used glazes, but not always.
The results were published Wednesday in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a chemistry journal.
Tradition holds that the "Mona Lisa" is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that da Vinci started painting it in 1503. Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century painter and biographer of da Vinci and other artists, wrote that the perfectionist da Vinci worked on it for four years.
The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze - a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality.
Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday.
The technique, called "sfumato," allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings.
The French researchers used a noninvasive technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study the paint layers and their chemical composition.
They brought their specially developed high-tech tool into the museum when it was closed and studied the portraits' faces, which are emblematic of sfumato. The project was developed in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.
The tool is so precise that "now we can find out the mix of pigments used by the artist for each coat of paint," Walter told The Associated Press. "And that's very, very important for understanding the technique."
The analysis of the various paintings also shows da Vinci was constantly trying out new methods, Walter said. In the "Mona Lisa," da Vinci used manganese oxide in his shadings. In others, he used copper. Often he used glazes, but not always.
The results were published Wednesday in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a chemistry journal.
Tradition holds that the "Mona Lisa" is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that da Vinci started painting it in 1503. Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century painter and biographer of da Vinci and other artists, wrote that the perfectionist da Vinci worked on it for four years.
2011 DELTA NORTH SENTORIAL RACE: PRINCE NED NWOKO BEGS ELECTORATES FOR VOTES
* PROMISES TO BE THE MESSIAH THE DISTRICT HAS BEEN SEEKING FOR.
* THROWS DIRTY DART AT ROLES OF HIS OPPONENTS AT THE PAST ELECTIONS.
* PROCLAIMS ONE MAN ONE VOTE PHILOSOPHY AS HIS BASIS OF VICTORY AT THE POLLS.
* BLAMES PAST PDP NATIONAL LEADERSHIP FOR THE POOR PERFORMANCE OF THE PARTY IN DELTA NORTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT.
* ENCOURAGES THE ELECTORATES AT THE GRASS-ROOT TO ACTIVELY ENGAGE IN THE ELECTORAL PROCESS AND SAFE-GUARD THEIR VOTE AT ALL COST
DELTA GUBER RACE: OMO-AGEGE BANKS HOPE ON THE GRASS-ROOT.....HOW FAR CAN HE GET?
* Challenges the Anioma Nation to step up to the guber race, because their have capable hands
* Challenges Gov. Uduaghan to present one Project planed and executed to completion by his government
Mark Denies Calling For State Of Emergency In South East
EMMA UCHE
President of the Senate, Senator David Mark has denied reports that he called for the declaration of a state of emergency in the South-Eastern states.
Mark who has come under criticism over reports credited to him, that he called for the declaration of a state of emergency in the South East, also debunked allegations that he betrayed an emotion that suggests hatred for the Igbos.
An obviously distraught Mark described the said the allegation by the Ohaneze Ndigbo, Lagos and Obi-Igbo organization as misplaced adding that the such accusation, which is premised on reports that he called for the declaration of state of emergency in the South East because of the raging kidnapping cases is at best absurd and repugnant.
In a statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Paul Mumeh, Mark said the statement credited to one Oliver Akabueze of Ohaneze Ndigbo, Lagos Chapter and Chief Charles Ahize, who claimed to be the leader of Obigbo published in The Sun newspaper of Saturday were pure mischief and tantamount to blackmail.
"First, the President of the Senate, worried like any other responsible leader, condemned the increasing cases of kidnapping and urged that necessary measures be put in place to halt the trend. The abnormal situation occasioned by this development should worry every right thinking member of the society. For avoidance of doubt, the President of the Senate did not call for a state of emergency in the South-Eastern states nor did he display an emotion to suggest his hatred for the Igbos", he said.
Senator Mark's submission it could be recalled followed a motion moved by Senator Anthony Manzo and 16 others on the state of insecurity in the country compounded by the cases of kidnapping.
Mark also clarified his thoughts in his statement saying, "I think there is a requirement for the Federal government, the state governments and the local governments to come together and arrest the cases of kidnapping. The way I see it, if we can declare a state of emergency on this kidnapping and armed robbery that are going on, we can arrest the situation.
"The Federal government has really declared state emergency to get power back and it should, in similar vein, declare a state of emergency in all areas where we have armed robbery and kidnapping. I think, we have a misconception on the issue of state of emergency. It does not mean that we should remove the governor and then take over. No! Federal government, even in our constitution can declare a state of emergency and they have done so in power sector, we should do so for kidnapping and armed robbery.
"No one should agree less that we all in danger of this twin menace if armed robbery and kidnapping are not brought to an end. I think this is a wrong time to pretend about this matter or reduce it to ethnic issue. It is a national embarrassment and all rational human beings must stand up and be counted among those who stopped these evils.
"Crime of any kind is condemnable and there should be no sentiment expressed. So, Akubuezes and Ahizes who are championing ethnic card should re-examine themselves whether kidnapping and robbery should become acceptable ways of life", he said.
President of the Senate, Senator David Mark has denied reports that he called for the declaration of a state of emergency in the South-Eastern states.
Mark who has come under criticism over reports credited to him, that he called for the declaration of a state of emergency in the South East, also debunked allegations that he betrayed an emotion that suggests hatred for the Igbos.
An obviously distraught Mark described the said the allegation by the Ohaneze Ndigbo, Lagos and Obi-Igbo organization as misplaced adding that the such accusation, which is premised on reports that he called for the declaration of state of emergency in the South East because of the raging kidnapping cases is at best absurd and repugnant.
In a statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Paul Mumeh, Mark said the statement credited to one Oliver Akabueze of Ohaneze Ndigbo, Lagos Chapter and Chief Charles Ahize, who claimed to be the leader of Obigbo published in The Sun newspaper of Saturday were pure mischief and tantamount to blackmail.
"First, the President of the Senate, worried like any other responsible leader, condemned the increasing cases of kidnapping and urged that necessary measures be put in place to halt the trend. The abnormal situation occasioned by this development should worry every right thinking member of the society. For avoidance of doubt, the President of the Senate did not call for a state of emergency in the South-Eastern states nor did he display an emotion to suggest his hatred for the Igbos", he said.
Senator Mark's submission it could be recalled followed a motion moved by Senator Anthony Manzo and 16 others on the state of insecurity in the country compounded by the cases of kidnapping.
Mark also clarified his thoughts in his statement saying, "I think there is a requirement for the Federal government, the state governments and the local governments to come together and arrest the cases of kidnapping. The way I see it, if we can declare a state of emergency on this kidnapping and armed robbery that are going on, we can arrest the situation.
"The Federal government has really declared state emergency to get power back and it should, in similar vein, declare a state of emergency in all areas where we have armed robbery and kidnapping. I think, we have a misconception on the issue of state of emergency. It does not mean that we should remove the governor and then take over. No! Federal government, even in our constitution can declare a state of emergency and they have done so in power sector, we should do so for kidnapping and armed robbery.
"No one should agree less that we all in danger of this twin menace if armed robbery and kidnapping are not brought to an end. I think this is a wrong time to pretend about this matter or reduce it to ethnic issue. It is a national embarrassment and all rational human beings must stand up and be counted among those who stopped these evils.
"Crime of any kind is condemnable and there should be no sentiment expressed. So, Akubuezes and Ahizes who are championing ethnic card should re-examine themselves whether kidnapping and robbery should become acceptable ways of life", he said.
Bomb kills 3 in Afghan capital ahead of conference
RAHIM FAIEZ
A suicide bomber slipped through the Afghan capital's tight security ring Sunday, killing three civilians near a busy market two days before an international conference hosting representatives from about 60 nations, officials said.
An American service member died in a roadside bombing in the south and other weekend attacks left 11 Afghans dead, reports said, as the Taliban meet the arrival of thousands more U.S. troops this year with a rising tide of violence.
The Kabul bomber was on foot near the market and his target was unclear, police official Abdul Ghafor Sayedzada said.
Hospitals reported three civilians killed, including a child, public health official Kabir Amiri said. Health ministry spokesman Ghulam Sakhi Kargar said about 45 people were wounded.
University student Tamim Ahmad said he saw a man on foot run up to a passing convoy of international troops and detonate an explosives-laden vest. However, Afghan authorities and NATO said no international troops were operating in the area at the time of the attack, which the international force condemned.
"The insurgents have chosen to use violence to gain media attention, once again at the expense of innocent Afghan civilians," said Col. William Maxwell, director of the Combined Joint Operations Center for the NATO-led force.
Security has been tightened across the capital ahead of Tuesday's Kabul Conference, which will be attended by the heads of NATO and the United Nations and top diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The meeting — held nearly nine years after U.S.-backed forces toppled the Taliban's regime of extreme Islamic law for sheltering al-Qaida terrorist leaders — is to discuss the country's reconstruction and eventual handing over of all security to the Afghan government.
Thousands of Afghan police were setting up checkpoints and patrolling Kabul trying to prevent any insurgent attack on the meeting or its delegates. Afghan and international officials said Saturday that authorities had arrested a Taliban bomb-maker involved in a plot to attack the conference, but they gave no details.
In May, the Taliban briefly disrupted a national peace conference in Kabul with rocket-propelled grenades that landed about 100 yards (meters) from the site of the gathering, and insurgents also waged a gunbattle with police outside the meeting. Three civilians, but no conference delegates, were wounded.
The NATO-led international force is being bolstered by 30,000 more American troops this year, and allied forces say they have captured or killed dozens of Taliban leaders in recent months. However, their tactics have not been able to reduce insurgent attacks, which have intensified this year across the country.
An intercepted memo from Afghan Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar indicates the Islamist militants are gearing up for a long fight.
Omar, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan, urges his followers to obtain more heavy weapons and to assassinate or kidnap any Afghans — especially women — working with President Hamid Karzai's government, NATO said Sunday.
The Taliban also staged a brazen jailbreak Sunday in the western province of Farah, where a smuggled bomb exploded at a prison, allowing 11 inmates — including suspected insurgents — to escape from the facility that held about 350, officials said.
A guard died in that blast and one inmate was shot and killed while fleeing, said provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Faqir Askir.
In the key southern city of Kandahar, where international forces are preparing a push to wrest control of Taliban-dominated areas, two police officers and a civilian died Sunday morning when a roadside bomb exploded near a hospital, local police chief Sadar Mohammad Zazai said.
Also Sunday, a car bomb exploded near the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, but killed only the suicide attacker, who was unable to get near either Bagram Air Field or a convoy carrying an international reconstruction team, said Gen. Abdul Rahman Sayedkhail, police chief of Parwan province.
A Taliban spokesman for the area, Zabiullah Majahid, claimed the Parwan bomb killed 12 Americans. The insurgents often exaggerate death tolls of their enemies for propaganda purposes.
In the south on Saturday, four Afghan policemen died when insurgents attacked a checkpoint in Gereshk district of Helmand province, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said Sunday.
The Ministry of Defense also said one Afghan soldier died and another was wounded in Sabari district of Khost province Saturday after their vehicle hit a roadside bomb.
An American service member was killed Sunday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, a NATO statement said. So far in July, 55 international troops have died in Afghanistan, 40 of them American. Last month was the deadliest of the war for the multinational forces, with 103 killed.
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden argued Sunday that the rising U.S. death toll does not mean that the new counterinsurgency strategy for the war is failing.
Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Biden said most military strategists expected the summer months to be especially deadly because coalition forces are more frequently engaging the insurgents. He said the "surge" in troops should be given time to work.
"All of this is just beginning. And we knew it was going to be a tough slog," Biden said. "But I think it's much too premature to make a judgment until the military said we should look at it, which is in December."
A suicide bomber slipped through the Afghan capital's tight security ring Sunday, killing three civilians near a busy market two days before an international conference hosting representatives from about 60 nations, officials said.
An American service member died in a roadside bombing in the south and other weekend attacks left 11 Afghans dead, reports said, as the Taliban meet the arrival of thousands more U.S. troops this year with a rising tide of violence.
The Kabul bomber was on foot near the market and his target was unclear, police official Abdul Ghafor Sayedzada said.
Hospitals reported three civilians killed, including a child, public health official Kabir Amiri said. Health ministry spokesman Ghulam Sakhi Kargar said about 45 people were wounded.
University student Tamim Ahmad said he saw a man on foot run up to a passing convoy of international troops and detonate an explosives-laden vest. However, Afghan authorities and NATO said no international troops were operating in the area at the time of the attack, which the international force condemned.
"The insurgents have chosen to use violence to gain media attention, once again at the expense of innocent Afghan civilians," said Col. William Maxwell, director of the Combined Joint Operations Center for the NATO-led force.
Security has been tightened across the capital ahead of Tuesday's Kabul Conference, which will be attended by the heads of NATO and the United Nations and top diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The meeting — held nearly nine years after U.S.-backed forces toppled the Taliban's regime of extreme Islamic law for sheltering al-Qaida terrorist leaders — is to discuss the country's reconstruction and eventual handing over of all security to the Afghan government.
Thousands of Afghan police were setting up checkpoints and patrolling Kabul trying to prevent any insurgent attack on the meeting or its delegates. Afghan and international officials said Saturday that authorities had arrested a Taliban bomb-maker involved in a plot to attack the conference, but they gave no details.
In May, the Taliban briefly disrupted a national peace conference in Kabul with rocket-propelled grenades that landed about 100 yards (meters) from the site of the gathering, and insurgents also waged a gunbattle with police outside the meeting. Three civilians, but no conference delegates, were wounded.
The NATO-led international force is being bolstered by 30,000 more American troops this year, and allied forces say they have captured or killed dozens of Taliban leaders in recent months. However, their tactics have not been able to reduce insurgent attacks, which have intensified this year across the country.
An intercepted memo from Afghan Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar indicates the Islamist militants are gearing up for a long fight.
Omar, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan, urges his followers to obtain more heavy weapons and to assassinate or kidnap any Afghans — especially women — working with President Hamid Karzai's government, NATO said Sunday.
The Taliban also staged a brazen jailbreak Sunday in the western province of Farah, where a smuggled bomb exploded at a prison, allowing 11 inmates — including suspected insurgents — to escape from the facility that held about 350, officials said.
A guard died in that blast and one inmate was shot and killed while fleeing, said provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Faqir Askir.
In the key southern city of Kandahar, where international forces are preparing a push to wrest control of Taliban-dominated areas, two police officers and a civilian died Sunday morning when a roadside bomb exploded near a hospital, local police chief Sadar Mohammad Zazai said.
Also Sunday, a car bomb exploded near the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, but killed only the suicide attacker, who was unable to get near either Bagram Air Field or a convoy carrying an international reconstruction team, said Gen. Abdul Rahman Sayedkhail, police chief of Parwan province.
A Taliban spokesman for the area, Zabiullah Majahid, claimed the Parwan bomb killed 12 Americans. The insurgents often exaggerate death tolls of their enemies for propaganda purposes.
In the south on Saturday, four Afghan policemen died when insurgents attacked a checkpoint in Gereshk district of Helmand province, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said Sunday.
The Ministry of Defense also said one Afghan soldier died and another was wounded in Sabari district of Khost province Saturday after their vehicle hit a roadside bomb.
An American service member was killed Sunday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, a NATO statement said. So far in July, 55 international troops have died in Afghanistan, 40 of them American. Last month was the deadliest of the war for the multinational forces, with 103 killed.
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden argued Sunday that the rising U.S. death toll does not mean that the new counterinsurgency strategy for the war is failing.
Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Biden said most military strategists expected the summer months to be especially deadly because coalition forces are more frequently engaging the insurgents. He said the "surge" in troops should be given time to work.
"All of this is just beginning. And we knew it was going to be a tough slog," Biden said. "But I think it's much too premature to make a judgment until the military said we should look at it, which is in December."
ADDRESSING THE SECURITY SITUATION IN NIGERIA
NWOKEDI NWORISARA
Lately the security situation in Nigeria appears to be getting out of hand. Kidnapping has become rampant. People are uneasy starting from the President who proposed using the army to tackle it down to the ordinary man on the street whose only weapon is prayer. To tackle kidnapping will entail that we do a thorough soul searching of our past to find out where we went wrong in our policies with a view to ameliorating the situation. Every problem confronting a country arises from what it does wrong or what it allows the outsiders to do wrong to it. When bad policies accumulate it becomes a visible problem. You tackle it by acceptance not denial. You can then deal with the symptoms with confidence that the root causes will not replicate.
Kidnapping has a psychology that what belongs to one person can be possessed by another and enjoyed as if it was legal. It defines the total breakdown of law and order in a society where this crime is rampant. It shows there is presently no strong and existing legal value that is enforceable in such a society. It is an indication that security and enforcement is not working or is corrupted from within. On the other level of analysis where a security system is in place and working, its preponderance indicates there is multiplicity of other parallel bodies doing the same thing but ineffectually. It may also mean that there is confusion in the enabling laws or in the constitution which evens the splinters are trying to take advantage of. If there exist a central enforcement body guided by clear cut rules of engagement, then we can lay all blames on its table, but is there?
Let us look at the situation closely. The constitution has defined the right of the Nigerian citizen to self defense but has denied him the right to arm himself or rather the constitution guaranteed it but the advent of military rule expunged it or rather twisted it making it difficult for Nigerians to carry arms for self defense. It extends to the states as well. The constitution grants States power and authority but denies them enforcement arms that are independent of central authority even when slightly different laws may exist in the states. It goes on to the third tier of government the local councils as well. Now can you imagine the confusion that exists already because whether you like it or not these governments and individual players must find a way to enforce their constitutional given independent authorities and powers by keeping independent militias or creating factions in the central policing authority, what you call corruption for want of a better definition.
The question is what happens to these separate enforcement arms when the owners get out of power? What happens to them when the owners are about to get into power? What happens to them when security votes increase to as much as N500 million per month for some governors and as much as N20 million for local government heads or even so called constituency votes running into millions for legislators and their aids. You have a desirable confusion of contending militias who are bound to act outside the purview of existing laws even if the laws were stable. Now consider also that Nigeria had gone through a successful privatization during President Obasanjoรข€™s 8 years in power. Much of the choice public properties and assets now rest in private hands. So if you were illiterate you only begin to understand that those property you used to see as public is now private. Coupled with this is the growing private sector security build up by those who can afford it. Consider also that these private ventures have also privatized the nationally collected security information which they need to secure erstwhile public now private concerns. And this security information gathering tactics are now shared by private militias making no one a monopoly of critical information especially on movement of persons they target. Now tapping of GSM phones and blocking of internet sites, mails, computers or the airwaves of broadcast stations is a childรข€™s play every one can perform. It used to be exclusive to the SSS and the police and the army but it appears privatized too.
It is even worse for instance when you have to privatize NITEL and after sometime you change your mind. Now you know how it gets accepted in the minds of those who do not have to know what you are doing. The impression is that there is no need to work hard on our own. Young people begin to see their commonwealth in the hands of few. They begin to think they can acquire wealth by taking away from the haves because they see wealth as privatized public property. On the other hands faced with he highest unemployment rate in any country in the world, young people are easily recruited into these private militias and they learn from the flimsy reasons given by their employers for eliminating their political or business opponents. When their employer gets out of power or no longer able to meet their rising demands they move on to other employers.
Today most state governments have their security outfits that are nationally unrecognized except by their state Assemblies; the same state assemblies that recognize Shari as laws. You can imagine the push and pull going on in the Nigerian constitution but our executive and legislators are so blind that they do not see these cleavages. They are more concerned with appropriating more money to maintain the ever growing demands of their private militias aimed at the 2011 elections.
Now how can we explain to them the need for restructured political system or the need for a better constitution when the system has become set for the consequences of wrong policies as we approach the object of these sturings-2011 elections? You can begin to appreciate the upsurge of kidnapping in Nigeria. It is known as political deterrence. In the Nigerian political system of the skewed variety of today critical political decisions are concluded now in the spiritual to enable manifestation come about in 2011. Now all attempts are made to deter opponents from carrying out their ambitions to run against certain candidates in the elections.
As I read it others who may fund certain candidates are also deterred by ridding them of their financial base. It could be their children, their parents or in-laws. These actions are always emanating from top political party men and even States but since it is illegal everything is regarded as kidnapping or armed robbery even when performed by uniformed men acting in collaboration with constituted authorities. That is the extent of the confusion that exists today in Nigeria. My intention of exposing this is to prove to doubters the evil we do ourselves when we refuse to change extant policies and the moribund constitution to address fundamental issues; when we fold our hands from facing reality because we happen today to be in power. The destiny of this country is the collective responsibility of all of us whether we recognize it now or only later on
Lately the security situation in Nigeria appears to be getting out of hand. Kidnapping has become rampant. People are uneasy starting from the President who proposed using the army to tackle it down to the ordinary man on the street whose only weapon is prayer. To tackle kidnapping will entail that we do a thorough soul searching of our past to find out where we went wrong in our policies with a view to ameliorating the situation. Every problem confronting a country arises from what it does wrong or what it allows the outsiders to do wrong to it. When bad policies accumulate it becomes a visible problem. You tackle it by acceptance not denial. You can then deal with the symptoms with confidence that the root causes will not replicate.
Kidnapping has a psychology that what belongs to one person can be possessed by another and enjoyed as if it was legal. It defines the total breakdown of law and order in a society where this crime is rampant. It shows there is presently no strong and existing legal value that is enforceable in such a society. It is an indication that security and enforcement is not working or is corrupted from within. On the other level of analysis where a security system is in place and working, its preponderance indicates there is multiplicity of other parallel bodies doing the same thing but ineffectually. It may also mean that there is confusion in the enabling laws or in the constitution which evens the splinters are trying to take advantage of. If there exist a central enforcement body guided by clear cut rules of engagement, then we can lay all blames on its table, but is there?
Let us look at the situation closely. The constitution has defined the right of the Nigerian citizen to self defense but has denied him the right to arm himself or rather the constitution guaranteed it but the advent of military rule expunged it or rather twisted it making it difficult for Nigerians to carry arms for self defense. It extends to the states as well. The constitution grants States power and authority but denies them enforcement arms that are independent of central authority even when slightly different laws may exist in the states. It goes on to the third tier of government the local councils as well. Now can you imagine the confusion that exists already because whether you like it or not these governments and individual players must find a way to enforce their constitutional given independent authorities and powers by keeping independent militias or creating factions in the central policing authority, what you call corruption for want of a better definition.
The question is what happens to these separate enforcement arms when the owners get out of power? What happens to them when the owners are about to get into power? What happens to them when security votes increase to as much as N500 million per month for some governors and as much as N20 million for local government heads or even so called constituency votes running into millions for legislators and their aids. You have a desirable confusion of contending militias who are bound to act outside the purview of existing laws even if the laws were stable. Now consider also that Nigeria had gone through a successful privatization during President Obasanjoรข€™s 8 years in power. Much of the choice public properties and assets now rest in private hands. So if you were illiterate you only begin to understand that those property you used to see as public is now private. Coupled with this is the growing private sector security build up by those who can afford it. Consider also that these private ventures have also privatized the nationally collected security information which they need to secure erstwhile public now private concerns. And this security information gathering tactics are now shared by private militias making no one a monopoly of critical information especially on movement of persons they target. Now tapping of GSM phones and blocking of internet sites, mails, computers or the airwaves of broadcast stations is a childรข€™s play every one can perform. It used to be exclusive to the SSS and the police and the army but it appears privatized too.
It is even worse for instance when you have to privatize NITEL and after sometime you change your mind. Now you know how it gets accepted in the minds of those who do not have to know what you are doing. The impression is that there is no need to work hard on our own. Young people begin to see their commonwealth in the hands of few. They begin to think they can acquire wealth by taking away from the haves because they see wealth as privatized public property. On the other hands faced with he highest unemployment rate in any country in the world, young people are easily recruited into these private militias and they learn from the flimsy reasons given by their employers for eliminating their political or business opponents. When their employer gets out of power or no longer able to meet their rising demands they move on to other employers.
Today most state governments have their security outfits that are nationally unrecognized except by their state Assemblies; the same state assemblies that recognize Shari as laws. You can imagine the push and pull going on in the Nigerian constitution but our executive and legislators are so blind that they do not see these cleavages. They are more concerned with appropriating more money to maintain the ever growing demands of their private militias aimed at the 2011 elections.
Now how can we explain to them the need for restructured political system or the need for a better constitution when the system has become set for the consequences of wrong policies as we approach the object of these sturings-2011 elections? You can begin to appreciate the upsurge of kidnapping in Nigeria. It is known as political deterrence. In the Nigerian political system of the skewed variety of today critical political decisions are concluded now in the spiritual to enable manifestation come about in 2011. Now all attempts are made to deter opponents from carrying out their ambitions to run against certain candidates in the elections.
As I read it others who may fund certain candidates are also deterred by ridding them of their financial base. It could be their children, their parents or in-laws. These actions are always emanating from top political party men and even States but since it is illegal everything is regarded as kidnapping or armed robbery even when performed by uniformed men acting in collaboration with constituted authorities. That is the extent of the confusion that exists today in Nigeria. My intention of exposing this is to prove to doubters the evil we do ourselves when we refuse to change extant policies and the moribund constitution to address fundamental issues; when we fold our hands from facing reality because we happen today to be in power. The destiny of this country is the collective responsibility of all of us whether we recognize it now or only later on
Clinton aims to refine goals of Afghan war
MATTHEW LEE
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton started a South Asia tour on Sunday aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old war in Afghanistan and pushing neighboring nations to work together in the fight against al-Qaida and Taliban extremists.
Clinton landed in Islamabad where she will underscore the need for Afghan-Pakistani cooperation in winning the war but also announce plans to beef up U.S. development assistance to Pakistan, which is rife with anti-American sentiment.
In talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani on Sunday and military and civilian officials on Monday, Clinton is seeking to convince Pakistanis the U.S. is committed to the country's long-term development needs and not just short-term security gains.
This, officials hope, will lead to greater Pakistani cooperation on key U.S. policy goals, particularly combatting Pakistan-based militants accused of conspiring to attack the United States, including the failed Times Square bombing, and stepping up action against extremists along the Afghan border.
"To get there we need to change the core of the relationship with Pakistan," said Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Clinton plans to announce about $500 million in several new development programs — funded by a bill approved by Congress last year to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan with $1.5 billion a year over five years — that will focus on water, energy, agriculture and health.
These initiatives will mark the second phase of projects begun under a new and enhanced "strategic partnership" that began last year.
Holbrooke noted that when Clinton visited Pakistan last October she had "waded into continually hostile and skeptical crowds." But he maintained that the new U.S. focus is "producing a change in Pakistani attitudes, first within the government and gradually, more slowly, within the public."
Still, he and other official concede, mistrust of America runs deep in Pakistan, particularly over unmanned drone strikes which are aimed at militants but kill or maim civilians and to many Pakistanis represent an unacceptable violation of sovereignty.
Vali Nasr, a Holbrooke deputy, said overcoming the suspicion remains a work in progress.
"We're beginning to see movement, but this is not going to happen overnight," he said. "We're not going to be able to get them aligned over a one-year time period on every single issue and change 30 years of foreign policy of Pakistan on a dime."
Equally important, officials say, is getting Pakistan and Afghanistan on the same page.
Holbrooke said last week that "nothing could be more important to the resolution of the war in Afghanistan than a common understanding between Afghanistan and Pakistan on what their strategic purpose is."
After Pakistan, Clinton will attend an international conference on Afghanistan in Kabul on Tuesday.
Security has been tightened across the capital ahead the conference, which will be attended by diplomats from 60 nations as well as the heads of NATO and the United Nations.
Still on Sunday, a suicide bomber in the eastern section of Kabul killed three civilians and injured dozens more.
Clinton's visit to Afghanistan comes as American lawmakers and voters are increasingly questioning the course of the drawn-out war with rising death tolls among U.S. and international troops and growing questions about corruption.
Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the infusion of tens of thousands of new U.S. troops. So far in July, 54 international troops have died, 39 of them American. An American service member was killed by a blast in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, and an American died in a blast in the south on Friday.
Later in the week, Clinton will meet up with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in South Korea, where tensions with the communist North have risen after the sinking of a South Korean warship that was blamed on the North.
She will finish her trip in Vietnam for discussions with regional leaders. Among the topics will be the upcoming elections in Myanmar.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton started a South Asia tour on Sunday aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old war in Afghanistan and pushing neighboring nations to work together in the fight against al-Qaida and Taliban extremists.
Clinton landed in Islamabad where she will underscore the need for Afghan-Pakistani cooperation in winning the war but also announce plans to beef up U.S. development assistance to Pakistan, which is rife with anti-American sentiment.
In talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani on Sunday and military and civilian officials on Monday, Clinton is seeking to convince Pakistanis the U.S. is committed to the country's long-term development needs and not just short-term security gains.
This, officials hope, will lead to greater Pakistani cooperation on key U.S. policy goals, particularly combatting Pakistan-based militants accused of conspiring to attack the United States, including the failed Times Square bombing, and stepping up action against extremists along the Afghan border.
"To get there we need to change the core of the relationship with Pakistan," said Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Clinton plans to announce about $500 million in several new development programs — funded by a bill approved by Congress last year to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan with $1.5 billion a year over five years — that will focus on water, energy, agriculture and health.
These initiatives will mark the second phase of projects begun under a new and enhanced "strategic partnership" that began last year.
Holbrooke noted that when Clinton visited Pakistan last October she had "waded into continually hostile and skeptical crowds." But he maintained that the new U.S. focus is "producing a change in Pakistani attitudes, first within the government and gradually, more slowly, within the public."
Still, he and other official concede, mistrust of America runs deep in Pakistan, particularly over unmanned drone strikes which are aimed at militants but kill or maim civilians and to many Pakistanis represent an unacceptable violation of sovereignty.
Vali Nasr, a Holbrooke deputy, said overcoming the suspicion remains a work in progress.
"We're beginning to see movement, but this is not going to happen overnight," he said. "We're not going to be able to get them aligned over a one-year time period on every single issue and change 30 years of foreign policy of Pakistan on a dime."
Equally important, officials say, is getting Pakistan and Afghanistan on the same page.
Holbrooke said last week that "nothing could be more important to the resolution of the war in Afghanistan than a common understanding between Afghanistan and Pakistan on what their strategic purpose is."
After Pakistan, Clinton will attend an international conference on Afghanistan in Kabul on Tuesday.
Security has been tightened across the capital ahead the conference, which will be attended by diplomats from 60 nations as well as the heads of NATO and the United Nations.
Still on Sunday, a suicide bomber in the eastern section of Kabul killed three civilians and injured dozens more.
Clinton's visit to Afghanistan comes as American lawmakers and voters are increasingly questioning the course of the drawn-out war with rising death tolls among U.S. and international troops and growing questions about corruption.
Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the infusion of tens of thousands of new U.S. troops. So far in July, 54 international troops have died, 39 of them American. An American service member was killed by a blast in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, and an American died in a blast in the south on Friday.
Later in the week, Clinton will meet up with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in South Korea, where tensions with the communist North have risen after the sinking of a South Korean warship that was blamed on the North.
She will finish her trip in Vietnam for discussions with regional leaders. Among the topics will be the upcoming elections in Myanmar.
Internal Security: Another Collapsed Infrastructure
Ifeanyi Izeze Friday
The unbridled kidnapping, violent armed robberies and other heinous crimes being perpetrated with impunity across the country, do not show a government that is in charge, nor a country that is at peace with itself. What are they governing if people even the poor amongst us cannot freely move around for fear of being shot dead or kidnapped? Is governance not about people (the governed) and their welfare which includes security? In a nation where almost all the infrastructures in every sector of its daily existence have completely collapsed, what remains for such a country to labeled a failed state?
Why can't this agendaless administration just zero-in on only two sectors-security and power, rather than dissipating its energy in every area without making impact in any except fraud and corruption?
Truth be told, the inactivity or the inability of the police, the State Security Service (SSS) and even the Civil Defense to be more proactive and sincere in addressing the general state of insecurity across the country is an fallout of the serial failures of our leadership on issues that affects the ordinary citizens.
It is a big shame that it took the Police IG and his high command the kidnapping of four journalists to wake up their ideas on squaring up to the now obvious national security embarrassment. Many innocent and hardworking (of also including politicians) Nigerians had faced the same or even worse fate in the past. The past action or inaction of the Federal Government especially the police could best be described as indifferent. Had the Federal Government taken a serious and decisive action initially when the kidnapping began, the kidnappers probably wouldn't have gotten this sophisticated.
From exhibited pretentious indications, it appears that this recent episode of kidnapping might be the answer to the prayer(s)of the people of this country especially from the Southeast as it seems to have stoke and spur the government to live up to its duty of providing security for its citizens.
The call by genuinely concern Nigerians especially from the south east for the re-introduction of the Bakassi Boys as a better alternative to Police and other security agencies was a clear indictment on government and the people operating it.
Unlike armed robbery which is sudden, almost unpredictable, and short timed, kidnapping is a more time-dragging enterprise that involves several rounds of calls and answers (in negotiation) between the kidnappers and their victims' contacts. It is majorly a GSM crime.
So why is the police and the SSS not taking advantage of the time span involved to, in collaboration with the telecom companies, track phone calls and use that to zero in, isolate and pinpoint localities where these criminals may be operating from? Or should we assume that such technology does not yet exist in Nigeria or assume that the police knows where the crooks are but are not interested in arresting them for whatever reason, best known to them?
The SSS in itself, in my opinion, seems to be defectively structured. The organization is supposed to be the Nigerian equivalent of the American FBI and the British MI5. How come that the Nigerian SSS functions only within and around State House, Abuja; around state governors and their government houses?
What actually is the day to day function of the SSS? What is the actual work in specific terms, of the SSS? Is it only to hound down political opponents of those misruling this country?
Is the SSS not supposed to be interfacing with the Police on exchange of intelligence? Infact do they actually gather intelligence on issues pertaining to the security of lives and property of the ordinary Nigerians apart from hanging around the President and governors? And if they do, who receive such information- the police or state governors?
If it does not exit, the now hydra-headed spate of violent armed robberies, kidnapping, even issues of human trafficking and oil bunkering, has made it pertinent for both the Police and the SSS to interface for a cooperative fight against crimes and criminals who are on daily basis becoming sophisticated for our analog and not very honest Police Force.
Anybody who has travelled to the southeast and south south in recent times would obviously agree that the people were right to ask for an alternative to the present Nigerian police. In the region where people are snatched everyday, there are police and joint military task force checkpoints at less than one kilometer intervals across the entire stretch of almost all the major interstate roads even within major towns. So no bi the rat weh deh house deh go tell the one weh deh bush say fish don enter house? Abeg, let's call a spade!
Traditional rulers are also part of this security problem. The Oba of Benin deserves a national honour for his sincere approach to tackling kidnapping and violent armed robbery in Edo state. The problem is that there are no such traditional rulers in the southeast and in the southsouth, traditional rulers have lost their respect and reverence because of oil money. The security agencies especially the SSS not Police, should thorough background check on the local chiefs and their assistants in these hot spots to find out the part(s) they play in these criminal acts. Deposing and pushing these men of high standing in the community, if they are collaborators in this criminal enterprise, would help to teach others a lesson, too. Afterall, these criminal elements live somewhere -in the town (s) where these local chiefs and their assistants rule.
Onovo's excuse that the police are very conscious of their operations in a democratic environment and must ensure accountability and responsibility in their operations, is nothing but an expression of a disabled mindset. Nobody is saying the Police should go and destroy entire village. With adequate intelligence, there shouldn't be any need for that, not even the ongoing house-house search in Obioma--ngwa area where the journalists were kidnapped.
The problem is that the police have zero capacity to gather intelligence or investigate criminal activities. Nothing best captures police expertise in this regard than a satire on the web that: There was a competition among various Nigerian security agencies on their level of intelligence gathering capabilities. Two dogs were released into a nearby bush in a fenced compound and each agency was asked to find where the dogs were. When it came to the turn of the police, they didn't even bother to enter the bush at all. The policemen simply arrested two goats, took them to their station and beat them to the stupor and the goats confessed in writing that they were the dogs the policemen were looking for.This is not funny at all. If you visit our police station you will know what I mean. As at Friday 16 July morning, over 800 kidnappers have been arrested by the Police in Ngwa area of Abia and yet no iota of clue on the where about of the four journalists. Hip! Hip! Hip; Hurray! After now, what happens next? Everybody (security agencies) will go back to sleep, abi?
IFEANYI IZEZE IS AN ABUJA-BASED CONSULTANT ON STRATEGY AND COMMUNICATION
The unbridled kidnapping, violent armed robberies and other heinous crimes being perpetrated with impunity across the country, do not show a government that is in charge, nor a country that is at peace with itself. What are they governing if people even the poor amongst us cannot freely move around for fear of being shot dead or kidnapped? Is governance not about people (the governed) and their welfare which includes security? In a nation where almost all the infrastructures in every sector of its daily existence have completely collapsed, what remains for such a country to labeled a failed state?
Why can't this agendaless administration just zero-in on only two sectors-security and power, rather than dissipating its energy in every area without making impact in any except fraud and corruption?
Truth be told, the inactivity or the inability of the police, the State Security Service (SSS) and even the Civil Defense to be more proactive and sincere in addressing the general state of insecurity across the country is an fallout of the serial failures of our leadership on issues that affects the ordinary citizens.
It is a big shame that it took the Police IG and his high command the kidnapping of four journalists to wake up their ideas on squaring up to the now obvious national security embarrassment. Many innocent and hardworking (of also including politicians) Nigerians had faced the same or even worse fate in the past. The past action or inaction of the Federal Government especially the police could best be described as indifferent. Had the Federal Government taken a serious and decisive action initially when the kidnapping began, the kidnappers probably wouldn't have gotten this sophisticated.
From exhibited pretentious indications, it appears that this recent episode of kidnapping might be the answer to the prayer(s)of the people of this country especially from the Southeast as it seems to have stoke and spur the government to live up to its duty of providing security for its citizens.
The call by genuinely concern Nigerians especially from the south east for the re-introduction of the Bakassi Boys as a better alternative to Police and other security agencies was a clear indictment on government and the people operating it.
Unlike armed robbery which is sudden, almost unpredictable, and short timed, kidnapping is a more time-dragging enterprise that involves several rounds of calls and answers (in negotiation) between the kidnappers and their victims' contacts. It is majorly a GSM crime.
So why is the police and the SSS not taking advantage of the time span involved to, in collaboration with the telecom companies, track phone calls and use that to zero in, isolate and pinpoint localities where these criminals may be operating from? Or should we assume that such technology does not yet exist in Nigeria or assume that the police knows where the crooks are but are not interested in arresting them for whatever reason, best known to them?
The SSS in itself, in my opinion, seems to be defectively structured. The organization is supposed to be the Nigerian equivalent of the American FBI and the British MI5. How come that the Nigerian SSS functions only within and around State House, Abuja; around state governors and their government houses?
What actually is the day to day function of the SSS? What is the actual work in specific terms, of the SSS? Is it only to hound down political opponents of those misruling this country?
Is the SSS not supposed to be interfacing with the Police on exchange of intelligence? Infact do they actually gather intelligence on issues pertaining to the security of lives and property of the ordinary Nigerians apart from hanging around the President and governors? And if they do, who receive such information- the police or state governors?
If it does not exit, the now hydra-headed spate of violent armed robberies, kidnapping, even issues of human trafficking and oil bunkering, has made it pertinent for both the Police and the SSS to interface for a cooperative fight against crimes and criminals who are on daily basis becoming sophisticated for our analog and not very honest Police Force.
Anybody who has travelled to the southeast and south south in recent times would obviously agree that the people were right to ask for an alternative to the present Nigerian police. In the region where people are snatched everyday, there are police and joint military task force checkpoints at less than one kilometer intervals across the entire stretch of almost all the major interstate roads even within major towns. So no bi the rat weh deh house deh go tell the one weh deh bush say fish don enter house? Abeg, let's call a spade!
Traditional rulers are also part of this security problem. The Oba of Benin deserves a national honour for his sincere approach to tackling kidnapping and violent armed robbery in Edo state. The problem is that there are no such traditional rulers in the southeast and in the southsouth, traditional rulers have lost their respect and reverence because of oil money. The security agencies especially the SSS not Police, should thorough background check on the local chiefs and their assistants in these hot spots to find out the part(s) they play in these criminal acts. Deposing and pushing these men of high standing in the community, if they are collaborators in this criminal enterprise, would help to teach others a lesson, too. Afterall, these criminal elements live somewhere -in the town (s) where these local chiefs and their assistants rule.
Onovo's excuse that the police are very conscious of their operations in a democratic environment and must ensure accountability and responsibility in their operations, is nothing but an expression of a disabled mindset. Nobody is saying the Police should go and destroy entire village. With adequate intelligence, there shouldn't be any need for that, not even the ongoing house-house search in Obioma--ngwa area where the journalists were kidnapped.
The problem is that the police have zero capacity to gather intelligence or investigate criminal activities. Nothing best captures police expertise in this regard than a satire on the web that: There was a competition among various Nigerian security agencies on their level of intelligence gathering capabilities. Two dogs were released into a nearby bush in a fenced compound and each agency was asked to find where the dogs were. When it came to the turn of the police, they didn't even bother to enter the bush at all. The policemen simply arrested two goats, took them to their station and beat them to the stupor and the goats confessed in writing that they were the dogs the policemen were looking for.This is not funny at all. If you visit our police station you will know what I mean. As at Friday 16 July morning, over 800 kidnappers have been arrested by the Police in Ngwa area of Abia and yet no iota of clue on the where about of the four journalists. Hip! Hip! Hip; Hurray! After now, what happens next? Everybody (security agencies) will go back to sleep, abi?
IFEANYI IZEZE IS AN ABUJA-BASED CONSULTANT ON STRATEGY AND COMMUNICATION
ARE NIGERIANS STUPID OR WHAT?
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
(Reflections on corruption and lawlessness in Nigeria )
This paper is a response to Daniel Elomba's report on how much Nigerian leaders make relative to how much leaders in industrialized countries make. The outrage in the fact that a poor country such as Nigeria pays its leaders more than industrialized countries pay their leaders calls for something drastic to be done about governance in Nigeria. The paper calls for benevolent dictatorship to straiten Nigeria .
Today (July 16, 2010), I read a report by Daniel Elomba on how much Nigerian leaders make Vis aVis leaders in developed countries. It said that even Nigerian legislators' salaries are more than English and American legislators and presidents! This is in a country where the average Nigerian lives on about two dollars a day. The report got me thinking; the following essay is the result of that reflection.
There are basically two approaches to human beings. One is the religious approach; the other is the scientific approach. The religious approach sees people as loving by nature and urges people to love one another. Love is essentially what Jesus Christ taught his followers. He said: do unto others as you want them to do to you. All of us want to be loved by other persons therefore his logic is that we should love other persons. Love other persons if you want them to love you. In a world where every person loves every person there would be peace and joy. In a world where all persons loved and cared for all persons there would be security for all persons. This approach to human beings is ideational; that is, it is a product of pure thinking; it is a hoped for state rather than an actual state of any human society on planet earth; there is no place on earth where human beings unconditionally love each other. Religion proceeds on the premise that a deity, God, created human beings and that he created them a loving bunch. There is no empirical evidence that God exists let alone that he created people; the idea of God has to be accepted on faith for it is not proven.
The other approach to people is the scientific approach; this approach is also called the realistic approach; it is an approach based on empirical observation of human behavior. Here, folks look at human history and observe human beings empirically; from their observations they say that certain inevitable conclusions stare us in the face about human nature. People are said to be self centered with each of them working for his self interests only (and, may be, for his immediate family's interests) and does not care for other persons interests. People are said to be separated atoms, each atom apparently motivated by what is good for it and not what is good for other atoms. Because they are essentially working for their personal interests and could care less for social interests they necessarily clash with each other. Conflict is the inevitable result where folks are driven by self interests only. Human society is thus said to be characterized by social conflict; conflict that must be managed or else there would be no social harmony.
Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work, Leviathan, said that in the state of nature each person is at war with other persons and powerful persons enslaved weak persons and the weak banded together and fought the powerful; in nature each person tries to appropriate other persons' belongings and the result was perpetual warfare and insecurity for all persons. People's lives were nasty, brutish and short.
As Hobbes saw it governments were necessitated by peoples need to obtain a modicum of physical and social security. People banded together and chose from among them a person and made him their leader (king) and gave him power to make and implement laws that protected them and punished those who harmed them.
As Hobbes saw it the monarch's chief duty is to pass laws, set up courts, jails, hire police and military and go after law breakers; arrest, try and imprison law breakers and generally do whatever protects the people. People are said to be amoral, evil and self interested and therefore if you want to have them live in harmony with each other you have to use the force of law to corral them; you have to watch people closely, monitor their every behavior and make sure that they do not step out of line. Those who step outside the confines of the law are mercilessly pursued, apprehended, tried and punished to the fullest extent of the law (including capital punishment). This is said to be the only way to have a civilized society. Human beings are seen as savages who do not care for each other; therefore, if you want them to peacefully live together you must impose draconian laws on them. This is the real politics approach to human nature.
Hobbes political philosophy led to or justified Europeans divine right of kings doctrine. Others political thinkers, such as John Locke (Second Treaty on Government), Charles Montesquieu (the Spirit of Laws), Jean Jacque Rousseau (Social Contract), Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince), Utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) etc presented ways to have a law and ordered society that nevertheless was not oppressive. These political theorists, by and large, agreed that human beings are lawless by nature and need to be disciplined by the iron fist of the law or else they reverted to their natural amoral liberty (the romantic Rousseau took exception and posited that noble savages, American Indians, were naturally loving; this is what happens when a scholar is armchair and does not go to the field to observe what he is writing about; if Rousseau had left the salons of Paris and Geneva and gone to the Americas he would have seen that his noble savages were busy hunting each other down, cutting each others throats and using human heads to demonstrate their bravery).
Science proceeds on the grounds that the universe came into being accidentally (Big Bang) and that chance and randomness determines what happens in the universe. People are seen as the accidental product of changes in the environment. Accidents produced people and they evolve in adaptation to changes in their physical universe. People are seen as animals pure and simple. The only demonstrable force in them is their desire to survive at all costs and the fact that the fittest among them tend to survive and the weakest perish; Charles Darwin posited this hypothesis. As animals people are driven by self survival and to the extent that they want others to survive with them their selfish genes, Edward Wilson tells us, disposes them to desire the survival of those who share similar genes with them, which happens to be their children (this is not a good argument for, ultimately, all human beings share the same genes therefore if selfish genes drives them it would dispose them to desire the survival of all people). Science tells us that people are what we see, selfish creatures, and that we have to be realistic and structure society with laws that anticipate their inevitable conflicts and deal with them.
It is clear from all appearances that Nigerians do not love each other and therefore cannot be expected to have a society based on love. A people that for over 1000 years sold their people to either Arabs or Europeans cannot be called a loving people; in fact, they can only be called savages.
If we rule out the agency of love as the chief means of maintaining social cooperation in Nigeria what we are left with is the agency of law. Laws made in a dispassionate manner and impersonally implemented would seem to be the only means of attaining law and order in Nigeria . Draconian laws seem the only mechanism for giving Nigerians social security.
It would seem that the Nigerian National Assembly, the bicameral Legislature (House of Representatives and Senate), ought to be making laws and that the law enforcement agencies (executive branch of government through the police, courts etc) ought to be enforcing those laws. Instead, what we have in Nigeria is a legislature that essentially construes its members function as stealing from the country (each member of this supposed peoples representatives make more money than the president of the United States; a country where the average citizen lives on about two dollars a day pays its deputies more than a country where the income per capita is over $46, 000 a year!).
The executive branch of government apparently is construed as a prize that the various ethnic groups vie to capture and from it loot the national treasury, big time. The Nigerian president makes more money than the heads of states of the major industrialized countries; that is correct, a banana republic whose only revenue generating product is oil pays its useless head of state more money than countries producing wealth. (In my opinion no public official should make more than thirty times the minimum wage. If what the individual desires is wealth he ought to go to the private sector where it is permitted to make money and become billionaires. )
The judicial branch of government, the courts, are as corrupt as the other two branches of government; it takes hefty bribes for so-called judges to look the other way as the politician crooks go about stealing from the people.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when oil revenue runs out that Nigeria would have no money to pay for any kind of government (the sad part of it all is that the thieving politicians of Nigeria have failed to socialize Nigerians to the need to pay taxes so that when oil revenue runs out they would generate money to run the government; if Nigeria is governed by human being, not thieves, all Nigerians by now would have accepted paying, at least, twenty percent of their annual incomes in taxes; but, no, the thieves ruling the country do not even pay their faire share of taxes, all they do is take from the economy and not give to it). When oil revenue runs out Nigeria would probably descend to the level of Somalia , a failed state. The country would descend to Hobbes state of nature where all are at war with all and life is nasty, brutish and short.
Could we ask if a people that do this sort of thing to themselves are intelligent? Could it be that Nigerians are not intelligent? Could it be that we are expecting too much from a people that are genetically disposed to be unintelligent?
In most Western Intelligence testing instruments, such as Stanford Benet, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS) etc the average Nigerian scores as if he is mentally retarded. In the West IQ of 70 and under is considered indicative of mental retardation. The average Nigerian scores less than 70 on these tests! That is correct, these people score on IQ tests as if they are mentally retarded!
Could it be that Nigerians are mentally retarded and, as such, cannot govern themselves? Could it be that we are expecting morons to govern themselves well? Are these people destined to revert to savagery and perhaps resume selling their people to whoever wants to buy them for slaves? Their leaders apparent disinterest in their peoples welfare, their not working to provide their people with jobs continues their peoples' history of selling Africans into slavery; if they cared for their people they would not leave them to suffer and starve to death.
(Those they sold to the Americas , African-Americans, tend to score a bit higher than them but lower than white folk. The average African-American scores about 85; the average white person scores about 100; there is a 15 point difference in the two races IQ scores. Asians generally score higher than both blacks and whites. IQ scores are reflected on scores on standard scholastic aptitude tests, SAT; Asians average score is over 1200, whites over 1100, African Americans about 850 and Africans too little to be mentioned. Given Asians high performance on these tests is it any wonder that they are doing well economically and are on the curve of overtaking Europeans and Americans economically, whereas poor scoring Africans sink to the bottom of everything!)
It does not take much intelligence to realize where Nigeria is heading to: Somalia's lawlessness, yet the leaders of Nigeria (if the criminals pretending to be in leadership positions in Nigeria can be called leaders) do not see what is coming their way, what is staring them in the faces.
Kidnapping for ransom is these days the only way unemployed university graduates can get money in the Southeastern part of the country; here, unemployment runs as high as 80%.
Are Nigerians born unintelligent or what? Why can't they see what is coming their way and do something to avert it? Why must they only busy themselves with stealing from the oil money that multinational corporations that mine oil give to them (they are so dull that they cannot mine the oil by themselves or engage in other industries that the country can possibly make money from).
The masses of Nigeria's over 100 million persons languish in poverty and their pseudo-intellectual s account for that poverty by blaming the white man. They are always pointing two accusatory fingers at Europeans and the West, ignoring the three fingers pointing back at them. They say that slave trade and neocolonialism underdeveloped Africa . May be so. But the question is: who sold Africans to white folks and to Arabs? Africans did. Therefore, Africans were equally culpable in slave trade and if we must blame white folks for slavery we must also blame Africans for selling their people.
(Interestingly even though they sold more Africans to Arabs than they sold to Europeans, Africans do not blame Arabs for slave trade; they only blame Europeans. One suspects that they understand that the religion of Islam does not encourage guilt feeling hence Arabs do not feel guilty for their past crimes and thus it is a waste of time blaming them for slavery. Christianity, on the other hand, makes Christians feel guilt for their past sins hence white folks feel guilty for the sin of slavery. Africans recognizing white folks proneness to guilt feeling take advantage of it and make them feel guilty by blaming them for slavery; they shake white folks down for money, economic aid, money which, of course, they redirect to their thieving pockets and never use to help their people. In so far that folks must feel guilty for slavery it must include Africans and Arabs; no one should allow African sociopaths to make him feel guilty for the crime Africans participated in committing.)
Slave trade ended over a hundred years ago (the British Lord Lugard stopped it in 1902 when he destroyed the last slave selling syndicate in Nigeria, the Aro slaving syndicate).
Fifty years after they obtained independence from the British, the schools and other infrastructure built by the British are decayed and dilapidated! Nigerians do not see it fit to maintain their inherited British built infrastructure talk more about increasing them.
Before our very eyes, these people are reverting to the jungle that the British tried to extricate them from. Soon they will be living as their forefathers did: roaming around the jungles of Africa, capturing each other and selling their people to whoever wants to buy them and use them as slaves (if there were no international laws against slavery these people would today be actively capturing and selling their people; in fact, some of that is actually taking place behind our backs).
These people are primitive and it is about time we said the obvious out loud and stopped allowing political correctness preventing us from saying what we see with our naked eyes. We must stop trying to make these people feel good by not telling them how we see them. Good self esteem is based on truth not lies, not telling Nigerians that they are descent folk when we see them as criminals.
What Nigerians seem to know how to do best is stealing and engaging in massive corruption and with the money they stole engaging in vain behaviors; each of them wants to be seen as a very important person, a VIP, a chief, a doctor, professor do nothing. These people masquerade around as if they are important human beings. You ask: important for what? What have they contributed to human civilization to make them important? In physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astrophysics and astronomy they have contributed zilch. They are not known for their contribution to the art of good governance. We might as well have our dogs govern any social organization than look to Nigerians to do so.
If importance is judged by what folks have contributed to humanity, Nigerians are unimportant, unless, of course, we are talking about importance derived from stealing.
Not long ago, James Watson suggested that may be these people are too unintelligent to govern themselves well and we set on him and chased him out of his job. Could it be that the man was correct in his unguarded expression? Are these people unintelligent?
If they are unintelligent should we waste our time expecting them to do what common sense says that human beings should do, govern themselves properly? May be we should wash our hands of these people and look the other way as they continue making a royal mess of their land and eventually degenerate to the level of Somalia. If we did that in a few decades these people would probably wipe themselves out of existence and then leave their land for wild animals to roam on? Nigeria and indeed all of Africa would be transformed into one humongous wild life preserve and folks from all over the world would come and enjoy life in the wild.
A people who cannot govern themselves well have no business asking other persons to sustain them alive; other people have no business helping them to stay alive. We ought to leave these people to steal to their hearts content and then take the consequences of transforming their country into a criminals' paradise. We should not give them any kind of economic aid and let them die off. At present they present their disease ridden bodies to our sights and make us feel guilty hence help them; may be we ought to stop allowing sympathy to dispose us to help them.
CONCLUSION
Observation shows that a few Nigerians are carting away the wealth that belongs to all Nigerians and devoting them to themselves alone. Experience shows that most Nigerians are too fearful, too cowardly to challenge those stealing their wealth. When the masses make noise about the need for equity and justice in the distribution of national wealth the criminals ruling them send their goon squad to go kill a few of them and cow the rest of them into silence. Fire bullets into a crowd of Nigerians and kill some and the rest run away and like terrified rats go hide in underground burrows and from there make noise about the need for justice for all (killing some of them ought to make them enraged and fight for liberty if they were a courageous people but they are a people that tolerated slavery for over a thousand years so we know that they are a cowardly people).
Given Nigerians fearfulness and the fact that if left alone they would not rise up and fight the kleptocrats robbing their country down it seems to me that Nigeria needs a benevolent dictator to seize power and use coercion to shape the country up. Such a dictator must be authoritarian and totalitarian and for, say, fifty years do things that would drag Nigeria into the twenty first century, especially industrialize her. I have developed this thesis in another paper and merely mention it here; it is the antidote to Nigerians current lawlessness and rampant corruption. The alternative is to behave like the ostrich and hide their heads and pretend that nothing is wrong with their country until it degenerates to the like of Somalia .
A criticism of this recommendation could be the fact that Nigeria in the past was ruled by military dictators and those did not improve the lot of Nigerians; indeed, many of them were as corrupt as today's political class. True. Yet, it is conceivable to have a dictator do the right thing for Nigeria . The alternative is worse, is it not? Can Nigerians afford to have their present corrupt political class keep on ruling them? They can if a failed state, such as Somalia , is their choice! The other criticism is that democracy needs time to develop and that we do not need to abort its development in Nigeria . This is also true yet if what passes for democracy, looting of the economy by a few, is the only path to democracy I say that a dictator that consciously does what needs to be done for a few decades before real democracy is practiced in the country could not be worse.
One is simply tired of making excuses for Nigerians and Africans; one is tired of explaining why they do not seem able to do any thing right; one has come to the conclusion that they either get it right or disappear from existence.
(Reflections on corruption and lawlessness in Nigeria )
This paper is a response to Daniel Elomba's report on how much Nigerian leaders make relative to how much leaders in industrialized countries make. The outrage in the fact that a poor country such as Nigeria pays its leaders more than industrialized countries pay their leaders calls for something drastic to be done about governance in Nigeria. The paper calls for benevolent dictatorship to straiten Nigeria .
Today (July 16, 2010), I read a report by Daniel Elomba on how much Nigerian leaders make Vis aVis leaders in developed countries. It said that even Nigerian legislators' salaries are more than English and American legislators and presidents! This is in a country where the average Nigerian lives on about two dollars a day. The report got me thinking; the following essay is the result of that reflection.
There are basically two approaches to human beings. One is the religious approach; the other is the scientific approach. The religious approach sees people as loving by nature and urges people to love one another. Love is essentially what Jesus Christ taught his followers. He said: do unto others as you want them to do to you. All of us want to be loved by other persons therefore his logic is that we should love other persons. Love other persons if you want them to love you. In a world where every person loves every person there would be peace and joy. In a world where all persons loved and cared for all persons there would be security for all persons. This approach to human beings is ideational; that is, it is a product of pure thinking; it is a hoped for state rather than an actual state of any human society on planet earth; there is no place on earth where human beings unconditionally love each other. Religion proceeds on the premise that a deity, God, created human beings and that he created them a loving bunch. There is no empirical evidence that God exists let alone that he created people; the idea of God has to be accepted on faith for it is not proven.
The other approach to people is the scientific approach; this approach is also called the realistic approach; it is an approach based on empirical observation of human behavior. Here, folks look at human history and observe human beings empirically; from their observations they say that certain inevitable conclusions stare us in the face about human nature. People are said to be self centered with each of them working for his self interests only (and, may be, for his immediate family's interests) and does not care for other persons interests. People are said to be separated atoms, each atom apparently motivated by what is good for it and not what is good for other atoms. Because they are essentially working for their personal interests and could care less for social interests they necessarily clash with each other. Conflict is the inevitable result where folks are driven by self interests only. Human society is thus said to be characterized by social conflict; conflict that must be managed or else there would be no social harmony.
Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work, Leviathan, said that in the state of nature each person is at war with other persons and powerful persons enslaved weak persons and the weak banded together and fought the powerful; in nature each person tries to appropriate other persons' belongings and the result was perpetual warfare and insecurity for all persons. People's lives were nasty, brutish and short.
As Hobbes saw it governments were necessitated by peoples need to obtain a modicum of physical and social security. People banded together and chose from among them a person and made him their leader (king) and gave him power to make and implement laws that protected them and punished those who harmed them.
As Hobbes saw it the monarch's chief duty is to pass laws, set up courts, jails, hire police and military and go after law breakers; arrest, try and imprison law breakers and generally do whatever protects the people. People are said to be amoral, evil and self interested and therefore if you want to have them live in harmony with each other you have to use the force of law to corral them; you have to watch people closely, monitor their every behavior and make sure that they do not step out of line. Those who step outside the confines of the law are mercilessly pursued, apprehended, tried and punished to the fullest extent of the law (including capital punishment). This is said to be the only way to have a civilized society. Human beings are seen as savages who do not care for each other; therefore, if you want them to peacefully live together you must impose draconian laws on them. This is the real politics approach to human nature.
Hobbes political philosophy led to or justified Europeans divine right of kings doctrine. Others political thinkers, such as John Locke (Second Treaty on Government), Charles Montesquieu (the Spirit of Laws), Jean Jacque Rousseau (Social Contract), Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince), Utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) etc presented ways to have a law and ordered society that nevertheless was not oppressive. These political theorists, by and large, agreed that human beings are lawless by nature and need to be disciplined by the iron fist of the law or else they reverted to their natural amoral liberty (the romantic Rousseau took exception and posited that noble savages, American Indians, were naturally loving; this is what happens when a scholar is armchair and does not go to the field to observe what he is writing about; if Rousseau had left the salons of Paris and Geneva and gone to the Americas he would have seen that his noble savages were busy hunting each other down, cutting each others throats and using human heads to demonstrate their bravery).
Science proceeds on the grounds that the universe came into being accidentally (Big Bang) and that chance and randomness determines what happens in the universe. People are seen as the accidental product of changes in the environment. Accidents produced people and they evolve in adaptation to changes in their physical universe. People are seen as animals pure and simple. The only demonstrable force in them is their desire to survive at all costs and the fact that the fittest among them tend to survive and the weakest perish; Charles Darwin posited this hypothesis. As animals people are driven by self survival and to the extent that they want others to survive with them their selfish genes, Edward Wilson tells us, disposes them to desire the survival of those who share similar genes with them, which happens to be their children (this is not a good argument for, ultimately, all human beings share the same genes therefore if selfish genes drives them it would dispose them to desire the survival of all people). Science tells us that people are what we see, selfish creatures, and that we have to be realistic and structure society with laws that anticipate their inevitable conflicts and deal with them.
It is clear from all appearances that Nigerians do not love each other and therefore cannot be expected to have a society based on love. A people that for over 1000 years sold their people to either Arabs or Europeans cannot be called a loving people; in fact, they can only be called savages.
If we rule out the agency of love as the chief means of maintaining social cooperation in Nigeria what we are left with is the agency of law. Laws made in a dispassionate manner and impersonally implemented would seem to be the only means of attaining law and order in Nigeria . Draconian laws seem the only mechanism for giving Nigerians social security.
It would seem that the Nigerian National Assembly, the bicameral Legislature (House of Representatives and Senate), ought to be making laws and that the law enforcement agencies (executive branch of government through the police, courts etc) ought to be enforcing those laws. Instead, what we have in Nigeria is a legislature that essentially construes its members function as stealing from the country (each member of this supposed peoples representatives make more money than the president of the United States; a country where the average citizen lives on about two dollars a day pays its deputies more than a country where the income per capita is over $46, 000 a year!).
The executive branch of government apparently is construed as a prize that the various ethnic groups vie to capture and from it loot the national treasury, big time. The Nigerian president makes more money than the heads of states of the major industrialized countries; that is correct, a banana republic whose only revenue generating product is oil pays its useless head of state more money than countries producing wealth. (In my opinion no public official should make more than thirty times the minimum wage. If what the individual desires is wealth he ought to go to the private sector where it is permitted to make money and become billionaires. )
The judicial branch of government, the courts, are as corrupt as the other two branches of government; it takes hefty bribes for so-called judges to look the other way as the politician crooks go about stealing from the people.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when oil revenue runs out that Nigeria would have no money to pay for any kind of government (the sad part of it all is that the thieving politicians of Nigeria have failed to socialize Nigerians to the need to pay taxes so that when oil revenue runs out they would generate money to run the government; if Nigeria is governed by human being, not thieves, all Nigerians by now would have accepted paying, at least, twenty percent of their annual incomes in taxes; but, no, the thieves ruling the country do not even pay their faire share of taxes, all they do is take from the economy and not give to it). When oil revenue runs out Nigeria would probably descend to the level of Somalia , a failed state. The country would descend to Hobbes state of nature where all are at war with all and life is nasty, brutish and short.
Could we ask if a people that do this sort of thing to themselves are intelligent? Could it be that Nigerians are not intelligent? Could it be that we are expecting too much from a people that are genetically disposed to be unintelligent?
In most Western Intelligence testing instruments, such as Stanford Benet, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS) etc the average Nigerian scores as if he is mentally retarded. In the West IQ of 70 and under is considered indicative of mental retardation. The average Nigerian scores less than 70 on these tests! That is correct, these people score on IQ tests as if they are mentally retarded!
Could it be that Nigerians are mentally retarded and, as such, cannot govern themselves? Could it be that we are expecting morons to govern themselves well? Are these people destined to revert to savagery and perhaps resume selling their people to whoever wants to buy them for slaves? Their leaders apparent disinterest in their peoples welfare, their not working to provide their people with jobs continues their peoples' history of selling Africans into slavery; if they cared for their people they would not leave them to suffer and starve to death.
(Those they sold to the Americas , African-Americans, tend to score a bit higher than them but lower than white folk. The average African-American scores about 85; the average white person scores about 100; there is a 15 point difference in the two races IQ scores. Asians generally score higher than both blacks and whites. IQ scores are reflected on scores on standard scholastic aptitude tests, SAT; Asians average score is over 1200, whites over 1100, African Americans about 850 and Africans too little to be mentioned. Given Asians high performance on these tests is it any wonder that they are doing well economically and are on the curve of overtaking Europeans and Americans economically, whereas poor scoring Africans sink to the bottom of everything!)
It does not take much intelligence to realize where Nigeria is heading to: Somalia's lawlessness, yet the leaders of Nigeria (if the criminals pretending to be in leadership positions in Nigeria can be called leaders) do not see what is coming their way, what is staring them in the faces.
Kidnapping for ransom is these days the only way unemployed university graduates can get money in the Southeastern part of the country; here, unemployment runs as high as 80%.
Are Nigerians born unintelligent or what? Why can't they see what is coming their way and do something to avert it? Why must they only busy themselves with stealing from the oil money that multinational corporations that mine oil give to them (they are so dull that they cannot mine the oil by themselves or engage in other industries that the country can possibly make money from).
The masses of Nigeria's over 100 million persons languish in poverty and their pseudo-intellectual s account for that poverty by blaming the white man. They are always pointing two accusatory fingers at Europeans and the West, ignoring the three fingers pointing back at them. They say that slave trade and neocolonialism underdeveloped Africa . May be so. But the question is: who sold Africans to white folks and to Arabs? Africans did. Therefore, Africans were equally culpable in slave trade and if we must blame white folks for slavery we must also blame Africans for selling their people.
(Interestingly even though they sold more Africans to Arabs than they sold to Europeans, Africans do not blame Arabs for slave trade; they only blame Europeans. One suspects that they understand that the religion of Islam does not encourage guilt feeling hence Arabs do not feel guilty for their past crimes and thus it is a waste of time blaming them for slavery. Christianity, on the other hand, makes Christians feel guilt for their past sins hence white folks feel guilty for the sin of slavery. Africans recognizing white folks proneness to guilt feeling take advantage of it and make them feel guilty by blaming them for slavery; they shake white folks down for money, economic aid, money which, of course, they redirect to their thieving pockets and never use to help their people. In so far that folks must feel guilty for slavery it must include Africans and Arabs; no one should allow African sociopaths to make him feel guilty for the crime Africans participated in committing.)
Slave trade ended over a hundred years ago (the British Lord Lugard stopped it in 1902 when he destroyed the last slave selling syndicate in Nigeria, the Aro slaving syndicate).
Fifty years after they obtained independence from the British, the schools and other infrastructure built by the British are decayed and dilapidated! Nigerians do not see it fit to maintain their inherited British built infrastructure talk more about increasing them.
Before our very eyes, these people are reverting to the jungle that the British tried to extricate them from. Soon they will be living as their forefathers did: roaming around the jungles of Africa, capturing each other and selling their people to whoever wants to buy them and use them as slaves (if there were no international laws against slavery these people would today be actively capturing and selling their people; in fact, some of that is actually taking place behind our backs).
These people are primitive and it is about time we said the obvious out loud and stopped allowing political correctness preventing us from saying what we see with our naked eyes. We must stop trying to make these people feel good by not telling them how we see them. Good self esteem is based on truth not lies, not telling Nigerians that they are descent folk when we see them as criminals.
What Nigerians seem to know how to do best is stealing and engaging in massive corruption and with the money they stole engaging in vain behaviors; each of them wants to be seen as a very important person, a VIP, a chief, a doctor, professor do nothing. These people masquerade around as if they are important human beings. You ask: important for what? What have they contributed to human civilization to make them important? In physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astrophysics and astronomy they have contributed zilch. They are not known for their contribution to the art of good governance. We might as well have our dogs govern any social organization than look to Nigerians to do so.
If importance is judged by what folks have contributed to humanity, Nigerians are unimportant, unless, of course, we are talking about importance derived from stealing.
Not long ago, James Watson suggested that may be these people are too unintelligent to govern themselves well and we set on him and chased him out of his job. Could it be that the man was correct in his unguarded expression? Are these people unintelligent?
If they are unintelligent should we waste our time expecting them to do what common sense says that human beings should do, govern themselves properly? May be we should wash our hands of these people and look the other way as they continue making a royal mess of their land and eventually degenerate to the level of Somalia. If we did that in a few decades these people would probably wipe themselves out of existence and then leave their land for wild animals to roam on? Nigeria and indeed all of Africa would be transformed into one humongous wild life preserve and folks from all over the world would come and enjoy life in the wild.
A people who cannot govern themselves well have no business asking other persons to sustain them alive; other people have no business helping them to stay alive. We ought to leave these people to steal to their hearts content and then take the consequences of transforming their country into a criminals' paradise. We should not give them any kind of economic aid and let them die off. At present they present their disease ridden bodies to our sights and make us feel guilty hence help them; may be we ought to stop allowing sympathy to dispose us to help them.
CONCLUSION
Observation shows that a few Nigerians are carting away the wealth that belongs to all Nigerians and devoting them to themselves alone. Experience shows that most Nigerians are too fearful, too cowardly to challenge those stealing their wealth. When the masses make noise about the need for equity and justice in the distribution of national wealth the criminals ruling them send their goon squad to go kill a few of them and cow the rest of them into silence. Fire bullets into a crowd of Nigerians and kill some and the rest run away and like terrified rats go hide in underground burrows and from there make noise about the need for justice for all (killing some of them ought to make them enraged and fight for liberty if they were a courageous people but they are a people that tolerated slavery for over a thousand years so we know that they are a cowardly people).
Given Nigerians fearfulness and the fact that if left alone they would not rise up and fight the kleptocrats robbing their country down it seems to me that Nigeria needs a benevolent dictator to seize power and use coercion to shape the country up. Such a dictator must be authoritarian and totalitarian and for, say, fifty years do things that would drag Nigeria into the twenty first century, especially industrialize her. I have developed this thesis in another paper and merely mention it here; it is the antidote to Nigerians current lawlessness and rampant corruption. The alternative is to behave like the ostrich and hide their heads and pretend that nothing is wrong with their country until it degenerates to the like of Somalia .
A criticism of this recommendation could be the fact that Nigeria in the past was ruled by military dictators and those did not improve the lot of Nigerians; indeed, many of them were as corrupt as today's political class. True. Yet, it is conceivable to have a dictator do the right thing for Nigeria . The alternative is worse, is it not? Can Nigerians afford to have their present corrupt political class keep on ruling them? They can if a failed state, such as Somalia , is their choice! The other criticism is that democracy needs time to develop and that we do not need to abort its development in Nigeria . This is also true yet if what passes for democracy, looting of the economy by a few, is the only path to democracy I say that a dictator that consciously does what needs to be done for a few decades before real democracy is practiced in the country could not be worse.
One is simply tired of making excuses for Nigerians and Africans; one is tired of explaining why they do not seem able to do any thing right; one has come to the conclusion that they either get it right or disappear from existence.
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