RE: [NaijaPolitics] Igbo Lagos APC crowd of blackmail Alarmists :Re NDIGBO AND JONATHAN By C. Don Adinuba

[Rex Marinus]

Ugo, every Igbo, in fact every Nigerian, has a right to their political leanings, and the rights to express themselves, and promote their ideas freely. Of all people, the Igbo cannot be expected to follow the herd. As great democrats, the Igbo will follow their conscience no matter whose proverbial ox is gored. "Igbo APC sympathizers" must not agree with you, and no one must have the temerity to assume they speak to the Igbo quest more than the other. Anyi n'aje ubi ka ji n'a ka! There is not a single Igbo direction. Let no one presume to be more righteously Igbo than the other. That is dangerous.  I salute you.
Obi Nwakanma

 

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From: NaijaP...@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 20:34:41 -0400
Subject: [NaijaPolitics] Igbo Lagos APC crowd of blackmail Alarmists :Re NDIGBO AND JONATHAN By C. Don Adinuba

 

"To be sure, Igbo leaders are at liberty to support any person. But such an endorsement should be on certain conditions which must hinge on long term interests of Ndigbo. The current hysteria over Jonathan without negotiating any deal for the development of our homeland belittles all of us. NDIGBO & JONATHAN By C. Don Adinuba


Every week the is always a new letter to Ndigbo or press release to Ndigbo by some groups of people and almost all of them are APC sympathizers and supporters based in Lagos State. It appears Igbos do not like their political leaning and their political groupies and they have now resort to insulting Igbos every day with their letter to Ndigbo or press release to Ndigbo telling Ndigbo that  heaven is falling. The difference is that an average Igbo man sees and looks at things from a total different point of view, and as it is Igbos are still in general doing quite well within the regrettable Nigerian factors of economic corruption, political corruption, corrupt favoritism, tribalism and religious zealots despite their alarmist tendencies that heaven will fall if Igbo do not join APC. Heaven will not fall and Igbos have rejected APC and so what.
http://visionvoiceandviews.com/tag/values/
Identifying corrupting arguments on corruption
              Published October 29, 2013 
       

By
Noel A. Ihebuzor
I shared these thoughts on corruption about a year ago. Recent events in Nigeria and reactions to them on social media prompt me to share them again.
Bad is Bad.  But to selectively focus on the “bad” committed by persons you do not like, hyping it and creating a mass hysteria around it whilst turning a convenient blind eye to the “bad” of other people you like is bad.  Blanketing out news on the “bad” glaringly perpetrated by persons whose causes you champion is bad. Bad is Bad.
Impunity is bad. But to selectively focus on impunity at one level and to remain silent when impunity is generously dished out by other levels of government is bad. It is to allow economics, religion and politics to either condition our perception or to dampen our capacity for impartial judgments and consistent demonstrations of moral outrage. It is to practice a morality based on expediency. Such expediency-driven morality eventually imposes a huge burden of dysfunction in our judgements, a dysfunction with unimaginable opportunity costs and which dysfunction indeed could then have untold deletrious effects on a polity which looks up us as impartial watchdogs

BOLA AWONIRAN wrote  • 8 months ago 
When highly enlightened and brilliant public opinion molder such as yourself,are apportioning collective culpability on the masses who are victims of merciless and perfidious cruelty from the tyrannical ruling elites,it is a season of anomy indeed .
Mr Sam ,it is that some of us have selective memory,and we always find it convenient to blame the voiceless victims for their plight ,conveniently forgetting their past dynamism and bravery in fighting and dying for the fatherland they love and believe in ,in the face of formidable odds.
Mr Sam ,Nigerians by our antecedents were never docile nor accommodating of injustices nor tolerant of the impunity of our rapacious tyrannical intellectually arid thieving elites,when leaders with courage of their conviction,high moral integrity,sincerity,honesty ,valiant and indefatigable constitution, the masses exhibit their dynamism and abhorrence of any form of injustice and elites impunity,after all it was these same masses that compelled IBB to step aside, and confronted with the most tyrannical regime in our fatherland history(that of the dark gorgled one)despite tanks and all they do battle with the tyrant and vanguished him,all these under the brilliant and strategically adept leadership of people like Dr Beko,Barrister Alao Aka Bashorun,Pa Alfred Rewane,Admiral Elegbede both paid the supreme sacrifice for the cause,Col Abubarkr Umar Dangiwa,Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu,General Alani Akinrinade,Proff WS,Proff Adebayo Williams,Proff Segun Gbadegesin,Dr Tunji Dare et al.When the duplicitious and diabolically traitorous N.L.C. calls out the masses to do battle with the tyrannical elites over oil subsidy removal,the masses responded only to be betrayed by the duplicitous N.L.C, leadership cadre.
Mr Sam a revolutionary upraising is not made without a leadership cadre,a revolutionary uprising abhor leadership vacuum ,your Ukrainian uprising is being teleguided and financed from E.U. capitals and Washington.the Arab spring was a grand geopolitical chess game orchestrated by the west to truncate the ascendant Iranian geopolitical power in the region.
When people like you can finally midwife the birth of a nascent patriotic and valiant leadership cadre ,then you will see what Nigerians are capable of.
GOD BLESS.

see more

Nnaemezie Onyenka • 8 months ago

And mind you while Jonathan is fighting with a governor, Obasanjo fought with the vice president. He did not even fight with him, decapitated him.

Nnaemezie Onyenka • 8 months ago

At least Jonathan is democratic enough to conceed Amaechi the right (or privilege) of fighting 'with' him. Under Obasanjo, that privilege did not exist. He did not 'condescend' to the level of fighting with a governor. He only 'kidnapped' them. Ngige would have prefered to be fought with. And yet kidnap did not cause a civil war. It is fighting with a governor that will.

http://thenationonlineng.net/new/between-prophets-and-alarmists/

Between prophets and alarmists

Posted by: Sam Omatseye in Sam Omatseye February 3, 2014

When prophesies come, we ignore them because we are optimists. When they come to pass, we accept them as fatalists. Only prisoners of hope accept tragedies as a routine and never worry about storm clouds. They tell themselves in their fatalistic fashion: it was to be.
That has been the way of Nigerians. Many societies around the world have ended up like this. But here we continue to live dangerously. In this season, we have wobbled into some of such prophesies, and Nigerians seem to take them in strides.
That is why we ignore the cries of the skinny vicar of our financial soul over a depleting treasury and balding governor’s lamentations over the atrophy of the rule of law in his state. Rather we listen to a plump graduate of Breton Woods Institution when she says only $10.8 billion is missing and shows little righteous agony over the discrepancy. Again, when the opposition says the president should invoke the best of presidential soft power to rein in the drift in Rivers State before budget and ministerial nominees, some people say it is against the people.
They forget that the federal government can always spend outside the budget, and that the ministerial nominees and service chiefs’ matters do little to affect the affairs of state and security. The issues are political. No one asked the president why he has not extended his powers on Mbu Joseph Mbu, the commissioner of police in Rivers State. Even when a serving senator was flown abroad after the potentially fatal rubber bullet shot, not a word issued out of the president’s lips.
Shall we ask ourselves what they did with last year’s budget? For half of last year, state governments received fractions of their entitlements. The queens of government, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Diezani Alison-Madueke, have not explained in mathematics, graphics and plain English language why we cannot pay our bills even though oil prices beat the budget benchmark by over $30 dollars per barrel. Even at that, we have almost depleted the so-called excess crude account when the price did not fall to even 80 dollars any time last year. When CBN chief Sanusi yelled, we did not go beyond quibbles over whether his math was right or wrong. We forgot the implications for the ordinary poor.
In Rivers State, we see Governor Rotimi Amaechi fighting with President Goodluck Jonathan. We see it as a partisan matter, so it is not important what the law says and what decency prescribes.
We forget that every crisis in our history came with warnings over trouble to come. Here we have troubles on two fronts: politics and economy. Both spell dire consequences. A well-known priest Mathew Kukah joined the cynical crowd in a recent interview by saying that the threat to Nigeria is in the pages of the newspapers and no one will be there when the politicians solve their problems. This is another cynical way of capsizing before our elite where he has friends on both sides of the divide. Politicians always resolve their differences after so much has been lost in lives and resources. If they resolve their differences, do they resolve the nation’s?
Our history teaches us sombre lessons. The crisis of the First Republic started in the Western region, but many saw it as simply an Awolowo and Akintola fracas. Until elections came and it strangulated the region and all of Nigeria. The larger consequence was a civil war, and the tales of deaths, starvation and misery belonged not to the Yoruba of the west but the Igbo of the east.
As poet John Donne warned, “ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” My father Moses often said that if you throw a stone into the market, you cannot guarantee the safety of your mother. When crisis comes, it has a life of its own. Those who trigger it suffer as well as those who know little about it. If you start a bush fire, you also have to run for your life.
That is why it is important to listen when people warn about a national drift. The danger is that we see things in rigid partisan brackets and fail to realise that not all partisan cries are without merit. We chuck them aside as paranoia. Henry Kissinger purred: “even the paranoid have enemies.” When Asari Dokubo threatened over 2015 elections, no one paid him a visit. But when Nasir el RuFai uttered his own, he was detained.
If APC or PDP makes a case, it is inevitably partisan. But it does not mean it lacks substance, especially if the substance pries into our very existence. In the closing chapters of the Second Republic, Awo warned over the drift of the Shagari regime into tyranny, and raised the spectre of the preventive detention act that made Kwame Nkrumah notorious. He was dismissed as a partisan. A few months later, he was proved right and the republic slurred into a last song.
We have seen this sort in other lands. Sir Winston Churchill was the disregarded prophet when as a back bencher in House of Commons he warned his country. In his grand and elegant growl, he described Hitler as the mad man of Europe. He said all of the continent should stop the tyrant before he engulfed civilisation in his Nazi holocaust. He urged Britain to start re-arming to match Germany that was building the most formidable military machine the world had ever known.
His foes described him as an alarmist, with the peroration of partisan. When Hitler was ready, he rolled over France with his Blitzkrieg, and it took the Americans to save the world with help from nature in Russia and miscalculation by the fuehrer. England paid for ignoring Churchill when the German air force, the Luftwaffe, strafed London and other cities into a daze of apocalyptic fear.
Even France may have been spared the humiliation of German invasion through the Ardenne Forest if the Vichy quislings had heeded Charles de Gaulle’s warning over fortifying that section and warding off the Nazis from Paris.
Crisis comes from what many often regard as little crisis. The Boko Haram crisis might not have escalated if Yar’Adua had not regarded the death of its leader as trivial. Ironically, it is in search of justice for their leader that that region fell into the malignity of deaths, bigotry, lawlessness and state of emergency whose end is not in sight. The Owu War that ignited into what historians call the Yoruba Wars started over a fracas over cheap peppers. How many know that the First World, that conflict of butchery, began by the killing of an Arch Duke of Sarajevo. Those little things only mark tipping points of escalating tensions. It is just like a divorce that is triggered by spill of a glass of milk.
The tragedy is that Nigerians are either facile or docile and accept injustices. So the political elite get away with any impunity. Russia wanted to impose its will on Ukraine, but the people resisted and have forced the prime minister to step down. In Turkey, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has lost popularity because of his highhanded ways. The Maghreb has shown in its Arab Springs, in spite of drawbacks, that it will stand for justice.
If we take the rule of law and decency seriously, we shall have little tensions. Europe and America are no less contentious people than we. But they have decided to abide by rules rather and men. The worst, as poet Lord Byron once wrote, that we can expect when bad things happen is the three words: I told you so.
 

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, cdon adinuba cdon...@yahoo.com [NIgerianWorldForum] <NIgerianW...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

 NDIGBO & JONATHAN

By C. Don Adinuba

 

God, in his infinite wisdom, created me Igbo. If it is possible to reincarnate, I will return to this world an Igbo. I don’t know any section of Nigeria that could withstand the rest of the Nigerian federation for a whole 30 months as Eastern Nigeria did between 1967 and 1970. Despite the severe economic and air blockade, Biafra was a bold statement about the blackman’s scientific and technological capabilities, as the preeminent American scholar of sociology, Stanley Diamond, reported to the world in 1968. Frankly,  I don’t know of any part of Nigeria that would come out of the catastrophe with practically no money, and yet within only three years there were scarcely physical traces of the war. Perhaps only the Igbo could challenge the Yoruba in educational development and within a mere 20 years  (from 1945 to 1965) “wipe out their educational handicap in one fantastic burst of energy”, as Chinua Achebe puts it in The Trouble With Nigeria.

 

 In any endeavour where merit is the sole criterion for determining recognition like sports, music and education, the Igbo would always excel. The Igbo are often referred to as the African version of the Jewish people whom Ali Mazrui, the most published African scholar, calls in his most ambitious book, Cultural Forces in World Politics, a race whose prodigious achievements in science, philosophy, finance and international politics are far in excess of their population. In her charming book, World On Fire, Amy Chua, an economist and distinguished professor at Yale Law School, calls the Igbo “an economic dominant” group in West Africa. The Bamileke people of Cameroon are called Igbo on account of their industry and entrepreneurship.

 

However, the Igbo, once guided by such far-sighted men as the Great Zik of Africa, Michael Okpara, Akanu Ibiam, Ukpabi Asika, Pius Okigbo and others, are now in dire need of strategic direction. Already, it would seem we are not being taken seriously. On Thursday, January 30, 2014, Governor Seriake Dickson led a large delegation of Bayelsa leaders to thank Vice President Namadi Sambo for “supporting our son, President Goodluck Jonathan”. Sambo’s contribution to Jonathan’s presidency is a matter of speculation. In the 2011 general vote, Sambo lost his ward to an opposition party. Since prominent Northern political leaders became critical of Jonathan and since the Boko Haram insurrection became full blown, you would expect Sambo to show his hand, as Vice President Atiku Abubakar did in 2000 during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency when political sharia was launched in 12 northern states, causing problems of colossal consequence. But our vice president has been missing in action. This is a story for another day.

 

Why does Gov Dickson find it important to constantly thank Vice President Sambo for his support but has not uttered a word of gratitude to Ndigbo who have given Jonathan unprecedented support, far more than he has received from his own Niger Delta region? Has Edwin Clark, the leader of the Ijaw, ever publicly  acknowledged Igbo support for Jonathan?

 

Erstwhile Anambra State governor Chukwuemeka Ezeife, who for years was in the vanguard of the campaign that “it is either an Igbo president in 2015 or Nigeria will cease to exist” now threatens war if Jonathan is not returned to office next year. He probably borrowed the war threat from the lips of Asari Dokubo of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force. How did Ezeife, a former lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda and retired federal permanent secretary who holds a Harvard doctorate in economics, find himself in the same company as Mujaheed Dokubo? Indeed, there is a Jonathan frenzy throughout Igboland. But it is not founded on any discernible rationality. A very influential Igbo professor who is one of the architects of Igbo support for Jonathan is often the first person to admit in private that Jonathan’s development presence in the Southeast is embarrassingly poor, saying it is worth about the sixth of federal government’s  projects in the North Central geopolitical zone.

 

The Enugu-Onitsha highway is not passable. The Okigwe—Aba Road is a death trap. The Umuahia—Ikot Ekpene Road is probably the worst road in the world, after the road leading to Arochukwu. All federal roads in the Southeast, with the exception of about three or four, are in a messy state. The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company has been handed over to Emeka Offor’s Interstate Electrics which the Bureau of Public Enterprises and the National Council on Privatisation in a joint report declared financially and technically incapable of doing electricity distribution business. Ironically, the consortium promoted by the five Southeast state governments and the finest entrepreneurs from the zone and recommended by the BPE/NCP for the Enugu Disco was in a bizarre act overruled by the Jonathan administration. Electricity distribution Is a natural monopoly, so it means all parts of Nigeria can develop in the foreseeable future but not the Southeast. No place can grow without adequate electricity.

 

True, a number of Igbo people have under Jonathan been appointed to “juicy positions”. There are more Igbo private jet owners now than ever. But in a world where the buzz expression now is inclusive development, as opposed to a policy which excludes the majority of the people from the economic process, the new concept of Igbo empowerment is antithetical to development. Igbo leaders are not asking Jonathan to help create a system which could accelerate development of Igboland which unfortunately is increasingly becoming an economic desert. Figures from the national Bureau of Statistics show the Southeast and severely security-challenged Northeast to be the least developing geopolitical zones in both relative and absolute terms.  No one is asking the president to build natural gas pipelines to the Southeast, as there are in the Southwest, so that heavy industries could be established in the area. No one is asking that a seaport be built in, say, Onitsha, for economic and strategic reasons. In his absorbing book, My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence, Dubai Ruler Mohammed Maktoum explains that the establishment of the world’s largest man-made port and other seaports in this desert emirate has been at the heart of Dubai’s phenomenal development. Igbo leaders are not even asking Jonathan to do something as simple as directing ministries, departments and agencies to patronize Innoson vehicles, so that this ingenious Innoson Motors firm would not go the way of Anammco in Enugu which collapsed on account of poor patronage by even government agencies across the nation. Igbo leaders are not asking Jonathan to help revive the Nigerian Cement company at Nkalagu in Ebonyi State.

 

What we rather hear from these leaders is that Jonathan is a great leader because he has promised to build a second bridge on the River Niger so that traffic would flow easily from Asaba to Onitsha during Christmas and Easter when Igbo people return home en masse. Is this what is called strategic thinking in the 21^st century? The Jonathan presidency is modernizing the Lagos—Kano rail which is bound to have a significant impact on the economies of these two states and their neighbours. Neither Lagos State governor Babatunde Fashola nor Kano State governor Kwankwanso has ever kowtowed to the president for this strategic and capital intensive initiative. But the moment the president promised he would start the second Niger bridge, Peter Obi, in his capacity as chairman of the Conference of Southeast Governors, mobilised large delegations of Igbo leaders in a well-choreographed show of endless public adulation and obeisance to Jonathan. Frankly, it is unrealistic to expect any major ethnic group which has chosen this inelegant role for itself to be taken seriously. Any wonder the president had no difficulty throwing out Festus Odimegwu, a particularly brilliant and gifted technocrat, out of office once Governor Kwankwaso balked at Odimegwu’s pledge that he would be the first chairman of the National Population Commission to conduct a credible national census?

 

To be sure, Igbo leaders are at liberty to support any person. But such an endorsement should be on certain conditions which must hinge on long term interests of Ndigbo. The current hysteria over Jonathan without negotiating any deal for the development of our homeland belittles all of us. It is does not portray a people prepared, as Achebe would say, to join the rest of the world step into the 21^st century with restored hope and dignity.

 

 

Adinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.

 

 

 

 

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Posted by: Ugo Harris Ukandu <abuj...@gmail.com>

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