₦airaland Forum

Chai! he make man useless...

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Up PDP! better days are ahead...

we appreciates them...

hmmm

Sai baba! we are moving toward our dream...

good one

Chai! God have mercy on us..

hmmm

hmmm

Politicians know how to divide and rule...

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hmmm

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream), Senator Kabiru Marafa (APC, Zamfara), has told the Senate that Governor Abdulaziz Yari is not from Zamfara State.

Yari and Marafa had clashed over Ahmad Bello Mahmud, a nominee of President Muhammadu Buhari for Resident Electoral Commission of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

While Yari insisted that the nominee who was to represent Zamfara in INEC should not be confirmed by the Senate, Marafa said he should be allowed to represent the state.

The Senate Committee on INEC, chaired by Senator Suleiman Nazif (APC, Bauchi), last month recommended the rejection of the nominee, and it was approved by the Senate.

Marafa, yesterday, raised a point of order alleging that the governor’s parents, like that of the nominee, were not from Zamfara State.

“It is very clear that the only opposition to this nominee is coming from the Governor of Zamfara State who wrote to the president that the nominee is not from Zamfara State but from Sokoto State. The governor’s parents are not from Zamfara State,” he said.

In his remarks, the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, assured Marafa that justice would be done on the matter.

Yari had in a letter he personally signed requested President Buhari to drop the nominee and replace him with Alhaji Sani Garba Gusau, saying Mahmud was from Sokoto and not Zamfara State.


https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/marafa-to-yari-you-re-not-from-zamfara.html

By which ever means the panjandrums of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, were able to patch it up, their national convention, the first since its ouster from power in 2015, has come and gone leaving in its trail the usual post- convention trauma that features some teeth gnashing, some wailings, some threats, real and imaginary, and lots of conjectures about what would be and what would not be thereafter.

But nobody, not even the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, can dismiss what the opposition party, the PDP, successfully put up as a non-event. What is left now is to see how the PDP executives under the chairmanship of Uche Secondus, manage themselves from now through to the 2019 presidential election.

With a heavy baggage, naturally there is a lot of pressure on the PDP to remake itself and launder its not-so-admirable image to regain the support and the sympathy of the people before it ventures into the series elections from next year. PDP is counting on disaffected and disappointed people to move in droves from the ruling party not only to strengthen its support base but, working with a major catch like Atiku Abubakar, to refurbish and recoup the political gravitas that it was known for in the 16 years that it ruled the country. It remains to be seen how successful it will be in this new enterprise.

But for the growth of democracy, the rebirth of the PDP and the registration of many other parties portends good omen. It promises to usher in the year 2018 as a year of great expectations: one, that Nigeria would not drift into a one party state, two, that there would be one or two strong parties that would pose the challenge from opposition perspectives to the ruling party and keep it on its toes.

For now, the ordinary mortals like us do not need any visit to the clairvoyants or resort to the use of the occult to know that the presidential fight in 2019 will be a straight fight between the APC and the PDP with a slight tweaking in the cast of characters. PDP has no Goodluck Jonathan to parade and it is not certain for now, who will have the good luck to carry its flag. But there is no such cloud of uncertainty over the APC.

APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, the incumbent president, is now 75 years old. Despite the buffeting of a recent ill-health, followed mercifully by a miraculous recovery, the man has remained his ramrod self, fit as fiddle with this glowing look of healthiness all around him. As they say, he is good to go and I don’t think the APC will, in clear conscience, be willing to change a winning horse. So Buhari is.

Whoever emerges as PDP’s flag bearer, be it the aforementioned Atiku Abubakar, or Sule Lamido or Ahmed Makarfi, or Ibrahim Shekarau or, for that matter , some dark horse yet to show his face, the contest promises to be the kind of fight that the inimitable Fela Anikulapo Kuti once described as roforofo fight.

The 16 years that PDP was in power can be likened to the plague of the locusts. President Buhari’s fight against corruption, one of the three cardinal programmes of his administration, has uncovered monumental fraud on the part of the PDP run government. APC has this in its armoury - a potent weapon to deploy in political war time. In fact, some professional political assassins are already warming up in the social media with ugly facts and figures detailing when, where and how they happen - the arms bazaar for instance and the soulless acquisition of the Diezani Alison-Madueke property armada just to mention but a few examples.

The prospective voters, who witnessed the efficacy of the looting machine at work over the years under review, will have the added value of being further entertained by the counter -factual narrative of what went wrong, how it could have gotten worse if the old order, presided over by President Goodluck Jonathan, had continued with the remorseless squandering of the commonwealth. Have you forgotten the dire intelligence warning by the American doomsayers which claimed that Nigeria would disintegrate in 2015? Precisely that, according to the change narrative of the APC strategists, was the apocalypse that the Buhari mission in politics had changed during the election - halting the perilous drift into anarchy and doom.

But nobody should be under any illusion that the PDP, veterans of grim battles and dirty wars, would be so plagued by guilt that they would just surrender and allow themselves to be overrun by the enemy they now know very well. That is a warning that the APC must be prepared to take as much as they give in the high end battle for the votes of the people.

It is not difficult to imagine the attack line of the PDP. Even at the most mournful time when the party was going through its near death experience, torn by factional disputes between one time chairman, Ali Modu Sherrif and his traducers, some members of the party, irrespective of their faction, felt bitter enough to gallantly put up some tepid fight against the APC government’s unremitting onslaught. Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose, the enfent terrible of modern day politics and the architect of stomach infrastructure, never let a day pass without throwing some tantrums at the Buhari government or the President himself. President Buhari’s fight against corruption, he proclaimed, was discriminatory, one-sided and self-serving. At other times, the war against the Boko Haram insurgents was unwinnable because of the method the Buhari regime had adopted.

He was not alone. Femi Fani Kayode, in his usually acerbic style, deployed all the arsenals he had in the Fani Kayode lexicon to write off the APC administration as if the party and its government were totally incapable of anything fundamentally inspiring. At best the two were noted more for crudity than for finesse and sophistication in their polemics and the engagement in diatribe. The two of them succeeded, in no small measure, in promoting the rise of political lying.

But what the president and his handlers have to worry about most as we get closer to these days of drama and political fireworks would be the perceived inability or perhaps the unwillingness of the president to walk the talk where and when it matters most. For instance, the issue of corruption is uppermost on his mind and it is therefore very high on his agenda. But when allegations of corrupt practices are levelled against those who are close to him and who should be above board, there is evident dithering and clumsiness in handling it as if to suggest, even if falsely, that he is treating such people with kid gloves. On such occasions, Senator Shehu Sani said the president was given to using deodorants to fight the corruption that is close home and detergents for those not so close.

I remember that many Nigerians clapped for President Buhari when he vowed that he would not allow any corrupt Nigerian to use the proceeds of corruption to buy his way into public office. A vow implemented more in breach than in observance. Perhaps unknown to him many such people must have found their way to such high public offices despite numerous question marks on their character and integrity.

Even if the APC wishes to query the moral right of the PDP to point any accusing finger at the government when it comes to issues of morality, the less than inspiring governance style of the administration, issues of probity and accountability, nobody, at least not the onlookers, would side with the APC when they call to mind the tardiness with which the Abdulrasheed Maina scandal has been handled so far and the less than serious manner the government has handled the herdsmen rampage in the country, a sad phenomenon that is threatening to replace Boko Haram as the most serious security problem in the country today.

https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/rebirth-of-pdp-and-the-challenge-to-buhari.html

hmmm

The House of Representatives said the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is hiding $5 billion and failed to declare same to the federation.

The House yesterday said the amount was as a result of the 0.25 per cent deductions from all foreign-denominated revenue as ‘exchange commission,’ for converting dollars to naira.

The House said even after making the deductions, the balance credited to the federation account at various times have been in negative difference, running into billions of naira per year.

It also said the office of the Accountant General of the Federation failed to report the infractions of under-remittance of millions of dollars and trillions of naira into the federation account by the CBN.

Adopting a motion by Ayo Omidiran (APC, Osun), the House resolved to constitute an adhoc panel to investigate the matter and report back within eight weeks.

The House said the CBN, instead of embarking on its statutory role of receiving financial in-flows on behalf of the federation, now goes a step further to usurp the powers of the accountant general by preparing the federation account.

The lawmakers said the apex bank uses the opportunity “to manipulate the system by opening various accounts not known to the three tiers of government, where funds are remitted, hidden, diverted and spent without authorization.”

The House said in 2006, the apex bank opened various accounts with JP Morgan Chase Bank in New York in which IOCs remit revenues and that it still operates an account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to date.

Meanwhile, CBN said in a statement last night by its Acting Director Corporate Communications, Isaac Okorafor, that allegation that the apex bank diverted the said amount was ‘untrue’.

https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/cbn-withholds-5bn-illegally--reps.html

Kaduna State Government, on Wednesday, began screening of 43,806 applicants for 25,000 teaching positions in its primary schools, with M.Sc. degree holders being among the applicants.

The list of applicants pasted on the notice board at Rimi College, Kaduna, one of the examination centres, showed that two applicants held M.Sc. degrees in Biochemistry and Water Resources.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the examination of the applicants was held in 130 centres across the 23 local government areas of the state.

Other centres include Government Secondary School (GSS), Kakuri; GSS, Narayi; and Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS), Ungwan Mua’zu.

The examination was conducted under tight security, with officers of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and police personnel stationed at the centres.

A Permanent Member, Kaduna State Basic Education Board, Mrs Mary Ambi, said only those who scored the minimum points and possessed the required qualification would be contacted for an oral interview afterwards.

NAN recalls that the state government had in October announced plans to sack 21,780 primary school teachers for allegedly failing a competency test.

The test was conducted by the state government in June.

Meanwhile, the state wing of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) has rejected the government decision to sack the teachers.

Consequently, the union has taken the state government to the National Industrial Court, asking the court to determine if government has the mandate to conduct the test.

The NUT had on Oct. 30, filed a motion of “interlocutory injunction”, asking the court to restrain government from dismissing or disengaging any teacher on the basis of the test.

Justice Lawal Mani, in his ruling on Dec. 14, granted the prayer pending the determination of the substantive suit and adjourned the case until Feb. 6, 2018.

https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/master-degree-holders-apply-for-primary-school-job-in-kaduna-state.html

Hmmm

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Good one

Buhari swears in 7 new permanent
President Muhammadu Buhari today swore in seven new permanent secretaries.
They were inaugurated inside the Council Chambers of the Aso Rock Presidential Villa in Abuja before the weekly cabinet meeting began.

They are Mustapha Sulaiman (Kano ), Adekunle Olusegun Adeyemi (Oyo), Mrs. Ekaro Chukwumogwu ( Rivers), Adedayo Apata (Ekiti), Abdulkadri Muazu (Kaduna), Osuji Ndubusi (Imo) and Bitrus Nabasu (Plateau ).

They were not inaugurated on August 15 when Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, as acting president then, swore in 15 others because the permanent secretaries from their respective states had not retired.

https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/buhari-swears-in-7-new-permanent-secretaries.html

This man again?

Hmm

RIP