₦airaland Forum

judiciarypalava:
Show some sense of maturity, even if you are not, just pretend. AIT and the likes never aired what he is not or did not do. If he thinks they did otherwise, let him try court and you will be amazed on the turn of event.
As long as democratic governance is concerned, he is too dull to take us to the promise land he promised.

judiciarypalava:
Promising you are a better person than the incumbent, showcasing yourself as a saint is where the issue is. Now l know and confirm why spectators perform better from the stand and once handed the mantle, excuses will be their watchword. PMB and APC promised to turn Nigeria around within hundred days in office.
But as soon as they entered, they saw the reality and demanded for 100days honeymoon for Buhari. So what they did was to blackmail Jonathan out of power and nothing else, they where never ready and prepared to govern. One Month is more than enough to show us where you are going, just your blue print and nothing else. If you cant show or face where you are going in more than four Months, 4years will be a short time for anything serious to happen.
To tell you that education matters in governance. As a leader you must not rely on your personal assistants always. Their job is to guide and not to take decisions. Idiagbon did it for Buhari then, now Elrufai is doing this time. Buhari lacks economic and political awareness hence he is always pushed around by his HAUSA unofficial aids.
Listen to Uhuru Kenyata, you will know that for you to be qualified as his assistant, you must be very sound.
Take it or leave it, Buhari is an analog president and that is not what Nigeria needs now.

Alphaoscar:
Its only certified f00l like you that will answer that question with a Yes or No. He is interviewed in his capacity as Nigerian President and you expect him to answer the question in your shallow way?



Smh.

Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna state and a member of the panel investigating graft, said that associates of one former minister had approached him with an offer to return $250 million.

“When you say you want to refund, it means you are admitting that you took what was not yours,” Mr. Rufai said. “I said, ‘I am a governor, I am not involved in this. I will pass on your message.’ ”

ABUJA, Nigeria — Private jets that used to crowd the airport here have been grounded, their wings clipped by the new government’s crackdown on corruption. Rolls-Royces, Range Rovers and Jaguars are gathering dust in the showroom of this capital’s top car dealer. Luxury villas are left unsold, as is the fine Italian marble used to bedeck the homes of Nigeria’s newly rich.

Since assuming power in May on a pledge to root out the graft that has long permeated Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has squeezed the flow of public funds in an effort to clean up Africa’s biggest economy.

He has put many public projects on hold to review the contracts, and ordered many government ministries, departments and agencies to consolidate their bank accounts for closer monitoring of financial transactions. He has overhauled the management of the state oil company, while also moving to retrieve stolen money.

In recent days, the campaign escalated with the arrest of two high-profile figures: Diezani Alison-Madueke, the former oil minister whose five-year tenure was marred by recurring accusations of widespread theft; and the chairman of a Nigerian oil company. Both were held as part of inquiries into corruption and money laundering.

Photo

At Royal Choice, a private housing estate on the outskirts of Abuja, 20 mansions have been built but only two are occupied. Buyers have used estates like this one as investments and eagerly bought up property, often paying in cash. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

“Those actions will sustain the fear that the culture of impunity is over and government’s will to prosecute is strong,” said Adams Oshiomhole, a governor leading a national panel investigating federal graft. “There’s no more free money flowing because of the attempts by the president to block it, but also the fear that, ‘If I’m caught now, I’ll be prosecuted.’”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is the continent’s top oil producer and one of the biggest producers in the world. Yet corruption has undermined the nation, helping to keep 68 percent of its population living on less than $1.25 a day and perpetuating instability, especially the long-running conflict with Boko Haram.

Whether Mr. Buhari can maintain the pressure against graft, much less transform a society where corruption thrives at all levels, is far from clear. Over the years, previous assaults on the problem have fizzled. Mr Buhari himself first rose to power in a military coup in the 1980s, waging a self-described “war against indiscipline” during his short reign as military ruler.

But this year, with national frustration boiling over corruption and the rampages of Boko Haram, the extremist group that has terrorized northern Nigeria, Mr. Buhari won the presidential election in March as the head of an opposition alliance that is tasting power for the first time. Now many politicians and businessmen say he is facing growing pressure to reward the faithful.

The widening anti-corruption drive has chilled the economy elsewhere in the country, but nowhere has its impact been felt as keenly as here in the capital.

At Coscharis, the leading dealer of luxury cars here, Happiness Adibe has been going through her worst year in her nine years as a saleswoman. Last year was her strongest: a record number of buyers, mostly businessmen and politicians, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying Range Rovers and Jaguars from her. Seventy percent of her customers paid cash.


“There’s no money now, no money,” Ms. Adibe said. “Contracts aren’t going on now, everything is standing still. When contracts are going on, people are getting contracts and doing their, you know, thing.”

At Royal Choice — a gated community of villas selling for up to $1.8 million each, some furnished according to a London, New York, Dubai or Shanghai theme — Joshua Bialonwu has not scored a single sale since the new government took over. Under the previous administration, customers often bought villas in cash.

At Royal Choice, a private housing estate on the outskirts of Abuja, 20 mansions have been built but only two are occupied. Buyers have used estates like this one as investments and eagerly bought up property, often paying in cash. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York Times





https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/08/world/09nigeria-web2/09nigeria-web2-articleLarge.jpg

On a tour through Royal Choice’s eerily deserted streets and inside several villas, each empty except for a guard and a cellphone charging from a wall, Mr. Bialonwu explained why sales had dried up.

“With the uncertainties of the government presently, nobody knows how much you might be asked to return,” Mr. Bialonwu said. “So you want to hold on to as much as you can.”

Negotiations over what to do with ill-gotten gains are taking place quietly.

Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna state and a member of the panel investigating graft, said that associates of one former minister had approached him with an offer to return $250 million.

“When you say you want to refund, it means you are admitting that you took what was not yours,” Mr. Rufai said. “I said, ‘I am a governor, I am not involved in this. I will pass on your message.’ ”

Many officials and businessmen said that graft under former President Goodluck Jonathan reached levels not seen since military rule ended in 1999. Billions of dollars are believed to have disappeared from activities related to the oil industry, the source of 80 percent of all government revenues.

Last year, after the governor of the country’s central bank asserted that billions of dollars in oil revenue owed to the treasury was missing from public coffers, he was removed from his post.

The missing funds could amount to “$10.8 billion or $12 billion or $19 billion or $21 billion — we do not know at this point,” the bank governor wrote to the Nigerian Senate before his dismissal, adding that the problem could “bring the entire economy to its knees.”

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the state oil company, spent half of what it collected on its own operations, Mr. Rufai said.

An armored car on display in the lobby of a Hilton hotel in Abuja. At many upscale hotels and businesses in the capital, commerce has slowed this year, which many attribute to the government's crackdown on corruption. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

“The corrupt try to take money under the table,” he said. “Under Jonathan’s government, it is done so openly, with records. People actually document the diversion of funds. You just wonder, what is wrong with them.”

The loss of oil revenues has left many of Nigeria’s 36 states bankrupt or nearly bankrupt, unable to pay salaries.

Corruption in other sectors of the government was equally self-destructive, said Mr. Oshiomhole, the federal graft panel leader.

Money meant for the purchase of arms in the army’s fight against Boko Haram vanished, leaving soldiers without proper equipment. The privatization of the state power utility was riddled with fraud, enriching individuals but leaving most Nigerians still without electricity.



An import duty waiver granted to a politically connected Indian rice importer has dumped one million tons of substandard rice in Nigeria, Mr. Oshiomhole said, adding that a big farmer in his state, Edo, shelved plans to grow rice as a result.

Here in Abuja, people with no particular expertise but solid political connections made fortunes.

“Nothing better explains the amount of theft that went on that somebody without a business — he has a small office in the corner of his house with an iPad and a cellphone — has jets,” Mr. Oshiomhole said. “Everybody was just buying jets.”

The cash fueled a boom in high-end real estate development in the capital, Abuja, and in Lagos, the nation’s main city. Villas and condominiums built or purchased to launder money tellingly remain unoccupied, real estate agents and businessmen say.


https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/08/world/09nigeria-web3/09nigeria-web3-articleLarge.jpg

At Pated, a store that has sold Italian marble to the Abuja elite for decades, some politicians and high-ranking civil servants came to make large purchases in their official vehicles, said John Abimiku, a salesman. Others were more discreet, or tried to be.

“If you are dealing with a private businessman, you see a lot of prudence in terms of managing their resources,” Mr. Abimiku said. “But if it’s a politician, you tell him a price and he doesn’t argue too much. ‘O.K., it’s all right, it’s all right. Let’s have it.’”

But Sadiq Yaqub, Pated’s manager, said business now was the “worst it’s ever been” in the 12 years he has worked at the store.

[b]To press ahead, the Buhari government will back a new law to prosecute cases of corruption more quickly, said Itse Sagay, a legal scholar and human rights activist who now leads another presidential panel against corruption.

No high-profile case of corruption has been prosecuted successfully in the past decade, reinforcing a culture of impunity, Mr. Sagay said. Wealthy defendants have been able to exploit legal maneuvers to draw out trials for more than a decade.

“After 10, 12 years, you begin to have prosecution fatigue,” he said. “Witnesses have died, witnesses have disappeared. Those who have started the prosecution have retired.”

Mr. Sagay said that his panel is also focusing on reforming the handful of government anti-corruption agencies, which, he said, have been “contaminated” by officials working in concert with those they are supposed to be investigating.

“We now have at the federal government level a government that actually appreciates the work of the anti-corruption agencies,” said Sola Akinrinade, the head of a government anti-corruption academy.[/b].

Mr. Akinrinade acknowledged, though, that previous governments had also had strong starts. After being elected president in 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo surprised many with an equally aggressive push against corruption. But within a year or two, it was business as usual in Nigeria.

“Corruption,” Mr. Akinrinade said, “will fight back.”

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.





http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/world/africa/nigeria-president-pledges-to-root-out-long-entrenched-graft.html?_r=0

The hospital that is equipped with 640 slides CT scan, digital mammography, endoscopy surgery, highly sophisticated intensive care units and medical gas plants.


The MRI system we have installed in that hospital is the best in the whole of West Africa. There is none in Nigeria today. We went for the best because we want to save lives.”
http://thenews-chronicle.com/akpabio-commissions-ibom-specialist-hospital/

philips70:
Are you reading those detailed allegations though? That Ekpeyong has proof and seems to be very serious about it. Anyone who has such details on Amaechi, Fashola and the rest should go and submit them and insist. Are you not surprised of all Amaechi is a thief and the rest nobody has been able to pinpoint any property anywhere in this country linked to him?

For me I would really love anyone who has proofs including even those hidden under surrogates to present them and pursue them vigorously. Not the current one that just look like punishment for his support for Buhari to remove Jonathan.

nigerianvenom:
Stop it, ive got respect for u cos we are comrade in struggle against this evil called APC.


akpabio is d best governor in Nigeria since 99 except performance isnt a yardstick for measurement.

Only according to shallow and insincere people like you...


How much of akwa ibom did u know before akpabio came in?
I guess u only knew akwa ibom cos of ekaettes, akpans and co because everyone felt housemaids should be found in akwa ibom.

Akpabio came n restructured d state and it became the envy of all.


Nobody has done what this young man has done. He is my governor and i know what im talking about.

6 long fly overs isnt an easy feat in a state dat never had one before now.

A world class stadium hasn't bin built yet by any governor in Nigeria except akpabio.

The specialist hospital built by akpabio cant be found anywhere in Nigeria, its a fact. A fraudulent endeavour. He did not build or complete any hospital. What he labeled hospital was an empty building with no staff or equimpent and till this very second, the hospital is yet to see one single patient. Even akpabio himself couldn't secure any place in his own richest state in Nigeria to put a damn bandage on his leg so he jet off to london to have bandage wrapped around his leg.

[s]Ibom tropicana galleria is a edifice no governor in Nigeria has built.[/s] Abandoned and uncompleted project.

What about the airport, d power plant, d thousands of good roads, free n compulsory education for primary and secondary schools? Uncompleted airport after 8 years in office and still uncompleted.

Power plant was sold and the money collected is yet to be accounted for and there's nothing like thousands of roads, only in your imagination



I can go on n on.
Tell buhari to leave akpabio and focus on ameachi that has hundreds of petition heap on his head but buhari has so far refused to take action.

Fashola built a common website for 78m, yet nigerians sang his praises for stealing.

This country will never get better until u and i decides to say the truth

Firefire:
I know you will respond.

Walahi, won ti fi ori eee gba 'PARO' if you were born during the booming days of Paro. :

Firefire:
Ass-licker, when will you ask for Fashola and other looters in APC to be invited by EFCC ?

babestella:
Whoever told you Akpabio is Igbo just made your fail current affairs. Go back to school.

Ameko4ever:
This is the true story

Mr. Akpabio was taken in by EFCC operatives at about 5.20 pm.
He was said to have been accompanied a few aides and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, Ricky Tarfa.

abagoro:
In as much as Akpabio wasn't a success, he did a lot of infrastructural developments mainly in Uyo and Ikot-Ekpene and they far outnumber what you wrote up there.

Marvin67:
The two groups (CACOL and Rivers PDP) have always reiterated that they have submitted petitions to the EFCC regarding both men. EFCC has never denied receiving the petitions

chukwudi44:
Godswill Akpabio perfomed far more better than all the SW governors put together including the much overhyped Fashola!!! If you are jealous of the huge revenues accrued to his state simply go and develop oil in your own backyard and quit eyeing another man's money!!! You should even be grateful they are taking just 13% of their oil money and leaving the remaining 87% for your barren brown roof states to survive!! You should be grateful for their magnanimity.

chukwudi44:
So you are claiming ignorant of the numerous petitions filed against Amaechi and Fashola!!! You hypocrites you never cease to amaze me!! APC can brag about anything but certainly anti-corruption war is not one of them.

A very stinking Rotimi Amaechi. And Babatunde Amaechi are sent o the senate even in the midst of the dirtiest of scandals and yet some fools still want me to beleive this regime is anchored on anti-corruption.
I am yet to talk about the criminal Abubakar Audu who is facing trial for N11billion fraud yet the same "holy" party deemed it fit to hand over their gubernatorial ticket to him!!!

Marvin67:
I'm not for any party as I believe both APC and PDP comprises criminals. But let's be sincere, there's something selective about all this.
Some weeks back, a group called CACOL submitted a petition to the EFCC concerning alleged fraud against Fashola. Has Fashola been invited by the EFCC?
Some months back, Rivers PDP submitted a petition to this same EFCC about fraud allegedly committed by Amaechi. Has Amaechi been invited by the EFCC?
Howcome it's only perceived enemies of the president who are being hunted by the EFCC. A fight against corruption should be faceless.

chukwudi44:
Initial gragra!!! Nothing will come out of it!!! Akpabio wpuld be interrogated ans allowed to go home!! Later on the case would continue to linger in the courts!!

BTW Ministerial Nominee Rotimi Amaechi has already been indicted by a judicial commission of enquiry for N97billion scam,when is the EFCC going after him

john4reala:
bro I only saw it on pictures oo

john4reala:
OMO MEHN THAT STADIUM IS VERY HANDSOME AND CRITICALLY BEAUTIFUL

Working with Governor Fashola, you have to always be on your toes. He is a sportsman and when he walks at times, you have to jog. We were returning from an event on the afternoon the incident happened. We were at Outer Marina and you know Governor Fashola doesn’t use siren, so we were caught up in the traffic. There was a junior army officer passing the BRT lane and the Governor told one of his security guards to block him. That was when we sighted the senior military officer and Governor Fashola started walking towards the car. When he saw the Governor, he alighted and started saluting him. If I wasn’t close on the Governor’s tail, I would have missed that moment.

http://www.cityvoiceng.com/i-am-governor-fasholas-shadow-lukesh/

Has the Governor ever wanted a photograph from an event and you didn’t have it?

I don’t think so because I am like the Governor’s shadow. I travel with him; I am always in his meetings even when we travel abroad. There was a time we went for a meeting with ex-President Bill Clinton. Out of all his entourage, I was the only one that went in with him.

http://www.cityvoiceng.com/i-am-governor-fasholas-shadow-lukesh/

How many photographs of the governor do you take in a day? I take up to 500 images per day and at times there are some state events where I shoot up to 4,000, 5,000 images but on a normal day, 500 images. And those 500 images can be from four or five events. I have about six million images of the governor, of both his public and private life in my stock

http://www.cityvoiceng.com/i-am-governor-fasholas-shadow-lukesh/

nairalandbuzz:
Lukesh Photography again?

Ao much Fashola dey pay you??

So Oga Fash get private photographer wey dey follow am abi

Good to know.

Memorable! In 2007, during campaign period, he told me that when he becomes the Governor he will send me to Photography school to hone my skills, and he did. He sent me to London school of photography in 2008. What made it memorable was that I thought he would have forgotten because we had not even won elections at the time he made the promise.

http://www.lukeshphotography.com/my-experience-working-with-gov-fashola-lukesh/