₦airaland Forum

iwaeda:
Nigeria was scammed by APC that there is nothing called subsidy.

Founder of the Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc, Dr Atedo Peterside has asked those who criticised the removal of the fuel subsidy in 2012 to beg for forgiveness from former President Goodluck Jonathan.

Peterside also said the critics should apologise to Jonathan’s economic team which had the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi; and the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Recall that there were nationwide demonstrations tagged ‘Occupy Nigeria’ that began on January 2, 2012, launched by the then opposition of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Jonathan administration over the removal of subsidy.

The former president, then, said Nigeria would thrive economically if the subsidy of petroleum products were removed but Nigerians rejected it, despite promising palliatives.

Meanwhile, eleven years after, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced shortly that the country could not sustain the fuel subsidy, hence, would be removed.

Tinubu disclosed that the current budget handed over to him by former President Muhammadu Buhari did not provide for the petrol subsidy.

The declaration on May 29 has sparked outrage among Nigerians as long queues mounted at petrol stations and pump prices escalated across the country, leading to rising prices of transport fares and food products.

While some said there were no palliatives to cushion the effects, some opined that the timing was wrong, as many held that fuel subsidy should be gone.

Reacting via a Twitter post on Sunday, Peterside said the fuel subsidy removal was complicated as those who opposed it in 2012 have turned out to be its supporters.

The foremost investment banker and entrepreneur also said the 2012 protesters who led the strike in during Jonathan’s administration should beg Nigerians.

“The petrol subsidy removal is complicated by the fact some liars who held sway in 2012 are now singing a different tune in 2023. They should apologise to @GEJonathan @PeterObi @NOIweala & others in the 2012 Economic Team & beg Nigerians for forgiveness so we can move forward,” Peterside wrote.

flokii:
You don't get the point do you?.. Why will NNPCL rush to fix price of PMS at over #530.
Which section of the law gave them that power?

I'm sorry to say this but quota system has battered this country terribly. The Northerners are just behaving anyhow without recourse to logic and critical thinking.
That is the rubbish they did with so called 'Nigeria Air' after crippling other airlines and siphoning billions of dollars. This f00lishness can't continue. Just can't

NNPCL is now a limited liability company,no longer a Corporation and can't act on behalf of government. They can't transact anything or sell Crude Oil on behalf of the Nigerian government. It's complety ILLEGAL.

Human Rights Lawyer, Femi Falana has described the decision of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) to increase pump price of PMS as illegal.

He was speaking on the sideline of an emergency meeting of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) National Executive Council in Abuja.

Mr Falana said NNPCL has a limited liability company does not have any legal power to jack up the price of petroleum.

He urged the federal government to go back to the drawing board with a view to finding alternative solution to the problem, one of which he says includes the need to address the dollarization of Nigeria’s economy.

Falana also said Nigerians will challenge the decision, adding, however, that the solution to the fuel problem will be both legal and political.

The Presidential Election Petition Court has stepped down hearing in the petition filed by Peter Obi and the Labour Party against the election of President Bola Tinubu.

This latest development is a result of an improper schedule of documents tendered before the court as proof of the allegations of malpractices during the February 25 presidential election.

The court, during its proceedings on Thursday, cited some inconsistencies in the documents from the 23 Local Government Areas of Benue State.

While efforts to reconcile the differences turned out to be unsuccessful, the decision of the counsel to Obi and the Labour Party, Chief Emeka Okpoko, SAN, to use documents not filed to conduct the proceedings was rejected on the ground of illegality.


The court thereafter stepped down hearing of the petition and ordered the legal team to go and re-file the schedule of documents in line with the provisions of the pre-hearing report.

Peter Obi and the Vice Presidential candidate of LP, Datti Baba Ahmed, alongside the leaders of the Party, were in the court, to witness the proceedings.

The five Justices led by Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani hearing the petition had also retired to their chambers while Obi’s legal team reconciled their documents.

Microblogging media platform, Twitter, has removed the verification badge attached to the account of President Bola Tinubu.

This is coming hours after the verification badge of the immediate past Vice-President of Nigeria, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, was removed on Monday.

At the time of filing this report on Tuesday, our correspondent observed that Tinubu’s tag had been removed. However, the one on the account of the former president, Muhammadu Buhari, remained.

nairavsdollars:
I want him to free Nnamdi Kanu

Ihateheadslamer:
Super story for another 8yrs as usual

ORIAYO70:
Either you call him President or not!!!

His policy will ever affect ur daily life..

Awon set Yahoo pastor

The Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has said he will never call the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, his president.

The cleric and politician, during a webinar on Saturday, alleged a series of malpractices during the 2023 elections, saying the Independent National Electoral Commission made a mess of the electioneering process.

He said this while responding during a Question & Answer session after delivering his speech on the Zoom programme titled ‘Building the New Nigeria: The Role of the Diaspora’ organised by the PTB4Nigeria In Diaspora Group.

The meeting, which began 7pm and was monitored by our correspondent, had over 200 participants.

While speaking earlier during the programme, he said the 2023 elections were below acceptable standards.

When asked if he would be happy to work for the new government as a Minister of Diaspora Engagements, he laughed and said he would say what he said to the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), last week.

He said he told Buhari that sometimes he called him President of Nigeria and other times, he called him “My President.”

Bakare said, “Last Wednesday, I was at the Glass House where he (Buhari) has been restricted now because the main house is being renovated. I said I have done that for you. I want you to know that, because of the circumstances of your flying into power on the wings of integrity and incorruptibility, but you’re now passing onto someone who does not have that value.

He said that at “any public lecture anywhere, before this mess is cleared off, I will address Asiwaju (Tinubu) as a President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria but I will never call him my president.”

He said he didn’t participate in the elections, and therefore, no one could say he lost.

Bakare, who participated in the All Progressives Congress presidential primary in June 2022, where nomination forms were sold for N100 million, polled no single vote.

Briefly touching this, he said, “I participated in the primary, and there were hundreds (of persons) who participated only by stepping down, so there is no shame in what we have done. We spoke truth to power within seven minutes.”

“I wasn’t there when they voted, I wasn’t there when they scored (me) zero, but we won that badge of zero and badge of honour,” he said, adding that this was because some defeats that were more triumphant than victories.

Answering the question, he said if he was called to be a minister under the incoming government, there would be conditions to it, “but I am not desperate to be a minister, not at all. I was offered before but I turned it down. My life is not just to take photographs with the president and shake hands.

“But we will do if it will benefit even one citizen.”

Tinubu will on Monday, May 29, be sworn in as the President of the country.

On Thursday, Tinubu was handed the transition report by Buhari, where he also promised not to disappoint Nigerians.

He pledged to address the security and power crises, among other challenges confronting the country.

Diezani Alison-Madueke, former minister of petroleum resources, has filed a libel suit against the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the attorney-general of the federation (AGF) demanding to be paid damages of N100 billion over claims that she is corrupt.

In a writ of summons filed on her behalf at a federal high court sitting in Abuja by a team of lawyers led by Mike Ozekhome, a senior advocate, on May 26, 2023 and seen by TheCable, Alison-Madueke also demanded that the EFCC and the AGF should be compelled to apologise to her in three national newspapers “for the false, injurious, malicious and libelous publications” against her since 2015 when she left the country.

She listed statements and publications issued by the EFCC which she said were intended to lower her reputation and integrity and which she said did indeed lower her reputation and integrity “in the estimation of right-thinking members of the society within and outside Nigeria” and also brought her into “public ridicule, odium, contempt, derision and obloquy”.

The defamatory reports, as she claimed in the suit marked CV/6273/2023, are:

A publication on December 16, 2021, “Diezani: EFCC uncovers additional $72.8 million in Bank”

A publication on August 8, 2017, “Unbelievable!!! EFCC traces N47.2 Billion, $487.5 Million to ex-Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke”

A publication, “By virtue of an order of the Federal High Court of Nigeria sitting in Abuja, Diezani Alison Madueke, had forfeited to the Federal Government of Nigeria, the sum of $40,000,000.00 (forty million dollars) only, which jewelleries were found and recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in the premises of the Respondent (Alison-Madueke) and reasonably suspected to have been acquired with proceeds of the Respondent’s unlawful activities”, made by the court on January 24, 2022, relying on the “false information” made available to the court by the EFCC in a court process dated and filed on July 4, 2019, and widely published in the media.

A publication titled “By virtue of an order of the Federal High Court of Nigeria, sitting in Abuja, the Prosecution Counsel to liaise with the office of the Attorney General of the Federation towards the extradition of the Defendant”, made by the court on October 28, 2020, relying on the “false information” made available to the court by the EFCC in a court process dated and filed on November 13, 2018, and widely published in the media.
Claims and publication made by the EFCC on December 16, 2021 to the effect that it had uncovered an additional $72.8 Million in a bank purportedly belonging to her.

A “false and defamatory statement” made by the EFCC and concerning her on or about February 17, 2022 to the effect that she should be extradited for stealing a sum of $2.5 billion belonging to the Nigerian government.
A “false and defamatory statement” made by the EFCC concerning her on or about August 8, 2017, to the effect that she has embezzled the sum of 2Billion belonging to the Nigerian government.

The EFCC and AGF were given 14 days from the service of the summons to enter their defence.

Alison-Madueke was minister of transportation (and later mines and steel development) from 2007 to 2009 under President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua before serving as petroleum minister under President Goodluck Jonathan from 2010 to 2015.

Even the most ardent supporter of the President, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) must be happy to see him pack his nuisance and return to Daura (or Niger, wherever) come Monday. If there is a regime in this world on which the sun cannot set fast enough, it is Buhari’s. He rode into the presidency in 2015 with his babariga pockets filled with tokens of goodwill and high expectations of renewal. Eight years later, he had bankrupted everything with his sadism and indolence. He came into power in a blaze of glory but his departure will be accompanied with deep sighs of “good riddance.” One good thing about his sociopathic nature is that he will not even be moved to care how much he has let down everyone who once took him seriously.

As much as the buck stops at his table, he could not have been the kind of failure he was without his enablers. They are many, but the most vociferous of these minions was his media team. For a collective that never advanced an original thought or devised any meaningful strategy of public engagement, they had a larger-than-life reach. From buffering Buhari from reasonable public opinion to obfuscating serious issues, they enabled his apathetic stance while the nation faltered under his watch. If they had summoned their will to a higher moral resolve, perhaps Buhari would not be leaving so much wreckage and carnage behind.

If there was something that quickly defined the Goebbelsian ethos of the Buhari regime at its inception, it was the number of media aides recruited. For a man who would not even appoint his federal ministers, he was rather quick to inaugurate a whole nest of media howlers. Close to hand, he had people like Femi Adesina, Garba Shehu, Bashir Ahmed, Tolu Ogunlesi, and Lauretta Onochie. Some of them were accomplished professionals before they took up the job of image laundering for the presidency, but you can hardly look back at key moments during their term and cite instances when they had a shining moment of professional management of public relations and communication. By May 29, when the sun sets on their time, they would all have been indistinguishably diminished by the multi-dimensional failings of the government they served.

At the back end, the administration also maintained a troll farm. There, they had tucked the rabble-rousers, whose job was to loiter around the highways and byways of the internet, defending Buhari against every reasonability and generally darkening counsel with words without knowledge. Partly due to the redundancy of these associates and perhaps too, because of the lack of any apparent strategic thought that went into planning the information management aspect of the Buhari presidency, what the bloated media team ended up delivering was eight years of cacophonous public communication. On his own, Buhari is sure to fail at any leadership role. With the choir he appointed, his shortcomings got more loudly amplified.

To be fair, media managers in the new media age face a peculiar dilemma in managing public relations and communication. Now that virtually anyone for whom the odds align can sidestep the traditional media gatekeepers and reach an indeterminate public directly, responding to the public can be vertiginous. Media aides to non-performing politicians like Buhari have it far worse—for good reasons. They must confront and control public perceptions and sentiments that can be so powerful they trump objective reality. Also, considering how more easily information can be released into the public sphere to stir mischief these days, media aides to politicians find themselves working in a permanent crisis zone where they are putting out either series of small fires or a conflagration (or both at the same time). Continuously being in a self-defence mode can do things to one’s cerebral capacities, and the frequent misspeaks and missteps that typified these aides’ jobs since 2015 is proof that the aides’ wit became addled over the years of managing Buhari’s crisis-prone government. The highest they achieved was a raucous and rancorous engagement with Nigerians whom—judging from their frequent putdowns—they passionately despise.

Yes, one must admit that being a media aide to a Nigerian politician is unenviable responsibility. We live in a polity where poverty is endemic, political promises are aplenty, and people confront their leaders with a sense of urgency that can be incompatible with the slow-paced nature of democratic deliberations. You cannot blame people jaded by the persistent failures of leadership for wanting quick-fire solutions. Sadly, the cohort of mostly myopic leaders that Nigeria is plagued with can hardly envision solutions to what bedevils us. Consequently, our interactions with them cannot but be defined by antagonisms, bitter exchanges, and mutual frustrations. That is why media aides to politicians turned their social media handles into workstations where they engage the public in crass and classless exchange of clap backs and other claptrap.

When leaders have nothing to show as solid achievements, their media aides must justify their existence by becoming one-trick ponies whose expertise begins and ends with fighting random people online. Aides managing a truant boss like Buhari have had it really hard. They spent the eight years inventing stories, deflecting questions bordering on accountability to the public, punching down at political opponents and their supporters, pandering to their current paymasters while putting up a grand show for prospective ones, and generally maintaining a facade of government functionality. While it must have been exhausting work for them, many of those activities are ultimately useless because neither their approach nor the substance of their communication advanced the course of democracy (or even our national values).

Our relationship with our leaders has ontologically been acrimonious, and they lack the political savviness to redefine it meaningfully. Our leaders probably cannot function without antagonising Nigerians, and their public relations managers too cannot act outside that frame. The conception of their professional responsibility is locked into that debilitating cycle such that they can hardly imagine public interaction without slap downs and punch downs. Even if they discern that the irascibility some people display online is borne of frustration with a polity where nothing ever happens, they still cannot demonstrate empathy. They must necessarily antagonise their fellow citizens. Once behind the high walls of Aso Rock, they can no longer afford to see humans whose survival is threatened by the cluelessness of their employers and who have every reason—and right—to make demands on the government. All they see are pesky irritants who will not let them eat in peace. Their revert is duplicity, deceit, and the shallow-mindedness that suffuses every part of their communication.

Looking at the spin they put out during those times Buhari was hospitalised outside of the country, you saw people in whom there is no truth. You assess how they dragged the presidency on social media like a rag cloth, and you see professional misfits. You consider the childishness of those who classified a section of Nigerians that refuses to drool before them into “wailers,” and what you see are small-minded bigots in high places. When you recall how these people poorly responded to the serious issues of insecurity that imperilled many Nigerian lives, you see people drained of their humanity. When you evaluate their double-fanged responses to the problems of corruption and its consequent denudation of the Nigerian value system, you see a bunch of frauds who add a lack of reflexivity to their hypocrisy. When your measure their dismissive attitude toward the economic hardship that Nigerians suffered under the watch of their inhumane principal, you see people shorn of their capacity to be reasonable humans.

On Monday, they will exit their respective offices (save for those lucky to be reabsorbed by the incoming administration). We will not miss them. Goodbye to their játijàti!

In spite of lingering court case, the Federal Government has insisted the National Carrier, Nigeria Air, will take to the sky before May 29, 2023.

Minister of Aviation, Sen. Hadi Sirika, gave the assurances during the National Aviation Stakeholders Forum 2023, on Thursday.

He said the Federal Government is taking necessary measures to overcome the hurdles introduced by the indigenous airlines that went to court to stop the process.

The minister described as unfair the action of the local airlines, adding that the Buhari government had supported local airlines more than all previous governments.


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He accused them of constituting a stumbling block to the actualisation of the national carrier which will impact new jobs and better opportunities in the industry.

He said the Nigerian Aviation industry is the only one in the world where qualified pilots are without jobs.

He said 50 pilots had come to him complaining about their unemployment status, adding that the national carrier should be able to employ more pilots and create other job opportunities.

He said Ethiopian Airlines, the offered bidder for the national carrier is highly competent, and profitable enough to add value to the Nigerian aviation sector.


The minister of state, Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, has said he has set up a committee to investigate airlines indebtedness to government’s service providers in the aviation industry and recommend ways of recovering the debts. The airlines are heavily indebted to the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), the Nigerian…