₦airaland Forum

This is Dr. Usama Riaz. He spent past weeks screening and treating patients with Corona Virus in Pakistan. He knew there was no PPE. He persisted anyways. Today he lost his own battle with coronavirus but he gave life and hope to so many more.

Hizzy:
So they haven't been invested on our health sector since they assume office.They have been diverting the funds and Mr integrity didn't do anything.Nope Covid-19 must wipe them

A Paskistani Doctor who spent the past weeks screening and treating coronavirus patients in the Middle East country, has reportedly died of the disease. 

 American-Pakistani activist @_SJPeace_, said the doctor identified as Usama Riaz knew there was no Personal protective equipment (PPE), but he persisted in treating patients with coronavirus. 

 He wrote; 

This is Dr. Usama Riaz. He spent past weeks screening and treating patients with Corona Virus in Pakistan. He knew there was no PPE. He persisted anyways. Today he lost his own battle with coronavirus but he gave life and hope to so many more. KNOW HIS NAME

"If you save a life, it is as if you saved all of humanity." His story and the story of all those fighting need to be written for history to remember. This is sacrifice, Heroism, and martyrdom. (Also if you don't know a Muslim or have a friend that is, u do now. Follow)

 In Dr Riaz's last video before he died of coronavirus, he advised Pakistanis to take the virus seriously and also listen to health authorities. 

His last massage about Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/ysjthLfecs

— zeeshan ahmad (@zeeshan4ir) March 23, 2020

The halt of all air travel to the UK—and, of course, the fear of contracting coronavirus in London—has ensured that Buhari can’t go to London. This must be one moment when he wished he built at least one state-of-the-art hospital in Abuja.

Coronavirus: Why Buhari Won’t Address Nigerians

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi


In most parts of the world, it feels like the world has come to, or is coming to, an end. Routines have been displaced. Familiar reality has been ruptured. Even habitual perceptions of the world around us are being disrupted. And people are gripped by immobilizing panic and anxiety.

In stressful, uncertain moments like this, people look up to their national leaders for assurance, for psychological comfort, for emotional stability, for guidance, for good cheer. Most leaders have lived up to this expectation. They have addressed their compatriots in national broadcasts and become consolers in chief. Well, except Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari.

Amid spiraling apprehension about the new coronavirus and the uptick in the number of infections in the country, there has been unnervingly loud silence from the man who calls himself Nigeria’s “president.”

The quietude from the Presidential Villa in the midst of potentially one of the world’s worst pandemics has been so disturbing that citizens have been literally pleading to hear from the man who claims to be their president.

Even Nigeria’s infamously pliant, “rubber-stamp” Senate, which takes pride in being at the beck and call of the executive, has called on Buhari to address the nation. But one of Buhari’s media aides said such calls from the senate amounted to “populism and cheap politics”!

Why can’t Buhari address the nation? What’s the big deal about a 5-minute (or less) televised address to the nation that someone will write for him? Well, the truth, which I’ve been pointing out since 2018, is that Buhari is too steeped in battles with his own personal demons to care about Nigerians.

Buhari is not well. A televised broadcast, however short, might expose and aggrandize this fact more forcefully than ever before. Notice that in previous broadcasts that his handlers felt compelled to ask him to make, he evinced noticeably low energy and slurred his speech.

On November 23, 2018, I tweeted about my encounter with a doctor who met Buhari in a non-medical context and told me, based on his treatment of and interactions with dementia patients, he was convinced that Buhari has dementia which, as I’ve pointed out before, is often characterized by repetitiveness, unawareness, mental deterioration, impaired memory, diminished quality of thought, slurred speech, and finally complete helplessness.

When I first pointed this out, a few people thought I was being malicious in the service of my opposition to his reelection. Now even close aides of Buhari admit in private that I was right. People who have had a chance to interact with him recently also concede that Buhari appears to be wracked by an irreversible mental decline and loss of control.

He stays no longer than 10 minutes at Federal Executive Council meetings and goes there only for photo ops to deceive Nigerians into thinking that he is in charge when, in fact, he is a sick puppy. It isn’t his fault that he is sick. Anyone, including me, can fall ill. I concede that. But Nigeria is too complex to be governed by a sick, insentient person.

If Buhari had any honor, he would have declined to seek a second term on account of his health and for the love of the people of Nigeria. But his ambition and greed are greater than his patriotism and integrity.

Now, Nigeria is officially “presidentless” not just because Buhari’s current mandate is brazenly rigged and therefore illegitimate but because Buhari has no mental presence to rule. Abba Kyari, his Chief of Staff, no longer conceals the fact that he is the one who calls the shots in the Presidential Villa—and in Nigeria. A March 10, 2020 news report in ThisDay, for instance, said Kyari was in Germany on behalf of Nigeria to hold talks with Siemens “on improved power” in the country.

That’s not the duty of a chief of staff. But anyone who doesn’t know by now that Abba Kyari is Nigeria’s unelected (perhaps unelectable) surrogate president must be living under the rock. But because he isn’t officially the president, not to mention the fact that he has severe speech impediments, he can’t address the nation.

So the first reason Buhari won’t address the nation is that doing so would expose his state of mental and physical health. A sick, ghostly “president” slurring his speech in a televised national broadcast would probably spook the nation more ominously than coronavirus can.

The second reason is that Buhari is in a grievous bind now. He was supposed to go to London for a medical checkup in February, but the leak of this information on social media and on fringe news websites caused his handlers to postpone it by a few weeks— after, as usual, declaring that the leak was “fake news.”

The halt of all air travel to the UK—and, of course, the fear of contracting coronavirus in London—has ensured that Buhari can’t go to London. This must be one moment when he wished he built at least one state-of-the-art hospital in Abuja.

Given the horrible state of healthcare in Nigeria (which was made even worse by Buhari’s serial neglect of the sector in the time he has been “president”) and the inability to go on medical tourism anywhere else in the world, I would be shocked if Buhari is even remotely in a position to address the nation.

So Nigerians eager to hear from the man who says he is their president will have to contend with dishonest presidential press releases that purport to emanate from Buhari’s words, but which are actually ordered by Abba Kyari. Yemi Osinbajo is of no consequence any more.

Of course, even when Buhari was healthy and mentally alert, empathy, compassion, and fellow feeling were not his strong suits. He is a solipsistic narcissist who has no capacity for vicarious identification with the plight of people who are not directly related to him.

So it’s unfair to implicate only his physiological and mental decline in his insensitivity to the anxieties and dread of everyday people. His ill health only brought his cold detachment from people into bolder, more visible relief.

To be fair to him, though, people who are worshipped by as many stupid people as Buhari has been worshipped most of his adult life tend to suffer compassion deficit. A lot of his worshippers are now realizing that they wasted their emotions on a man who doesn’t care a tinker’s damn about them. But the most hopeless of them persist in their folly.

In Nigeria, the new coronavirus isn’t just threatening people and upending their ways of life, it is also exposing the crying leadership deficit in the country and the fraud that is packaged as the country’s “president.” I hope we all come out of this alive.

CharleyBright:
Rather than form a unified and Strong Southern Region to tackle the Monolithic North, the South(West & East) has always been unfocused and more engrossed at outwitting each other while playing a second fiddle to the North of being the "loyal bride" at different points in time.

With the police backing for anti-Oshiomhole group leaders, they can determine who will attend NEC meeting and wield simple majority to remove Oshiomhole. The refrain of the group is “just get him out at all cost, leave him alone to sort himself out in the court.”

Director-General of Voice of Nigeria, VON and APC chieftain, Mr.Osita Okechukwu has detailed some of the sins of the embattled national chairman of the ruling party, Adams Oshiomhole, including how he allegedly betrayed the party’s national leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. He concluded that removing the former Edo governor as helmsman is in APC’s best interest. He spoke with TUNDE THOMAS on this and more.

 What’s your take on the recent declaration by a former governor of Anambra state, Dr Chukwuemeka   Ezeife that Igbo may cease to be Nigerians if denied the presidency in 2023?

We should tread with caution. Please let’s not use anger or threat to push our case for Nigeria president of Igbo extraction. That will be a great disservice to our collective goal.

My understanding is that my elder statesman, Dr Ezeife is talking out of the abundance of his heart in that interview Otherwise can he compulsorily move millions of Ndigbo who reside and invest in all the nooks and crannies of our dear country out of the nation? For some of us, we take pride that Ndigbo are the foremost patriots, as we live and invest in other geopolitical zones more than any other ethnic group.

Our position is that the rotation convention midwifed in 1999 at the inception of the fourth republic, beginning with the rotation from the South to North, to South and back to the North should be allowed to continue.

Now that it is coming back South in 2023, and now going by equity, natural justice and good conscience upon which the rotation convention is anchored, it is only the  Southeast that is the only geopolitical zone in the Southern belt that has not presided over Nigeria. Therefore, it is our turn.

This is our appeal, not threat or intimidation, for no geo-political zone can win the presidency alone.We the Buharists didn’t win the general election in 2015  until we gained traction and built bridge across the Niger. This is the persuasion path to follow.

Following last week declaration by a former HOS Gen Yakubu Gowon that Igbo have been marginalised for long, some Nigerians have suggested  that one of the best ways to address this is for the two major political parties, APC and PDP  to zone 2023 presidency to the South-East, do you think that would work?

I commend Gen.Gowon sincerely for adding his eminent voice to our agitation.It is our considered view that Nigeria president of Igbo extraction that will be a healing balm & final end to the scars of the civil war.It will silence fringe elements & enhance unprecedented development of Nigeria.

Yes, it can only work if the two dominant political parties APC & PDP nominate their candidates from Southeast or Ndigbo of South- South.This is what we dubbed the Falae /Obasanjo model adopted in 1999.

We may recall that at that point in time, aspirants like Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, Dr Olusola Saraki, Umaru Shinkafi of blessed memory and Dr Ogbonaya Onu, the present Minister of Science and Technology were all persuaded to step down for Falae and Obasanjo who were both from the South West for the collective interest of our dear fatherland.

Some Nigerians have described  former President Olusegun Obasanjo as a hypocrite following his call for restructuring of Nigeria. He was accused of failing to do it when he was in power for eight years but others have hailed him for having the courage to eventually make the call, what’s your stand on this?

The fact that one didn’t execute certain policies while in office does not actually preclude the person from supporting the idea because he is out of power. This is my position. Yes, it could have been better if Chief Obasanjo had devoted the energy he unleashed on 3rd term to restructuring. However, this does not make him a hypocrite, it may be a mistake of the heart.

We must bear in mind that the greatest hindrance to restructuring Nigeria is the hangover on oil money. As long as most states depend on the monthly Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), as the only means of survival, as long as it becomes difficult to wean them off such largesse, there will continue to be opposition to restructuring in some quarters.

Why has APC been unable to restructure Nigeria despite the fact that restructuring was part of the party’s manifesto during the campaigns? Some are even saying that APC is not showing that commitment because President Buhari’s body language doesn’t seem to support restructuring?

Restructuring is a work in progress. It is  is not a one day event. Accordingly, the foremost leader of my great party and President of Federal Republic of Nigeria, His Excellency Muhammadu Buhari has already embarked on restructuring by other means. One, he has started the first line charge of releasing federal accrued revenue directly to all the 774 local councils in Nigeria. This is a major plank of restructuring. This means that all the money accruing to local councils are paid directly to them. We need to urge the governors to forget the practice of  holding  joint account  with  local councils  and give effect to this fiscal restructuring.

Another commitment to restructuring is Buhari’s agrarian revolution. It is on record that Mr President has invested more than any Head of State or president post- 1970 in agriculture. The agrarian revolution will water the ground for restructuring. As I said earlier that until we appreciate that every square meter of land space in Nigeria is blessed abundantly with wealth, there will be no consensus on restructuring. For example, it is easier today for the successful rice farmer in Kebbi and Ebonyi States to support restructuring than those who have not keyed into Buhari’s agrarian revolution.

On the present state of insecurity across the country, some have expressed concern  over the deteriorating situation….

Cuts in…. The truth is that Mr President is worried like most of us about the present state of things especially insecurity , the only thing is that he is not the talking type, who will shout on top of the roof, otherwise a lot is covertly taking place to contain the insecurity imbroglio. That’s why contrary to the expectations of traducers, he accommodates salient views from both local and international community.

Operation Amotekun, the regional security outfit recently established by South-West governors has been described as a form of community policing and a model which other geo-political zones should emulate but there are some divergent views on the outfit…..

To me   whether it is Amotekun, or  forest guards  or any other  similar organizations ,they  are all welcomed, and it doesn’t matter whether they are Local Government Council, or state  based. The unintended changes  in the security challenges in our fatherland require all manner of solutions. And Amotekun and Co are part of the solutions. Whether you call it local, community or regional police, the most important thing is that we are secured. There should be no controversy over Operation Amotekun. It is part of the security architecture designed to secure lives ad properties of citizens.

The recent suspension of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as the APC national chairman has become  a subject of debate with some saying that his removal will create further problems for the party,while others are saying that it is a good riddance to bad rubbish, what’s your stand on the issue?

Without being immodest or writing off Comrade Adams Oshiomhole entirely, I belong to the group that proposed that his urgent removal as chairman would be good for the immediate repositioning of our great party. His exit will stem the gross mismanagement of our dear party and help us to pick the broken pieces.

Why do you subscribe to the removal of Oshiomhole  who some party leaders, including those from  the South East recently  publicly commended for  making it possible for APC to secure majority in the National Assembly and in particular made  the South-East geo-political  zone secure national and state assembly seats, plus a governor?

I read the advertorial & I’m conversant with my leaders, I  have great respect for them but no sincere APC member will deny the incontrovertible fact that Oshiomhole mismanaged our great party &unintentionally resurrected PDP, a political party which was on the verge of collapse in 2019 after serious internecine intra-party crisis.

There is no doubt that his narcissism and dictatorial tendency cost APC  several states including Adamawa, Bauchi, Rivers, Zamfara, FCT and some legislative seats in the Southeast. Recently we lost Bayelsa due to his recklessness.Otherwise who is a sane chairman that will allow a sitting senator to go for Deputy Governor? Or that will not diligently scrutinize the credentials ofcandidates ?

Thirdly, he breached our great party’s constitution & even the rules he enacted himself, like the choice he placed on advertorial for states to choose  either direct and indirect mode of primary. Some states like Enugu chose indirect and he reversed it arbitrarily in the midst of gubernatorial primary.

Lagos also chose indirect primary and he went ahead contrary to the choice of Lagos State Stakeholders of APC to print ballot papers for direct primary. In fact, Comrade nearly shunted Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a man who made him governor and chairman. If not for his sagacity, of conducting the primary with his men, Asiwaju had almost lost Lagos to his estranged godson, former governor Ambode.

He quickly brushed aside the Oshiomhole primary panel and took his fate in his hand. Please cross check this fact, for I stand to be contradicted.If he can betray Asiwaju, whoelse can he spare?

But some APC members are giving him credit for making it possible for APC to win Imo state....?

Cuts in… Without delving much into this matter, I don’t agree with those who are making such claims. I would rather give the credit of our late recovery of Imo State, to Gov.Hope’s sagacity rather than Comrade Oshiomhole’s input. I was part of that battle. Let’s not forget that it was Oshiomhole  who further compounded the Imo state  problem for APC, from where Senator Rochas Okorocha stopped.

As far back as 2018,  Oshiomhole has been creating serious problems for APC in Imo state. After the gruesome congress battle for the soul of APC in Imo State, the Senator Osita Izunaso’s  faction won, before the gubernatorial primary. Then rumours started flying that Oshiomhole  was going to cancel the congress.

Luckily I met him on July 12, 2018 at the launch of Abuja rail line and I  pleaded with him not to cancel the primary  but  he told me he was going to do so, that then Governor Rochas was one of his key supporters for his chairman-ship bid.

I pleaded that the cancellation would be akin to giving  monkey back cup of water snatched from him, but he remained adamant. Few days later he canceled the congress, hence the confusion that later followed. The rest they say is history. Oshiomhole created serious problems for APC.Asking him to go will bring a lot of relief to the party.

Fears are being expressed that the lingering feud between Governor Godwin Obaseki, and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole may cost APC Edo state during the guber election coming up in the state later in the year, do you harbour such fears, and how can the crisis be resolved?

With Oshiomhole’s ’s imminent exit, one doesn’t harbour such fears. He is most likely to go before the party’s primary in the state.He was the one who publicly abolished godfatherism in Edo State, and demonized those who supported him in Edo State, like Chief Anthony Anini of blessed memory. But is it not a paradox that he now desperately bids to be a new Edo State godfather? What a contradiction. APC has got nothing to lose with Oshiomhole’s removal.

Buhari’s Team In Disarray As Monguno Declares War On Abba Kyari

Nigeria’s national security adviser, Babagana Monguno, has accused President Mohammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, of undue and dangerous interference on matters bordering on national security.

Consequently, Mr Monguno has fired a warning memo to all service chiefs to desist from taking further directives from Mr Kyari, according to documents seen by PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Monguno said Mr Kyari’s directives to service chiefs were sometimes issued without the knowledge much less approval of the president, a practice he said has added to government’s failure to contain insecurity.

“Chief of staff to the president is not a presiding head of security, neither is he sworn to an oath of defending the country,” Mr Monguno, a retired major-general, said in the December 9, 2019, letter.

“As such, unprofessional practices such as presiding over meetings with service chiefs and heads of security organisations as well as ambassadors and high commissioners to the exclusion of the NSA and/or supervising ministers are a violation of the Constitution and directly undermine the authority of Mr President.

“Such acts and continues meddlesomeness by chief of staff have not only ruptured our security an defence efforts, but have slowed down any meaningful gain that Mr President has sought to achieve.”

Mr Monguno’s letter comes as insecurity returns to centre stage as a major cause for worry among Nigerians.Violent attacks linked to bandits, kidnappers, armed robbers and vandals have continued to claim multiple lives and properties across the country.

The president has repeatedly promised to curb the crises, many of which he met in office, but has largely failed like his predecessors.

Security experts, opposition and federal lawmakers have responded by advising the president to fire his service chiefs.

The service chiefs have been unable to rein in Boko Haram insurgents since 2015 when Mr Buhari named them to take charge of various arms of the nation’s security architecture.

While previously held swathes of land have been taken back from terrorists, deadly attacks on civilians and military targets have worsened since 2018.

The Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, said in recent media interviews that the military has degraded insurgents’ capacity to attack Abuja and other cities outside the war-ravaged northeast.

National security sources told PREMIUM TIMES on Monday that the fresh memo showed how Mr Kyari has helped in keeping the service chiefs in office despite overwhelming call for their ouster.

It also underscored the frustration faced by Mr Monguno and others who found Mr Kyari’s influence over the president too domineering for national benefit, sources said.

Mr Kyari and two presidential spokespersons, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu, did not return requests for comments about the memo Monday afternoon.