₦airaland Forum

Aegon:
her so called status doesn't put food on my table neither does her being angry change anything. Goodluck and Buhari both have a chance to put food on my table and not an attention seeking girl who doesn't even have a PVC. if she's angry let her hit her head on the wall.

u call a girl dat Beyonce feature in her song titled flawless an attention seeking girl? i doubt if u will eva c omotola's shadow.

Aegon:
her so called status doesn't put food on my table neither does her being angry change anything. Goodluck and Buhari both have a chance to put food on my table and not an attention seeking girl who doesn't even have a PVC. if she's angry let her hit her head on the wall.

You don vex?
At least, her status is able to change lives, to change people's views about things. Not everybody can put food on your table. While some are sent to preach the gospel, some are sent to serve the people and make lives better.

Even if the reason were not so absurd, Nigerians are politically astute enough to know that the postponement has nothing to do with security. It is a flailing act of desperation from an incumbent terrified of losing.
- Chimamanda Adichie

What does she know about Politics.

A balance evaluations of both sides.

chimamanda we know u are good writer but at this point we are in damage control and the safest way out is to allow GEJ to be there till 2019.

Deeninetyseven:
lol. She is not writing so you will buy her books. And why do you believe in limitations this much?
Is Chinua Achebe a god? Writers come and go.

xacly, no be only her dey vex

Not bad.

But hard to figure if this is intended to be a literary work or a BBC news report.

In Buhari we stand!

Jokay07:
xacly, no be only her dey vex

Oya, stop to dey vex. Things can only get better.

Election was postponed to allow over 20 million voters get their PVCs within the 6 weeks period. The core of these 20 million is from areas likely to vote for GEJ. JEGA withheld PVCs from these folks to favour his party - APC. Government is smarter and more powerful and had to intervene. Now APC is restless and shouting; "postponement is provocative and threat to democracy”. I wonder how an act legally carried out by INEC has become a threat to democracy. Did INEC break any law? APC won’t tell you the real reason why they are crying wolf, but PDP/GEJ knows.
Insecurity is never the reason for the postponement. JEGA lied!!!

Beautymc:
Everybody want to be noticed

SMH for you.In case you don't now,,she has made Africa,not just Nigeria,proud.Someone that was invited by Michel Obama to the white house.Someone that has been interviewed by the CNN.Someone that was nominated along side Beyonce Carter.Someone that has won awards.Someone whose book was used as a storyline for the file 'half of a yellow sun'.Which other relevance do you think she is seeking?

Vex for?

Deeninetyseven:
Oya, stop to dey vex. Things can only get better.

Bobby4090:
Democracy, Deferred: Postponed election, an embarrassment of bad choices, by Chimamanda Adichie.

Last week, Victor, a carpenter, came to my Lagos home to fix a broken chair. I asked him whom he preferred as Nigeria’s next president: the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, or his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari.

“I don’t have a voter’s card, but if I did, I would vote for somebody I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like Buhari. But Jonathan is not performing.”

Victor sounded like many people I know: utterly unenthusiastic about the two major candidates in our upcoming election.

Were Nigerians to vote on likeability alone, Jonathan would win. He is mild-mannered and genially unsophisticated, with a conventional sense of humor. Buhari has a severe, ascetic air about him, a rigid uprightness; it is easy to imagine him in 1984, leading a military government whose soldiers routinely beat up civil servants. Neither candidate is articulate. Jonathan is given to rambling; his unscripted speeches leave listeners vaguely confused. Buhari is thick-tongued, his words difficult to decipher. In public appearances, he seems uncomfortable not only with the melodrama of campaigning but also with the very idea of it. To be a democratic candidate is to implore and persuade, and his demeanor suggests a man who is not at ease with amiable consensus. Still, he is no stranger to campaigns. This is his third run as a presidential candidate; the last time, in 2011, he lost to Jonathan.

This time, Buhari’s prospects are better. Jonathan is widely perceived as ineffectual, and the clearest example, which has eclipsed his entire presidency, is his response to Boko Haram. Such a barbaric Islamist insurgency would challenge any government. But while Boko Haram bombed and butchered, Jonathan seemed frozen in a confused, tone-deaf inaction. Conflicting stories emerged of an ill-equipped army, of a corrupt military leadership, of northern elites sponsoring Boko Haram, and even of the government itself sponsoring Boko Haram.

Jonathan floated to power, unprepared, on a serendipitous cloud. He was a deputy governor of Bayelsa state who became governor when his corrupt boss was forced to quit. Chosen as vice president because powerbrokers considered him the most harmless option from southern Nigeria, he became president when his northern boss died in office. Nigerians gave him their goodwill—he seemed refreshingly unassuming—but there were powerful forces who wanted him out, largely because he was a southerner, and it was supposed to be the north’s ‘turn’ to occupy the presidential office.

And so the provincial outsider suddenly thrust onto the throne, blinking in the chaotic glare of competing interests, surrounded by a small band of sycophants, startled by the hostility of his traducers, became paranoid. He was slow to act, distrustful and diffident. His mildness came across as cluelessness. His response to criticism calcified to a single theme: His enemies were out to get him. When the Chibok girls were kidnapped, he and his team seemed at first to believe that it was a fraud organized by his enemies to embarrass him. His politics of defensiveness made it difficult to sell his genuine successes, such as his focus on the long-neglected agricultural sector and infrastructure projects. His spokespeople alleged endless conspiracy theories, compared him to Jesus Christ, and generally kept him entombed in his own sense of victimhood.

The delusions of Buhari’s spokespeople are better packaged, and obviously free of incumbency’s crippling weight. They blame Jonathan for everything that is wrong with Nigeria, even the most multifarious, ancient knots. They dismiss references to Buhari’s past military leadership, and couch their willful refusal in the language of ‘change,’ as though Buhari, by representing change from Jonathan, has also taken on an ahistorical saintliness.

I remember the Buhari years as a blur of bleakness. I remember my mother bringing home sad rations of tinned milk, otherwise known as “essential commodities”—the consequences of Buhari’s economic policy. I remember air thick with fear, civil servants made to do frog jumps for being late to work, journalists imprisoned, Nigerians flogged for not standing in line, a political vision that cast citizens as recalcitrant beasts to be whipped into shape.

Buhari’s greatest source of appeal is that he is widely perceived as non-corrupt. Nigerians have been told how little money he has, how spare his lifestyle is. But to sell the idea of an incorruptible candidate who will fight corruption is to rely on the disingenuous trope that Buhari is not his party. Like Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party, Buhari’s All Progressives Congress is stained with corruption, and its patrons have a checkered history of exploitative participation in governance. Buhari’s team is counting on the strength of his perceived personal integrity: his image as a good guy forced by realpolitik to hold hands with the bad guys, who will be shaken off after his victory.

In my ancestral home state of Anambra, where Jonathan is generally liked, the stronger force at play is a distrust of Buhari, partly borne of memories of his military rule, and partly borne of his reputation, among some Christians, as a Muslim fundamentalist. When I asked a relative whom she would vote for, she said, “Jonathan of course. Am I crazy to vote for Buhari so that Nigeria will become a sharia country?”

Nigeria has predictable voting patterns, as all democratic countries do. Buhari can expect support from large swaths of the core north, and Jonathan from southern states. Region and religion are potent forces here. Vice presidents are carefully picked with these factors in mind: Buhari’s is a southwestern Christian and Jonathan’s is a northern Muslim. But it is not so simple. There are non-northerners who would ordinarily balk at voting for a ‘northerner’ but who support Buhari because he can presumably fight corruption. There are northern supporters of Jonathan who are not part of the region’s Christian minorities.

Delaying the elections is a staggeringly self-serving act of contempt for Nigerians.
Last week, I was indifferent about the elections, tired of television commercials and contrived controversies. There were rumors that the election, which was scheduled for February 14, would be postponed, but there always are; our political space is a lair of conspiracies. I was uninterested in the apocalyptic predictions. Nigeria was not imploding. We had crossed this crossroads before, we were merely electing a president in an election bereft of inspiration. And the existence of a real opposition party that might very well win was a sign of progress in our young democracy

Then, on Saturday, the elections were delayed for six weeks. Nigeria’s security agencies, we were told, would not be available to secure the elections because they would be fighting Boko Haram and needed at least another month and a half to do so. (Nigeria has been fighting Boko Haram for five years, and military leaders recently claimed to be ready for the elections.)

Even if the reason were not so absurd, Nigerians are politically astute enough to know that the postponement has nothing to do with security. It is a flailing act of desperation from an incumbent terrified of losing. There are fears of further postponements, of ploys to illegally extend Jonathan’s term. In a country with the specter of a military coup always hanging over it, the consequences could be dangerous. My indifference has turned to anger. What a staggeringly self-serving act of contempt for Nigerians. It has cast, at least for the next six weeks, the darkest possible shroud over our democracy: uncertainty. Source: The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/nigeria-election-democracy-deferred/385341/#disqus_thread

Whatever, I will vote Jonathan

Bobby4090:
So who wants to be noticed? you or Chimamamda? Can any of your generations past and present attain her world wide status?

...u de mind sm

Ms Adichie is entitled to her opinion. Nigerians has grown so complacent lately that every action is blamed on conspiracy. Jonathan conspiracy. I expected more from Ms Adichie. She spends more time in the US than anywhere near Africa. Ms Adichie must understand that the postponement was not merely security related. I believe also that INEC was not ready. Nigerian Lawyers would have had a field day if this election was not postponed. I have now travelled to London to confront OBJ at his book lunch today in one hour time at Royal Society of Medicine. We need the 'articulate' Ms Adichie to do her research before trying to bamboozle Naira Landers and the larger Nigerian society with her mis-observations. What her staff thinks about the election is irrelevant. Ms Adichie is fond of comparing Lagos with cities in the US. That is lazy and uninspiring. Realism suggest that we must accept that the denizens of kebbi, nassarawa and chibok cannot compare with new jersey in the US for a generation, if not more. The intelligentsia, of which Ms Adichie belongs wring their hand in disgust on the apparent taciturnity of Jonathan, when they know very well that he is not the problem. 90 percent of Nigerians talk and behave like Jonathan, despite his loftiness. Ms Adichie is flagging a red herring. Perhaps Ms. Adichie should return to the US, where she feels at home.

KwoiZabo:
chimamanda we know u are good writer but at this point we are in damage control and the safest way out is to allow GEJ to be there till 2019.

if truly you know wat damage control is, then a Nigeria without GEJ as president is a better control measure. Do you prefer Bokoharam continuing with their massive killings? And corruption as pervasive as it is for another 4yrs? A Nigeria with GEJ as president in the next 4 years is nothing different from an inhabitable abyss.

kristisking:
Even this gay activist.I'm not surprised about this comment.It is coming from a frustrated outcast who picked offence because of the signing into law anti gay bill by GEJ.

She is married. To a man. Who is male.

Bats want to be identified as birds.

Anyway,PGEJ till 2019!

The political situation in nigeria is very clear to everyone even an old man n the bush undstnd d politikin in nigeria. Jonathan started well but he fumbled at the long run. Buhari on the other hand is a good choice for nigeria now, he has an occult like follower ship. Most of those who have decided to vote GMB are so addamant and hell bent on votng him no matter the conspiracy while those who have decided to vote GEJ are not that adamant but are just doing so because they feel GMB might introduce sharia or the north are not born to rule. People with this kind of thought abot buhari know deep inside them that buhari alone can't introduce sharia, they are just looking for excuses that would make them not to vote buhari. But fortunate enough for buhari most people with dis phobia about hm are begining to accept him. GEJ knows deep inside him dat if the election s free and fair buhari would emerge the winner wiith a wider margin.

lookingforjob:
[b]It is sad to see many anti-progressives call Buhari names because of his tribal accent. Igbo's , Yoruba and Hausa's all have various ways of speaking and pronunciation due to our mother tongue. When i watched father Mbaka's video, his accent was obvious when he pronounced OIL as OYEL but does that makes him an illiterate? General Buhari reads, writes and gives speeches in English, He had a lauded and excellent interview on Aljazeera, Channels, eta'l but the hatred by some Nigerians will never let them see the fact that this is the only man who can deliver the change the common man crave for.


The most supporters of this present administration are the Igbo's. They see this as an opportunity for them to avenge what was done to them during the civil war. They never blamed Ojukwu who started a suicide mission and ran to ivory coast leaving them to their fate. This is why they will never see anything good in Buhari even if GEJ does nothing, they are contented.

THEY ARE HAPPY THE ELECTION WAS POSTPONED. THEY ARE SO EASY TO DECEIVE. GEJ fooled the igbos with Azikwe and promise of a bridge that's still on paper. They see GEJ as the closest they can get to aso rock. voting him is their way of flexing their political muscle but we shall put them to shame.

Had APC presented Fashola, Atiku or Kwankwaso , they will still find reasons to vote for GEJ and label Apc candidates bad. This hate is not about buhari, it's the way they feel they can get revenge for refusing to allow them form their Biafran territory. The Igbos believe another 4 years of GEJ presidency might bring about the end of Nigeria. Their selfish motive is to establish Biafra. They call Yoruba's slave to the North and all sort of names. They are a petty tribe. Its unfortunate the disunity of this country originates from their region.
They call for disintegration of the country but you will find them in every parts of the country selling fake drugs and fake goods produced in aba. They can't stay in their eastern region yet they want biafra. they even claim to own Lagos and its no mans land. Let's assume the country was divided today, will lagos be in the biafran map empty chest beaters. no wonder you find their people on death row all over Asia due to drug trafficking. instead of voting for a competent government, they prefer to suffer and resort to crimes for living. they are sadists, they travel home on 31/12 and return back on 02/01 and still hate such land that host their businesses.

In 2011, we all saw GEJ as a messiah and we voted him en-masse irrespective of his tribe and religion. We thought he would deliver us from years of misrule due to his humble look and name GOODLUCK. Nigerians did not vote PDP but GEJ. Then Yoruba's were not tagged slaves for trooping out to vote for him en-masse.

They said APC and Buhari promised to make Nigeria ungovernable. My question is why can't these people be arrested if the statements tagged to them were true GEJ is the commander in chief of all forces in Nigeria and it baffles me how a civilian in Buhari can make his government ungovernable while he sits and watch without taking actions. Isn't that a high level of incompetence?

Good luck Jonathan is the worst president we ever had in this country. The misfortunes of his administrations exceeds the so called transformations. I urge everyone to vote wisely


##March4Buhari [/b]

I rather burn my PVC than to reward a dictator that staged coup against a democratic government. He should be in jail if we are in a decent country. I don't even want to mention his forged certificates. That's an issue for another day.

DahtzFestjayz:
Shame to Jonathan and His Crew Sai Buhari Sai Baba #March4Buhari #March4GMB

Did you really read the article?

franciskaine:
if you truly you know wat damage control is, then a Nigeria without GEJ as president is a better control measure. Do you prefer Bokoharam continuing with their massive killings? And corruption as pervasive as it is for another 4yrs? A Nigeria with GEJ as president in the next 4 years is nothing different from an inhabitable abyss.

Nigeria overtook 8 countries in the corruption index under GEJ, Bokoharam us not a conventional crisis but the administration is winning. what else does APC have to say?

Beautymc:
Everybody want to be noticed

abi o

Bobby4090:
So who wants to be noticed? you or Chimamamda? Can any of your generations past and present attain her world wide status?

Hian!

Diz one iz heavily mouthed ni

egift:
Even if the reason were not so absurd, Nigerians are politically astute enough to know that the postponement has nothing to do with security. It is a flailing act of desperation from an incumbent terrified of losing.
- Chimamanda Adichie

which Nigerians is she talking about? The ones that have given Buhari a bloody nose severally? The political space is throwing up absurdities.

Beautymc:
Everybody want to be noticed

Deeninetyseven:
Even Chimamanda Adichie? I wonder what you are trying to do now.

For saying this if it could b possible u whould have received a slap from me. Imagine urself saying chimamamanda Adichie trying to be notice. I don't blame u I blame ur ignorance.

If you can vote for Buhari you can also kill somebody.

Its quite refreshing to see and read what our Intellectuals think of Buhari who some people say he's an illiterate.

Bobby4090:
So who wants to be noticed? you or Chimamamda? Can any of your generations past and present attain her world wide status?

Ahh, that was harsh

siraj1402:
It will be very much bias judging Buhari military regime as inhuman, can anyone tell me which of military regime is not characterized by its peculiar behavior? Checking all the military that has ruled us in this country,one will surely find one or two things that is inhuman. No one expect him to be taking laws into his hands should he emerged as the winner.All we are saying is enough of this corruption that will not allow us to grow in all sector.Enough of this insecurity.The souls of innocent lost during Jonathan administration alone is more than souls lost during Nigeria civil war.
God bless Nigeria and Nigerians.

Thank you jare. What Buhari did then was much deserved, especially when you look at the level of decadence in our polity then.