₦airaland Forum

All parties are responsible, all governments since the saga started and I will dare say the mess started before the contract was agreed in the first place. The summary of it all is that we are paying the penalty for the way Nigeria is structured and the way the defective structure is operated.

My earnest desire is that government makes the cituzens of this country pay that bill in tbe most direct, brutal fashion possible so that the citizens can sit up and take notice about how this country is and how it is run. We are just too docile as Nigerians. These chaps in government do all manner of things on our behalf and we are essentially disinterested, naive, careless.

In the UK a contract of such magnitude (relative to budget, GDP, revenue, whatever) will be under severe scrutiny for months on end before approval and then it will be monitored day and night by all and sundry. Here even citizens will defend their pet governments secrecy on huge, humangous deals that have far and wide effects on their future prosperity or as in this case povrty. Hope we all learn from this when the dust settles.

Only God Almighty knows what this present government has signed off since 2015 that we may only discover when the mountainous bills come in say a decade from now.

Nigerians should learn to count their teeth with their tongues and hold government accountable or else.... Mr Goodluck Jonathan is alive and well. A panel of inquiry should be set up and he should tell us what he knows and what this mess is all about.

GavelSlam:
A society of self-entitled morons.

Your fathers produced absolutely nothing and now you are towing the same path.

You refused to carry out any research but you are experts at phishing, scam and tramadol.

Government attempts to kickstart with the basics but you complain.

Why not show your stuff for all the world to applaud?

I like the series of replies you put to those inquests. It will reset their thinking if they are not lost in their ways. That it takes the government to kick start a pencil making factory it is more an indictment of the failure of the common man to venture, to be productive. One should ordinarily be ashamed of himself. I am ashamed it takes the prompting of government to make pencils.

You beggerly citizens ask them to provide jobs and they give you pencils to make and you say no. You want to build space craft.... kai, Nigerians

Osobi32:
Shame shame shame.... This country is finished. Pencil production in 2019 and u are proud of ur achievement and bold enough to put it on the news! Nigeria is gone

Please stop this nonsense. You can criticise all you want IF YOU HAVE A RIVAL PENCIL MAKING FACTORY AND FEEL THREATENED. If not support it. It has the pote tial to take folks not as endowed as you off the streets and away from crime. We are looking at the benefits to society as a whole and the gains from a culture of 'making things', a culture of self sufficiency rather than the things themselves which is of secondary importance.

Fantastic first step. I am particularly happy that PRODA is involved so that it can leverage on this to trigger other developments. This is the way it should go. The next task is to turn 'a project' into 'an enterprise'. So, link up the entrepreneurs. Let them take the reins, reverse engineer the machines and seed the industires all over the nation.

There should be a Bureau where NGO's, Foundations and other non state actors can interface to know what government is cooking. Surely someone is interested in turning 'the enterprise' to an 'industry'. Hopefully we will get there.

Please I will want government to keep an eye on this initiative till it is self supportive. You simply cannot allow this initiative to go moribund. This nation severely needs these things to survive. We are pleading.

I like the effort and hope it can be qualified. What I donot like is the banner I can see in the background which shows.... yet again agro-products and extracrive minerals and I am like..... not again. When are we going to start thinking differently. We have been doing this since independence.... haba.

We cannot support our rampaging population on farm products and sacks of columbite. We just cannot. It will not give us the lifestyles we so desire even if we are 100 percent disciplined as a nation.

princfred:
When state Islamic government in that area ensured stifling and destruction/removal of churches and Christians where will the counter ideology come from? The prevalent ideology furling this menace is Islam and Christianity if allowed to thrive there is the main counter ideology that can savage the situation even a Nigerian soldier told me this.

Christianity?...are you joking. Do you want to pour petrol on fire. Please don't be narrow minded and equally ideologically extreme.
If you want to quench red hot steel you put it in water, preferrably warm water not in ice or you will get an explosion and you may lose the steel.

The Boko Haram ideology comes from a twisted interpretation of islamic tenets. It does not reflect mainstream islam just as you have multiple doctrinal interpretations in Christianity some of which donot reflect mainstream Christianity. If a certain Christian group goes rogue as a result of doctrinal error, I don't think it will make sense to try and counter that ideology with an entirely different religion they probably know nothing off. It will only worsen the situation.

To solution to weaken that group will be to attack the fringe elements with the proper islamic interpretation of their actions in a deliberate manner as to reform or elevate their thinking. It is dangerous because the hierachy will immediately notice is and seek to neutralise that but if it is done in a massively coordinated fashion it will be effective.

The solutions to this problem lies where it is domiciled. The people of that region have to stop running and start speaking the right things to win over the hearts and minds of theor fellow citizens. The government has to fashion deliberate programmes to counter the toxic Boko Haram ideology.

bekpo:
Why will d Nigerian army b waiting for d terrorists to take d fight to them? Does it mean that d terrorists r well trained and equipped than our troops? Why can't our troops take d fight to them? Why r our troops always at d defensive other than offensive? Where exactly do they(the terrorists) coordinate their attack? Why can't we have intelligence on where they coordinate their attack? I think d phone number of all d commanders and troops working with them should b bogged to forestalled sabotaged. Until these questions r being answered, we will continue to b at d receiving end.

Take fight to who. It is like you donot know what assymetric warfare entails. It has kept American pinned down in the Middle East for upwards of 20 years. The first popular assymetric warfare in modern times, the Vietnam war was the first military defeat America experienced.

Assymetric warfare entails fighting an enemy with adaptive camoflague, the enemy morphs, changes from one minute to the other. In Vietnam the farmer planting rice in a paddy field near a military base by day will pick up an AK-47 by night and coordinate an ambush. Is Boko Haram written on the foreheads of anyone. Insurgents have no uniforms, no tags, no medallions. They could be traders inthe market by day, farmers by day, wheelbarrow pushers by day but when the whistle sounds they congregate, attack amd then melt back into society.

That is why when people say the military is infiltrated I just laugh at this absurdity. Intelligence gathering in asymmetric warfare does not need direct contact. They can see these military men 24/7 close up and personal and can choose anytime to strike. It is a very hard war to fight. It is like fighting a ghost.

In Vietnam things got so bad that certain commmanders considered wiping out whole villages or evacuating them but this was considered counterproductive as it will only drive more locals to sympathise with the enemy.

Please Nigerians should understand the military. It is doing the best it can do in the circumstance. No commander will willingly seek to sacrifice his men needlessly. They are colleagues, compatriots and friends. But what I feel is that the effort and strategy to end this carnage must be a complex, multifaceted one involving both hard, soft and intelligent power working simultaneously and in coordination to defeat an equally complex adversity. It is not a military campaign alone. Civilians have their part to play as well. They too have sacrifices to make.

kayusely70:
This is no more a conventional war but a guirrellea war. Nigerian troops should change tactics and strategies.

It has always been a guerilla war since the Yaradua days. Its like you know little about this conflict.
Like I often said, you simply cannot defeat an ideologically driven movement by military means alone.

C'mon Nigerians, is it not becauee the citizens of this country donot have an ideology aka collective set of values it is so easy to divide, conquer and misrule us. When a set of people believe in something so strongly it forms their thought process and permeates deep to reflect in their lifestyle it them becomes extremely hard for them to be contained.

What smart governments do is to sift ideology from mere impulsive criminality. Send criminality through the criminal justice system but for ideology the only way to defeat it is to counter it with a better one. But to lump everything together and try smashing it with a hammer will simply not work. Boko Haram will not go away easily. They will continue eating away at the resolve of the mikitary and this country for as long as the candle of their warped ideology remains lit. And they have perhaps an unlimited supply of idle minds to tap into.

The government needs to engage with them non militarily as well. I don't mean the hierachy but the rank and file. You will be surprised that the further away the average foot soldier is from the leadership the less he or she will believe in 'the cause', just like in any religious setup. They will have elders, deacons but they wil also have mere church goers who will flip at the slight cgange change in attraction. These are the folks the government should go after. Sow a counter ideology in them and let it rot the system from within.

You will be surprised how many factions the group will be broken into with better containment prospects. My two cents.

It took trillions in lost trade, hundreds of souls perishing under collapsed container trucks for port operarions to be liberalised. Story of Nigeria. It takes a tragedy and more to reset thinking and kill sentiment.

AdeMavrodi:
How much will playing for England add to his bank account? Better continue to enjoy life at club level my chief

It lengthens club career. Most players discover that secret often too late. Look at those Nigerian players that forced fhemselves out of the Nigerian national team: Vincent Enyeama, Victor Moses, Peter Odemwingie and all the lot. After retirement from the national team their careers mysteriously stall and crash.

Gracealone:
No matter how little, there is always a lead to follow in other to catch a criminal.

So far, EFCC have succeeded at apprehending internet fraudsters who defrauded private citizens but not politicians who looted our Commonwealth.

Because they are yet to be an institution. They are still a personal business centre. When they become a full fledged intitution they will not look at anyone's face or ask anyone's name.

fokusmind:
This is where you need a president like Trump:
Locate your plant in Nigeria or Toyota cars are banned . How can Toyota think locating their plant in Ghana is better than Nigeria (with our population and craze for anything Toyota)? Men, that is a hot slap on our leaders and the over 200 million Nigeria. Ghana is just 30million people. Who has bewitched us?

As citizens of a nation we should begin to educate ourselves on the specifics of what had made us poor and backwards for decades and the immediate steps we need to take to get us out of problems. Any nation facing what we have seen today will be angry, mad that investment is going to a competing neighbour. We need to start getting angry about the right things to progress.

Nigeria has upheld the continents economy for long. We have supported the biggest multinationals with a large, viable, profitable opportunity despite our poverty. Every sector from banking, to retail, to telecommunications has Nigeria as their biggest market, yet when it comes to the cream of the crop, the real economic multiplier, manufacturing, they prefer to go somewhere else.

It is sad and vexing. Are we a universal toilet, a dumping ground, a use and dump country... Nigerians should realise that no matter how fancy a village market, supermarket or hyper market is, no one sleeps there at the end of the day. Everyone GOES HOME. We cannot prosper being satsified as the market of Africa or the world. We cannot prosper with import/export & general merchandise plc, shop, shop, shop...or ABC & Sons trading company.

I find that very hard to believe.

Finals in far away Poland. Another desert trek for the finalists which will certainly be Western European teams. Why does UEFA do this repeatedly.

slex:
Groups of death:

Group G

Exactly. They will all beat each other mercilessly and whoever can raise a finger after it all will go through. 'There will be goals... lots of goals....', speaking in a John Wick tone.

Porto, Young Boys, Feynoord. This is the group of death. Sympathy to Rangers and Stevie G. Have always wished him success. One of my favs in the day.

Corruption can never end in this structure. One thing after another. Always stories.

Piss poor service is beginning to catch up with Globacom all their freebies cannot cover. My 9mobile flagship network remains exclusive for both calls and data. Hope they keep it trim. We don't want a crowd here.

TSRC:
If I were buhari ,I would block all import.
We don't reward bad behavior.
Fucvkk the ACFTA deal.

Then smuggling will go through the roof. Maybe better for those who see the civil service as their inheritance since the Customs Service will have to recruit enough people to form a human chain round Nigeria. That is not the solution.

When you face an unmovable force the only way to avoid being crushed is not to build a useless wall but to create a pressure equilibrium, an equal and opposite force. I tell you how.

Find another automaker that can rival Toyota and give them a deal they cannot refuse. While the two giants fight each other on the west coast you make your indigenous makers your top priority. Like I said days ago. Every cutting edge industrialist should be on speed dial to Mr. President day and night. And as a President you should have them in a cluster meeting every month for synergy and strategic objectivity.

All I can see folks here saying is, What do you expect, what do you expect..... this is just annoying. I will tell you what citizens of other countries expect. They expect to engage their leaders in proper plans and programmes to move their countries forward and they follow up these expectations with torrid pressure to perform, to deliver them.

We have a serious citizen problem in this country. We simply cannot bring ourselves collectively to move forward. I repeat again. Every enlightened Nigerian should be angry, incensed at this development because we know what it means for our economy down the line. Our paltry wealth will be moving to Ghana soon.

We should be as concerned as Americans when a single plant moves to Mexico or Canada and we know how Trump has fought and fought to have production, jobs and wealth retained in America. Why can't we demand this of our leaders....

I tell you why. That is not our priority. Our priority is tribe, religion and sentiment. We are too distracted to demand and have better governance. We simply do not have any values.

If this is true I hope this will anger enough citizens of this country to demand for better governance.

Folks, all the distractions of ethnicity and religion we feast on is not helping us. It is destroying us. It is distracting us from what really matters in life which is peace and prosperity.

We have to raise the standards of governance. Gone should be the days of citizen docility, gone should be the days of citizen ignorance, gone should be the days when we elect leaders on a whim, sentiment and vague promises of eldorado. Nationals of other climes have specific, definitive, quantitative issues they demand before election.

Trump promised to revive American manufacturing and confront the imbalance of Chinese trade. This is a specific, measurable promise and electoral campaign demand. If only we can hold our leaders to specific performance indices, specific items of delivery and specific timescales we will get better out of them.

From where I sit it is as if the Ghanian people sent their leader to Japan to get 'something', Something they had demanded he do before empowering him with their vote. Nigerians were busy arguing IPOB, G7 invite, ADB Chairman, Macron, Trump and everything that has no bearing whatsoever on their lives, futures and destinies. Will I be surprised that because no demand is made of our leadership, post Japan no meaningful deliverables will come to Nigeria....

This country is just annoying and the people of this country are mentally sick.... totally useless...

mgbadike81:
How can you expect the Japanese to site an assembly plant in Nigeria when the economic climate is not favourable. Coscharis is already regretting establishing a Ford assembly plant in Nigeria.

See what I said a few days ago on the Coscharis/Ford issue.

* Industrialisation is like a spiders web, one factor broken and the whole system collpses into a viscious cycle of foreign dependency.

* By the time we start importing automibiles from west coast plants our shame will be complete. Remember Michellin left Nigeria for Ghana a few years ago. We no longer make tyres in Nigeria. You can imagine if we were still making tyres and Dangote comes up with his plants, slowly the pieces fall into place and in a generation we become completely self sufficent in automibile manufacture. That is how it happens.

* For folks saying how can we afford automobiles I hope your stupidity is clear to all since you insinuate by that, that the purchasing power of the average Ghanian is higher than that of the Nigerian. When Ghana begins to earn hard currency from Nigeria your eyes will become open to the need to encourage industrialists at home.

All Nigerians are experts in is tribalism and religious bigotry while other nations push ahead. I just hope the Toyota deal to Ghana is not true and Nigeria still gets a chance to attract something or else Mr. President should return to nigeria ASAP, calling up Mr. Coscharis on the flight home.

I long for a time we will have leadership that is madly keen, driven in their sleep and wake to have something productive on ground.

Red Star.... One of those deadly teams in Europe in years gone by. Money and means have left them outside the corridors of champions for long. It will be a long, long time before we see a team outside the top five leagues winning the ol big ears.

yazga:
Japan organized TICAD to help African countries with funds, technical support and an avenue for Businessmen on the continent to network with theirs.

Rwanda, Botswana, even Lesotho went with several young entrepreneurs.

Nigeria went with civil servants carrying Buhari’s bag

I thought Tony Elumelu is there to fight for the youth in business.

Football dominance is cyclical. When your time is up there is hardly anything that works in your favour to return to the summit. Folks just think it is how badly their teams are setup. What they should also realise is how other teams may have improved which is not in the control of anyone in the system.

The fact of the Manchester United story is that the Premiership has become far more competitive than in the dying days of Sir Alex Ferguson and I will dare to say that if the man was still in charge uptil now United will not fare significantly better than where they are now. Now we have a Premiership made up almost exclusively of foreign managers save for five mainly recently promoted teams and we all know what foreign managers bring to the game, better organisation, better game play, better tactics, better player recruitment, etc.

Gone are the days when it was only Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger and Rafa Benitez Sir Alex had to compete against. Today even mid table teams have competent foreign managers that easily outclass the likes of Sam Allardyce, Alan Pardew, Mark Hughes and ol Harry Rednapp. In the days of Sir Alex who could imagine a Wolverhampton go to Italy and get a result against an Italian side. Today they made the groupies for Europa and will compete with any of the big six english teams without fear.

Top teams have upgraded too. Liverpool 'uptraded' Brendan Rogers for Jurgen Klopp, City went for arguable the best coach in modern soccer, Pep Guardiola, Pochettino retired Tim Sherwood to punditry and even Arsenal went for a younger and equally competent version of Wenger. The league has improved in leaps and bounds and this was evident in last years European finals where for the first time in history both finals were contested by teams from the same league.

So, as it is understandable that when you sit in bus or train and a parallel one parked pulls out it appers you are moving backward, United apears to be falling behind but the truth is that United is merely stagnant, it is others that have improved remarkably and I don't think we give credit to these managers enough for remaining aflot, something I believe even Sir Alex could not have done in the circumstances. Soccer domination is cyclical.

When I started watching soccer on telly, long before the advent of international broadcasting, the internet or cable tv, it was the Bundesliga on weekend show. We get these matches a week after they are played and then it was all Hamburg SV dominating Germany. They were then what Bayern Munich is today, title after title. Where are they today. Then they started broadcasting the English league and it was Nottingham Forest. They were the Manchester City of that time, flashy play, flashy players.... where are they today.

In the late 80's or was it early 90's the Italian league came on NTA 2 Channel 5 and it was Ac Milan all the way with an occassional sprinkling of Sampdoria, Parma and Juventus.... today Milan cannot even make the UCL.

I have seen enough to know no crown lasts forever. The truth is that it may take United another decade to win the Premiership or it may never happen again just as I simply cannot imagine Hamburg winning the Bundesliga or Forest win the Premiership. Anything can happen.... or not happen.

Everything boils down to dialogue, negotiations, settlements and gazetted agreements, period. Governance is pretty easy if you know what you are doing. However our governments are often hostile and stand offish by nature. This flies in the face of what real democracy is all about.

The Muslims in Transamadi and all of Rivers state are legitimate residents and citizens who pay their taxes and exercise their electoral franchises. They should be accorded the respect and care deserved.

My prognosis of this governor remains the same. He is absolutely lost focus. Everything your hear coming out of Imo is about Rochas reminiscent of the early days of the Buhari administration when you thought GEJ was still in government and the APC in opposition.

Granted things are bad and a lot of sanitation is required but that is what institutions are meant for. Why do our leaders always want to make themselves institutions.

I think the citizens of that state had better review his honeymoon with a view to cutting it short, dust up his manifesto and begin to turn up the heat on him and his administration to get him to focus on issues of governance and advancement if not yet another 4 years will be needlessly lost. Mr. Ihedioha is beginning to become a disappointment.

....Do this in the US and chances are the lady will be back with an AR15 and half a dozen hybrid mags brimming with armoured piercing shells.

We take far much too bull in this country. Defaming what useless character.... hiss.

PrecisionFx:
I believe the igalas will vote him out.

Let's see how to goes.

I hope you donot refer to ethnic poiticking because I think it is time we move past this. The collective values I allude to are progressive values, values centred around what it means to develop your state and people, good govermace, beat practices. I donot want the elections decided by tribal sentiments and along ethnic lines because the governor comes from somewhere and he and his kinsman will claim victimisation, ethnic sentiments and prejudice.

The facts of his misgovernance will be drowned in a sea of sentiments and both he and his people will learn no lessons of what bad governance can cause. We must begin to elect people into office based purely on merit. Has our sufferings not been enough to quench sentiment in our souls. I doubt if the Igbirra man has come off better than the Igala man or Okun man in Bello's dispensation. Everyone shares an equal patrimony of leadership failure. People should vote along conscience lines please.

PrecisionFx:
Only aggressive n open rigging can save Yahaya bello

Then it is still up to the citizens to resist and shutdown the state if they feel cheated. A man on the ground fears no fall. If the citizens of the state are going to hang themselves or drink poisons to end their misery they may as well have a final say and go out in a blaze of glory.

So you folks can clearly see that Nigeria is caused by Nigerians. The citizens ultimately determine their destiny. No matter how undemocratic a country is, no matter how evil its leadership is, if the people can only hold collective values, collective values, COLLECTIVE VALUES, COLLECTIVE VALUES!!!.... there is hope.

Obviously the delegates of the APC cannot seem to agree on what good leadership, good governance is so even a donkey can be elected into governance.

Now that the first layer of defence has failed woefully is now left for the second and the last layer, the citizens to determine at the general polls who or what leads their destiny. If they choose him again, no one can help them.