Northern Nigerian political class should learn from the past about the meaning of integrity before it's too late.
In the days of the Northern Region, the government constructed air-strips for use of the Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, in most of the provinces that made up the Northern Region, including Mubi, Jalingo, Wukari, Sokoto, Gusau, Minna, Azare, Gombe, Bauchi, Idah, etc. Sir Ahmadu Bello had three small Cessna aircrafts in his fleet.
The administration and operation of the fleet of aircrafts was supervised directly by an Assistant District Officer, ADO, in the Premier’s office. His name was Alhaji Suleiman Gurin, a former teacher from Adamawa Province.
One day, Sir Ahmadu Bello flew one of the aircrafts in his fleet to Sokoto on a private visit.
When he returned to Kaduna, the administrative headquarters of the region, the ADO, Alhaji Suleiman Gurin sent him a bill for his flight to Sokoto! His explanation was that the Premier went on a private visit, using the aircraft that was strictly for official schedules.
The importance of his request was that the Premier was owing the government! And therefore should make the appropriate refund to the government’s treasury. Without any hesitation, Sir Ahmadu Bello, who was amused at the request, made the payment.
When he went public with details of his exchange with Alhaji Gurin, it was his way of commending the ADO, and setting his conduct as one that others should emulate.
He wanted to further affirm the reality that everyone who served was a subject to the state, and to the laws that have been made to effectively govern that state. When state actors, regardless of the privileges conferred on them by their offices, begin to assume superiority over the state itself, perdition is not far from that society.
When subordinates respectfully hold their bosses up to these standards, the pillars that hold societies together remain firmly in place. Of course, the whole saga became an unforgettable one for the ADO and his family".
Kingosytex: Despite the fact that Tinubu is the best definition of greed, I must confess that he carries everybody along. He is an astute politician and his sagacity is top notch.
He still stands tall among his contemporaries.
Utter nonsense.
How many of the 20 million Lagosian has he carried along?
Blatant abuse of power, if Nigeria had a real democratic system the opposition and NASS will be justified in requesting budget cuts and political sanction against the presidency to curtail abuse of power and resources.
Buhari’s children have no right to use Presidential jet, says Obasanjo’s ex-aide
A former Special Adviser to ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo on Political Matters, Akin Osuntokun, says the children of the President, Maj. Gen Muhammau Buhari (retd.), have no right to use the Presidential jet.
Graxie: Yet poor idiots will be fighting for this people. These men have secured future for their kids, they deceive you with ethnicity and religious beliefs. Who would have thought Atiku and Ribadu can be at the same place. How about Osibanjo and Atiku, Nigeria youth with empty stomach will be here fighting for politicians.
It is called state capture, the youth can only look up to the people that control the wealth of the land.
[quote author= post=85706797]Mr Nuhu Ribadu : Another man we respect so much in our darling nation. A man against thieves, fraudsters and criminals.
From all of us @[color=#006600][/color] : Happy Married Life to Mahmud Nuhu Ribadu and his wife, Amina Aliyu Ismaila.
May the Almighty Allah bless your marriage. May this New journey of their lives be filled with Joy, Peace and More Love.[/quote]Mr Nuhu Ribadu is now surrounded by thieves, fraudsters and criminals.
xandy84: Everything is not corruption. Corruption is part of the problem and not all the problem. Nigeria electricity model is based that is non workable. You generate electricity and add it together, then share it.. It is just like our system of government, it never going to work right....
Well Done.
Nigerian failure to understand the disastrous outcome of a rental economy that shares instead of produce. The symptom of sharing from the centre is corruption or how else will an unproductive Nigerian politician going to be rich.
shadeyinka: No! The total electricity power generation capacity we have is 6GW. We generate an average of 3GW. We need at least 15GW of electricity to cover the federation. We need 30GW to start industrialization.
So, how would 3GW distributed to Magodo and Omole because they pay higher tariff.
Our problem is inadequate generation!
Nigeria needs more than 15GW to cover the nation. SA has 53GW and they are struggling with a population of 60 million.
Nigeria must decentralise the power sector to scale to each region. The fact that the SW came to the conclusion that the security problem in the SW is beyond the capabilities of the federal police is an indication that other social infrastructures cannot be delivered by Abuja and needs to be decentralised restructuring doesn't need to be political.
ALAGOGO007: For many years now, Nigeria has been facing an extreme electricity shortage. This deficiency is multi-faceted, with causes that are financial, structural, and sociopolitical, none of which are mutually exclusive. Nigeria’s power sector has high energy losses from generation to billing, a low collection rate and low access to electricity by the population. There is insufficient cash generation because of these inefficiencies and the power sector is consequently reliant on fuel subsidies and funding of capital projects by the government.
At present only 10 % of rural households and 40% of the country’s total population have access to electricity. Power supply difficulties cripple the agricultural, industrial and mining sectors and impede the Nigeria's ongoing economic development. The energy supply crisis is complex, stems from a variety of issues and has been ongoing for decades.
As of December 2013, the total installed or nameplate capacity (maximum capacity) of the power plants was 6,953 MW. Available capacity was 4,598 MW. Actual average generation was 3,800 MW. As of December 2014, the total installed capacity of the power plants was 7,445 MW.
The minister for power Babatunde Fashola said that 90 million Nigerians lack electricity supply. This is an indictment of the government and a clarion call on that same government as well as other stakeholders to do something urgently about the wobbling electricity supply situation in the country. Every year, the Nigerian government invest huge amout of money in the power sector with no positive impact, something seems not right!
The big question is, are we going to witness a stable power supply in our lifetime , will it ever happen?
Nigeria must change it's energy strategy and design to scale. Let regions build and distribute electricity independently of the federal government. Remove the failed privatisation programme.
webshopNG: Some places already have it. You jist need to grow to that level.
For the common man. It wont happen anyyime soon. But the common man can create his own solar power. Just like we all dug boreholes and forgot about the Nigerian water corporation.
The boreholes are the reason why Lagos is sinking. There are no shortcut to development.
press9jatv: Pastor Adeboye prays for some staff of a construction company to finish a road job they were allegedly paid and expected to complete in 2019. The prayers was reportedly for the construction company to finish the road job in 2020.
The Bible says Prayer is the Key, Prayer is our own weapon of welfare, we can not fight you , but we can go on our knees and pray, so leave us with our prayers. Thank you. Do you and let’s do us .
Stupid pastor, the road that they were paid to complete in 2019, now requires prayer for these imbeciles to complete in 2020. In any civilised society, the construction workers will be prosecuted and the useless pastor admonished for wasting company time.
The Nigerian middle class and the second exodus (II) By Chris Akor On Jan 9, 2020
Last week, I began by showing how the second phase of military rule coupled with poor economic management precipitated the first exodus of Nigerian professionals or middle class. Two professional groups were mostly affected: academics and medical doctors. I also argued that the impact on the academia was particularly severe and it marked the beginning of the total collapse of scholarship in Nigerian university, a collapse Nigeria never recovered from. Currently, what goes on in the Nigerian university system, with few exceptions, is best captured by the term “garbage in, garbage out”.
By a stroke of luck, however, the medical profession survived, in part due to the strong foundation laid in medical training and practice by the British and also the appeal of the profession to Nigerians, even if quality has nosedived.
However, years of under-investment and a total lack of interest in the health of its citizens, has resulted in the collapse of the healthcare system in Nigeria. Currently, only about 4 per cent of Nigeria’s budget is allocated to the health sector – and these largely go to subsidise the training of medical doctors. Healthcare provision and infrastructure has completely collapsed with a World Health Organisation (WHO) report on healthcare delivery placing Nigeria at 197 out of 200 surveyed countries.
Unsurprisingly, medical professionals have led the second exodus with most seeking better work conditions and pay outside the country. Just to show how terribly they fared in Nigeria, an average Nigerian doctor earns just about N200, 000 ($560) monthly while his counterpart in the United Kingdom earns between £49-83 per hour. A recent poll conducted by NOI Polls showed that 88 percent of doctors in Nigeria are considering work opportunities outside the country and the figure is projected to keep rising as more as medical professionals continue to grapple with deep systemic challenges in Nigeria that make it difficult for them to practice and survive.
So severe is the rate of emigration that if the current trend continues, Nigeria will be left with no middle class in the nearest future. This will make it the second time in Nigeria’s chequered history that the middle class is being decimated. But whereas the first time was under a military regime, the second time is during democratic rule, where the middle class should normally thrive and be the symbol of an open and democratic society.
This leads me to the question of the role of the Nigeria middle class in politics – a question I have had to return to so many times over the last four years.
The middle class, that broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class or in classical Marxian speak, located between the bourgeoisie/capitalist class and the proletariat, is so critical to the sustenance of democracy, good governance and economic development. It is, according to David Madland, “a prerequisite for robust entrepreneurship and innovation, a source of trust that makes business transactions more efficient, a bulwark against credit booms and busts, and a progenitor of virtuous, forward-looking behaviours, such as valuing education”.
The middle class not only supply the workforce and expertise needed to run the country’s bureaucracy and manage the economy, they also ensure the government is run most efficiently with adequate public investments in education, health and infrastructure and in accordance with societal and democratic norms. This benefits everyone in the society and not just special interests. Of course, good governance sets the stage for economic growth and development.
The middle class act to protect the democratic order because their economic fate is almost directly tied to the quality of governance. They depend on public services more than the rich and as Obama opined in 2011: “When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom.”
However, evidence from Nigeria and other depraved societies suggest that the middle class are their own greatest enemies, often preferring personal emancipation than societal progress.
The Nigerian middle class has been the greatest supporters and enablers of the status quo no matter how terrible that status quo is. Being part of the exploited class but with professional knowledge or privileged positions in the civil service, they often offer their services and knowledge to the exploiters for hire.
Consequently, they have become the greatest advocates of the ruling class, the greatest defenders of Nigeria’s politics of plunder, neopatrimonialism and prebandalism. Being part of the exploited class themselves, they often speak the language of the downtrodden until they are noticed and called to the service of the ruling class where they have proved especially useful in fashioning strategies to further the exploitation of the downtrodden.
In Nigeria, the moment they had the chance, they wasted no time in cajoling naive military boys in their 20s and early 30s into a full blown civil war that consumed millions of lives when all that was at stake was the egos of the military boys. So comfortable were they with the military boys that after the war, the intellectual wing began to advocate for a diarchy – a form of government where both the military and civilians rule – as the best system for Nigeria. Not done, they recommended the rejection of the more collegiate parliamentary system of government bequeathed to Nigeria at independence and the adoption of a more dictatorial presidential system because, as they claim, sharing power between a president and a prime minister was not feasible in Africa. But they also forgot that investing so much power in the president in a system with very weak institutions of restraints is tantamount to creating a dictatorship. But how do they care; the “49 wise men”, as they were called, argued that in anyway, they presidential system they recommended was more compatible with African indigenous kingship/chieftaincy traditions.
Of course, they are quick to connive or offer their services to military boys to truncate the nation’s democracy, and immediately after such coups, they rush to legitimise the regimes, offering their services and expertise in entrenching the regimes. Their services do not go unrewarded. They are generously rewarded or they help themselves to the public till generously and quite a number of them have successfully transited from the middle to the upper class.
FreelanceRebel: Nigeria is not rich the way you assume, even our budget of trillions has yearly deficit of over 30%
Nigeria is well endowed with hard-working people and resources, hand Nigeria over to a Western leaders and you will see another Japan, Germany or USA with 20 years.
Racoon: What about the jollification the governor & the northern elites were involved in during the wedding of the daughter of the GM-NNPC last week? What about the security votes you lots have been constantly collecting without any improvement in security?
What more about the the culpribility & conspiracy of the core northern leaders and elites who a benefiting from the self-inflicted BH insurgency? Let him that comes to equity come with a clean hand.
They closed down Maidugari just to accommodate the wedding of NNPC GMD daughter, with 49 private jets parked at the Airport.
The Chief terrorist should try rubbish and get rubbish ASAP from Trump
The chief terrorist has military bases stationed in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Afganistan, how many Iranian soldiers are based in the Americas. You stupid black slave, that's why the West has troop all over Africa and we think we have freedom.
suskumayaya: I feel a lot of people here comment based on patriotism. The actual fact is we have potentials but it has not cascade to any meaningful economic development. Of course, we are better off pre 1999 in all ramifications but we are not even close to where we are suppose to be in the economic development curve.
Nigeria has the potential to remain poor, because of cultural factors, growing population, insecurity, environmental degradation and too many ethnics groups.
Starboytwo: The most important thing to do before we can move forward as a nation is to solve ELECTRICITY problem
We should demand 24 hour electricity from this people, I don't know how but we gotta do something or na like dis e go dey dey...
We need light men...
I'm a young entrepreneur and I make money daily from my business, but I spend 80% of the money on fuel every day and generator maintenance...
Fix electricity and watch our naija "gbera"
Electricity is the easiest problem to solve especially in a country blessed with natural gas, hydroelectric energy and solar energy.
The government will not solve the electricity issues as it is against the supporters of this government and the previous ones. Who will buy the imported kerosene, diesel generators and hurricane lamps if Nigeria has 24/7 electricity?
shugabasbn: What is your problem on who taking credit? Awarding of contract is different from releasing of fund and executed of project. There is teaching hospital awarded during Muritala/Obasanjo military regime in my town that passed through different regimes until later built by Obj during his second tenure as civilian president n completed by late president Umar Yaradua. Award is just a paper work, anyone can do that but executed of the project is the main thing n who carry the glory is less concerns of the citizens. That is what we elected to do.
Nan so Nigerian will sign contract and claim "award is just paperwork"
Olodo! A contract is the foundation of any projects, you get it wrong and the project will fail before it even starts. This is why Nigeria signed a $40 million wet gas contract with the Irish P&ID company and are now liable for $10 billion and counting.
KingGBsky: Congratulations to Nigeria. If Buhari can make Nigeria rice sufficient and even to the level of exporting rice then it’s very welcome.
A president and petroleum minister that can't fix the four refineries under his care, will turn Nigeria into an industrial exporter of rice....my brother why do you like liars.
LOL well, the Ghanian are now concerned with the ECO are reading the terms and conditions.
Ghana wants to join new West African currency but ditch euro peg,
ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Ghana’s government said it is determined to join a West African currency that will replace the France-backed CFA franc as soon as next year in eight regional countries, but it urged members of the currency union to ditch a planned peg to the euro.
Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara and French President Emmanuel Macron announced this month that West Africa’s monetary union had agreed to cut some financial links with Paris that have underpinned the region’s common currency since its creation soon after World War Two.
On a visit to Ivory Coast, French President Emmanuel Macron and Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara on Saturday announced an overhaul of the CFA franc, a currency used by eight states in West and Central Africa, most of them former French colonies. to be replaced by the ECO which will be pegged to Euro
‘If a small country unilaterally fixes its currency to a larger neighbour, it in effect transfers policy sovereignty to that larger neighbour. The fixing country loses sovereignty because it no longer controls its own monetary destiny; the larger country gains sovereignty because it manages a larger currency area and gains more “clout” in the international monetary system.’
Destroyerofyeeb: When I say Nigerians are stupid unpatriotic cvnts some people go dey vex. Their hatred for anything buhari has blinded them. France isn't gonna let go of their colonies easily.
I dislike Buhari, but I support his opposition to the French control ECO (Formerly CFA) and the closure of the country borders. I am a Nigerian patriot and not a support of either the PDP or APC
Business › Re: Abubakar Malami Revokes MTN's $2 Billion Tax Case by sulaak(m): 3:14pm On Jan 12, 2020
