Pentecostalism either classical or modern has its conflicting, competing, and complementary angles to the Nigerian socio-religious scenario. Africans are known as a highly religious society typified in the multi-religious nature of the modern African system. Consequently, the ‘Christian God’ is now abstracted in the African gods; hence the domineering effects and of course the coinage of Pentecostalism to Pente-rascalism.

Tragically, some questionable characters have successfully highjacked the pulpits and heightened tension in our political space by taking advantage of unsuspecting gullible followers; using the pulpits for fake prophecies and inciting statements thereby turning Pentecostalism into Pente-rascalism. After reviewing a video clip in which David Ibiyeomie, a Nigerian pastor, the founder/presiding pastor of Salvation Ministries with its headquarters located in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria – made unprintable and other inciting statements about the President-elect Asíwájú Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Vice-President-elect Sen Kashim Shettima. 

The pastor’s admixture of politics into his sermon equally signposts an emerging dangerous trend that could undermine peace and security across the country as clergymen encourage the faithful to migrate their sectarian biases, hatred, and disaffection into everyday life. Hence, the recently concluded 2023 general elections which saw the Christian faith being exploited and abused to promote politics of hate, divisiveness, and spreading falsehood, a development that demystified many clergymen that were once held in high esteem but have now become false prophets before their followers. 

Unexpectedly, your preferred candidate Peter Obi, lost the election. He did not come close to winning, he came a distant third position against your false prophecies. So why will any reasonable person want to burn down a country Nigeria? Since childhood, many of us have been conditioned by the environment/society, religion, culture, and parenting to have a certain pattern of thinking. The infusion of Pente-rascalism has further worsened our condition. What is more, these things just don’t happen by magic, they are usually products of planning and effort. Nigeria will get it Right, Not instantaneous, The Foundations will be laid and will be built upon onward.

Interestingly, the majority of Nigeria’s population of over 200 million follows either Islam or Christianity. Historically, these two major religions have coexisted peacefully. However, since independence, the country has suffered from many ethno-religious conflicts. In the recent past, the kind of activities of some disgruntled elements using the pulpits for politics of ethnicity and religion has increased and further polarized our delicate fault lines. The latest madness is the message from David Ibiyeomie de-marketing the President-elect and the Vice-President-elect.

It is instructive that, even after a winner has emerged from the 2023 presidential election and some aggrieved candidates are already in the tribunal to vent their waves of anger. Sadly, David Ibiyeomie and some other disgruntled elements who have been apushing for change through unorthodox means and continued with weaponizing ethnicity and religion. It should be noted that in one of my previous articles; “The Misery Of APC Muslim Muslim Ticket” I forewarned about the danger and seed of disunity surreptitiously planted by some “Christian” leaders with their utterances unmindful of sowing dangerous seed that will in the future makes it very difficult for a Christian to win a Presidential election in Nigeria. The unabated attack and hatred coming from the pulpit to the President and Vice President-Elects are unprecedented.

Of course, you can tell the character of a man by what he spews out of his mouth. Truth is, these criminal elements and the so-called movement Obidients ‘Obingos’ folks are only behaving true to type: they’re delusional, misbegotten, and certainly don’t deserve to dwell in the midst of men with discernment and understanding. This is exactly what the likes of David Ibiyeomie and his cohorts are capitalizing on to remain relevant and sustained the falsehood, deceitfulness, and fake prophecies – ‘selectively saintly.’ the more I review the video the more sorry I feel for the gullible followers who can’t decipher the obvious truth about the man’s determination to become relevant and guide his personal interests. Fake prophecies and brainwashing can never be the will of God. The will of God cannot be rigged. It is imperative to appeal to the conscience of stakeholders to admonish some of our merchants of miracles masquerading as “Men of God” to stop manipulating their congregants.

In lieu of the above, it has become imperative to enlist the support of stakeholders, faith-based leaders, particularly the leadership of the Christian body ‘CAN’, our patriarch in the person of Pst Enoch Adejare Adeboye and Bishop David Olaniyi Oyedepo to urgently intervene and rein in the pastors misrepresenting God. We cannot afford a second civil war or religious crisis any longer. Nigeria must not burn, politics is not a do-or-die affair.

Obiageli (Oby) Ezekwesili is like a daughter to me. Even when she was a minister, I treated her the same way I treated my biological daughters. She was a dynamic young woman, who is competent, reliable, and very enterprising. As she, therefore, clocks 60 today, I cannot but thank God for her life, as I wish her more fulfilling and glorious years and decades ahead.

Oby and I met through Transparency International, an initiative started by Peter Eigen, who had worked at the World Bank and saw the need for more integrity in the public arena. While Oby and Peter collaborated, I chaired the advisory council. Due to her hard work and dedication to duty, and because I naturally like working with intelligent people, it was easy for me to warm to Oby at the time.

When I came out of prison in 1998, I travelled to the United States, essentially to thank those who had worked for my release; people that cared, like the CNN founder, Ted Turner; people at Ford Foundation, where I used to be Board of Trustees member, and others. I remember Oby came to see me on the day I was meeting with most of my children, sharing my prison experience and looking ahead to what I believed at the time to be a more private life. Oby was then at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

When opportunity afforded itself that I became President, I already knew that I had somebody to bring into government.

Before I appointed Oby a minister, I first assigned her to work closely with me in what we called the Price Intelligence Unit, which she headed and was domiciled at the Villa. It later became the Due Process office, which earned her the nickname, ‘Madam Due Process.’ The idea was to cut down on waste and bring transparency and accountability into the award of contracts, which she did excellently. The point is, in government, you cannot accurately eliminate sharp practices; but if you have good public officials like Oby, you will reduce it to the barest minimum. That exactly was what she did at a period when all contracts had to go through her office. Oby’s stewardship in the Due Process Office brought about substantial reduction in cost of contracts, which, of course, saved the government billions of naira at the time.

Given her involvement in the global demand for more transparency in the oil and gas sector, she was a founding member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. The NEITI, Nigeria’s version of EITI, that we have today is by dint of her efforts and the support I gave, especially in the days of difficult beginning.

From the Due Process Office, I appointed Oby a minister in charge of solid minerals. At that period, illegal mining was being carried out in several parts of Nigeria and most of the people in the business I shared my frustration with said we needed to put in place the requisite regulation. They also suggested that we needed someone tough to handle that ministry. So, knowing Oby very well, I could not see a more perfect fit for the sector. That was why I sent her to the ministry, and she did excellently.

After we had gone far in our transformation reforms in the Ministry of Solid Minerals, I realised that we had not done much in education. At that time, I knew that the Ministry of Education required reforms and the three people that I thought I could use were already heavily involved in other things. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was still in finance, Nasir el-Rufai was handling the Federal Capital Territory, which had almost been destroyed with deviation from the original master plan. Then I had just put Oby in solid minerals. I had a conversation with the Head of Service who felt that I could redeploy Oby for the assignment. I was hesitant because I did not want to disrupt what she was doing at the Ministry of Solid Minerals. “Sir, is the solid minerals ministry more important than that of education?” queried the HoS. That question settled it for me. I sent Oby to education, and I told her to recommend a replacement for the solid minerals’ ministry.

As President, I tried to expose some of the brightest talents I had in government to opportunities available to be the best they could possibly be. Without any doubt, Oby was one of the best talents I had working with me. On a lighter note, when Oby worked with me, she was quite young, but very intelligent. There were three of them at that time that used to drag age, and I enjoyed their banters: Oby, Frank Nweke and Nenadi Usman. The three of them were under 40 and then in council. They were always arguing among themselves about age seniority, and Ngozi used to treat them as juniors. But it was all fun.

I recall when Oby informed me that she was given a job at the World Bank, I did not want her to go because I really needed her. But then I said to myself, “Let her go, it may be part of Nigeria’s contribution to global development, especially in Africa.” She went to the World Bank and did her best. She was, for me, one of the best from Africa.

Now that she is 60, she should look at what she has done in the past and what God has enabled her to do and give thanks, while preparing herself for the future. She is still a young lady. My prayer is that God’s grace will continue to abound in her.

• Obasanjo, GCFR, is a former President of Nigeria (1999 to 2007)

The beauty of every democracy is periodic elections and such elections must pass all the known characteristics of an election in a democratic setting.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American President, probably, gave us the basic tenets of what an election ought to be in a democracy, when in his famous Gettysburg speech, he defined democracy as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. As simple as that definition was, it contains all the requirements that are expected of a credible, fair and free elections. The central idea in Lincoln’s celebrated speech is that in a democracy, elections are meant for the people and its outcome must reflect the wishes and aspirations of the people the elections were meant for. What this means and implies, is that sovereign authority belongs to the people and flow from them. Anything outside this cannot be said to be an election. It is either a magic or a mere selection which has no place in a democratic setting.

The danger of a regime without sovereignty of the people, is that anarchy and chaos are bound to loom, this is because, man is naturally a political being and he is bound to revolt when his rights are violated, such rights as determining who rules and govern over him. When such rights are violated, they become an invitation to anarchy, chaos and anti-regime profiling.

This is better explained in the theory postulated by Thomas Hobbes in explaining the social contract theory between the ruled and ruler. According to Hobbes, to escape the state of nature that is gloomy, sordid, brutish and short, man willingly surrendered his rights and entered into a contract for the establishment of a state. The social contract obliges citizens to respect and obey the state, in exchange for stability and security that only a system of political rule can provide.
In modern day democracy, that social contract is renewed every election year. The implications of a forceful contract, presupposes a return to what Hobbes described as state of nature as the people who were supposed to freely consent to the contract through elections were neglected, this happens when politicians rig elections and impose themselves on the people, the danger of such undemocratic move, is that anarchy is bound to reign supreme under such circumstances.

Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, Nigeria has had a chequered and sour history with regards to the sanctity of the electoral process. While we may have tolerated the electoral malfeasance for the past 20 years now, as periods of experiment and learning, the 2023 general elections was the height of electoral heist ever  witnessed in the history of this country, despite providing the umpire with all the necessary tools it required to conduct a credible and free election . Armed with a solid improvement in technology, one would have thought that the electoral body would have leveraged on them to make the polls credible, rather, the elections as widely reported by international and local observers failed to meet the standard expected of an election.

During the old good days, in description of a new invention and innovations especially in science and technology, and in exclamation to surprise inventions, we usually respond with that timeless old song: Come and see, American wonder, Come and see, America wonder, who no know, American wonder, who no know, American wonder. The song and caption of this piece reminds us of how time has changed, and the American Wonder has been replaced with such negativity as fraud, stealing and electoral abracadabra.

Maybe, the Nigerian version of American wonder could not have been properly expressed than what INEC did in the last presidential election, leaving some of us who sang the American wonder song in those days to wonder, if our own version of Nigerian Wonder connotes everything fraud. The Nigerian wonder that INEC showcased to the world bequeaths everything negativity in direct opposite of the American wonder.
The joint election observation mission(JEOM) involving The International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) led by Her Excellency, Joyce Banda, former President of Malawi, in their preliminary report, indicted the electoral body of erosion of confidence and trust. In their report, she said and I quote ‘’at the close of the polls, challenges with the electronic transfer of results and their upload to a public portal in a timely manner, undermined citizen confidence at a crucial moment of the process ‘’

The report continued, ‘‘Moreover, inadequate communication and lack of transparency by the independent National Electoral commission (INEC) about their cause and extent, created confusion and eroded voter’s trust in the process ‘’. End of quote.
The report of JOEM, clearly indicted the electoral commission. Prelude to the conduct of the general elections, INEC had promised on several occasions to the chagrin of stakeholders, to transmit the results of the Presidential elections in real time, for the public to view. For clarity, let me quote the chairman of the commission, Prof Yakubu, in his words, “let me once again reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of BVAS for voter accreditation.

There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC result viewing portal (IREV) in real time on Election Day. “.  Rather than stick to their guidelines, they hoodwinked Nigerians on the Election day, and technically refused to upload the Presidential election results in real time, thereby eroding the confidence and trust of Nigerians in the whole process. The inability of INEC to upload results, even one month after the polls, smacks of a hidden agenda.
To worsen the matter, when opposition parties drew the attention of the commission to the obvious flaws, rather than address the issues raised before declaring a winner, the commission, responded with the now infamous “GO TO COURT”.
To subtly tell Nigerians that the results they are about to announce does not reflect their wishes, while Nigerians were yet asleep, in a manner only akin to a thief, the electoral body announced the result of the presidential election.

This to me was an indirect way of sarcastically telling Nigerians, you don’t need to be awake to hear the results as it does not reflect your wishes.
While Nigerians thought the electoral body would have redeemed itself with the next scheduled elections as the governorship and state assembly, the electoral body once again failed Nigerians and recorded high spate of inconclusive elections across the country. The INEC imbroglio was compounded by the embarrassment in Adamawa, were against any known law, the REC who is not empowered to do so, arrogantly announced a winner in the Adamawa Guber even when collation was still ongoing .

The impunity displayed by the Adamawa REC, Mr. Hudu Yunusa, were derived from the posture of unprofessionalism and illegality by its national Chairman, who despite severally been reminded of fragrant violation of its own guidelines, went ahead to announce a winner in very odd hours of the night. Mr. Hudu must have been bolstered by the impetus of its chairman in doing the wrong thing, if not; I wonder what gave him the audacity to announce a result without figures, even while collation was still ongoing. What a bizarre.

While aggrieved parties have heeded to the infamous “go to court”, it now behooves on the judiciary to prove to anti- democratic forces, that the judiciary remains the last hope of the common man by righting the electoral wrongs of the last general elections without fear or favour.
If we must progress as a nation, our electoral institutions must be so strong as to eliminate any possibility of seeking redress in the courts. We must do everything within the armpits of the law to make every vote count.
A government without the sovereignty of the people will only return us to a state of nature were life is short, brutish and nasty. None of us can witness the revolt of the people.

The revolt may not happen now, or in the next election, but what is certain, if we continue in this cruel way of recruiting leaders through a very crooked and flawed process, without little or no approval from the electorates, perhaps, just one day, the owners of political power shall revolt, to end the Nigerian version of American wonder.  

MR. PRESIDENT’S APOLOGY MANTRA

While I was rounding up with this piece, I just read over the news that Mr. President has asked Nigerians to forgive him. While there is no problem in seeking for forgiveness, after all, God almighty admonished us to forgive those who have wronged us, but Mr. President did not tell us what offense he has committed, at least that would have afford Nigerians a clear understanding of what sin they are pardoning for Mr. President, in any case, I wish him good luck as he retires from service to the nation.

•High Chief Sen. Ben Ndi Obi, CON, FNIPR writes from Abuja

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”-Winston Churchill- commending the bravery of the British people (especially the youths) during the second world war.
“Everyone should lose a battle in his youth, so that he does not lose a war when he is old”- George Martin

The debt of tribute I owe the younger generation in Nigeria has accumulated since the martyrdom of Leah Sharibu. It is late in coming but God knows my appreciation of her supreme sacrifice resides in my heart since the beginning of her captivity. She stared terrorism in the face and rejected her captors’s offer of conditional freedom. In the circumstances, it was not really a demanding coercion. Just momentarily renounce Christianity for Islam and we will set you free. If there was ever a good bargain, this was it. Yet she rejected the offer. Remember she was even a child. As a matter of fact, the Islamic doctrine of taqqiya has a priori absolved her of culpability in specifically the kind of situation she found herself in. Faced with a similar burden, did the founder of christianity, Saint Peter, not deny Jesus Christ, thrice before cock crow at dawn?

I have been privileged by fate to be at the centre stage where her peers have decided to pick up the gauntlet for the political salvation of Nigeria. They call themselves the obidients movement, so christened as a rally for the personification of their ideal choice for the political leadership of Nigeria, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr Peter Obi.

Not too uncommon, at the latter part of middle age, I have been experiencing intermittent weariness of spirit on the sacrifices of the political choice I have made and the probability of Nigeria getting it right. If I will not succumb, the credit goes to the pact I have intrinsically made with this Nigerian demographic. I urged them on, all through the campaign, with the challenge and exhortation of Frantz Fanon, that, “out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its destiny, to fulfil or betray it”. As the 2023 presidential election goes, they fulfilled their part of the bargain but their dream has been abbreviated by the depravity of the political status quo.

As a student of Nigerian politics, it would be remiss of me to give the impression that I did not anticipate all that has happened in the interim. But we human beings are a creature of hope. How could I have imagined that a Muhammadu Buhari presidency would, in repudiation of its soul and spirit, birth a new dawn for Nigerian politics? Wasn’t I the one who earlier spoke of the theory of social reproduction in which tendency, a regime reproduces itself, in form and character. So, welcome to the neo Buhari ideological dispensation where we are confronted with its manifestation in the weaponization of ethno religious bigotry and polarisation, not to talk of the intimate commonality of the physical and mental fragility of the man on whose desk the buck stops. An apple, they say, does not fall from the tree.

There is the aspect of furtive Yoruba triumphalism, or, to be more precise, the Yoruba of Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s persuasion. It is the difference between the legitimacy of the Ayo Adebanjo’s Afenifere and the illegitimacy of the contrived Reuben Fasonranti’s faction. So to say, the ‘election’ of Tinubu is inherently a tragedy for all concerned, beginning with the man of the moment himself. I cannot recall a precedent in modern world history where an incoming president arrives in office with the liability and illegitimacy of a most disreputable pedigree. Not even the infamous Donald Trump, matches him in this regard. At least Trump won his election, free and fair.

Tinubu is one of Nigeria’s political personages, I would rather not publicly discuss. For whatever it is worth, I shared a personal relationship with him, reinforced by the fact of our Yoruba consaguinity. Significantly, he was there for the Yoruba people, when duty beckoned in the annulment of the 1993 presidential election crisis. Regardless, it is equally a Yoruba tragedy, in the sense of a comparative analysis of the qualities of hitherto Yoruba representation at the height of political office in Nigeria. How does he fare compared to Obafemi Awolowo, Ladoke Akintola, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ernest Shonekan, Moshood Abiola. More significant is the applicability of the abiding Yoruba canon of omoluabi. Here is a pertinent illustration of what constitutes Omoluabi:

“We’ve had OBJ military, Sonekan and OBJ civilian. Tinubu would be 4th!!. This matter is first and foremost about Integrity, Conscience and the essence of Omoluabi, on which measures, those of us opposing Obi, and wanting a 4th Yoruba Presidency, when our neighbours have not hand ONCE, have woefully betrayed the Yoruba core ethos of Omoluabi. An Omoluabi is NOT greedy and self-centered!!!”

These excerpts are not my words but they adequately capture my sentiments. The sad commentary here is that no Yoruba can claim to support Tinubu on the grounds of any fine principle, idealism, altruism or patriotism. Neither have I heard any of such supporters make the claim. For them, it is a question of opportunism, survival of the fittest, my brother right or wrong. It is the difference between 1999 and 2023.

The implicit concession of the Nigerian presidency to the Yoruba in 1999 was a compensation for the annulment of the 1993 presidential election won by Chief Moshood Abiola. It was a political and moral victory for forward looking Nigerians and it set the stage for the adoption of the power rotation convention. The convention also serves as a responsive containment strategy to the destabilising zero sum dimensions of Nigerian politics.

Fast forward to 2023 where another Yoruba has been ‘elected’ the president, in a situation of direct contradiction of the moral imperative of the 1999 concession. As the saying goes, the revolutionaries of yesterday have become the reactionaries of today. It is the story of how the NADECO Progressives of yore have substantially morphed into the neo Buhari ideologues of today, a subsidiary bulwark of a criminally bent status quo. The difference between the Yoruba society of 1999 and the culpable one of 2023 is the gap that separates the hero from the mercenary.

Whereas the ascendance of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo to the Nigerian presidency in 1999 was rectitude and remedy of a wrong that was perpetrated against Abiola inclusive of his Yoruba heritage; that of Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu (if the court so decides) 24 years after is a callous deprivation of a sense of belonging to the most conspicuous victim of Nigeria’s power politics.

It is ironical that the consolidation of the 1999 remedy into the equitable norm of power rotation would meet its nemesis
at the behest of Yoruba insensitivity and selfishness. The ensuing (potential) Tinubu Presidency thereby tantamount to the usurpation of a norm with manifest utility of restoring equilibrium to Nigerian politics. Whereas 1999 was cause celebre across the length and breadth of Nigeria, the 2023 outcome speaks for itself in the prevailing self-evident atmosphere of gloom and despondency stalking the land. Alienation from this explicit violation of a norm has been deepened by the 2023 farcical elections.

About two years ago, President Olusegun Obasanjo, in consultation with Professor Wole Soyinka, resolved to host a non-partisan Pan Yoruba summit. I was charged with the role of the coordinator, in which capacity I went to brief and invite Tinubu. After hearing me out, he proposed that the agenda should include two items. One is the call for a referendum on a putative constitutional review and the other is the demand for power shift to the South. I concurred with the caveat that my own support for presidential power rotation begins and stops with the South East zone. In fulfilment of a sense of personal obligation, I alerted him that this was going to be the subject matter of my column the following day. Nothing has since happened to warrant a variation of this position. As a matter of fact, intervening developments have made it more compelling.

As the cliche goes, a lot of water had since passed under the bridge. If there was any vindication for those of us who had conspicuously stood for the zoning of the Nigerian presidency to the South East, it was the emergence of Peter Obi as presidential candidate. Beyond fulfilling the righteousness of the national unity and integration prescribed concession of the Nigerian presidency to the South East, he has enjoyed national and global acclaim and attestation (as a befitting round peg in a round hole) on the kind of leadership that best serves the cause of Nigeria’s socioeconomic development going forward.

Buoyed by the obidents movement, he utilised the presidential campaign spanning several months to successfully pitch his candidacy. In him, the opportunity provided by the concatenation of the 2023 election circumstances found competence and capacity.
Against this generic background, I couldn’t have found myself in any position other than the one I presently hold, ideologically and morally. It is a position that was bound to come in conflict with that of sundry Yoruba nationalists and opportunists. The difference between us and this latter category, is the difference between a Yoruba nationalist and a Yoruba patriot. I had earlier clarified the distinction:

‘The compelling virtue of the Afenifere endorsement of the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi can be reduced to the theoretical distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Unlike nationalism, good citizenship or patriotism is not a function of racial/ethnic identity. It is a conscientious Yoruba and good Nigerian who concludes that it is the turn of the Igbo to be the beneficiary of the observance of power rotation to the South. All cultures are ennobled by the application of the fundamental scriptural dictum ‘to love your neighbour as you love yourself’.

‘You can be a Yoruba nationalist without being a good man but you cannot be a good Yoruba if you are not a good man. The difference between patriotism and nationalism is simple – a patriot loves his country and is proud of it for what it does whereas a nationalist loves his country and is proud of his country, no matter what it does’. 

The Nigerian Army, on Thursday, retired 53 regimental colours used in the order of battle.

The ceremony, held at Eagle Square, Abuja, also witnessed the issuance of colours to 28 newly created units, bringing the number of units in the Nigerian Army to 81.

President Muhammadu Buhari, dressed in military uniform, presided over the ceremony and the presentation of colours.

The event has in attendance members of the National and Executive Council, members of the Diplomatic Corps, Executive Governors of the States benefitting Units, Service Chiefs, past Chief of Army Staffs, senior military officers, both serving and retired, captains of industries, as well as other important dignitaries.

Since 2007, new units have been established and operationalised in line with the increasing operational commitments of the Nigerian Army, as well as provisions of the extant NA Order of Battle (ORBAT).

In an update on the ceremony on Tuesday, Director, Army Public Relations Officer, Brig. General Onyema Nwachukwu, in a statement, explained that “historically, the origin of colours dated back to the early days when men fixed their family badge to a pole and held it aloft in the battle for the dual purpose of indicating their position and as a rallying point should the occasion arise. This tradition was sustained by medieval chivalry as armorial bearings were placed on their banners so that these could be seen well above the melee.

“At the beginning of the 16th century, when armies were beginning to adopt a system of regimentation, each Unit was allotted a Colour, a custom which persisted till the present day. In the NA, the first known account of Colours dated back to 1863 when the company designated for Nigeria moved from Gold Coast (now Ghana) to Nigeria with their company’s flag, which represented their Colours or Guidon as they are called by the British.

“However, Colour Presentations in the NA for the first time was in 1922 when the then British monarch, His Majesty, King George V, awarded Colours to each battalion of the Nigerian Regiments, which formed part of the British West African Frontier Forces (WAFF), in recognition of their services.

“The Regiment as a whole was also granted a colour, which has an inscription written in Arabic captioned ‘’Victory is from God Alone’’ and till date, this inscription is being used by the Nigerian Army on the Logo and also on NA officers’ cap badges of the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and below as well Non-Commissioned Officers.

“The Colours of a regiment are presented by the heads of state or monarch, prime minister and Commanders-in-Chief of the Country or State, under which the regiment exists. The National and Regimental Colours carried by NA units during parades and ceremonial activities are an important source of identity and pride not only for the units involved but for the NA and the Armed Forces of Nigeria (AFN).

“The sight of the Colours creates a feeling of pride in soldiers and ex-soldiers. From ancient history, Colours have served as an inspiration for heroic acts of self-sacrifice and become the symbol of the fighting spirit of a regiment, for they bear the campaigns, battle honours and badges granted to the regiment in commemoration of the gallant deeds performed by its members from the time it was raised.

“The association of the Colours with heroic deeds of the units emblazoned on them has led to the custom of regarding the Colours with veneration. It is, therefore, the desire of combat and combat support units to be presented with National and Regimental Colours in special ceremonial parades with the President and Commander-in-Chief of AFN in attendance. Colours are presented to combat and combat support units and regiments only.

“It may interest you to know that the last Trooping and Presentation of Colours Parade for the NA units was conducted in 2007. Since then, new units have been established and operationalised in line with the increasing operational commitments of the NA, as well as provisions of the extant NA Order of Battle (ORBAT).

“Colours are usually retired after 10 years of service. Most of the Colours in the NA have been involved in multiple operations in various geopolitical zones of the Country, as well as foreign countries, hence deserving retirement and the presentation of new Colours.

“It is against this backdrop and in line with the traditions, customs and ethics of the NA, Trooping and Presentation of Colours Parade 2023 will be conducted to retire torn or worn out Colours, as well as to present the National and Regimental Colours to the newly established and operationalised NA units in line with the increasing operational commitments of the NA, as well as provisions of the extant NA ORBAT.

“A total of 81 units will, therefore, be participating in the Parade, 53 Colours will be due for retirement, while 28 Colours will be presented to new NA units. The event is a unique ceremony, not only to the units eligible for Colours presentation, as many are looking up to this ceremony to witness the height of military discipline and regimentation.”

[TheWill]

Nigeria’s February/March elections undid many things. One of them was the 63-year-old myth that no wealthy and ambitious candidate could emerge president. Until the last presidential election.

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s president between 1963 and 1966, came close. But while ownership of his extensive and authoritative newspaper chain made him influential, he was not wealthy. In any case, he was only a ceremonial president.

The other leaders, especially the elected ones, up till now, had neither money nor ambition. And all, without exception, were also not prepared for office. A number of them even said so publicly.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu would be the first Nigerian leader to have money and ambition and also to publicly say he is ready and prepared to rule and still get elected. Considered to be one of Africa’s wealthiest politicians, he has extensive business interests and investments from real estate and stocks to media.

He would be the first elected president to defy the so-called “owners of Nigeria” who have over the years been obsessed that power in the hands of a wealthy and independent-minded candidate might put the beneficiary beyond their reach.

As it turned out in the February 25 presidential election, ambition alone would not have been enough to get Tinubu over the line, especially after his own party leader President Muhammadu Buhari’s banknote redesign on the eve of the elections threw the country into financial chaos. Money, ambition and dare-devil courage combined to snatch the chestnut of Tinubu’s aspiration from the fire of adversity.

“Do you know why he won the election?,” US diplomat and election observer asked recently. “He got the money; he had the best national organisation that worked for him and the ground game.”

What this means for governance, whether it brings more freedom and accountability or inhibitions and opaqueness, would be interesting to see in the days ahead.

But the loss of kingmaker leverage is not the only lesson from the 2023 elections. The unravelling myth of the sitting president as alfa and omega in determining a successor, is lesson number two.

In the last election, Buhari showed himself as the master of strategic ambivalence. He did not want Tinubu as his successor. Yet, in his valley of indecision, he knew that the surging wave would land the shore, and was quite pleased, in spite of his misery, to go with the flow. It was not always like that. 

President Olusegun Obasanjo made his own wave. As military head of state, he moved heaven and earth to install Shehu Shagari as civilian president in 1979. And in his second coming as civilian president he went over, above and beyond the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the time to choose Umaru Shehu Yar’Adua as successor.

And I remember that after he fell out with the party and tore his card, he told a visiting reconciliation party to Abeokuta comprising President Goodluck Jonathan that after God and Jonathan’s parents he was the most consequential person in making the former president.

It now appears that those days are going, or gone. What the 2023 elections show is that every serious and determined candidate can make their own victory.

The governor-king has been undone, too. And that is lesson number three. For decades, Tinubu, for example, ruled the roost in Lagos. He survived the wiles and deadly onslaught of the Obasanjo era, going for years without one kobo for Lagos councils from the Federal Government which illegally seized their statutory allocations following a dispute over the creation of additional councils by the Tinubu administration. 

Yet, in what his associate and Minister of Works, Babatunde Fashola SAN, recently described as “blindsiding”, Tinubu lost Lagos to Labour Party’s Peter Obi, a rookie in the presidential race. But it was not only Tinubu who suffered defeat in his stronghold. 

Other party stalwarts, including seven governors, failed to get election to their new retirement home – the Senate. Six states featuring the governors’ preferred candidates on the ballot also flipped. 

Lesson number four: Abraham Lincolns come once in a blue moon. Famous among things for contesting and losing eight elections, two of them the presidency, Lincoln could have been a distant political cousin of Nigeria’s former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, in another life. Atiku, the presidential candidate of the opposition PDP, was on his sixth attempt in 30 years. 

He did not lose the last election, though. He won it for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) which may have found it far more difficult to keep power if Atiku had let his decades of political experience guide him. 

Unlike Lincoln whose multiple losses taught him that the only way to win the 1860 presidential election was to keep the Republican Party united, Atiku’s strategy to win was keeping his party divided. 

Even Buhari, another serial loser, had learnt that his fabled 12 million voter-base in one section of the country could not win him the presidency. It took Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) an alliance with Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and three other parties to win at his fourth attempt in 2015. 

In Atiku’s world of contrarian politics, the PDP “split” not into two but into four parties – Labour Party, NNPP and the Wike-led Integrity Group. In his next life, no matter the degree of temptation or provocation, it’s unlikely that Atiku would yield to the dissociative political maths of subtraction and division.

Kenyan political veteran, Raila Odinga, shared the fifth lesson during the LEADERSHIP Awards and Conference in Abuja shortly before Nigeria’s election, but we were not listening: “Don’t trust technology too much,” he said, or something to that effect. “They can fail or be made to fail.”

In spite of Odinga, we believed otherwise. The bimodal voter verification system (BVAS) was advertised as the gamechanger, but widely believed as the miracle-worker. Unfortunately, the system was undermined by glitches in a number of areas and the electoral management body which seemed unprepared for a Plan B, found itself seeking refuge in a backhanded electoral guideline that it was not obliged to transmit results electronically.

Machines fail, just as people fail them. But whether they fail or are made to fail, the recourse must be clear beforehand and consequences applied.

And yes, the ground game, infamously called “political structure” still matters. That is the sixth lesson of the last election. Even though Obi despised those who criticised the Labour Party for not having political structures, he still relied significantly on the structures of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) to mobilise support. 

Obi commanded the social media army. Unlike the APC and PDP, however, his extra-terrestrial troops were largely absent in many of the over 176,000 polling units where party agents needed to be physically present to oversee voting, counting and collation of results. If, as Joseph Stalin said, it is who counts and not who votes that matters, then LP lost the election before it was even held.

Lesson number seven: Polls are like mini-skirts. They are short enough to attract attention but long enough to hide the subject matter. They disappointed catastrophically in the U.S. elections in 2016. It was the same in Nigeria. Nine polls, including those by Bloomberg, CNN, ANAP/NOI among others, projected Obi would win. Only three, including Stears Polls, were close to the mark.

Even where strong anecdotal evidence suggested that the polls would be wrong, the pollsters did not let such evidence get in the way of their will. In the light of what eventually happened, there would still be enough humble pie left for pollsters, their sponsors and subscribers to eat before the next major election in Nigeria.

Lesson number eight is that ideology is an elite fiction. Ideology is dead! The tribe is resurgent. Long live the party! Peter Obi, a self-confessed capitalist trader, ended up flying the flag of LP! Apart from Tinubu who has maintained his progressive bonafides and AAC’s Omoyele Sowore who has remained unapologetically anti-establishment, other candidates have elevated political flirting to an art. 

The courts have blessed this infidelity by ruling that it is the party and not the individual candidates that matters. And since the difference in policies and ideas among the major parties is a matter of form rather than of substance, candidates have become rolling stones gathering no moss. 

With no real incentive to debate or discuss issues in spite of elite consternation over the lack of ideology, candidates relapsed to their primordial strongholds, invoking religion and ethnicity for redemption.

Post-election Nigeria feels like Humpty Dumpty. On top of the serious challenges of inflation, unemployment, stark economic deterioration and insecurity facing the country, not to mention the growing sub-regional instability, the incoming government has to first pick up the broken pieces of hope before it can start the difficult job of putting the country together again.

During the governorship and state house of assembly elections in March, the president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) enjoined Nigerians to go ahead and collect any monies distributed by vote-buying politicians but still vote their conscience. Ideally, it should be shocking that a country’s president—especially one who came to power as an anti-corruption crusader—would shamelessly endorse an electoral infraction. But he has let us down so often that pointing out this error will be a waste of everyone’s precious time.

The more annoying part of that thoughtless statement was that it negated his previous posturing on the naira redesign policy to protect electoral integrity. When he met King Charles in the UK in November, he insisted the policy had come to stay because it would protect Nigerians from those who would use their lush resources to manipulate the election outcome. After reiterating that he would ensure a level playing field for contestants, this conviction would swing only months later. So, if ensuring election integrity was not a deep resolve, why take people through so much pain and hardship?

This man and the “Sai Baba” men watched as Nigerians, already severely impoverished by his uninspiring leadership since 2015, underwent the diminishing effects of the poorly conceived and shoddily executed naira redesign. The dwindled loss of livelihood especially crushed the small-scale producers who work in the agricultural produce sector and operate within the informal economic system. We are not a society that knows how to count and account for lives and resources, so we will never be able to adequately comprehend the full scale of the debilitating effect of that policy. However, it is still certain that people died from the stress, and some of the crippled businesses will never recover. All for what?

Naira redesign policy was a disaster that Buhari superintended over as a military dictator. Even though he saw the brutal outcomes of the policy, he still repeated it 40 years later. As it turns out, there was no larger vision for either our elections or democratic processes that drove the agenda. There was no gain for democratic institutions to which they were committed, it was just another one of the sadistic ideas that Buhari cranks out of his sociopathic mind each time he feels that Nigerians have not suffered enough. If there was no profound objective to be derived from the whole redesign policy, and he himself could advocate people taking money from their corrupt politicians, why did he not just leave people to collect their N5000? Why break things in the guise of trying to fix them?

That was the sort of ineptitude that defined Buhari’s regime. Several policies unleashed severe suffering but were hardly followed by any bigger plan to make the outcome meaningful. They banned food importation to stimulate local agriculture, but all we have to show for the economic ingenuity is the soaring costs of food prices. He closed the borders for almost two years to galvanise local manufacturing, making life even more unaffordable. After accumulating losses and hardship, they re-opened them. They could not point out anything remarkable they achieved through it. They said those ideas were why countries like China flourished, but ended up proving that half education is bad especially when running a country.

In not wanting to deal with either the complexities of planning or the messiness of human behaviour, Buhari’s regime treated social engineering as a process that could be automated. For instance, to make Nigeria a cashless economy, his administration restored far less cash into circulation than they took out in the form of the old notes. They imagined they could force people to use electronic means without first ensuring that the infrastructure to support such a massive scale of transaction was in place. That is his standard approach to governance: throw people into a desert and expect them to either stimulate their creative impulses and invent food, or eat sand and die.

Even his anti-corruption agenda was half-hearted. With too many Faustian bargains he had made to get to power, the best anti-corruption agencies achieved under him was to pursue the small fry while the real thieves of the Nigerian patrimony sashayed freely.

Last Friday, while giving his farewell message at the final Sallah homage at the Presidential Villa in the FCT, he reportedly said, “Having been a governor, minister, and the president twice, I think God has given us an incredible opportunity to serve as your president. And I thank God for that. So, please whoever feels I have done wrong to, we are all humans. There is no doubt I hurt some people and I wish you will pardon me. And those that think that I have hurt them so much, please pardon me.”

Here are two things he should note: First, we do not think or feel we have been hurt by his leadership, no. Those words suggest that the visceral impacts of his punitive leadership are simply a matter of individual perspective rather than objective reality. We have receipts that substantially demonstrate that he stole eight years from us. From rising and multidimensional poverty to out-of-school children rates, insecurity, corruption, and overall diminished quality of life, Buhari’s failure is not a matter of mere opinion or emotions. We live the insalubrious effects.

Second, saying we are all humans is fallacious. Who would look at the past eight years of his inhumane administration and not wonder if Buhari has a drop of humanity in him? When you look at Buhari, when you study his characteristic nonchalance to the high hopes and aspirations of Nigerians that his administration serially frustrated through their ineptitude, you cannot but understand why humans invented the concept of Satan. Some people’s wickedness is so unique that you need idioms of the supernatural to explain that degree of malevolence. Under Buhari’s watch, people were routinely kidnapped, and there was at least an instance where a community had to organise a fundraising to get money to retrieve their children abducted from school; entire communities were imperiled by rampaging herdsmen; prisons were serially attacked; terrorists and bandits killed poorly-armed security personnel in such high numbers that their bosses allegedly resorted to burying them secretly in order to hide the casualty rates; even the Nigerian Defence Academy was breached, and an Airforce Fighter jet shot down. Despite all the restlessness that defined his tenure, the man gaslit Nigerians by insisting we were doing better than ever before. How does that lack of fellow feeling qualify him to be categorised as “human”?

Buhari admitted he got all he wanted by becoming the president, but what of Nigerians? What did they get in return? Now he says he will no longer be burdened by the country’s issues. If over-solicited after May 29, he promised to relocate to Niger republic across the border. He might have said that as a joke, but that is in fact quintessential Buhari. He has a pattern of expecting others to do things he ought to do because he is lazy and inept. He is never responsible for anything. He got into power by pretending to be poor because he was incorruptible even though his election was sponsored by people whose hands were soiled by public corruption. He achieved little, and now expects Nigerians to clean up his failures.

For him to ascribe his failures to the fallibility of humanity when he barely even tried is another failure in itself. As someone who has had the privilege of living off Nigeria’s resources his entire adult life, Buhari failed spectacularly because he took and took and took but never gave back. He has not only failed as a leader, but also as a human being. He does not deserve forgiveness from even an all-merciful God.

‘One life taken in cold blood is as gruesome as a million that may go down in a pogrom’—Dele Giwa (1947-1986) 

Having read the 2010 book, ‘Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State’ I am not surprised that the power struggle between the two most senior military leaders in Sudan has exploded into a shooting war in which Khartoum is now effectively another killing field. “Nothing in Sudan has just happened; the catalogue of disasters, diseases and death have all been man-made,” wrote Richard Cockett, a former editor of the London ‘Economist’ more than a decade ago. “Even the killings in Darfur were allowed to take place because it suited the interests of some politicians and nations. The oil hungry Chinese, meddling Western politicians, spineless African leaders, shamefully silent activists, land greedy Arab tribes, myopic Sudanese politicians, all share responsibility for the tragedy of Sudan.” 

With the United Kingdom, Canada, and other Western countries finding it increasingly difficult to evacuate their nationals from a country where law and order has broken down, we must commend the federal government for the efforts to move Nigerian students to Egypt. There are also lessons to learn from the remote and immediate causes of the current tragedy in Sudan. Youth protests for greater accountability and a better living standard ultimately toppled Omar Al Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship in 2019, after which the military hijacked power. And those young Sudanese who risked their lives must now be asking themselves salient questions. But interrogating this familiar tragedy on the continent raises so many issues competing for attention that Sudan may have to wait for another day. 

For us in Nigeria, especially, latest reports about the leaked American intelligence documents describing an effort by Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group to recruit rebels as part of an “evolving plot to topple the Chadian government” should concern our authorities. According to the report published in the ‘Washington Post’ on Monday, the documents detail a discussion in February this year between Wagner’s leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and his associates about the timeline and facility for training an initial group of rebels in Avakaba (a city in Central African Republic), close to the Chadian border, and the route that Wagner would use to transport them.  

There are many critical issues here but let us isolate just two. A crisis in Chad is a crisis in Nigeria, given the proximity and associated security issues. Besides, in a divided country like ours with abundant mineral resources, what stops these mercenaries from extending their network to Nigeria once they succeed in installing a puppet regime in N’djamena? These are the kinds of scenarios that the Intelligence community in other countries would be looking at and I hope our people are watching the situation in Chad.  

However, as important as the Chadian issue or even the crisis in Sudan may be, it will help to also pay attention to developments in Malindi, Kenya, where dozens of corpses of the ‘Good News International Church’ members are being exhumed. These unfortunate victims of religious brainwashing were reportedly persuaded by their pastor to starve themselves to death on their way to heaven. Meanwhile, the Pastor himself is alive, even when some of the emaciated survivors of his chicanery are refusing help. “When we tried to administer first aid to give her sips of water with glucose with a spoon, she sealed her mouth and was signifying that she doesn’t want any help,” it was reported of a woman. A man in his 40s said he was in his senses and should be left alone. “He even called us enemies of him going to heaven.” 

With videos of some Nigerian ‘Men of God’ stepping on the heads of their congregants or asking them to eat grass, which they gladly abide by, we should pay attention to what is happening in Malindi. Some of these characters have asked their members of the opposite sex to go naked and do all kinds of crazy things. With a cocktail of ignorance, poverty and superstition, millions of Nigerians can easily fall prey to these conjurers. If we are therefore not careful, the tragedy of Malindi is not too far away. In any case, we have also seen that in the Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions of our people in the Northeast: It is also about going to heaven where, according to what they believe, several virgins are waiting for these bloody zealots! 

 We will have to leave religion and the tragic developments in Sudan, Chad, and Kenya for the moment. My concern today derives from a story in the PUNCH newspaper of Tuesday. According to the report, two people accused of being behind a thunder strike at Ikyve in the Konshisha Local Government Area of Benue State were buried alive by irate youths. Let’s take the story from PUNCH: “A man identified as Henry Ihwakaa alongside his wife and a child were reportedly struck by thunder on Saturday in the community. Irked by the incident, youths from the area were said to have mobilised and apprehended the father of the alleged thunder victim, Ihwakaa and another elderly man purported to be his collaborator. 

 “The youths were said to have dug a shallow grave and buried them alive. A community leader in the area, Baba Agan, who claimed to have reported the case to the police at Tse Agbaragba, the headquarters of the local government, said before policemen could get to the village, the two elderly people had died. ‘There was a light rain that day (last Saturday) accompanied by thunder which hit a young man, his wife, and a two-week-old child and the three people died. As a result of that, youths in the village mobilised and went to the house of the father of the young man whose name is Henry and the father’s name is Ihwakaa. They attacked him and an elderly man, dug a grave and buried them alive,’ Agan said. 

 “It was, however, learnt that when a police team arrived at the scene, the two victims had already died in the grave and their bodies were exhumed. When contacted on Monday, the state Police Public Relations Office, SP Sewuese Anene, confirmed the incident. Anene said two suspects have been arrested in connection with the incident while an investigation was ongoing. The PPRO who said only one person was buried alive, however, warned members of the public against jungle justice, urging aggrieved persons to always report any case of disagreement to the police for necessary action.” 

 Since I read the story on Tuesday, I have been very disturbed. That people would bury another person alive is beyond frightening. And so is the rationalization for the gruesome murder. But if there is anything we can take from the immortal words of the late Dele Giwa with which I opened this column, it is that no matter our pretensions to the contrary, the Nigerians crisis is not much different from that of Sudan.

I have written before that the list of extra-judicial killings in Nigeria is as long as that of the “offences” for which the victims are accused. Following the daylight murder in July 2012 in Ekiti State of a 70-year-old woman, Mrs. Rebecca Adewumi, who was tortured to death by rampaging youths because her rival claimed to have seen her (Mrs Adewumi) in a dream tormenting her son, I did an intervention titled ‘Apani Ma Wagun, Olokiki Oru’. In 2008, after a commercial motorcycle (Okada) rider hit a woman on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway in the Rivers State capital, he claimed that he saw three cats crossing the road and that it was after hitting one that it turned into a woman. The hapless victim of a careless Okada rider was instantly pounced upon and clubbed to death.

 Whichever way we look at all these issues, they are by no means isolated. They tell a compelling story about our country and the absence of the rule of law. A United States-based public affairs commentator, Dr Churchill Okonkwo, once summed it up this way: “From the political class that hire thugs to kill opponents; the bandits, kidnappers and ‘killer herdsmen’ that kill at will; the mob and onlookers that stone a suspected petty thief to death and ethnic warlords that burn and kill for every little communal dispute, our cultural orientation appears to permit killing without a good reason.”  

 It is difficult to fault Churchill. We place no premium on human life in Nigeria. And we can see the consequences in every area of our national life, including our politics, notorious for impunity and absence of accountability. That’s why some could gather after a natural occurrence like lightning to accuse another person(s) of being responsible and then proceed from there to conduct life burial. I hope the police will bring the perpetrators of this most heinous crime in Benue to justice.  

 Meanwhile, I am aware that in a season of transition such as we are in today in Nigeria, the main obsession is about power politics. I have no problem with that. But it will also serve us not to miss the essence of this tragedy. That a discernible jungle ethos now defines living and livelihoods in Nigeria should concern critical stakeholders. When you run a system in which the life of the ordinary citizen can be so casually taken on such flimsy grounds and in this most bestial manner, all else is forfeit. 

 Oby Ezekwesili at 60 

Love her or hate her, Mrs Obiageli (Oby) Ezekwesili, who tomorrow marks her 60^th birthday, has made a significant impact in our nation. A chartered accountant, public servant, and activist, Ezekwesili has at different times played critical roles on the Nigerian scene, the African continent and in the global arena. Although she started out in the private sector, she was always at the forefront of the conversation on how to bring transparency and accountability into government business. And she has lived by what she preaches. 

 Right from the time she was first appointed head of the Budget Monitoring and Price Intelligence Unit (popularly known as Due Process Unit) by former President Olusegun Obasanjo at the inception of the current democratic dispensation, Ezekwesili has remained a force for good. But what I particularly remember is the critical pioneering and leadership role she played in the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) as founding chairperson. 

 On her stewardship in government where she held different portfolios, including Solid Minerals and Education, there can be no better tribute than the one by President Olusegun Obasanjo that I have been privileged to read: In every public role she has played, according to the former president, Ezekwesili has demonstrated uncommon integrity, dedication to duty and strength of character. 

It is therefore most fitting that Ezekwesili today enjoys the reward enunciated in the Biblical book Proverbs 22 verse 29: When you are diligent in what you do, you will stand before kings, not mere men. Ezekwesili has, at different times, been named in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 100 Women, TIME 100 Most Influential People, New York Times 25 Women of Impact, Albert Einstein’s Foundation’s Genius:100 Visions of the Future etc.

As my own dear sister, Oby Ezekwesili turns 60, I wish her happy birthday, long life, and good health.