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Simply how much does a country need to keep its busiest international airport from running as an oven? The Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos must be the latest airport in the world. It is easily the latest I've travelled through and I have been through quite a lot of airports. Even the Nairobi airport in Kenya that has been engulfed by fire is much less hot as the MMIA.

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You should not even begin with comparing it with the airport in Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa. Ghana's Kotoka International Airport, Accra might be small but it doesn't meet you with the repulsiveness the MMIA greets you with. Even the Eyadema airport in Togo includes a better atmosphere. The Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Dakar, Senegal trumps ours by light years. That is these are African countries.

We dare not try to compare with airports outside Africa. The moment you descend from the plane to go through the immigration point, the sensation is like you're being punished for daring to visit to Nigeria – if your foreigner – or you're being punished for daring to leave the nation – if your Nigerian. The saddest part with this reality is that money isn't the key reason why we have an airport that makes us look like we are a people without shame. Or, are we?

ABUJA — President Goodluck Jonathan, yesterday, lamented that the crises in some parts of the country has slowed down economic development. He stated this while being presented with the 2013 Africa Peace Award from the United Religions Initiatives URI, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. According to the president, internal stability is essential for the development of the country saying that, “there can be no meaningful economic development where people are fighting.”

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Jonathan said: “Even when countries are fighting at the end of the day they will still come to the dialogue table to resolve. Problems could hardly be resolved through the barrel of the gun. Even if you have the most sophisticated weapon to fight, you will still come to negotiate otherwise you can never live in peace.

“If you go to the Southern part of this country you hear about kidnapping and if you go to the North you have the issue of Boko Haram. For us to develop our country we must all embrace peace. There is no way the government can perform magic when the people are shooting guns, because economic growth and development is in the hands of the private sector.”

The President added: “There cannot be economic development without peace. For you to develop economically there must be peace and political stability. So the leadership of African Union and ECOWAS have changed and we believe that we must help ourselves and help our states and govern our states the way it should be governed. If there are crisis we should intervene and that has been helping us significantly.”

The president who dedicated the award to Nigerians promised that he will continue to focus on providing the enabling environment in the country for businesses to thrive.

He said: “This award is dedicated to my people and my country Nigeria. We couldn’t have been qualified for this award if my people did not encourage me. In Nigeria God has given us that unique privilege to be fairly more robust than some of our African countries and we are one of the African countries that the whole work look up to, to assist in one way or the other. So this award is for Nigeria and not for Goodluck Jonathan.

“We would continue to do our best. For me as an individual, I will continue to play my role in spite of the challenges. Let me use this unique opportunity to call on all Nigerians and all the people of the world to embrace peace. You cannot talk about development when you are fighting,” the President emphasised.

The Regional Director of URI, Ambassador Mussie Hailu while presenting the award to the president said it was in recognition of President Jonathan’s immense contributions to religious harmony in Nigeria and peace keeping operation under the United Nations.

According to him, “we have been following with great interest the great role the President play in his country, West Africa and Africa as a whole since he took office as President of Nigeria. We commend his leadership qualities in West African sub region in particular as ECOWAS Chairman and also lauded the current transformation agenda of his administration.”

Vanguard

Many have written about the pros and cons of the national dialogue. The difference between the writers, however, does not lie in whether they think the national dialogue should go ahead or it should not, the difference has been in the intention of each writer.

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Some have taken an opposing stance on the issue simply because of the name of the man who proposed it, i.e. Goodluck Jonathan, while some are defending the national dialogue idea with all they’ve got because the proposal comes from the source where their bread is buttered. Whether or not the national dialogue goes ahead would not have any telling effect on the majority of Nigerians.

We know this except we choose to pretend about it. That we are where we are today is not because we have not had our own share of dialogue as a country; it is because all of us have been talking while none of us, it seems, is listening. If we really want change in the form of a dialogue, we need not release a new song into the long list of distraction tracks that this dialogue has come to be over the years. All we need do is take a look at the past. We have some answers to guide us.

The value of a promise is directly related to its source. If one’s father has a record of failing to do the things he promises to do, one would eventually learn to understand that the value of a promise from the mouth of such a father amounts to nothing but mere words. One would not know why some are opposed to the national dialogue because it was proposed by President Goodluck Jonathan, but if they need a reason apart from they just refusing to agree with whatever has to do with that name, there is at least one valid one: President Jonathan is not a man of honour, he does not keep his words.

There’d be no need to argue whether he promised to spend one term only or not; the President and his estranged political cronies will sort that out. One begins to wonder why politicians would go to the market screaming about one of them not keeping to his word when not keeping to one’s word is one of their brand identities. Politicians who keep to their word are the ones who break the code of politics the Nigerian way. So, this is not about the President keeping to that particular promise. That’s between him and his internal adversaries.

The President has incessantly broken his words with Nigerians. He cannot be trusted even when he appears live on national TV at 7am and greets, “Good Morning fellow Nigerians.” You should at that point doubt the time. A panel is not judged by its composition but by its results. The President has been an expert at constituting panels and committees and even a better expert at throwing their reports in the dustbin.

The Nuhu Ribadu Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force was one of the carrots dangled at Nigerians in the wake of the N2.6tn fuel subsidy scam. After months of toil and sweat, with Ribadu himself abandoning a consultancy job in Afghanistan, the report has since become history despite its findings and recommendations. The Muhammadu Uwais Panel report on Electoral Reform had some telling recommendations, one of which included the need to do away with a situation where a man gets to appoint the referee of a game he is also a participant.

The President who keeps mulling about building institutions obviously showed his gross lack of appreciation of that word when he chose to defy the recommendations on reforming our electoral system and instead chose to do things the very same way they used to be done before the Uwais Panel offered a way out. The report is somewhere gathering dust while Nigerians live on trusting that the President would continue to be unbiased in elections even though the system ties the successes and failures of the electoral process directly to him. The President appoints the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission. We’d not need a national dialogue to fix this anomaly and when we had a chance to fix it, President Jonathan sat on it.

SURE-P was supposedly set up to ameliorate the sufferings of Nigerians in the face of the increase in petrol prices. Today, SURE-P is equated with what some call “GEJ Alert.” This is a bank alert they get on their phones every month in the name of SURE-P. This was never the plan or purpose but since this fits the President’s 2015 agenda, it has since become the norm for SURE-P. The programme is a shabby response to demands from citizens who had complained about where the money to be removed from subsidy would go.

The only people who will say SURE-P has not failed are the people directly or indirectly benefiting from it. Dr. Christopher Kolade would not pick his Bible in a true church of God to swear that SURE-P has been everything they told him it’d be. SURE-P was a scam from the very beginning and it is very much in line with its origin as was intended by President Jonathan’s transformation agenda of corruption.

Before you start considering the national dialogue, kindly pay attention to these words:

“On assumption of office as President, I swore to an oath to always act in the best interest of the people”… 

“To save Nigeria, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices. On the part of government, we are taking several measures aimed at cutting the size and cost of governance, including ongoing and continuous efforts to reduce the size of our recurrent expenditure and increase capital spending. In this regard, I have directed that overseas travels by all political office holders, including the President, should be reduced to the barest minimum. The size of delegations on foreign trips will also be drastically reduced; only trips that are absolutely necessary will be approved”

“For the year 2012, the basic salaries of all political office holders in the Executive arm of government will be reduced by 25 per cent. Government is also currently reviewing the number of committees, commissions and parastatals with overlapping responsibilities.” 

These are the President’s own words delivered in a hurriedly put together National Broadcast on Saturday, January 7, 2012.

No doubt, the President was acting in the best interest of Nigerians when he travelled to Israel with the Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah, despite the damning allegations of corruption hanging over her head. You may have to read the words again to see that the President has gone back on every promise. As I write, we have more committees, salaries have certainly not been cut even by one per cent, and the travels have only increased. These are excerpts from a speech not the whole speech; these are not from his many speeches but just one of them, yet we can plainly see that words do not mean a thing to President Jonathan. He just utters them. He says them to fit his agenda and motives per time.

Is this the man Nigerians want to trust with the waste of several more billions on a supposed national dialogue? The dialogue will not be binding on anyone because it is not sovereign, so then this is just another political show with the sole purpose of getting the President some possible political goals as the politics of 2015 heats up the political arena. Will Nigerians be fooled again?

Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka has advised President Jonathan and the ruling elite to take into consideration some of the questions being raised about the National Dialogue exercise.

He spoke at a book launch in honour of the retiring President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Isa Ayo Salami. The book a compendium of Salami’s judgments, is authored by Mrs. Funmi Quadri.

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In his address entitled, “Justice is never siddon look,” Soyinka said there must be justice for all whether rich or poor.

He said: “I declare, I quote justice is the first foundation of humanity. At all times, law, even where it is temporary unskilled, emasculated, predominates, written or unwritten, law embodies the total will of the society Yes, law exercises an authority that transcends mere power. That is why we must task those whosoever is administrator of law with an ethical rigour, a measure that is paramount perhaps by only whatsoever the society expects of medical doctors who minister to the people’s physical and mental health or religious ministers who are preoccupied with the requirements of the spirit.

“Governors are blindly selective to what court orders they obey and President becomes completely deaf or blind to judicial orders.

“And that question is this: what is the role of the rest of us the in between humanity, Do we fold our hands and literarily siddon look? Most of the time it does appear that we have no option when justice appears to fail even his own immediate high echelon.”

He added: “Yes, many have warned, they have warned tirelessly and in various forms become deafened by the sound of their voice as it bounces back from the stones walls of a different complacency and sometimes criminality and complicity. The most notorious example of this today is of course the so called national conference.

“As many other propositions, the social context which is ever changing may provide avenue of fresh thinking but the stark truth is that all have been said cogently and relevantly.

“Those who think they can erect a future without first ridding the ground of the past debris flout against natural order or regeneration.”

The Nobel Laureate added: “Of all the conceivable negative baggage I can think of right now, the most pressing, I have always maintained, takes the form of a critical absence, subversion or suppression of – Justice.

“How have we fared, within this environment that most immediately sustains us – well, sort of? I shall evoke here one of the most notorious public profile cases of the serial degradations of Justice that seemingly shook this nation to its foundations. There are other cases we could cite – the murder of Dele Giwa for instance. Or Harry Marshall. Kudirat Abiola. Suliat Adedeji. A.K. Dikibo. Abukakar Rimi. Barnabas and Abigail Igwe, husband and wife, both officers of the law. Or Chief Dina – lest I stand accused of omitting my own homestead. Or indeed numerous others, so quickly relegated into the sump of unsolved cases. 

My choice today, the main reference point for our sobering retrospection is however singularly apt. Despite his terminal absence, that preeminent victim shares with our celebrant, albeit in a tragic mode, the ironic symbolism of ‘Justice in Denial’, a role that interrogates both the very concept and operations of Justice, and also, the main structure for its delivery, which is – the Judiciary. 

No one will question the seismic impact of the circumstances that took him from our midst, a dastardly deed which, as already claimed, shook the nation to its very foundations. However, the nation did not topple over – from all appearances. As we all know however, nations like the United States do not rest satisfied with appearances. Visible or not, internal damages – that very possibility – preoccupied the guardians of public monuments and safety.”

 PM News

October 28, 2013

The meeting of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National dialogue with stakeholders in the South-South today ended in confusion, following an outburst from participants against a remark made by Governor Adams Oshiomhole. Pius Nsogho reports that Governor Oshiomhole was whisked far from the venue by his security details when the specific situation became tense.

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EDO STATE GOV'T PRESS STATEMENT:
Thugs believed to have been hired by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), yesterday disrupted the proceedings of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue/Conference in Benin City today as they stopped Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State and others from making contributions to the ongoing talks.

A person in the Presidential Advisory Committee, Col Tony Nyiam (rtd) was the arrowhead of the disruption as he shouted down the Governor while making his contribution. The thugs believed to have  been imported from neighbouring states heckled the Governor when they seen that his contributions would be distinctive from the perceived opinion.

The Governor who took the stage to make his contribution shortly after the Isoko Ethnic group had made their contribution said he objected to spending huge public funds on a wasteful venture saying, throughout the tenure of President Olusegun Obasanjo, money was used on similar conference and at the end, nothing came out of the conference.