Power supply drops to 2,676.54MW

Power supply has dropped to 2,676.54Mega Watts (MW), it emerged at the weekend.

It was learnt the reduction was due to attack on one of the nation’s most critical gas pipelines, the Escravos Lagos Gas Pipeline A (ELPSA), last Wednesday and the blowing up of an explosive device at Egwa near Batan, in Gbaramatu Kingdom, Delta State.

The energy generation, according to Statistics, posted on the Ministry of Power’s website on March 11 was 2,747.45MW.

Besides, peak generation dipped to 3,770.3MW.

The Transition Company of Nigeria (TCN) could not evacuate 70.91MW of the total energy generated in the period under review.

Thank you, Awujale

Oba Adetona has done what is expected of a traditional ruler of repute

Oba Sikiru Adetona, The Awujale of Ijebuland, deserves commendation for the candid remark he made during President Goodluck Jonathan’s visit to his palace on Thursday. It is not all the time that we have traditional rulers speak truth to power. I met the Oba for the first time at Ijebu-Ode Grammar School in the early ‘70s. I cannot remember what exactly he came for then, but I remember he told the story of how he became Oba and also mentioned something about appreciating whatever gift his children gave him, despite the fact that he is blessed himself. When you deduct about 40 years from the Oba’s age, you would know he must have been extremely young then. And he was extremely handsome, too. Even at his age, he is still any lady’s man, no pun intended. But these are not matters for today.

The Awujale deserves commendation not just for the frank speech but because of his consistency in such matters. The president had gone to the palace in continuation of his tours to traditional rulers in the southwest. I said it about three weeks ago when the president was in Lagos to meet some traditional rulers, that none of the Obas would dare tell their subjects to vote for the president or any other person for that matter because it is wrong to do that. One is even at a loss as to why the south west has suddenly become a tourism centre for the president at this point in time. President Jonathan seems to have made a fetish of such tours as if the Obas would, at the snap of a finger, order their subjects to vote for him. In Yorubaland, gone were those days.

The longest fortnight

•Jega

Suddenly, six weeks have become a fortnight… the longest fortnight in the history of the country. The postponement of an event however unpleasant is a poor substitute for its outright cancelation. A thousand years will eventually become a thousand seconds. As the nail biting countdown to the most explosive election in the post-colonial history of the nation begins, one must be chastened and sobered by the shocking finitude of time. If only time can stay still, autocrats would have added it to their list of captives.

By now, President Goodluck Jonathan would have discovered that a postponement of six weeks might have been enough to gain some strategic respite, particularly to recover his poise and pull some stunts against an opposition that would have been stung by the sudden turn of events. But it is not enough to scramble what has been fecklessly unscrambled; or to attempt to cobble together a new hegemonic power formation in the country.

Jonathan had a whole six years to will this new power bloc into being by forging new alliances; by building bridges and by breaking out of his ethnic cocoon to create a pan-ethnic charter for the nation. The time was ripe; the opportunities were abundant. For a fleeting magical second, the moment seemed to have met its man and its match. But he bombed it spectacularly. You cannot give what you don’t have. Unprincipled expectation is the bedmate of promiscuous optimism.

A few months into the Jonathan presidency, it ought to have been clear to all but the most hardy optimists that it was all a horrendous scam.  It was obvious that the new ruler lacks the discipline, the diligence, the application, the visionary impetus, the intellectual wherewithal and the psychological stamina and steeliness to administer a complex commonwealth of two hundred million souls tottering at the edge of despair and despondency.

Jonathan’s charm offensive of the past three weeks, particularly in the South West and his singularly offensive and obscene attempt to buy his way back into electoral reckoning by massive bribery of the political elite and agents of influence must rank as the worst instance of presidential delinquency in the annals of electoral corruption in Nigeria . With this in your face , I don’t care impunity, there can be no further proof that the Nigerian president does not care a hoot or give a damn about the sanity of the political system or the survival of the nation itself.

It has been observed that a person should keep his friendships in a state of constant repairs. How anybody in a few weeks can cobble together a dominant power consortium that can withstand the tumultuous revolt of the Nigerian multitude that we have on our hand remains a perplexing mystery even to the most accomplished of political witchdoctors. It is said that politics is the art of the possible, but even in politics, certain things are simply impossible.

The presidential gallivanting, the executive walkabout and the dollar spree even as the naira, the ultimate symbol of national sovereignty, was tumbling in the market would have been unnecessary if Jonathan had done the needful. At the onset of his presidency, Jonathan had at his beck and call the active base of the traditional South West activists and progressive politicos who fought a relentless and slogging campaign to validate his presidency.

He could also have tapped into the dormant resentment against the feudal arrogance of an oligarchic cabal bent on sabotaging his ascendancy. But all the goodwill was frittered away in a jiffy as Jonathan retreated into an ethnic igloo to be surrounded by tempestuous tribesmen and other recuperating revanchists.

As for the wise, wily and formidably discerning Yoruba obas who are rumoured to be beneficiaries of Jonathan’s dollar deluge, if they didn’t know what to do, they wouldn’t be on their fathers’ throne the first instance. Past masters of the cloak and dagger politics that come with empire building, they are also astute readers—bar one or two feckless ones—of the dominant political mood of their people. After almost a thousand years of an unending battle of will and wits with the populace in which many of them paid the supreme sacrifice, they know where the balance of power resides. They will collect and then they will recollect.

As the Jonathan presidency slouches towards a momentous finale, the entire country lies in ruins and smouldering wreckage, spiritually, politically, economically and militarily broke and back-broken. At no other point in the country’s history has the nation faced more dire prospects of economic annihilation. At no other point has Nigeria been at the military mercy of neighbours.

Never in its history has Nigeria been confronted with and wracked by such intra and inter-religious animosities and conflicts. Never have the political elite been this riven and polarized along the fearsome fault lines of region, religion and ethnicity. It has even become impossible to get the various factions of the political class to agree on the minimum precondition for the conduct of election.

Never has an election brought out the worst in our people, thanks to a political campaign that has been unprecedented in its rancour and distemper. Not even in the run up to the infamous 1964 general elections which was boycotted by the UPGA party did we witness such intense bitterness and animosity within the ruling class. It was a bitterness that fed directly into the subsequent violent military mutiny, a momentous pogrom and inevitable civil war.

As we have seen in Nigeria and more recently in Kenya and Cote D’Ivoire, whenever the electoral process is marked by intense hostility and a lack of elite consensus on the basic rules, we may be sure that the outcome is already vitiated by political adversity. When a four-star general and one of Nigeria’s most decorated soldiers and a global citizen in his own right is summarily cashiered for attending the birthday celebration of his former commander in chief who also happens to be the political benefactor of the current commander in chief, we can be sure that the gloves have come off and the battle line sharply drawn.

This past week, Ben Nwabueze, the respected constitutional lawyer, has advocated a coalition government or a government of national unity to manage what promises to be a momentous post-election tempest. If this is not a wily kite flying on behalf of an embattled government, then it is a case of trying to shut the stable door after its equestrian inmates had bolted. For it presupposes, against all evidence to the contrary, that there might still be a semblance elite amity after such a polarizing and divisive election.

In the unseemly circumstances that we have found ourselves, a ruling coalition or a Government of National Unity is possible and feasible only under strict international supervision and after the tempest might have blown off. Under similar circumstances in Kenya,  Mwai Kibaki, the old Gikiyu fox, summarily terminated the results as they rolled in and declared himself elected.

In Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo simply barricaded himself in after he had lost the presidential election until he was flushed out of his underground bunker with the aid of French forces. As if to confirm the looming apocalypse, international emissaries have been coming in and out of Nigeria like doctors in an emergency ward, trying to appeal to the political class to save the nation from imminent perdition.

Their grim, unsmiling and taciturn visage tells its own story. In any case if anybody misses the import of all this, the unscheduled but widely publicized visit to Aso Rock by one or two members of our own equivalent of the 1922 Committee of the British parliament should tell those who know how to read tea leaves that once again, the nation is on the cusp of momentous events.

As he rues the ruins and wreckage of the country gifted to him in a moment of spite and hubris by the man who is the most influential and arguably the most controversial personage of the Fourth Republic, the otherwise genial and affable Goodluck Jonathan must be wondering what happened and the road not taken. Never in the history of the country has a ruler snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in this manner. But this is not the time to continue to excoriate the formerly shoeless boy from Otueke. This is the time to put on our thinking cap about how to extricate the nation from the debris of another historic cul de sac.

There are times when sharpening contradictions suddenly mature, forcing a nation into a fundamental rethink about its future. This is the moment of the grand gridlock. In a sense, Jonathan himself is a victim of the post-colonial condition in a way the colonial imaginary that founded Nigeria and the colonial imagination that powers it along could not have envisaged. This is the moment when colonial malice meets post-colonial malignancy. Having been thrown into the chessboard as a helpless and hapless pawn, Jonathan has shown that he has other ideas.

As sober students of history would attest, nothing is completely without some value, not even the most horrendous human experience. As a matter of fact, there are some radical philosophers and historians who push this view to the bitter conclusion that nothing good can come out of history. It is just a record of random brutality and contingent cruelty. As a British historian, floored and flawed by facile empiricism, would put it, “history is just one fxxxx  thing after another.”

But history is ultimately and in the last instance structured in such a way that perplexes us and challenges the rigour of the dialectical imagination. It may well be that the paradoxically revolutionary dimension of the Jonathan administration is to expose for all to see, the huge racket of the neo-military civilian fascism foisted on Nigeria by retreating military barons. But having exposed the hoax, Jonathan has shown that he lacks the revolutionary nobility of spirit, the cerebral endowments and the political stamina to force through a new charter for the nation.

This is the basis of the historical conundrum in which we have found ourselves. Even if Jonathan spends the next hundred years in office, he is unlikely to make a dent on the deep rot, the political malaise, that afflicts Nigeria.  What is not there is simply not there. National transformation is not a function of empty sloganeering.

Transformation is deeper than mere change because it involves a deeper, more integrative, more holistic and more deliberately systematic reordering of a society towards a new orientation and a new set of values. As it is, the paradox of our situation is that change is now required in order to even begin to think of transformation.

The last patriotic duty Jonathan owes a country that has given him so much is to leave quietly if he loses the election fair and square. He must resist the temptation to play the biblical Samson. Thereafter, he must be accorded the respect and dignity accruing to a former head of state, of a man untested and untried who ruled Nigeria in very difficult circumstances and who tried his very best, only that his best was enough. If he cannot lead the way, he has at least taken explosives to the house of cards. The Nigerian ruling cabal must rue the day they invited a neophyte of power nuances to hold the fort for them.

The next fortnight is going to be the longest night indeed for Nigeria. It is going to bring out the worst or the best in Nigerian. There is no point in demonizing and scape-goating poor Attahiru Jega and casting ethnic slurs on a very patriotic Nigerian. As readers of this column would testify, we harbor reservations about the way and manner of Jega’s appointment, but this has never extended to questioning his integrity. Never in the history of the nation has a man been saddled with a more onerous and difficult duty of electoral umpire. Jega should be allowed to do his job without any further let or hindrance.

One of the lessons that Nigerians must take away from the current crisis is the fact that as a complexly variegated country with diverse ethnic nationalities in different and often divergent modes of economic, spiritual, intellectual and political production, Nigeria is powered along by a micropluralism of power centres which induces a negative equilibrium which can only be disturbed or disrupted by a conventional power formation at its own peril. This is Jonathan’s undoing, just as it has been the undoing of Obasanjo, Abacha and Babangida before him.

A negative equilibrium is a tense equipoise of countervailing forces; an unstable ensemble whose stability is dependent on the dynamic instability of its elements. Only a new revolutionary power group led by complete outsiders or what Antonio Gramsci has described as the emarginati, people from the margins, can shatter the order by inaugurating a new order.

In the absence this revolutionary countervailing power formation, and while still waiting for the arrival of a pan-Nigerian critical mass, it is worth restating that any Nigerian ruler who is a product of the old status quo must keep his friendship in a state of constant repairs. As Jonathan will learn in about a fortnight, scrambling for votes at the eleventh hour is not the sign of a man who has learnt the elementary lesson of politics.

Two weeks to poll: Jonathan still in a tinder-box

Despite a six-week window for more covert and overt campaigns, the nation’s presidential race is still getting tighter by the day with much anxiety. Caught in the midst of the campaign web is President Goodluck Jonathan, who is running from pillar to post. In this piece, YUSUF ALLI, MANAGING EDITOR, NORTHERN OPERATION examines how Jonathan got into a tinder-box

Barring last-minute hitches like “curious court injunctions”, the presidential election would have been lost and won in two weeks time. The battle has remained the fiercest, the keenest, the dirtiest and the most expensive for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its arch-rival, the All progressives Congress (APC). In the last three weeks, the candidate of the PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan had traversed the country in a sleepless manner for the third round of a nationwide campaign because the incumbency factor (a rigging device for democracy in Africa) is not adding up. From the increasing grey hair of the President to the mudslinging on television against APC candidate, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and key opposition figures, Jonathan has been tripping by winning some and losing some. The question is: How did Jonathan run into a tinderbox?

France increases efforts in fight against Boko Haram

France is providing intelligence to  Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Cameroun and Niger Republic, all of which are at war with Boko Haram.

Paris says it has also reoriented its military efforts in the region to focus more on the fight against the terror sect.

France specifically supports the Chadian offensive.

About 30 French troops have been deployed in Niger since last month near the Nigerian border, and French jets frequently fly over the area to provide intelligence, according to two French top diplomatic officials, who were not authorised to speak publicly.

The country also provides fuel and food supplies to Chadian troops, said one of the officials.

France has a big air base with 600 troops in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, close to Cameroon’s border and northern Nigeria.

It has deployed 3,000 troops in five countries of the Sahel in an operation aiming at fighting Islamic extremists in the region.

The operation to fight Boko Haram is “flexible,” which means that some troops can be redeployed from one country to another, one of the officials said, without giving more details.

France’s defence minister said last week that the country would “slightly” increase its number of troops in the Sahel region by the end of the year, but does not intend to take active part in the fight, against Boko Haram.

NIS recruitment deaths: APC accuses Jonathan of taking political advantage of calamities

Alhaji Lai Mohammed

The All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday accused President Goodluck Jonathan of taking political advantage of calamities in the country.

It dismissed as belated government’s compensation of N5million each to families of those who lost their lives in the Immigration recruitment exercise after one year.

The party said the compensation, coming at this time, was aimed at currying votes.

National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in a statement in Lagos wondered why it took the president all of one year to act on the promise he made to the families, adding that “but for the forthcoming elections, the President would have simply ignored the families, in his usual style.”

He said: ‘’The truth is that this President was forced to act because of the elections. Otherwise, why has it taken one year for the president to redeem his promise to the bereaved families? Why has his Administration not sanctioned those who sent innocent job seekers to their early graves after extorting them? Why is the Interior Minister, Mr. Abba Moro, who presided over the deaths, still in office, virtually dancing on the graves of those innocent youths?

‘’Sunday, March 15th, will mark one year since those vibrant youths were lured to their deaths by a callous federal government that failed them in all ramifications, including the security of their lives and the assurance of their welfare, the raison d’être of any government. It is therefore utterly reprehensible, immoral and wicked for the same administration to seek to make political gains out of the needless tragedy.’’

APC said President Jonathan, in his desperation for re-election, has also sought to take political advantage of other tragedies, including the Buni Yadi massacre of school children and the abduction of Chibok girls

It observed, ‘’After refusing to even visit the families of those school children in Buni Yadi and Chibok, the President suddenly woke up and started sending delegations to meet with them, all this because he needs votes. As a parent himself, how will the President feel if he had been so treated? Why must the President put his re-election over and above everything else, including the welfare and security of Nigerians? Is there no limit to desperation?’’

The APC said Nigerians are aware that the President has “suddenly woken up from his deep slumber and become artificially hyperactive, making repeated visits to regions that he had neglected in the past six years and doling out hard currencies even at a time the Naira was taking a beating, all for election purposes.

‘’No one is fooled by the antics of a desperate President, and in the fullness of time, Nigerians will show President Jonathan and his cohorts that they are not impressed by his pretend governance.’’

Don’t yield to campaign of division, Tinubu tells Ndigbo

•L-R: Hon Akeem Bamgbola, Hon. Gbolahan Yishawu, Hon Abiodun Faleke, Mr. Damola Kasunmu, National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, APC Governorship Candidate, Lagos State, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, his running mate, Dr. Oluranti Adebule, Senator Oluremi Tinubu; during Igbo Endorsement Rally For Buhari/Osinbajo and all APC candidates in Lagos State at Onikan Stadium, Lagos yesterday. PHOTO: TAIWO OKANLAWON

The National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, yesterday  urged Nigerians not to yield to any  campaign designed to  divide the country along religious and ethnic lines.

Addressing party supporters at the Ndigbo APC rally held at Onikan Stadium, Lagos, Tinubu accused the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of fanning the embers of division with a view to pulling the country down.

Tinubu described the Igbos in Lagos as dedicated and committed people who have made significant contributions to the development of the state and Nigeria in general.

He said: “Some of you have been here for over 50 years, doing your businesses unmolested. Nobody can discriminate against you. Nobody will fight you because of your language.

“Now, they have been coming to Lagos, calling you group by group or giving  you dollars, even ‘dollarised’ rice, ‘dollarised akpu’ , but can this translate any of these into school fees for your children? Can this open business opportunities for you in Lagos? The APC government has opened several opportunities for Igbo and we will continue to do so.”

Tinubu said the PDP only remembers the people of the approach of elections.

My husband must serve two terms, Patience Jonathan insists

•Patience Jonathan

First Lady Patience Jonathan declared yesterday that nothing would stop President Goodluck Jonathan from completing “our two terms in office.”

“Everybody is staying there for eight years. Now it’s our turn. We must complete our eight years,” she said at a women’s rally in Benin, Edo State.

“It is in the constitution of this country. Two,  two terms. We will complete our two terms and hand over.”

Taking a dig at the opposition, Mrs. Jonathan said: “I am a peaceful person and I preach peace anywhere I go. They are looking for a fight; they are looking for war. They are troublesome people. That is why they went and took expired drugs. Now they are crying. They are the people stoning people and nobody talked.”

She said the opposition should expect what happens to those standing in the way of a moving train.

In a veiled reference to the clash in the booking of the Ogbemudia Stadium for her rally and a separate event by the wife of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Hajiya Aisha Buhari, she charged: “They are dragging stadium with me, but me I am ready to go to the street and do my campaign.”

NLC breaks into two factions

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) yesterday broke into two factions following the emergence of Dr. Ayuba Wabba of the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria as the new president of the congress.

He had defeated Comrade Joseph Ajaero of the National Union of Electricity Employees by 1, 695 of the 3115 votes cast at  Friday’s rescheduled National Delegates Conference of the NLC in Abuja.

Ajaero polled 1,140 votes but vehemently disputed the result declared by the returning officer and pioneer General Secretary of the NLC, Dangiwa Aliyu.

Elected as deputy presidents were Adeyemi Peters, Kiri Mohammed and Najeem Yasen.

Comrades Issa Aremu and Igwe Achese who had also been defeated in the race for NLC deputy president teamed up with Ajaero to rubbish the election.

They branded the process as faulty and reminiscent of the earlier delegates’ conference that was aborted last month.

Two weeks to polls: Jonathan’s campaign in disarray as Buhari surges

Things are not adding up for President Goodluck Jonathan  and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in his re-election bid with the poll a mere 14 days away.

Suspicion is rife within the party hierarchy, and leaders are pulling in different directions, according to presidency and party sources.

So bad is the situation that the President’s campaign has split into five with the president himself taking his destiny in his own hand by personally criss-crossing the country to woo traditional rulers, opinion moulders, youth and women leaders with a view to salvaging the situation.

Shortly after his nomination by the PDP for the race, President Jonathan set up a Presidential Campaign Council led by Dr. Ahmadu Ali to co-ordinate the campaign nationwide.

But complaints and field reports reaching the president from the states convinced him that the council was far from effective.