INSURANCE

Obasanjo has called on President Muhammadu Buhari not to seek re-election in 2019.

Published

5 years ago

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday, in a blistering and excoriating 13-page statement, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari not to seek re-election in 2019.

Mr. Obasanjo, in a special press statement entitled, “The Wat Out: A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria Movement” said Mr Buhari has performed far below expectation and should honourably “dismount from the horse” to join the league of the country’s former leaders whose “experience, influence, wisdom and outreach can be deployed on the side line for the good of the country.”

Mr Obasanjo, a two-term president on the platform of People Democratic Party (PDP), said he felt disappointed by Mr Buhari, whom he supported during the 2015 election over then incumbent and candidate of his former party, Goodluck Jonathan.

Mr Obasanjo had written a condemnatory open letter in December 2013 titled “Before it is Too Late” where he highlighted the numerous failings of the Jonathan administration.

Mr Obasanjo argued that his decision to go against Mr Jonathan at the time was the right one, as events in the last three years have since proved, was for the good of the nation and nothing personal.

“Even the horse rider then, with whom I maintain very cordial, happy and social relationship today has come to realise his mistakes and regretted it publicly and I admire his courage and forthrightness in this regard,” Mr. Obasanjo said.

“He has a role to play on the side line for the good of Nigeria, Africa and humanity and I will see him as a partner in playing such a role nationally and internationally, but not as a horse rider in Nigeria again.”

Likening the state of the nation to lice-invested clothes, he said the country’s fingernails is stained with blood as it tries to kill the lice by pressing them in-between two fingernails. According to him, in other to make sure that our fingernails remains blood-free we must do what it takes rid our clothes of lice.

“The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today,” he wrote.

“With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood,” he added.

While thanking Mr Buhari for the effort of his administration in rolling back the Boko Haram insurgency and his fight against corruption, Mr Obasanjo said Mr Buhari has ultimately failed in other areas where he had thought he would be efficient.

The octogenarian, who bagged a PhD over the weekend, admitted he knew Mr Buhari was weak in handling the economy. He said he however went ahead and voted for him because at the time “it was a matter of ‘any option but Jonathan’” and because he thought Mr Buhari would appoint qualified Nigerians to help out in that area.

He slammed Mr Buhari for turning a blind eye to corruption within his government saying it amounted to condonation and cover-up saying whoever is “going to justice must be with clean hands.”

He also berated Mr Buhari for allowing the clashes between herdsmen and farmers to go “sour” and messy saying the endorsement of the President by some governors to seek re-election barely 24 hours after 73 people who were killed by herdsmen in Benue State were given mass burial was “a sad symptom of insensitivity and callousness.”

But Mr Obasanjo reserved his harshest words for what he described as Mr Buhari’s clannishness, lack of understanding of the dynamics of politics, and his tendencies to pass the buck of his government’s inadequacies to the immediate past administration.

“But there are three other areas where President Buhari has come out more glaringly than most of us thought we knew about him. One is nepotic deployment bordering on clannishness and inability to bring discipline to bear on errant members of his nepotic court. This has grave consequences on performance of his government to the detriment of the nation. It would appear that national interest was being sacrificed on the altar of nepotic interest. What does one make of a case like that of Maina: collusion, condonation, ineptitude, incompetence, dereliction of responsibility or kinship and friendship on the part of those who should have taken visible and deterrent disciplinary action? How many similar cases are buried, ignored or covered up and not yet in the glare of the media and the public?

“The second is his poor understanding of the dynamics of internal politics. This has led to wittingly or unwittingly making the nation more divided and inequality has widened and become more pronounced. It also has effect on general national security.

“The third is passing the buck. For instance, blaming the Governor of the Central Bank for devaluation of the naira by 70% or so and blaming past governments for it, is to say the least, not accepting one’s own responsibility. Let nobody deceive us, economy feeds on politics and because our politics is depressing, our economy is even more depressing today. If things were good, President Buhari would not need to come in. He was voted to fix things that were bad and not engage in the blame game.”

Buhari and the APC do not have the answer

Mr Obasanjo thus argued that neither Mr Buhari nor his party, the All Progressives Congress, hold the solution to the country’s problems.

He suggested that Mr Buhari was not healthy enough to withstand the rigour associated with running a country like Nigeria neither does his party capable of providing the answer needed to sail the country through its difficulties.

Mr Obasanjo said Buhari should step down at the end of his first term with honour and dignity and attend to his health and should not listen to his “self-serving so-called adviserswho would claim that they love him more than God loves him and that without him, there would be no Nigeria say.”

“President Buhari needs a dignified and honourable dismount from the horse. He needs to have time to reflect, refurbish physically and recoup and after appropriate rest, once again, join the stock of Nigerian leaders whose experience, influence, wisdom and outreach can be deployed on the side line for the good of the country. His place in history is already assured. Without impaired health and strain of age, running the affairs of Nigeria is a 25/7 affair, not 24/7.

“I only appeal to brother Buhari to consider a deserved rest at this point in time and at this age. I continue to wish him robust health to enjoy his retirement from active public service. President Buhari does not necessarily need to heed my advice. But whether or not he heeds it, Nigeria needs to move on and move forward,” he said.

“I have had occasion in the past to say that the two main political parties – APC and PDP – were wobbling. I must reiterate that nothing has happened to convince me otherwise. If anything, I am reinforced in my conviction. The recent show of PDP must give grave and great concern to lovers of Nigeria.

“To claim, as has been credited to the chief kingmaker of PDP, that for procuring the Supreme Court judgement for his faction of the Party, he must dictate the tune all the way and this is indeed fraught with danger.

“If neither APC nor PDP is a worthy horse to ride to lead Nigeria at this crucial and critical time, what then do we do? Remember Farooq Kperogi, an Associate Professor at the Kennesaw State University, Georgia, United States, calls it “a cruel Hobson’s choice; it’s like a choice between six and half a dozen, between evil and evil. Any selection or deflection would be a distinction without a difference.” We cannot just sit down lamenting and wringing our hands desperately and hopelessly.

More from my site

BUSINESS

Distractions not disruptions from 2019 Nigeria Elections

Published

4 years ago

Christopher

Distractions not disruptions from 2019 Nigeria Elections

Since voting for the next president is due in little more than two weeks, we will try to disentangle some of the muddled views in circulation about the impact of Nigerian elections on the economy. The consensus is that the impact is unremittingly negative, and that the investor develops a ‘wait-and-see’ stance on auto-pilot.

One theory in circulation is that the government has no time for any business other than the programme of elections. We would say that a government seeking re-election will be pushing hard on its agenda to soften up the electorate. In the current Nigerian context, this means the FGN looking to accelerate its capital releases. Voters who see a new road/school/hospital built in their neighbourhood are more likely to back the incumbent. They will also respond positively if the government, federal or state, settles arrears on salaries and pensions due to family or friends.

Another theory is that existing and potential investors succumb to a state of inertia because they are worried by the “uncertainty” surrounding the elections. The result is uncertain of course but we can say with confidence that, whatever the result, Nigeria should not fear a radical change of direction. In 2015 we had the “change” agenda, and now we have talk of floating the naira and dismembering the NNPC. Alongside their negative campaigning and finger-pointing, serious challengers everywhere look to capture the attention of voters with striking policies.

There is scope on the margins for new policies that can be introduced without the go-ahead from the National Assembly (the equivalent of President Trump’s executive orders). More broadly, the delivery of change is blunted by bureaucratic torpor across the three tiers of government. This means that we should limit our expectations of the new government in place at the end of the transition period in May. It works both way: no fear of change for the worse but equally little hope of a strong market rally like those following the election victories of Lula, now disgraced, in Brazil in 2002 and Mauricio Macri in Argentina in 2015. There were very brief, relief rallies after the Nigerian presidential elections of 2011 and 2015.

The outcome to avoid next month is a very close result that is challenged on the streets and in the courts. The presidential term is four years on the US model and the transition period three months. The time for a president and government to make their mark is already limited without such challenges.

The downside from challenges to an election result was evident in Kenya in August 2017. The Supreme Court nullified the presidential election result from earlier in the month. The main opposition candidate, who had cried foul, boycotted the re-run in October, and the incumbent (Uhuru Kenyatta) was declared winner with 98 per cent of the vote. We cannot say whether a flawed process has any impact on output beyond the very short term but we can say that the developmental capacity of the Kenyan government was weakened for about three months. The stock market saw a sell-off on the intervention of the Supreme Court and has not subsequently recovered (although other factors are also clearly at play).

According to a third theory, the macroeconomy is vulnerable to a slowdown in the run-up to the elections. Our findings suggest that this theory is the result of laziness on the part of analysts, some of whom are looking to create a narrative for their forecasts. (We were taught, in contrast, to construct forecasts on the basis of a tested narrative.) So we looked at historical data for the run-up to the Nigerian presidential elections in April 2007, April 2011 and March 2015.

The series we covered were FGN expenditure, inflation, offshore investment on the stock market and domiciliary bank accounts in Nigeria. We did not find any adverse trends other than a pick-up in in FGN spending in the run-up to the 2011 polls, which we can trace to a sizeable increase in the national minimum wage by the Jonathan administration. Eight years on, we may well be seeing a repeat (that the FGN insists is incorporated in its 2019 budget proposals).

Our findings indicate that investors could profitably move on from the ‘wait-and-see” stance. They have waited and generally seen little, if anything untoward domestically. Foreign portfolio investors have been exiting local debt markets for several months, but in response to US monetary policy normalization rather than the Nigerian elections. As ever, the domestic events to trigger their exit remain pressure on the naira exchange, public finances and official fx reserves as a result of a steep and sustained decline in oil revenue. This is not our base case expectation.

History does not always repeat itself, and it may be that the lessons we have drawn from 2007, 2011 and 2015, subject to data restrictions, no longer apply. It may also be that the next president is able to push through far-reaching change on taking office in late May. We suggest otherwise.

Gregory Kronsten

Head, Macroeconomic & Fixed Income Research

FBNQuest

INSURANCE

By the time Atiku finishes his tenure, presidency won’t be attractive – Gbenga Daniel

Published

5 years ago

Christopher

By the time Atiku finishes his tenure, presidency won’t be attractive – Gbenga Daniel

THE Director-general of the Alhaji Atiku Abubabar presidential campaign, Otunba Gbenga Daniel has said that the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP candidate will appoint the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, from the South-West zone if he wins the 2019 election.

Speaking at an interactive session with reporters in Lagos, yesterday, Daniel, who also stated that Atiku would curtail tribal and religious intolerance, noted that decisions on major offices were being given “serious consideration”, adding that no region will be marginalised.

He said: “We need to understand that the candidate has control over who becomes his running mate during the election and who becomes the SGF, if he wins.

“The offices of senate president and speaker of the house of representative will be decided after the polls and based on what plays out in both houses. “Aside from major slots, I think what is paramount to the people of the South-West is restructuring of the country, which Atiku is very serious about. So the issue for the South-West is not personality or slot issue per say because personalities come and go but restructuring Nigeria is significant and more symbolic than zoned offices.”

With restructuring, Daniel asserted that “by the time Atiku finishes his tenure, the presidency won’t be attractive to anybody because he vowed to restructure Nigeria by delegating lots of power to both the state and local governments.’’ He said the edge Atiku has over other candidates is that he was once a vice-president, he is the eldest among them and he is set to address the problems of tribal and religious intolerance squarely .”

INSURANCE

Atiku Abubakar speaks on reunion with Obasanjo, his endorsement by religious leaders

Published

5 years ago

Christopher

Atiku Abubakar speaks on reunion with Obasanjo, his endorsement by religious leaders

Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar has expressed excitement on the outcome of his meeting with former President, Olusegun Obasanjo.

The leaders met on Thursday at Obasanjo’s residence in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

Atiku wrote on his Twitter page after the meeting: “It was exciting meeting with my former boss and having lunch with him in Abeokuta.

Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar has expressed excitement on the outcome of his meeting with former President, Olusegun Obasanjo.

The leaders met on Thursday at Obasanjo’s residence in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

Atiku wrote on his Twitter page after the meeting: “It was exciting meeting with my former boss and having lunch with him in Abeokuta.

“Thank you for the prayers, Bishop Oyedepo. God bless Nigeria.”

Obasanjo had in the meeting endorsed Atiku’s presidential ambition.

He declared that Atiku will defeat the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2019.

According to him, he believes that Atiku has ‘re-discovered and re-positioned himself’ and is now good enough to enjoy his support in the next election.

Obasanjo said, “Let me start by congratulating President-to-be, Atiku Abubakar, for his success at the recent PDP Primary and I took note of his gracious remarks in his acceptance speech that it all started here.”

At the meeting were outspoken clerics, Bishop David Oyedepo, Bishop Matthew Kukah and Sheikh Ahmed Gumi.

Also at the meeting were leader of apex Yoruba group, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, former Ogun State Governor, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, PDP National Chairman, Prince Uche Secondus, ex PDP deputy national chairman, Bode George, Senator Murray Ben-Bruce, ex Cross River Governor, Liyel Imoke, ex-Minister Osita Chidoka, among many others.