Countdown Calendar: 550 Goodluck Jonathan Days To Go… or Resign With Dignity Sooner

Nov. 24, 2013
Today, President Goodluck Jonathan has 550 days left on his oath of office.
I would like to suggest resignation to him as a patriotic and honourable course of action, but I use both adjectives with a deep sigh.
When I first penned my first Countdown Calendar on his presidency, in July 2011, he had almost 1400 days.  On November 27 of that year when I offered the reminder again, he had 1,278.
In the past two years, I did not to write the calendar at all in order to avoid sounding like a heckler.  Today, with just one and a half years left, most of which will fall into the no-man’s land of preparing for the 2015 election, I think it is only fair to remind him again that Time does everything but wait.
What Mr. Jonathan does next, politically, could maim his legacy, or make it.  In my view, the only way for him to make a significant impact on Time may be to resign his office, or at least resist the temptation to seek re-election.  If he respects his country—and his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)—more than he loves himself, he ought to consider these options.
For certain, nobody in the presidency will tell him that under his leadership, Nigeria is a defeated country and the laughing stock of the international community.  Nigeria is defeated because Mr. Jonathan is defeated.  And the irony and the agony is that he has been defeated more by his friends than by his opponents.
As he left for London last week for a meeting of the Honorary International Investors’ Council (HIIC), Mr. Jonathan held in his bag his latest defeat, by his own Minister, Stella Oduah.  The HIIC aims to advise Nigeria on development issues, in the course of which it is heavy on political corruption and other challenges to investment such as crime, violence, poverty and political instability.
Mrs. Oduah has been embroiled for nearly two months in extremely scandalous corruption allegations that have taken on a life of their own internationally.  But even while the thunderous allegations went off hourly like bombs on an old Beirut street, Mr. Jonathan neither fired nor suspended her.
Even when he finally succumbed and set up a presidential panel allegedly to probe the matter, he took the Minister with him on a foreign tour for the first of the panel’s two-week lifespan, along with a member of the three-man panel.
You did not need anyone to tell you the president was not really looking for the truth, and it is no surprise the panel has since receded into irrelevance, with no report, no presidential action, and no resolution.  The Minister remains a member of the federal cabinet, and Nigeria is the butt of jokes around the world, many of them certainly heard by members of the HIIC Mr. Jonathan was due to meet in London last week.
Perhaps it was no surprise the Nigeria leader opted for the safety and security of a London hospital bed.  Had that event been in Nigeria and he had to contemplate a hospital bed, I am certainly he would have leapt off the ambulance into the conference hall like the Under-17 football captain Musa Mohammed after a crunchy tackle.
In other words, while Mrs. Oduah may well be innocent, corruption, incompetence and indolence again won the latest battle.
Regrettably, under Mr. Mr. Jonathan, they have won every conceivable ethical confrontation so far, and I challenge any presidency official to contradict this.
This is why no government official dwells on the Transformation Agenda ruse any longer.  As I continue to say, there is neither transformation nor agenda, certainly none of an ennobling or positive character.
I have no love for the PDP, everyone knows, but anyone who tells Mr. Jonathan the PDP—old or new—can win the next presidential election is lying to him.  Worse still, anyone who tells him he can win re-election is merely flattering him.  Nigerians who voted for him in 2011 did on the basis of his potential, but also because of his ruthless armada of political promises.
Those conditions have changed drastically, and I do not see Nigerians falling for any further “I once had no shoes” stories.  Mr. Jonathan’s demonstration of considerable weakness, along with his romance with the seedier dimensions of politics is certain to yield only grief at the polls.  The PDP, like Nigeria, would have a far better chance with someone else that has a chance at seeking believability on his own.
Once upon a time, Mr. Jonathan dismissed WikiLeaks revelations about the corruption in Nigeria of which he was a part, as “beer parlour gossip.”  At the time, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, also called the revelations, one of which involved her, “fiction.”
There is neither fiction nor gossip about Ministers who face extensive fraud allegations, just as there is neither fiction nor gossip about looming anarchy because a chief of state cannot summon the character to enforce discipline.
Not only is Mrs. Oduah neither “beer parlor” nor “fiction,” the menace she represents can damage Mr. Jonathan’s presidency irretrievably.   She confirms the advancement of Nigeria’s lootocracy while Mr. Jonathan’s inability to act decisively confirms the worst possible advancement of his political impotence, and his defeat.
The quality of Mr. Jonathan’s defeat as a leader is even more pronounced when one considers that he is unable to identify the relationship between his inability to lead and his unsuitability for leadership.
I am prepared to cheer a leader who pursues the best interests of his country, but when a leader is dragging that country into the depths of despair, the only thing a citizen can do is ask to be set free.   That is why I advocate for Mr. Jonathan a graceful, quiet exit.
Think about it: anywhere else in civilization, Mrs. Alison-Madueke, claiming to be “deepening reforms and rooting out corruption” would be one of those hilarious jokes to which you wake up laughing in the middle of the night, but not in Nigeria.
I have written elsewhere that Mr. Jonathan’s biggest fear on the corruption file is that he cannot control what might fall off the branches should he shake the tree.  Nigerians who wander about the future may want to keep in mind that during the street protests of 2012, the Nigerian leader actually sent armed soldiers into the streets in what I thought was a dangerous power-sharing arrangement with the military
And yet…and yet this is the year, 2013, that he promised Nigeria would see performance wonders from him.  At his Media Chat in June 2012, he dismissed his critics as people who would be humbled in 2013.  “No matter the abuse, we must plan. And after the abuse, people will see the results by 2013 and things will change,” he said.
Really?  2013 is all but over, and Nigeria is doing worse, not better.  Mr. Jonathan may want to remember that it is the mark of a man to be able to look into the mirror and simply say, “No more!”  No more recycling of hopes and promises.
Save yourself, Mr. Jonathan: resign.  Alternatively, please remember that with 550 days, miracles are still possible.
Can you summon the character?   I am not holding my breath.

NewsRescue

How Catholic was John F. Kennedy?

By Daniel Burke, Belief Blog Co-editor

(CNN) – When John F. Kennedy was a boy, his mother counseled her children on Good Fridays to pray for a peaceful death.
Young Jack joked that he’d rather pray for two pet dogs.
If you’re looking for the CliffsNotes version of Kennedy’s Catholicism, that anecdote touches on the key themes: the pious Irish mother, the light-hearted irreverence, the ever-present prospect of death.
But there’s much more to the story.
In the words of one biographer, Kennedy was Mr. Saturday Night but also Mr. Sunday Morning, rarely missing a Mass.
He was famously unfaithful to his wife but fiercely loyal to his church, even when it threatened his quest for the presidency.
One scholar suggests that Kennedy was becoming more religious as the Cold War wore on, and a prominent Catholic monk privately predicted his assassination. Another says that Kennedy’s public displays of piety were little more than political lip service.
As the country marks the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death – and it was far from peaceful, as we all know – almost every aspect of his life is again under the media microscope. But for all the ballyhoo about Kennedy being the first and only Catholic president, the topic of his faith remains largely untouched.
We’ve been told that he was venerated by many who shared his religion and vilified by many who didn’t. We know that his family shared sacraments with popes and confidences with cardinals. And we’ve heard about Kennedy breaking more than a few Commandments.
We also know that Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, revere Kennedy, hanging his portrait in their parlors next to images of the Sacred Heart, naming their schools and children after him.
But the halo around Kennedy’s head has dimmed in recent decades as revelations about his marital infidelities and carefully concealed health problems have come to light.
“Being the first of any group to get to the White House is worth taking seriously and showing respect for,” said the Rev. John Langan, a Jesuit priest and ethicist at Georgetown University. “But there is bound to be a very ambivalent reaction to Kennedy at this point in our history.”
That still doesn’t tell us much about what kind of Catholic Kennedy was, to the extent that we can ever know.
“It’s hard to look into the soul of a person, especially a person who’s been dead for 50 years, and judge their religion and belief in God,” said Thomas Maier, author of “The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings.”
No doubt Maier is right. But Kennedy's Catholic faith remains central to questions about his character and his legacy. And even if we reserve final judgment for the Almighty, we can still probe history for clues about how religion inspired and guided his short and star-crossed life.
The Irish Catholic ideal
When Kennedy was 13 and attending a Catholic school for the only time in his life, a visiting missionary spoke to the students about his work in India.
Afterward, Kennedy eagerly informed his parents that “it was one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever heard,” according to the Robert Dallek biography “An Unfinished Life.”
The Catholic missionary inspired two aims that day that would drive Kennedy for the rest of his life, according to Ted Sorensen, one of his closest advisers: the desire to enjoy the world, and the desire to improve it.
Few historians argue that Kennedy’s reputation as a womanizer isn’t well-warranted. But even tough-minded idealists such as Eleanor Roosevelt, who once regarded Kennedy as cocky and callow, eventually saw him in another light.
“My final judgment is that here is a man who wants to leave a record (perhaps for ambitious personal reasons, as people say), but I rather think because he is really interested in helping the people of his own country and mankind in general,” Roosevelt said after meeting Kennedy in 1960.
Kennedy put his personal mission another way: “Those to whom much is given, much is required.” That phrase echoes Luke’s Gospel, which, like many parts of the Bible, he learned from his mother, Rose.
Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, was often away making his millions and insisted that his children attend top private (and secular) schools such as Harvard. That left the nine Kennedy children’s religious education to Rose, a devout Catholic.
“At the time, it was the Irish Catholic ideal,” Langan said, “a big and active family where the father was successful in business and politics and the mother was the spiritual center, the person who held it all together.”
In other ways, the Kennedys were anything but typical Irish Catholics, said Kean University historian Terry Golway. They were lucratively rich. They mingled with Boston Brahmins. They went to Harvard, not Holy Cross.
“Some people saw them as a faux Catholic,” Golway said, “too big for their britches.”
But few historians doubt Rose Kennedy’s devout attachment to Catholicism.
She attended the country’s top Catholic schools, and she supervised her family like the nuns who ran those schools, according to biographer Barbara A. Perry.
Rose neither spared the rod nor tolerated emotional outbursts. Any bumps and bruises were to be “offered up to God,” the matriarch insisted, no complaining allowed.
“She was terribly religious,” John Kennedy said as an adult. “She was a little removed.”
Still, many say the stoicism Rose Kennedy instilled helped her son deal with the debilitating health issues that plagued his short life. Other historians theorize that Kennedy's poor health – he was twice given last rites before recovering – played a role in his wanton womanizing.
“His continual, almost heroic sexual performance,” wrote Catholic scholar Garry Wills, was a “cackling at the gods of disability that plagued him.”
Well before her son's playboy days, Rose neatly noted her children’s medical histories and church milestones such as baptism, confirmation and first Holy Communion on small index cards.
She left rosaries on their beds, tested their knowledge of the Catholic Catechism and oversaw their prayers for hints of apostasy.
Rose regularly took the children on walks to the local parish or the zoo, where she would show them the lions and explain how they once devoured faithful Christians. It was an effective, if morbid, method to hold the children’s interest, Perry notes in her book “Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch."
As the Kennedy kids grew up, Rose pinned questions about priests’ sermons and Holy Days on the family blackboard, expecting the children to discuss them at dinner, according to Perry.
The matriarch continued preaching the faith well into her children's adulthood, advising them that praying the rosary was as good a way to relieve stress as any drink or pill, and a good bit better for their figure.
And Rose wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy to “remind Jack about his Easter duty” to attend the sacrament of confession. “I’m sure that the church is quite near” to their home in Washington, she nagged.
Teasing and testing
Surrounded by his mother’s intense piety, Jack Kennedy couldn’t help but tease and test her.
He interrupted her Bible stories to ask odd questions such as what happened to the donkey Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday? Who took care of the ass after the crucifixion?
Later, Kennedy’s questions grew more probing.
Traveling through the Middle East as an adolescent, he visited Jerusalem, where Christians believe Christ ascended into heaven and Muslims believe the same about Mohammed.
Upon his return to the United States, Kennedy promptly asked a priest, “Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe in Christ any more than Mohammed?”
Get this boy some religious instruction, before he becomes an atheist, the priest told Kennedy’s parents, according to Dallek’s biography.
Later, Kennedy teasingly threatened to teach a Bible class – then a strictly Protestant practice – when his parents pressured him to dump his married girlfriend, Inga Arvad.
“Don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church?” he needled his mother and father.
“We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top – a structure that allows for no individual interpretation – or are we?”
Kennedy even ribbed Rose and Joe while fighting in the Solomon Islands during World War II. He told them he had dutifully attended Easter Mass at a native hut, even as enemy aircraft circled overhead. And his parents would be pleased to know a priest had devoted all his energies to Kennedy’s salvation.
“I’m stringing along with him,” Kennedy wrote, “but I’m not giving over too easy as I want him to work a bit – so he’ll appreciate it more when he finally has me in the front row every morning screaming hallelujah.”
The lion’s den
Joking aside, Kennedy took his faith seriously, according to several biographers, especially when it became a political issue.
In 1947, when Kennedy was a representative from Massachusetts, Congress held a hearing on public funding for parochial schools. He exploded when a Freemason testified that Catholics owe their loyalties to their church, not their country.
“I am not a legal subject of the Pope,” Kennedy countered. “There is an old saying in Boston that we get our religion from Rome and our politics from home.”
The congressional contretemps was just a prelude to the prejudice Kennedy endured during his 1960 presidential run.
Protestant leaders – from backwoods evangelists and radio preachers to prominent pastors such as Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale – warned the country would go to hell with a Catholic in the Oval Office.
“I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” Kennedy complained.
Against some advisers’ counsel, the candidate decided to directly confront the anti-Catholic bias with a televised speech to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. It was like Daniel walking into the lion’s den, a journalist said at the time.
In the now famous speech, Kennedy said he believed that America’s separation of church and state is “absolute” and that a presidential candidate’s religious beliefs are “his own private affair.”
“I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me,” Kennedy said.
The Protestant ministers pressed Kennedy on those pledges in a question and answer session that followed, according to Dallek, but the candidate’s calm reassurances seemed to win many of them over.
“He responded with such poise and restraint that the ministers stood and applauded at the close of the meeting, and some came forward to shake his hand and wish him well in the campaign.”
A ‘little less convinced’
As president, Kennedy continued to say his daily prayers, morning and night, his sister Eunice told historians. But “that doesn’t mean he was terribly religious,” she said.
“He was always a little less convinced” than the rest of the Kennedy clan, Eunice continued, especially his brother Robert Kennedy, who took after Rose.
Still, Eunice said John always hustled off to Mass on Sundays, even while traveling. Maier, the Kennedy biographer who called him Mr. Saturday Night and Mr. Sunday Morning, said The New York Times’ index of the president’s travels show him faithfully attending Mass once a week, wherever he happened to be.
“The popular perception is that he wasn’t all that religious,” Maier said, “but by today’s standards he would be called a traditional Catholic.”
Dallek said he believes Kennedy attended religious rituals more out of duty than desire. “This is the faith he was reared in, and something his parents expected him to do,” the historian said.
“As president it was kind of mandatory to go to church, to show that he was a man of good Christian faith. But was it something that informed his daily life and decisions as president? I don’t think so.”
Others, however, see echoes of Kennedy’s Catholic upbringing in his most famous speech, the 1961 inaugural address. In it, the new president urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“The words chosen seem to spring from a sacramental background,” the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, first Catholic chaplain in the U.S. House of Representatives, wrote in a recent blog post.
“In fact, the whole speech was framed by his belief in a living and ever-present God both at its beginning and in the end,” Coughlin wrote.
Two months later, in a move that may have harkened back to meeting the Catholic missionary, Kennedy founded the Peace Corps.
A monk predicts the assassination 
Regardless of how faithful Kennedy was, Irish Catholicism is as much a culture as a set of religious rules and rituals, said Peter Quinn, author of “Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America.”
Kennedy’s gift for gab and love of language; his fierce loyalty and clannishness; his temper and his wit; his concern for the poor and sense of the tragedy of life – he lost a beloved brother and sister at a young age – all are hallmarks of Irish Catholicism, Quinn said.
“The church was the building block of Irish identity, and Kennedy was imbued in that culture.”
Golway agrees. “There was a chip on his shoulder, a sense of being embattled and having to fight for everything. That’s a very Irish-Catholic thing.”
Other historians believe Kennedy was becoming more religious, in the traditional sense, as the threat of nuclear war loomed over his presidency.
“He never talked about his religion, never,” said James W. Douglass, author of “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters.” “But at great personal risk, he was turning from war toward peacemaking.”
Kennedy would not have been the first president to “get religion” in the Oval Office.
Lincoln, an unorthodox believer, once said that “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.”
Historians say Kennedy kept a note on his desk paraphrasing another quote from Lincoln, “I know that there is a God and I see a storm coming. ... If he has a place for me, I am ready.”
If Lincoln’s storm was the Civil War, Kennedy’s was the Cold War.
As Douglass notes, some Catholics had little confidence that Kennedy, the youngest elected president in American history, had the wisdom and humanity to carry the country through the existential threat.
“Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle,” Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk and author, wrote to a friend.
“But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

CNN

Only fresh election can resolve Anambra election crisis – PDP aspirant

By Wale Odunsi 

 

A constitutional lawyer, Mike Okoye, has petitioned the leadership of the National Assembly as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)Chairman, Attahiru Jega, in protest of the declaration of last Saturday’s Anambra gubernatorial elections as inconclusive.
According to him, only fresh elections will resolve the ongoing controversy.
Okoye, who was one of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship aspirants in the contest, said INEC had committed a technical mistake, having proceeded to officially declare the collated results of the local government and constituency without seeking a proper legal advice.
The lawyer said “INEC, having been satisfied that the final result of the election will be substantially affected by voting in the areas where the election were cancelled, thus, refused to make a return of the election and declared the election as inconclusive.”
He said the commission in his view rightly exercised the powers conferred on it by virtue of section 53(2) of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) and of all other powers enabling it to do so.
“The Commission in my view ought not to have declared as ‘final’ the collated results of the local governments and constituency before it ordered another election in the affected polling units.

“Since the commission, wrongly in my view, proceeded to officially declare the collated results of all the affected local governments and constituency, it is without power to alter the final figures of the results declared for any reason whatsoever; only a court of law can alter or amend the figures of the final result officially declared by the Commission.
“In my view, the Commission became functus officio, discharged of their duties as soon as the final results of all the local governments in the affected areas and the constituency were officially declared.
“The commission can no longer for any reason whatsoever, alter the figures of the result officially declared, to add or remove, or amend, from the declared results without an order of court,” Okoye said.
Okoye added that since INEC is without power to alter or add to the results officially declared, any election conducted in the affected polling units will be useless, worthless and tantamount to colossal waste of time and resources.
“Since the figures to be obtained cannot be added, without the alteration of the final figures in the declared results, the only option available to the Commission is to conduct a fresh election,” he counselled.

DailyPost

Jega loses in Anambra

When the gubernatorial election came up in Anambra State last Saturday, not only the party candidates were contesting.  The  Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was also in the race.  The organization, as represented by its National Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega, was contesting for our acclaim, our approbation and applause.  It was an election that was poised to position Jega as some sort of national hero.
How did INEC come out at the end of the day?  The election was so shambolic and topsy-turvy, that instead of approbation, the electoral organization got opprobrium. In place of acclaim, it got obloquy, and in place of beauty, it got ashes.  In fact, the Anambra election showed us that Maurice Iwu was still well and alive in our electoral life.
The statistics of the inconclusive exercise speak for themselves.  Number of registered voters was 1,763,761.  How many were accredited to vote?  A miserable 451,826.  More than 1.3 million people could not find their names on the voters’ register, and had been disenfranchised.
How many votes were eventually cast?  Total of 429,549.  Of that number, only 413,005 were considered valid, 16,544 were rejected, and 113,113, were cancelled.
At this point, the issue is not who becomes the governor of Anambra State among the legion of contestants.  When such a person emerges clean and clear, we shall congratulate him, and also encourage the losers to take hearts, and try some other time.  But first, the process.  It must be seen to have been free, fair and worthy.  How can the electoral body give us such disordered, jumbled and bemusing exercise, and then we say everything is okay?  It cannot be okay until it has been seen to be okay.
There were two frontrunners among the top five candidates in the election: Willie Obiano of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and Chris Ngige of the All Progressives Congress (APC).  The eyes of Nigerians, both at home and in the Diaspora, were on the two candidates, and how they would perform.  And suddenly, everything went fairly well in the strongholds of Obiano in terms of accreditation, supply of election materials, voting and collation of results, but in the strongholds of Ngige, everything that could ever go wrong did.  Voters were completely denied the rights to exercise their franchise, and as later admitted by Jega, there had been deliberate sabotage by the electoral officer in charge of the area.  He has since been arrested, and is undergoing investigation.
This is the third straight week I am writing on the Anambra elections.  And you would think I had a favourite candidate?  Not so.  My candidate was fair play, a free and fair process.  After that had been served, anyone could emerge governor, and I would have congratulated the person.  But he must have been seen to have emerged through a process that is largely unassailable, unimpeachable, unblemished.  Definitely, not the kind we witnessed last Saturday.  It was the shame of a country.  And what a country!
I have questions for Professor Jega, because though he may not be the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Anambra, the buck ultimately stops at his table.  What happened to the voters register?  The document was displayed before the election, and majority of registered voters found their names on it.  But on election day, another version was rolled out, in which out of 1,763,761 voters, only 451,826 found their names.  What happened? Who doctored the document?
Again, before the 2011 elections, INEC told us it was putting together a database of voters in the country.  It asked for, and got about N100 billion.  Was such money spent only for us to get the humongous confusion that ensued in Anambra last weekend?  With such development, we would be correct to shout:  ‘Professor Jega, where is our N100 billion?’  We know the professor is a honourable man, but we still have the right to ask for our database, don’t we? And if there is none, then where is our money?  We need answer, and desperately too, before we shout louder.
And then, the electoral officer who sabotaged voting in areas where Ngige was quite strong.  Did he work alone?  Was he in cahoots with other people within and outside INEC?  Was he induced?  If yes, what are the facts of the case?  We need answers from both INEC and our security agencies. It is not really about Ngige, or any other individual. He has got the shorter end of the stick today, it can be anybody else’s turn tomorrow. Injustice to one, as they say, is injustice to all. If it had happened to Obiano, Ifeanyi Ubah, Tony Nwoye, or Godwin Ezeemo, I would have raised the same queries, and shouted as loud as I’m shouting now.
If INEC could not conduct acceptable election in an isolated state, under the gaze of the entire country and the international community, what right do we then have to expect anything better in 2015?  Would the dogs and baboons not then be soaked in blood after the exercise, and that in a country where blood already flows daily like water? Surely, we can do without further cataclysm.
Friends, Nigerians, countrymen!  We have reasons to be apprehensive.  If INEC made a mess of eating an egg in Anambra, how then can we dare hope that it will do better at national elections in less than 15 months? Big puzzle.
Beyond the bungling and blundering of INEC, however, there are some other things to note about what happened last Saturday, which are germane to our democracy.
First is that no single life was lost in direct association with the election.  It was quite comforting.  An election of such magnitude, with high decibel tension, and no flare of violence?  Despite the provocations by INEC’s inefficiency, the people still held their peace.  It was quite salutary, and something to applaud after all.  The security agencies played their part, the electorate did their bit.  May we continue to have decorum and civility in our national life, despite whatever shortcomings there might be.
Again, it is never over till it is over.  Have you seen the performance of Tony Nwoye of the PDP in the results released so far?  He came into the campaigns less than a week to voting.  And for now, he is actually the runner up, even ahead of Ngige.  When I wrote last week that he could possibly be a winner, I know that you laughed.  Now, see who is laughing last and possibly laughing best.  Obiano of APGA has 174,710 votes, Nwoye, 94,956, Ngige, 92,300 and Ifeanyi Ubah of Labour Party, 37,444.  The lesson?  Never rule anybody out till the last blast of the whistle.  It is never over till it is over.  What if Nwoye had then had months to campaign and prepare for the polls?  PDP could have got Anambra State back.
Another revelation from the election, as shoddy and shabby as it was, is that ethnic sentiments are well and alive in Nigeria, and may forever be.  All the candidates are of the Igbo stock, and you expect the electorate to see them as one members of a large family.  Not so.  You found sub-ethnicity within a larger ethnicity.  Ngige hails from Idemili area, and that is where he has his largest votes.  Idemili North gave him 7,135, and 9,539 in Idemili South.  In other places, he got just a couple of thousands.  Ifeanyi Ubah is from Nnewi, and his Labour Party got an unprecedented 18,014 votes in Nnewi North, leaving mere crumbs for the other candidates.  In Nnewi South, he got 2,214.  In other places, he got votes in just hundreds, and a sprinkle of thousands.  And in Anambra North?  Obiano and Nwoye hail from the place.  They simply shared the votes between themselves, with the larger number going to APGA.  The submission?  Primordial sentiments of ethnicity and religion may never be divorced from politics in Nigeria.  People will still continue to vote based on tenuous considerations like the dialect the candidate speaks, the church or mosque he attends, is he candidate of a home grown party or a ‘foreign’ party etc.  Nigeria will never change, at least not for now.  Each region may therefore do well to hold its turf tight.  I am sure the scenario will play out in 2015, with the Yoruba largely going with the APC, the far North also with APC, depending on who the presidential candidate of the party is, while the South east, South
-south, and part of North-central may go with the PDP.  And all these will not be due to any fundamental reasons, other than this is the party/candidate that speaks my language, belongs to my religion, or hails from my geographical area. Nigeria we hail thee!
Back to INEC.  When Professor Attahiru Jega was appointed in 2010, I wrote a piece under the headline, ‘Jega, beware of jagajaga.’  And I take my counsel for him today from that piece again: “Will Attahiru Jega fare better (than Maurice Iwu)?  By the time he finishes the job he’s about to take, will his famed integrity still be intact?  Will we still salute and applaud him, or usher him out of office with missiles and projectiles?  Will the beautiful name, Jega, have tuned into jagajaga (confusion, absolute chaos) by the time he leaves?  May God forbid…  Jega must learn from the shipwreck that Maurice Iwu made of the job at INEC… if Jega makes the same mistake, it can only end in jagajaga.  And that would be tragic for a man who has been so well rated, and so highly recommended.”
Well, Anambra last week was jagajaga.  But Nigerians are not writing Prof Jega completely off yet, though there are calls for his resignation here and there.  He lost the battle last weekend, he should ensure he wins the war.

TheSun

The Anambra half and half election

The elections conducted aimed at choosing a successor to Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State further deteriorated the performance of Independent National Electoral Commission under the chairmanship of Attahiru Jega. Instead of normal results, the elections produced shocks, drama and now uncertainly not only about Anambra governorship but also national elections slated for 2015.
There are several ominous implications for this sad development. First is the attempted escape of INEC that only laws courts can nullify elections tainted with controversial ingredients. That was the facesaving  response of INEC to the demands of some of the candidates and the political parties that the purportedly inconclusive Anambra governorship elections be cancelled and a fresh one held. The main reason for the demand was that INEC conceded that elections were not held in strategic constituencies known to favour particular candidates.
It does not seem tenable as claimed by INEC that only law courts can nullify flawed elections, or that must be Attahiru Jega’s INEC. On the other hand, Maurice Iwu’s INEC in 2007, cancelled the Imo gubernatorial elections once it emerged that violence threatened in some areas. At least, so he claimed and organized fresh elections.
Whatever reasons compelled Maurice Iwu to hold fresh elections in Imo in 2007 after canceling the previous elections, the fact of Nigerian political history is that no law court’s order was obtained by Maurice Iwu’s INEC or any of the candidates before Imo 2007 gubernatorial elections were cancelled. The fresh elections produced PPA’s candidate Ikedi Ohakim despite hot dispute by PDP’s opponent Senator Ifeanyi Ararume, known to be opposed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
On this question of INEC power(s) to cancel potentially disputable or even disputed elections, the APC, Labour and PDP candidates should put INEC chairman Attahiru Jega in the dock to explain the difference between the cancelled Imo gubernatorial elections in 2007 and the half and half Anambra gubernatorial elections of 2013.
In fact, both former governor Ohakim and the man he defeated Senator Ararume must speak out on whether the Imo 2007 gubernatorial election was held along with others or cancelled and re-conducted later. We seem to forget so soon in this country, and that was why Jega’s INEC could spit on our faces that only law courts could annul elections.
APC’s candidate in the Anambra gubernatorial elections, Chris Ngige now weeps for the future of Nigeria. This must be a consolation rather than a rebuff that another Nigerian eventually weeps for the country. What was the general attitude last time when former Head of State General Muhammadu Buhari openly wept for the poor and wretched in Nigeria amidst the inestimable and unlimited wealth of the country?
Preparations for the Anambra elections were generally regarded as some forerunner for the much-dreaded 2015 for obvious reasons. At least four political parties have merged and have been so recognized as All Progressives Congress by INEC, the electoral regulating body which, itself, had claimed to have made up for its past lapses. Anambra was, therefore, a test for the presumed electoral strength of the APC. Hence the concern or indeed the suspicions of reasons for the withholding of elections in those areas known to be the stronghold of Chris Ngige.
The instant effect is the drop in Ngige’s votes in the first series to put his major APGA rival Willie Obiano in a bandwagon strong challenge in the supplementary elections in Ngige’s stronghold.
A very ominous among the ominous in the results of the Anambra gubernatorial elections is the implied fate of President Goodluck Jonathan. For purposes of political dignity, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should ideally, not be involved in campaigns to elect a state governor. A sitting governor can afford to be voted out always with the self-consolation of possibly returning some day. But the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?
Goodluck Jonathan, especially in the present political circumstances, is like a defending national champion and whatever points he concedes may lead to eventual loss of title. In other federations all over the world, state governors seeking office or re-election are on their own because any poor showing of such guys reflects appropriately for good or bad for the highest public office holder’s electoral ratings. From the Anambra governorship elections, Jonathan’s penchant for getting involved in his party’s governorship campaigns carries great foreboding.
He was in Edo State last time to campaign for his PDP candidate. In effect, Jonathan stahed his high office to campaign against (the then) ACN candidate and incumbent governor Adams Oshiomhole. Protocol demanded a courtesy call on a traditional ruler but he (Jonathan) was kept waiting. In the elections proper, Edo voters re-elected Oshiomhole, thereby rejecting PDP’s candidate and Goodluck Jonathan.
From there, Jonathan was also in Ondo State where again, he deployed his high office to campaign for PDP candidate Oke, against Labour Party incumbent governor Segun Mimiko. As it turned out in the second state, Jonathan risked his popularity to campaign as Nigerian President but was rejected, as the electorate retained Segun Mimiko in office.
Yet, in a third state, Anambra, President Jonathan did everything including the invocation of Nnamdi Azikiwe’s name/birthday, the date of the election. However, as one voter put it, “we know the difference between Nnamdi Azikiwe and Goodluck Jonathan. One, surely, is not the other. We also remember that for the 2011 presidential elections, Jonathan claimed Azikiwe among his forenames. After the elections, he dropped the name Azikiwe.”
With such a critical outlook, little wonder in the outcome of the Anambra election. APGA candidate took the lead with PDP in the second place. From whatever angle, President Jonathan -led PDP has been rejected in the third consecutive state. If unknown to Jonathan, his lot is like that of a champion defending his title in the game of boxing and so early in the tournament, suffers three consecutive knockdowns. He is not yet necessarily counted out but certainly has a big task to make up for the lost points.
All Progressives Congress (APC) fell into the third place especially in an apparent gerrymandering to lose candidate Chris Ngige votes from his stronghold. That was more of a psychological war to portray the APC as a non-starter in South-East.
INEC’s deliberate barring of elections in Chris Ngige’s stronghold goes beyond the politics of trying to belittle the man. But, among others, in Obosi of all places? The birthplace of the Emeka Anyaokus? How does the man now assess Nigeria’s political/electoral progress to his famed international community who, he (Anyaoku) said would be unhappy about zoning in Nigerian politics?
For the Anambra elections, there was a minimum of 20,000 security personnel. In 2015, as elections are expected to hold in at least 30 states on the same day, Nigeria will have to provide six hundred thousand security personnel. What is the entire strength of the police, the armed forces and the secret police?
And then alleged mercenaries arrested on the eve of the Anambra elections? Police reputation is on trial until these chaps are successfully prosecuted in law courts.
So much for Nigeria’s democracy!
Postscript: The late dramatist, Hubert Ogunde, is acknowledged for the copyright of the above headline, a title of one of his famous plays in the fifties, HALF AND HALF.

Your sons or you behave
By all means, if the offspring of any state governor breaches financial regulations, they must be treated equally as any Nigerian before the law. Only to that extent can the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission be justified in picking up, for interrogation, two sons of Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido.
However, in the process, the EFCC once again lived up to its reputation as the devil’s advocate. So far, Sule Lamido is a member of the People’s Democratic Party but he is known lately to be among top figures challenging the authoritarian tactics of the party’s leadership, especially national chairman Bamanga Tukur and President Goodluck Jonathan.
When did the EFCC become aware of the alleged financial crime of Sule Lamido’s two sons? Why did the EFCC fail to arraign them for prosecution all along? Could the delay be part of PDP’s reserve tactics to tame Sule Lamido back in line?
In a way, Nigerians should even be satisfied that the PDP members are at each other’s throats. Otherwise, we would not know anything about possible goings-on with our nation’s resources. Yet, innocent Nigerians are continuously subjected to series of hardship through wide-ranging taxes on any item and increased prices of essential others like fuel. If therefore the younger Sule Lamidos can be proved to have laundered the huge sum of ten billion naira, the law should take its course.
Their father’s political disagreement with President Goodluck Jonathan should be no excuse not to be prosecuted. Where the EFCC tarnished its reputation was that the crime fighting agency picked up the fight on behalf of President Jonathan only (repeat only) a few hours after Governor Sule Lamido was widely reported on electronic media that he had reported a minister to President Jonathan for allegedly collecting a bribe of two hundred and fifty million American dollars from an oil company.
According to Sule Lamido’s claim, President Jonathan so far, did nothing on the allegation and still retains the minister, a male, in office. Sule Lamido, in naming an oil company as the accomplice was fair enough to even specify the gender, lest false and malicious people rush to other speculations. Sule Lamido did not disclose when he made the allegation to President Jonathan. It was therefore only fair to expect Jonathan to investigate properly before taking or not taking punitive action against the minister concerned.
Yet, the fact of making the allegation public was not a tenable ground for EFCC only a few hours later, to wade in on Jonathan’s side against Sule Lamido.
There is this problem of state institutions like EFCC, the Secret Police and conventional Nigeria Police or even INEC, NTA and FRCN in discharging their duties as if they are the personal outfits of an incumbent political leader.
That is why these outfits are, on the change of government, generally purged, mostly with their career abruptly ending. For the umpteenth time, state institutions exist to serve the nation rather than individuals.
In this matter of Sule Lamido’s offspring, the EFCC further destroyed its reputation. Time will tell. EFCC should have accused the Lamido suspects long before their father exposed the bribery allegation against a minister.

TheSun

McDonald’s Advice To Underpaid Employees: Sell Your Christmas Presents For Cash

By Adam Peck

Tis the season for holiday spirit: Yule logs, egg nog, festive lights and exchanging gifts with loved ones. If you work for McDonald’s, though, be sure to save those receipts.
McDonald’s McResource Line, a dedicated website run by the world’s largest fast-food chain to provide its 1.8 million employees with financial and health-related tips, offers a full page of advice for “Digging Out From Holiday Debt.” Among their helpful holiday tips: “Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”
Elsewhere on the site, McDonald’s encourages its employees to break apart food when they eat meals, as “breaking food into pieces often results in eating less and still feeling full.” And if they are struggling to stock their shelves with food in the first place, the company offers assistance for workers applying for food stamps.
McDonald’s corporate officers have a history of offering questionable advice to their low-wage workers. Four months ago, the company partnered with Visa to distribute a sample “budget.” In it, the chain suggested that workers needn’t pay for such frivolous expenses like their heating bills, and factored in a monthly rent of $600. To workers living in New York City (home of 350+ stores) and other expensive metropolises, that number is almost comical.
McDonald’s employees are some of the most underpaid workers in the country. The company’s cashiers and “team members” earn, on average, $7.75 an hour, just 50 cents higher than the federal minimum wage. Responding to rising living costs, many stores have staged walk-outs, strikes and protests, demanding a living wage. In Europe, where the minimum wage for employees is $12, customers pay just pennies more than their American counterparts for the same menu items, while the stores themselves typically bring in higher profit margins than ones in the United States.
Of course, McDonalds has shown little willingness to negotiate higher salaries for their poorest workers even as labor rights groups up the pressure. Instead, their website has another piece of advice for people who are stressed about their meager paychecks: “Quit complaining,” the site suggests. “Stress hormones levels rise by 15% after 10 minutes of complaining.”

Update

“Digging Out From Holiday Debt” now redirects to an error message. “Some of the content has been reviewed and changes were made where appropriate,” McDonald’s spokesperson Lisa McComb told ThinkProgress. “We’ll continue to do that periodically.”
Here is what the page now looks like:

TP

Blaming the Victims: Media Bias Against Struggling Millennials

 By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | 

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(Photo: Elvert Barnes / Flickr)It has become a common refrain in the mainstream media: The economic problems that young people face are the product of generational laziness and a sense of entitlement. People between the ages of 16 and 24 have an unemployment rate of 16.3 percent, more than twice the national average, and an alarming 36 percent of adults age 18-31 are living with their parents.
"Word that six million young people are not working or studying comes as no surprise to anyone with a millennial in the basement," writes Jennifer Graham in an op-ed titled "A Generation of Idle Trophy Kids," for the Boston Globe. Millennials' describes, loosely, the generation born between 1980 and 2000. "It's young people who don't leave the house at all, not because they're scared like agoraphobics, but because their needs are met and they're content."
To say that Graham's article is a woeful oversimplification would be to give it way too much credit. The article is an embarrassing debacle, filled with worthless platitudes to support an argument that is insulting not only to young and poor people but to anyone who values critical-thinking skills. Graham fails to provide any serious examination of the economic conditions facing young people, and the article lacks any significant data to back up her claim that millennials are a "minimally employable crop" of slackers who lack "the motivation to provide for themselves."
She also seems to make the racist and classist assumption that all young people are white, privileged members of the middle class who have the luxury of returning to suburban homes (as opposed to, say, park benches or homeless shelters) when they lack steady employment. Conveniently, she ignores things like the fact that 57 percent of young black adults are either "near" or in "deep poverty."
It is tempting to ignore such a weak and unsubstantiated argument, but this will not do, given that the Globe's article is rather consistent with a widespread, systemic media bias against not only young people but poor and working-class people in general. The implication is unambiguous: Poor people, of all ages, are that way because they are lazy, entitled or amoral - never mind the actual economic conditions they face.
In fact, as if they were intentionally attempting to demonstrate the narrow parameters of debate that exist in mainstream media circles, even an article by a Globe editorial board member (who is a millennial) that aims to refute Graham's op-ed, manages to repeat some of its most galling weaknesses, including a notable lack of evidence to back up its claims. The rebuttal, like the original op-ed, turns what should be a serious issue - poverty among young adults - and reduces it to a few witty jokes ("we'll take responsibility for Miley Cyrus") and hipster phrases (the article concludes as such: "(drops mic) I'm out"). The article also falls into the familiar trap of assuming that all young people are privileged whites whose main priority is not finding food and shelter but having "the nice things we grew up with." This presumes of course, that all young people grew up with "suburban homes," computers, digital cable and other elements of the four-car-garage lifestyle the author describes. It might interest the Globe editorial board to know that most young people in today's world did not grow up in such decadence, and many barely scraped by and have no family support. This collection of Globe articles is basically a back-and-forth between white people discussing decidedly first-world problems.
The Globe's worthless offerings on the subject notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that the issue of the economic plight of young people is worth examining. But to do so requires a serious look at the real economic conditions young adults face and the reasons these conditions exist. Graham's article, and many others like it, generally fail to consider the context in which young people are struggling to find decent jobs, including the long-term economic impacts of deregulation and neoliberalism pushed by state managers and wealthy elites for some three decades now, which have kept wages stagnant for people of all ages, including young people; the impact of the 2008 economic crisis (mostly caused by people born well before 1980); the college affordability crisis; and the fact that low-wage service-sector jobs tend to be where job growth is.
Deregulation and Other Economic Trends
To understand why millennials are facing such perilous economic conditions, one must first understand why people of all ages are suffering massive economic struggles. For some three decades, under leadership of both political parties, the policies of deregulation, privatization, neoliberalism and the globalization of finance have been disastrous for working-class people. The result of these policies advanced by Ronald Reagan, Clinton appointees such as Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin and contemporary leaders of both parties, has decimated labor unions (only 11.3 percent of workers are unionized as of 2013, a 97-year low) and with it, have stagnated wages well below the rates of productivity. The data, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute, is alarming. "U.S. productivity grew by 62.5 percent from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12 percent in the same period," the paper concluded. The statistics are even more depressing when they reach farther back. "The typical worker has had stagnating wages for a long time, despite enjoying some wage growth during the economic recovery of the late 1990s. While productivity grew 80 percent between 1979 and 2009, the hourly wage of the median worker grew by only 10.1 percent with all of this wage growth occurring from 1996 to 2002, reflecting the strong economic recovery of the late 1990s," EPI concluded.
During this time there have been dramatic increases in poverty and inequality. Currently, the poverty rate (which is misleading because, as the World Bank notes, the poverty rate does not factor in increases to food and fuel costs), has edged up to about 16 percent, according to Census data, meaning about 46 million Americans are living in poverty. This is the worst poverty rate since the 1960s, according to The Associated Press. It is hard to imagine that those millennials who are among this group - and, it is worth repeating, this includes 57 percent of young black people, whose plight did not register in the minds of the Globe's opinion writers - are hoarding in Mom and Dad's basement playing with their iPads. In fact, many of them are among the 643,067 people who have been forced to spend nights in homeless shelters, according to a paper from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
The Impacts of the 2008 Economic Crisis
The aforementioned poverty rate has spiked from about 13 percent to 16 percent since 2008 - which was when greed and recklessness by stock-jobbers and the government that refused to rein in their crimes caused a near-collapse of the global economy. While Graham and others enjoy blaming millennials as being unique in their financial irresponsibility, the lion's share of the blame for the 2008 crisis belongs to Baby Boomers and older Generation X'ers. It is just that millennials are bearing the brunt of the consequences of those excesses. "The latest employment figures from the U.S. Department of Labor show that young Americans continue to be left behind in America's plodding economic recovery," Sarah Aryes of the Center for American Progress told Truthout.
Perhaps no other demographic has been hit worse by the impacts of the 2008 crisis and the long recession and slow recovery that has followed - and this is only worsened by the other economic conditions facing young people, such as stagnated wages and rising cost of college tuition. In fact, as an article in Tablet noted, the crisis has radicalized many young people who have found that "Marxism holds new appeal" and were central to the Occupy movement, the largest such social movement based on economic justice seen in decades.
The College Affordability Crisis
Of course, millennials who wish to better their options often look to higher education - once a practical guarantee of a middle-class existence. But, this too, is no longer the case. The cost of college, which has outpaced inflation virtually every year for three decades, has made it impossible for many young people to attend. "While college has long been viewed as the ticket to a well-paying job and a middle-class life, the price of a college education for millennials is more than 1,000 times what their parents paid," Aryes observes. In the past 30 years, a college education has increased more than 1,000 percent, compared with increases of 200 percent for gasoline and 250 percent for health care, she said.
Those who are not priced out often graduate with debt that may follow them the rest of their lives. While a Pell Grant used to cover nearly 77 percent of a public school education, it now tackles just about 36 percent. Students who attend private schools often graduate with debts ranging into six figures. And thanks to the bankruptcy reform passed by Congress in 2005, private student loans are no longer able to be removed through bankruptcy.
The Low-Wage Problem
And even those millennials who had the fortune and resources to attend college and find work are soon realizing that the job market is not exactly matching up with their skills. The vast majority of job growth - for millennials and others - is in low-wage service-sector jobs, such as food service and retails. Many offer little to nothing in the way of benefits, vacation time and so on. A fair amount of millennials are stuck in minimum-wage jobs, which at about $15,000 a year is a total disgrace. "If our standard for minimum wages had kept pace with overall income growth in the American economy, it would now be $21.16 per hour," calculates writer Salvatore Babones. A survey from Millennial Branding and Payscale notes that members of the younger generation are the most likely to work low-wage service-sector jobs. But this trend is not exclusive to young people. According to the Economic Policy Institute, "almost 30% of American workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs - defined as earnings at or below the poverty line to support a family of four - in 2020." Given that many predict the US economy will never recover to pre-recession levels, there is a real fear that this is not just a temporary aberration but a scary fixture of the new economy facing young people - and one they did little or nothing to cause.
Media Complicity
None of this has stopped corporate media outlets from "blaming the poor" and calling struggling young adults pejoratives such as lazy, entitled and minimally employable. The tendency to smear a whole generation reflects what is among the ugliest aspects of the human condition, where we continually blame the less-fortunate for our problems, with the list of people to hate ever-widening in the eyes of many misguided souls.
The truth is, millennials have much to be proud of and have turned out to be the most progressive and diverse generation in our nation's history.When it comes to gay rights, secularism, immigrants, interracial relationships and recreational drug use, young people - described as "Generation Next" - are historically accepting of others, compared with older generations and young people polled generations ago.
While the Boston Globe and other mainstream media outlets like to smear young people - and poor people in general - as lazy cretins, the truth is that the older generations may have a lot more to learn from today's young people than they realize. No valuable lessons will be learned so long as the media perpetuate the myth that those who struggle economically - whether newly or over the course of generations - deserve such a fate.

TruthOut