GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: FOR WHO THE BELL TOLLS NEXT.

Just five people shy of Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting incident that claimed 26 lives, the Uvalde Texas Robb elementary school mass shooting at 21 victims, now ranks among the highest grossing gun carnage in America. It is sad that such frequent blood spilling has tragically become part of our culture as a society. May the souls of the killed now rest.

25th AMENDMENT: ITS NOW ALL CRICKET.

Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi once questioned former President Donald John Trump's fitness to remain in office due to what she claimed was his declining mental capacity. Does anyone know what Madam Speaker presently thinks about the incontrovertible case which America is now saddled with? Just curious!

WHO WILL REBUILD UKRAINE?

The West should convert frozen Russian assets, both state's and oligarchs' owned, into a full seizure and set them aside for the future rebuilding of Ukraine. Like the Marshal Plan, call it the Putin Plan.

A HERO IS BORN.

I am staying put. I will not run away and abandon my people. The fight is here in Ukraine. What I need are weapons and ammunitions, not a ride out of town like former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani - President Volodymyr Zelensky.

IT IS WHAT IT IS.

"There is too much hate in America because there is too much anger in America." - Trevor Noah.

WORD!

A life without challenges is not a life lived at all. A life lived is a life that has problems, confronts problems, solves problems and then learns from problems. - Tunde Fashola.

NOW, YOU KNOW.

When fishing for love, bait with your heart and not your brain, because you cannot rationalize love. - Mark Twain.

JUST THE FACT.

In our country, you can shoot and kill a nigger, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings - Dave Chappelle

DO YOU?.

“What you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk for it." - Stuart Scheller.

HEDGE YOUR CRISIS.

Never get in bed with a woman whose problems are worse than yours. - Chicago PD.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

'The best way to keep peace is to be ready to destroy evil. If you Pearl Harbor me, I Nagasaki you.' - Ted Nugent.

OUR SHARED HUMANITY.

Empathy is at the heart of who we are as human beings. - Cardinal Matthew Kukah.

WORDS ON MARBLE.

"Birth is agony. Life is hard. Death is cruel." - Japanese pithy.

REPENT OR PERISH - POPE.

Homosexuality is a sin. It is not ordained by God, therefore same sex marriage cannot be blessed by the church - Pope Francis.

CANCEL CULTURE IS CORROSIVE.


FOR SAKE OF COUNTRY.


MAGA LIVES ON: NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER!

TWITTER IS BORING WITHOUT HIS TWEETS. #RestorePresidentTrump'sTwitterHandle.


WORD.

"If you cannot speak the truth when it matters, then nothing else you says matters.” - Tucker Carlson.

#MeToo MOVEMENT: A BAD NEWS GONE CRAZY.

"To all the women who testified, we may have different truth, but I have a great remorse for all of you. I have great remorse for all of the men and women going through this crisis right now in our country. You know, the movement started basically with me, and I think what happened, you know, I was the first example, and now there are thousands of men who are being accused and a regeneration of things that I think none of us understood. I’m not going to say these aren’t great people. I had wonderful times with these people. I’m just genuinely confused. Men are confused about this issue. We are going through this #MeToo movement crisis right now in this country." - Harvey Weinstein.


RON DELLUMS: UNAPOLOGETICALLY RADICAL.

"If it’s radical to oppose the insanity and cruelty of the Vietnam War, if it’s radical to oppose racism and sexism and all other forms of oppression, if it’s radical to want to alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, and other forms of human misery, then I’m proud to be called a radical.” - Ron Vernie Dellums.


WHAT REALLY MATTERS IN LIFE - STEVE JOBS

“I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others’ eyes, my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me. God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone’s heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth. Memories precipitated by love is the only true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on. The most expensive bed in the world is the sick bed. You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost – Life. Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well. Cherish others.” - SJ

EVIL CANNOT BE TRULY DESTROYED.

"The threat of evil is ever present. We can contain it as long as we stay vigilant, but it can never truly be destroyed. - Lorraine Warren (Annabelle, the movie)


ONLY THE POOR WISH THEY HAD STUFF?

“I’m not that interested in material things. As long as I find a good bed that I can sleep in, that’s enough.” - Nicolas Berggruem, the homeless billionaire.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

BUHARI, KEEP NIGERIA OFF ISMAT - OCHEREOME NNANNA


The announcement by President  Muhammadu Buhari that Nigeria will join ISMAT, a Saudi-led military coalition of Sunni Muslim countries fighting rival Muslim factions in the Middle East is capable of destabilizing Nigeria and unsettling its already seriously challenged unity in diversity. It is not only against the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but more than that, it is liable to reduce Northern Nigeria and the nation a whole to a theatre of Muslim proxy wars as we see in Yemen, Syria, Libya and other countries. President Buhari Many of us had warned, during the campaigns, that electing Buhari would put Nigeria in danger of its neutrality to issues of religion being undermined, given his avowal to carry the torch of Sharia to all corners of Nigeria. Although he has often said that no one can Islamise Nigeria, his intention to drag the nation into the 34-member ISMAT is, more than any other thing, an assumption that Nigeria is already a Muslim country, which it is not. 


The first sign that Buhari would drag Nigeria into the petty but dangerous quarrels among factions of the Muslim faith showed in December 2015 when the Nigerian Army responded to a roadblock mounted by the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (the Shiites) by killing hundreds of its members, flattening its enclave in Zaria and taking away its leader, Sheikh Ibrahim El Zakzaky without putting him on trial for any offence till date. In spite of the outrage this provoked from amazed Nigerians and the human rights community, the Federal Government has been cool and unbothered by this crackdown, which elicited a call from Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani to President Buhari to register the concern of his country. The Army said it had to act the way it did to avoid a situation whereby the Zakzaky group would constitute itself into another insurgent group like Boko Haram. 

This explanation probably helped in keeping many Nigerians quiet, but the warning from Shiite Iran betrayed the sectarian dimensions of the scorched earth killing of an ant with a sledgehammer. The plain truth is that majority of Nigerian Muslims (including Buhari) belong to the Sunni sect and do not see eye to eye with the Shiites. The danger of what happened was that Iran probably saw the action of the Nigerian Army which obviously had the backing of the President as official persecution of members of their sect. Shortly after this bloody incident, President Buhari started his many forays of official visits to the Arab world, ostensibly to rally their support to salvage the sagging prices of crude oil in the international market. 

On February 23rd 2016, Buhari had initially and wisely shown his reluctance in directly involving Nigeria in the coalition of Muslim countries fighting Islamic terrorism with this statement: “even if we are not part of it we support you”. But surprisingly, he made an about-face after meeting with Saudi King, Salman Bin Abdul-Aziz. He now was quoted as saying: “We are part of it because we have got terrorists in Nigeria that everybody knows which claims they are Islamic” (referring to Boko Haram). He then added that those (like us) who oppose his intention to send our troops to join ISMAT are “religious bigots” and challenged us to go and fight Boko Haram. 

Buhari is making it seem like joining ISMAT to fight Islamic terrorists is just like Nigeria joining ECOMOG or any other military alliance to confront a collective threat. This is a very myopic and dangerous assumption. In the first place, Nigeria is not qualified for ISMAT membership. There is no data to prove that Muslims are the majority in Nigeria. Even if they are (which I seriously doubt) it does not automatically make Nigeria a “Muslim” country. Senegal, with over 90 per cent of their population being Muslims does not classify itself as a Muslim country. All member-states of ISMAT are Muslim countries. Secondly, they are of the Sunni tradition. 

So, it is like forcing Nigeria to take sides in a conflict between Catholics and Protestants (such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the UK when the former was still involved in its insurgency to force Britain to grant independence to Northern Ireland). When it comes to quarrels between foreign powers, Nigeria has a subsisting policy of non-alignment. Nigeria only joins peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the United Nations and its regional subsets such as the African Union and ECOWAS. Nigeria never joins or openly sides with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) or their rivals, the Warsaw Pact. In fact, Nigeria’s neutrality and independence was forcefully asserted by the students’ uprising against the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact barely two months after independence in 1960. 

I wonder what the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs exists for if not to advise adventurous presidents like Buhari to stay away from committing the country the way he wants to. Nigeria is not a Muslim country. The constitution makes it clear that Nigeria does not have any state religion. Regrettably, successive Muslim presidents find it difficult to respect this constitutional principle. Apart from General Ibrahim Babangida sneaking Nigeria into the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and Buhari taking us to ISMAT, you see things like the Islamic figurines in our national currency called ajami in Arabic. You also see the motto of the Nigerian Army written in Arabic and translated to our common lingua franca, the English language as “Victory Comes From God”. 

Reverend Father Matthew Hassan Kukah in one of his books disclosed that our presidential villa (Aso Rock Villa) built by General Babangida, is a Muslim architecture – in a country that constitutionally does not have state religion! Are these taunts obviously meant to provoke the non-Muslim Nigerians or challenge them to do their worst? Yet, Buhari will come out and proclaim: “no one can Islamise Nigeria”. Beyond the constitutional issue, the danger of Buhari dragging us into ISMAT is that if care is not taken, Northern Nigeria will soon become a theatre of proxy wars between Shiite sects sponsored by Iran and their Sunni counterparts financed by Saudi Arabia and backed by Buhari’s Presidency. 

If we allow Buhari to send a contingent of our troops to help the Saudis to fight their Iran-sponsored enemies in the Middle East, nothing stops Iran from financing and arming Muslim groups to destabilise Nigeria. Already, we do not know who is sponsoring these so-called “Fulani herdsmen” who have been waging wars against communities in the North Central and Southern parts of Nigeria without Buhari saying a word, let alone taking decisive steps to eliminate these people and protect our citizens as he swore an oath to do. Unfortunately, Nigerian students, who rallied nationwide and successfully stopped Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa from signing the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact with Britain seem to have lost their consciousness, if not their conscience. 

The National Assembly must step in and stop Buhari before he lands us in something people never bargained for when they voted for him. Let us control his eagerness to make Nigeria a Saudi satellite state, or the Islamic kingdom’s area of military influence, with its attendant consequences for the survival of Nigeria as a single entity. Take this from me: if Buhari ignores our rejection of his move to take Nigeria into ISMAT, we will have more Islamic terror groups operating in pockets of enclaves all over the North as soon as Boko Haram dies down. By then, Buhari might even no longer be in Aso Rock to face the consequences of his unilateral action. Buhari MUST be stopped from taking Nigeria to ISMAT!

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