STAND BY YOUR MAN, THE MELANIA TRUMP'S WAY.

"But sometimes he cannot stand that somebody attacks him because if somebody attacks him he will punch back ten times harder. He is a fighter and if you elect him president, he will fight for you and our country." - Melania Trump, the next First Lady of the United States of America. ICHEOKU says America needs a strong leader at this hour of our greatest need and Donald Trump is a right fit. Vote Trump and together lets make America great again.

WISCONSIN, PLEASE VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP

Icheoku says Wisconsin please do not join the conspiracy to maintain the status quo and therefore must come through for Donald Trump to help make him unstoppable as he coasts through to make America great again. Please forget all the traps being set and hatchet jobs being done to stop his train to the White House as only The Donald can make America great again. So on Tuesday, VOTE TRUMP and together lets make America great again.

THE CASE FOR BIAFRA, STRONGER THAN SOUTH SUDAN AND KOSOVO - BRUCE FEIN

Biafra, dominated by the great Igbo race, enjoyed sovereignty before Great Britain commenced exploitive colonial rule over Nigeria under the racist banner of Rudyard Kipling’s “the White Man’ burden.” Britain asserted authority over Biafra based on the tyrannical doctrine that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

​The Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-85, and the Berlin General Act symbolized colonial lawlessness by treating Africa as a carcass to be divided up among European vultures.

​Restoration of Biafra’s sovereignty is justified under international law and practice—especially with the ongoing ethnic-inspired killings and persecutions of Biafans by Nigeria’s elected military dictator from the North touting sharia law, President Muhammdu Buhari.

Biafra’s sovereignty journey will require deft international diplomacy and the marshalling of widespread popular support from Biafrans and their resources. Power is never voluntarily surrendered. Rights ultimately are what you are willing to fight and die for.

​Prior to British colonization in 1906, the great Igbo people to the East of Niger, numbering some 3 million, and their cognate tribes enjoyed decentralized self-government. They were not living in a state of nature. Their self-rule came by force of arms—not voluntarily.

In 1900, the British government assumed responsibility for the Royal Niger Company’s territories, and formed the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, the Niger Coast Protectorate and the Lagos Colony Protectorate territories. 1913 witnessed the amalgamation of Nigeria into three administrative areas: the crown colony of Lagos and the Protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria.

​In 1960, Britain ended its colonization of Nigeria without reference to the Igbo or any other peoples of Nigeria entitled to self-determination. The Nigeria Independence Act established Nigerian territorial boundaries not by popular referendum or other reliable manifestations of self-determination of peoples, but according to the Nigeria’s Orders in Council, 1954 to 1960. They reflected British selfish maneuvers to dominate Nigeria economically.

Britain’s failure to offer Biafrans the right to self-determination violated the United Nations General Assembly Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples adopted on 14 December 1960. Paragraph 5 of the Declaration required that immediate steps be taken by the colonial power “to transfer all powers to the peoples of those [colonized] territories…in accordance with their freely expressed will and desire…in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.” The 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations emphasized that, “By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, all peoples have the right freely to determine without external interference their political status….”

The people of Biafra—recognized as distinct by British colonial authorities—were never provided an opportunity to vote for complete independence and freedom from the rest of Nigeria according to their freely expressed will and desire. They were never consulted on the subject when Nigeria became independent in 1960. Further, the 1960 Constitution of Nigeria was never approved by the people of Biafra in a referendum or otherwise. And neither has any subsequent Nigerian Constitution, including the current version decreed by a military dictator in 1999.

​In sum, the British decolonized Nigeria in violation of international law by failing to transfer power to the peoples of Biafra in accordance with their freely expressed will.

​That violation was not a technicality, but an affront to a fundamental human right. All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent is required to legitimate authority and to forestall external subjugation, oppression, persecution, or even genocide fueled by tribal, sectarian, ethnic, or megalomaniacal ambitions or hatreds.

​After independence from Britain, Nigeria soon became a charnel house for Biafrans. Deprived of their right to self-determination, they were left to the tender mercies of the Hausa-Fulani of the North and the Yoruba of the South in a unitary state unsuited for its diverse tribal, ethnic, and religious landscape. The gruesome 1967-1970 Biafran War was emblematic. Ethnic-based massacres of Biafrans and countless starving children who died as little more than skeletons was its grim face. The horrors suffered by Biafrans gave birth to the first modern international relief effort to lessen unspeakable misery.

​At the war’s conclusion, Nigeria’s General Yakuba Gowon’s sloganeered, “No victor, no vanquished.” The words proved a cruel hoax. The Igbo were marginalized, persecuted as traitors, and subjected to a Northern political yolk. Under incumbent Nigerian elected military dictator Buhari, the repression of the Igbo have reached new heights featuring indiscriminate killings, torture, and detentions without trial.

​Last March, for instance, 13 Biafrans were murdered and their corpses burnt to ashes and dumped in a burrow pit located in the area of Aba-Port Harcourt Road in Abia State by suspected Buhari agents. Last February, a team of Buhari’s Army, Navy, and Police and gunned down 22 Biafrans protesting Buhari’s detention of Biafran leader Prince Nnamdi Kanu.

​A complete chronicle of Buhari’s horrors only would numb by repetition.

​The point is that there is no political remedy for Biafra’s suffering—like an abused wife in a forced marriage—short of self-determination to regain its sovereignty that was illegally extinguished by the British and never surrendered after decolonization.

​States born from longstanding repression of peoples by ruling authorities are part of the woof and warp of international law or custom. Think of Bangladesh, Namibia, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Eritrea, and Kosovo.

​The case for Biafran sovereignty is as strong or stronger as these precedents.

​But to succeed, Biafrans will need to organize, unify, and make their case to the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States.

​If they do not all hang together, they might all come to hang separately.

NIGERIANS ARE NOT FED UP WITH CORRUPTION YET - FEMI ARIBISALA

“There is no fight against corruption in Nigeria. And if there’s no fight against corruption, you can’t even talk about war. Corruption cannot be narrowly defined the way Ezekwesili defined it, only relating to public institutions. We are corrupt in Nigeria. The plumber, the tailor, the whole society is corrupt. And, we have not yet taken a decision, we have not yet gotten to a point where we are fed up. I mean, she (Mrs. Ezekwesili) had given an example of Hong Kong where people became fed up and said enough is enough. We have not reached that situation yet, I don’t know why not, but we certainly have not. 

The 2015 election was not an anti-corruption election. We did not have any political party that presented an anti-corruption mandate to us. The party that won the election was just a makeover of the PDP, I mean, the PDP people moved from the PDP to the APC. If they were corrupt when they were in PDP, they became clean now that they are in APC. So there is no mandate against corruption. If President Buhari was determined to fight against corruption, my feeling is that he gave up after losing election three times. Because the fourth time, he formed an alliance with people who he despised before. And they were not necessarily people who had a track record of being (sic) anti-corruption. So today, I don’t know who is anti-corruption.” - Femi Aribisala.

Icheoku says give it up to Femi Aribisala for taking it to the APC government and their pretentious war on corruption. A government populated by people who are mired in corruption themselves, but who choose to pretend otherwise and you wonder where such pharisaic tendency will ever lead Nigeria to.

BUHARI CANNOT FIGHT CORRUPTION - ARIBISALA..

"If President Buhari was determined to fight against corruption, my feeling is that he gave up after losing election three times. Because the fourth time, he formed an alliance with people who he despised before. And they were not necessarily people who had a track record of being anti-corruption." - Femi Aribisala.

"I DID NOT HAVE SEX WITH ALL OF THE WOMEN" - TED CRUZ

Icheoku says then tell Americans those ones you had sex with; but please spare us all the deja vu general denial of "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky" of the Bill Clinton sexual escapade saga. Icheoku generally does not butt in nor have any beef with any man or woman who is cheating on their spouse. It is such a victim's spouse to either put up with such a philandering partner or throw them to the curbside. As far as Icheoku is concerned, it is those couples' private affair and it should be left solely as that, theirs alone to sort out. But where a supposedly upright man of God, who swears by the scriptures and lives the pretentious family value life, has any skeletons in his cupboard that make him less than the holy one he puts up appearance as; then such person has crossed the line. This double-faced life of living a lie, is what Icheoku has beef with. 

Therefore Icheoku calls on Ted Cruz to categorically deny the National Inquirer story, disavow those women and challenge them to come up with evidence of the dalliance or shut up. A matter now made more pressing with three of the five women identified as Katrina Pierson, Sarah Isgar Flores and Amanda Carpenter. It is just not enough for the candidate, Ted Cruz, to dismissively wave the story aside as a hit piece done on him by camp Trump, because John Edwards tried same with his love child only to later leak his spit; ditto OJ Simpson with the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman; as well as the Bill Clinton's Monicagate Lewinsky scandal. 

So while Icheoku is not saying that the tabloid got it right again this time with the story of the philandering Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz should go a step further to prove his innocence with a law suit or its threat; and also demand the recanting of the entire story as well as damages. This is the only plausible action of a man maligned or defamed; and if he fails to do so, the cloud of infidelity will continue to hover over him like a hallo and it will shadow him throughout this election season. So Ted Cruz, is it true?

AMERICA FIRST, NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

"So America first, yes, we will not be ripped off anymore. We're going to be friendly with everybody, but we're not going to be taken advantage of by anybody." - Donald Trump. Icheoku says the front runner in the Republican Party presidential primaries and president in waiting, the 45th POTUS to be, Donald John Trump, is right that his administration's foreign policy is going to be "America before others" in respect of America's dealings with the rest of the world. Icheoku agrees that it is not a trite policy to be taking care of everybody in the world while our own veterans, the poor and the needy, are left holding the plates on the streets, defecating on sidewalks and being over-exposed to the elements. Icheoku agrees with DT that while America will be a friend to all, America will not allow itself to be used by anyone, not anymore. Surely a good foreign policy initiative that will save America a lot of money and per adventure help heal the staggering deficit. Go Trump and together lets help make America great again.

ISLAMIC TERRORISM, TOUCH-DOWN BELGIUM.

Icheoku says the fast metastasizing global Islamic terrorism, trying as hard as it may to impose Islamic will on civilized societies, managed to snake into Belgium today and wrecked its usual havoc and mayhem. At the end of the cowardly act of terror, 34 Belgians lay dead; with over 200 others wounded, many critically. The terrorists penetrated the security web of Belgium to rain down their usual sorrow, blood and tears and you wonder where else is safe and likely on their target to do list or rather bulls-eye? 

From India to Somalia to Kenya to Nigeria to America to Canada to England to France to Spain to Afghanistan to Syria to Russia to Iraq to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Egypt to Israel to China to Mali to Ivory Coast, as well as several other places it have struck, it is the same people, from the same religion and you wonder what is really going on. Is violence the exclusive preserve of these munchkins who think that they can intimidate mankind into their warped way of life and supposed religion? Anyway, it will not be too long for a king who does not know Joseph to call for rendering of account. Donald John Trump is coming and as the 45th president of America, he will decisively fight this cancer of Islamist extremism and the whole world will be a better and safer place when he finishes with them. 

Icheoku says for those partisans who are calling out President Barack Obama for not calling off his visit to Cuba and Argentina and rush back to Washington because of the attack, Icheoku says Belgians have their own president and Belgium is not a 51st state of the United States of America. The president has done what is expected of him and should be done:- he acknowledged the attack; he prayed for the victims; he pledged assistance; possibly have spoken to Belgian leaders stating that America will stand shoulder to shoulder with Belgians, our friend and ally, in fighting terror world-wide and in bringing those terrorists to justice. But as always, partisans will always do what they do best, trying to milk every situation to push their partisan agenda. This is the reason for the season of Donald Trump; who is trumping everybody because Americans see and hear him as a leader they can trust to do what needs to be done without so much pandering or speaking on both sides of the mouth like all those other crass politicians. 

Our hearts go out to all Belgians in this their hour of great tribulation; and to all those who lost their lives today in that unspeakable, horrible act of Islamist terrorism, Icheoku says rest in peace. Their 9/11; their Juis Charlie; their Bataclan massacre; their Boko Haram massacres; and their every other terrorists attacks suffered by every other people anywhere in the world, will not be forgotten. Icheoku says let Belgians and every other people in the world, afflicted or affected by Islamist terrorism, know that help is on the way and Donald Trump, the exterminator, will do what he said he will do to rid the world of this pestilence. 

However, Icheoku does not understand why it is only whenever white people and white countries fall victim of terrorism that the world seem to hone in? Why does it take only a terror strike in Europe or America or Russia or China, that Islamist terrorism effervesces to the top center stage. How about Boko Haram Islamists terrorism that has been wrecking havoc on Nigeria for several years now? How about Syria? How about Pakistan? How about Turkey? How about Iraq? How about Kenya? How about Somalia? How about Egypt and how about everybody everywhere that has suffered in the hands of these animals. Every life should matter, whether black or white or brown or purple or pink; we are a one world and we all should be our brothers and sisters keepers, a one-cap fits all world. Belgians, the whole world is with you and together, those Islamists urchins will be routed. Our condolences.

OBAMA VISITS CASTRO'S CUBA.

Icheoku says this symbolic reaching out of hand of friendship and fellowship by President Barack Obama of America to Raul Castro's Cuba, is highly commendable. Icheoku hopes it will finally pave the way and be the igniting device for more things to come between the Island nation and the United States of America. 

Two memorable quotes by the two leaders:- 

"America believes in democracy. We believe that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion are not just American values but are universal values."  - President Barack Obama. 

"Tell me now. What political prisoners? Give me a name, or the names and if there are these political prisoners they will be free before nightfall." - President Raul Castro.

Icheoku wishes both countries well and prays for such mending of fences throughout the world. Iran is thawing, Cuba is on course and soon may be North Korea? Why not, since it costs less to live in peace than it costs to live edgily trigger-ready.

TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT TRUMP - JUDGE JEANIE

1. He thwarts the wishes of the Washington establishment class.

2. He is waaaaaay better than Mitt Romney…and will turn out the vote.

3. He’s a good dad. 

4. They have a close,long lasting friendship. 

5. He's a natural. 

6. He has a string work ethic. 

7. She agrees with him. 

8. He can win in November. 

9. He is free to speak his mind, because he understands he “isn’t responsible for someone else’s reaction” to his opinion.

10. He’s willing to change his mind when he gets new information.

As for Icheoku, everything about what Donald Trump says is in agreement with our own idea on the way forward; and together we will help make America great again. 

DONALD TRUMP'S TRAVAILS, EXPLAINED?

ICHEOKU says just like Jesus Christ survived his traducers who tried to stop him for speaking the truth, Donald Trump will survive the current umbrage of haters piling up on him and trying to stop him from reaching the White House. Donald Trump will eventually emerge victorious in his campaign to make America great again as the 45th president of the United States of America. 

Donald Trump is speaking the truth and it is not a crime; admitted it takes a lot of courage and he got it mightily. The primary reason American people are flocking to Donald Trump is that he is speaking to their hearts and about what many things gone awry in and with the country, which many oddball politicians are thinking about but which political correctness does not allow them to vocalize. His utterances are music to the ears and only a blind man will not see the so many things wrong with America which needs urgent attention. The Greek philosopher Plato foresaw this many centuries ago and warned about it. Icheoku says Go Donald, build that wall, make America great again and no weapon fashioned against you will prosper IJN. 

ARIZONA AND UTAH, PLEASE HELP KEEP TRUMP ROLLING.

Icheoku says a vote for Donald Trump will disarm his detractors who are trying to steal the nomination which they could not win. So lets give establishment politicians and politics as usual a well deserved knock out punch, VOTE FOR TRUMP.

MITT ROMNEY, THE VILLAIN, STRIKES AGAIN

Icheoku says this time, the Mormon and the man who tied his family dog on rooftop of a car for a twelve hour journey, has driven the Brutus dagger into the rib-side of Ohio Governor and presidential candidate John Kasich. A man he earlier endorsed, only to now, suddenly switch sides to crossover and endorse Ted Cruz. Icheoku says what changed or was Ted Cruz not there all along especially when his endorsement of Kasich took place. 

Anyway, Mitt is a loser and a choker; and he can hate Donald Trump all he wants, but Americans have since decided on Trump. Mitt Romney has since been consigned to the garbage of irrelevance and no American listens to him any longer. At best the endorsement will be a death sentence for the already lackluster Ted Cruz's campaign. Now Ted Cruz will be tainted and tagged with the establishment and entrenched politicians badge of dishonor. Ted Cruz has now been marked with the curse of Mitt Romney. The good news is that both Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz will be trumped by the Trump. Go Trump and together lets make America great again.

THE EVIL WOMAN AND WITCH OF ENDOR, DEFEATED.

Icheoku says in Michigan and the worst of it all is that it was by a 75 year old and tired, grey-haired, grandfather. If the Hippie Bernie can do this to Hillary, imagine what the vivacious and energized Donald Trump will do to her - use her to mop the floor. Say NO TO THE WOMAN WHO KILLED GADDAFI, the King of Africa. ICHEOKU says smart people do not accept to be told what to do and have refused to fall in line behind the machine. Away with the Clintons.

NAIRA'S FLOP IS DOOMSDAY FORETOLD - JOSEF OMOROTIONMWAN

EVERY corruption case in Nigeria  has an expiry date. This is one clear area where we shall consistently return to His Eminence, the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who we think can author a bestseller any day on the subject, being one Nigerian who thoroughly understands the Nigerian psyche and knows exactly when to do what. Truly, from very early in life, we have been indoctrinated into thinking that it is wrong to do any deep narrative on kings and the dead. While the latter must be allowed to rest in peace, the former deserve honour as God’s representatives on earth. Were these absolutely true, those volumes on the enlightened depots of centuries past would not have appeared. The Bible, which mainly chronicles the activities of the dead would never have been written. 

For us, the King deserves deep reverence but he must be talked about. Those of them who have not respected the law must face the law. It is too soon to forget how Sanusi, as the immediate-past Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, turned that body into a Republic within a Republic. Indeed, the collapse of the Naira today is doomsday foretold. We saw it coming. You can’t run the CBN with the type of impunity with which Idi-Amin ran the economy of Uganda and not expect the type of disaster we have in our hands today. Students of history will also easily remember that the Deutschemark suffered the same fate in post World-War II Germany. 

Again, Sanusi represents an archetype of the average Nigerian in authority. Space will only permit us to provide a synopsis of some of his deeds: In about 63 “intervention projects” mainly in Northern Nigeria and sparsely in the South, Sanusi turned CBN into a Father Christmas by doling out about N163 billion from the public till without any legislative approval and authorisation in utter defiance of the provisions of Sections 80(1) and 80(2) of our 1999 Constitution, which deal with issues of revenue and expenditure of the Federation. In August 2009, the CBN, under Sanusi’s watch pumped N400 billion of public fund into bailing out Afribank, Intercontinental Bank, Union Bank, Oceanic Bank and Finbank. The CBN single-handedly decided which of the commercial banks manifested distress signs and how much to give to them, without recourse to any legislative approval. 

In the eye of the Financial Reporting Council, FRC, the CBN under Sanusi’s watch embarked on a most reckless spending spree, the type of squander-mania never imagined in the history of the CBN, including N38.23 billion alleged missing in 2013. This amount was alleged to have been paid to the CBN subsidiary, MINT, but it never got to its destination. In 2011, CBN was said to have paid N38 billion to the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company, NSPMC, for the printing of banknotes, when in the entire year, the total turnover of NSPMC was only N29 billion! In the same year, 2011, CBN allegedly claimed paying N511 million, N425 million and N1 billion to Emirate, Wing and Associated Airlines respectively, for currency distribution nationwide. While Emirate had no local charter service, Wing Airline was not even registered in Nigeria and Associated Airline had a total turnover of less than N1 billion in that year. The exhaustive list of rots in the CBN, which cannot be contained here is perhaps an arm-long. 

Yet, in the process, Sanusi had an avalanche of superior and subordinate officers around him.  If we say Sanusi is guilty as charged, it simply follows that those who were paid to supervise him must be ten times guilty! From a distance, we kept reminding Nigerians that Sanusi was operating a Republic within a Republic. We wrote several articles on the issue, including “Still Celebrating Profligacy” and “Who Is Now the President?” as far back as 2011 and 2013 respectively but Sanusi was evidently untouchable. If all these could happen in a small CBN, located at the city centre, you can imagine what happened in a bigger and clumsier place like NNPC, located largely in the creeks. And if Sanusi was untouchable as a public servant, who now wants to go to his new giddy heights? Long live the King! We expressed our initial concern on the Sanusi escapade when we asked in this column, “Who were Sanusi’s Supervisors?” 

It takes more than one to be corrupt. Corruption is a chain, which like any other chain, is only as strong as its weakest link. Sanusi operated under Presidents and Ministers; he operated under a full-fledged National Assembly with its numerous bogus committees; and he operated literally with thousands of Nigerians who saw crime and didn’t call police! With Sanusi out of the system, the same people who facilitated his deeds are still in the system, doing for other corrupt elements what they did for Sanusi. And so, the chain continues. In Sanusi’s years, where there was no immediate cash to carry out his escapade, he proceeded to print the banknotes. Who, then, is still wondering why the Naira today is barely worth the paper on which it is printed? For all we know, a nation’s economy is like a fowl – it comes home to roost! 

Until we evolve a system where every offender has a taste of his poison through prison experience, we are not fighting any corruption. That system stands on sinking sand, where at the end of tenure, a governor heads for jail and the legislators who consistently gave him his annual appropriations walk our streets in freedom when the approval of this year’s appropriation presupposes that legislators are satisfied with what the governor did with the previous year’s approval. What else is the essence of the legislative oversight of the administration? Yesterday, it was Sanusi; today, it is Dasuki; but between Sanusi and Dasuki, there are at least a thousand Nigerians who should not be walking our streets in freedom – if we are really serious about fighting corruption.

SANDERS' HARD LESSON, ATTACKING TRUMP IS AKIN TO TAKING POISON.

Icheoku says if only the silver-haired grandpa Bernie Sanders had consulted JEB or any of the other now gone Republican presidential candidates wanna be, he would have known that staying alive this political season is abstaining from attacking Donald Trump. His hooligans attacked Trump's event in Chicago and the old man, instead of apologizing and restraining them, doubled up. 

His punishment, he was trounced by the shrill-voiced woman, Hillary Clinton, abysmally losing to her throughout all the five states with no exception - Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Even states he would have ordinarily won, being nearly whites only, he still lost to that woman, Hillary Clinton. Icheoku says this is the fate which befalls and awaits any attacker who shall mouth off against the peoples' choice and God's anointed one to make America great again. Icheoku says it is Donald Trump all the way to the White House and everything is lined up in the stars to mission accomplish it. Go Trump and together lets make America great again. Also build the darn wall and make Mexico pay for it as there will be a great wall of America too.

WOLE SOYINKA HAS GONE WRONG AGAIN - CHUKS ILOEGBUNA

THE  first time Wole Soyinka misdirected himself, it had to do with his “cautious endorsement” of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy. He offered a platter of reasons for the stunning faux pas, of course. But, post-election, his out of sync reading of Nigerian politics has been patently exposed. To recap, it happened that in the run-up to the presidential ballot, Professor Soyinka, long time combatant on the side of the oppressed, announced that the best thing that could happen to Nigeria was a President Buhari. His rationalisation: “It is pointlessly, and dangerously provocative to present General Buhari as something that he probably was not. It is however just as purblind to insist that he has not demonstrably striven to become what he most glaringly was not, to insist that he has not been chastened by intervening experience and – most critically – by a vastly transformed environment – both the localised and the global.” 

Aware that his about-face would set teeth on edge, Soyinka took the pains to further explain his Road-to-Damascus conversion. He had become a Buhari flag-waver, having “studied him from a distance, questioned those who have closely interacted with him, including his former running-mate, Pastor Bakare, and dissected his key utterances past and current.” He underpinned his implausible argument with his location in Buhari of “A plausible transformation that comes close to that of another ex-military dictator, Mathieu Kerekou of the Benin Republic.” Some of those unconvinced at the time went public with their disagreement. How vindicated they now are! President Kerekou had apologised in front of his people for the wantonness of his military dictatorship before they granted him a shot at democratic leadership. 

But, Buhari would have absolutely nothing to do with remorse and apologies, not even for heading a junta that executed its citizens on the strength of a retroactive decree, and not for other wild excesses of his despotic rule, for which Soyinka, in better days, had been indignant: “Of course, we know that human beings change. What the claims of personality change or transformation impose on us is a rigorous inspection of the evidence, not wishful speculation or behind-the-scenes assurances. Public offence, crimes against a polity, must be answered in the public space, not in caucuses of bargaining. In Buhari, we have been offered no evidence of the sheerest prospect of change. On the contrary, all evidence suggests that this is one individual who remains convinced that this is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to order.” 

Well, Buhari’s presidency is not even a year old and already the chickens have come home to roost. During the 1970s, Soyinka criticised Uganda’s Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada for converting his country’s universities into toys. Only recently, Buhari, with a mere press statement by one of his subordinates, fired the Vice Chancellors of 14 Federal universities, an irrational move unsupported by any known Nigerian statute. Is Soyinka unaware of this? In his Introduction to The movement of transition: a study of the plays of Wole Soyinka [Ibadan University Press, 1975], Professor Oyin Ogunba told the fascinating story of how, during an Ife Varsity conference, Soyinka had dramatically borrowed a piece of paper from someone, to pen an instant letter of resignation because a high official of the institution had mouthed a new and arbitrary administrative policy he could not live down. How time wounds all heels. 

While, in-between global junketing, Buhari has been busy on a firing spree, his field commanders have been firing at and killing peaceful pro-Biafra demonstrators. In fact, they seem minded to match, if not surpass, the unenviable record of massacres set by Olusegun Obasanjo in Odi and Zaki Biam, when they massacred nearly a thousand Shias in Zaria. Pray, in what way does this contemporary preying on human lives begin to equate the transformation that our Soyinka discovered in Kerekou? While an undergraduate at Ife during the 1970s, and working on freelance basis for The Punch group of newspapers, I recall approaching Soyinka to issue a damning statement over the 20 or so suspects that suffocated inside a Police Black Maria, and he obliged! 

This kind of memory jerks the consciousness into conceiving of our man at the barricades with placard-bearing demonstrators insisting that an immediate stoppage must be put to President Buhari’s human rites. Rather, our Soyinka of the “Justice is the first condition of humanity” fame, decided on appropriating a turf better left to the devices of by people with the éclat and élan for economics and public finance. Soyinka wants an ‘emergency conference” to fix the country’s “dire” economy! As was the case with his “cautious endorsement,” he is fluent with reasons. “Recovery is going to take quite a while…the President should call an emergency economic conference, with experts to be invited. Consumers, producers, labour unions, university experts, professors, etc. I think we really need an emergency economic conference, a rescue operation bringing as many heads as possible together to plot the way forward.” 

Soyinka’s difficulty in this new adventure is three-pronged. To start with, it is preposterous, unless our man will claim that between the superstructure and the substructure, he would place primacy on the latter? In which case the onus would be on him to list the numerous ways in which the inhabitants of graves benefit from buoyant economies. Of course, the problem is also to do national amnesia. There was a national conference held recently in this country. Its report is presumably on the presidential shelf, gathering dust. It quite possibly has been binned. Now, if the report of a properly constituted national conference is unworthy of attention, where is the assurance that the outcome of Soyinka’s emergency conference will attract other than skeptical presidential smiles or guffaws? 

Another fundamental disability of his recommendation is that the man in charge of the economy believes that it is soaring. As Soyinka was somewhere wailing about an economy going under, Buhari was elsewhere insisting that “Today, our country has the fastest growing economy in Africa and one of the fastest in the world.” So, who really requires a talk shop on an economy that is firing on all cylinders? Soyinka’s third handicap is the most dangerous – to him! Through the past year, Buhari and all the newcomers have been hammering it into every thick skull that the country’s problem was and still is the PDP. Therefore, doesn’t it occur to the Nobel Laureate that his emergency conference is tied into the uncanny prospect of proffering the problem as solution? 

How could we have “consumers, producers, labour unions, university experts, professors, etc.,” in whose ranks are PDP cadres, looters, stalwarts and foot soldiers, salvaging the economy? Doesn’t Soyinka realise that his idea, liable to contaminate the antiseptic purity of Buhari’s APC with tainted victims of change, could get him wrapped up on a treasonous charge? As an ardent and long-standing fan of Soyinka’s, I have advice for the “grey-haired lion”. Please leave President Buhari well alone. The man has experts in quantum, including those who would host a dinner for N82 million and others who would upgrade a personal website at N78 million, to confer with. Together, this amalgam can, in great speed, navigate the Nigerian economy to ether. Chuks Iloegbunam