The Presidency on Saturday reacted to reports that President Muhammadu Buhari’s daughter flew a presidential jet for her private business.
In a text to DAILY POST, Buhari’s media aide, Garba Shehu said the criticism that followed the situation was misplaced.
“Criticism is the rights of Nigerians. It is, however, misplaced in this circumstance. We have issued a statement about this issue.”
Reports had it that Buhari’s daughter, Hanan flew in a presidential jet to an occasion in Bauchi State.
Hannan, who is a first class graduate in photography was said to have been invited to the Durbar by Rilwanu Adamu, Emir of Bauchi, on Thursday.
Pictures which surfaced online showed that Hannan was accorded a warm reception by officials of the state waiting for her at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa International Airport.
The daughter of the president was said to have visited the state to document the event and other tourist attractions in the state as a professional photographer.
Hanna’s visit, however, elicited a lot of criticism from Nigerians who frowned at the choice of her flying a presidential jet for her personal business.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Saturday stated that President Muhammadu Buhari directly abused his office and exhibited the worst form of corruption by detailing the officially restricted Presidential jet to chauffeur his daughter, Hanan, for her private photography event in Bauchi state.
PDP described the action as provocative, condemnable, completely improper and an unpardonable slap on the sensibilities of millions of Nigerians, particularly, the youths, who look up to the President for integrity, uprightness and respect for rules.
Reports had it that Hanan flew in a presidential jet to an occasion in Bauchi State.
Hannan, who is a first class graduate in photography was said to have been invited to the Durbar by Rilwanu Adamu, Emir of Bauchi, on Thursday.
Pictures which surfaced online showed that Hannan was accorded a warm reception by officials of the state waiting for her at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa International Airport.
Hanna’s visit, however, elicited a lot of criticism from Nigerians who frowned at the choice of her flying a presidential jet for her personal business.
But, Buhari’s Media Aide, Garba Shehu in a swift reaction rubbished the criticisms that greeted the development.
However, PDP stated that the development is a strong pointer to the recklessness that pervades the Buhari Presidency and the indefensible annexation of our national assets and resources for illegal private use.
A statement by PDP’s spokesperson, Kola Ologbondiyan sent to DAILY POST reads: “It is even most appalling that instead of apologizing to Nigerians, the Buhari Presidency, in its arrogance, is resorting to falsehood and trying to justify the inexcusable.
“Our party holds that Mr. President should apologise for approving that her daughter uses the Presidential jet just for the purpose of allegedly taking photographs in a Durbar event in Bauchi state.
“Perhaps, the Buhari Presidency forgot that it is public knowledge that the Presidential fleet can only be authorized for use by the President, the First Lady, Vice President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, former Presidents, Presidential delegation and no one else.
“Moreover, the rules do not grant the President any powers to transfer any paraphernalia of office or privileges of his position to any of his children.”
PDP stated that the Presidency’s defence was a direct spat on millions of Nigerians who cannot freely ply our highways because Buhari and his party the APC, have failed to fix and rid our roads of kidnappers and bandits, who have practically taken over major routes under their despicable watch.
The opposition party noted that never in the history of Nigeria has a Presidency exhibited such arrogance, impunity and corruption, adding that the action has further shown that the Buhari Presidency had only been parading and getting away with false integrity.
“Nigerians could recall how President Buhari heavily accused and criticized previous administrations of voting and wasting huge resources to maintain the Presidential fleet and promised to sell off most of the planes to save cost.
“Since President Buhari assumed office, none of the planes had been sold. Instead, the Buhari Presidency had continued to budget more funds for the fleet with N8.5 bn budgeted for 2020 alone, only to approve that his daughter use a Presidential jet for her private photography event,” the statement added.
(FILES) In this file photograph taken on November 13, 1967, a Nigerian federal army soldier points to a sign in Calabar, the oldest port on the West African coast, after the federal troops took the city from the Biafran rebellion, during the Biafran war. Colin HAYNES / AFP
Dikoye Oyeyinka, 33, has been billed as one of the most promising Nigerian writers of his generation.
He went to some of the finest schools in his West African homeland but says that like the majority of his classmates he “didn’t know about Biafra until I was 14”.
When he did begin to find out about the brutal civil war that nearly tore Nigeria apart, it was not in the classroom.
Instead, it was a schoolmate in his dormitory who showed him a separatist leaflet demanding Nigeria’s southeast break away from the rest of the country.
Before then Oyeyinka had known nothing about how leaders from the Igbo ethnic group declared the independent state of Biafra in 1967.
(FILES) In this file photograph taken on August 16, 1967, Colonel Odumegwu Emeka Ojukwu, the leader of the breakaway Republic of Biafra, stands in front of a Biafra flag as he addresses a press conference in Enugu. AFP
He knew nothing of the conflict that resulted and the 30 months of fighting and famine estimated to have cost over a million lives before the secessionists surrendered 50 years ago in January 1970.
“We’ve had a very brutal history, the older generation went through a lot of trauma,” Oyeyinka told AFP.
“We just sweep it under the carpet, pretending nothing happened. But without knowing our history we will repeat the same mistakes. Our history is a succession of deja-vu.”
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It was to try to break this cycle of ignorance that the Oyeyinka wrote the novel Stillborn – a historic epic about Nigeria from the days of British colonial rule from 1950 to 2010.
In it, the civil war is the pivotal event.
‘Our History, Our Conflict’
Unlike other famed Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with her novel Half Of A Yellow Sun, or Chinua Achebe’s memoir There Was A Country, Oyeyinka is one of the few non-Igbo writers to have dwelt on the conflict.
“An Igbo friend got angry at me and said ‘You can’t write about us, it’s our conflict’,” he recounted.
But Oyeyinka insists that all Nigerians need to be made aware of what happened.
“We need to address these traumas ourselves, as a country, otherwise we are a tinder box ready to explode.”
While in the rest of Africa’s most populous nation many know little about the history of Biafra, in the former capital of the self-proclaimed state at Enugu the memory of those years lives on.
(FILES) In this file photograph taken on May 28, 2017, supporters of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) march through the Osusu district in Aba. STEFAN HEUNIS / AFP
Biafran flags — an iconic red, black and green with a rising golden sun — make appearances on the front of buildings and hardline separatists still demand independence.
The security forces — deployed heavily in the region — are quick to stamp out any clamour for a new Biafra. At the end of the war in 1970, Nigeria’s war leader Yukubu Gowon famously declared there would be “no victor, no vanquished” as he sought to reunite his shattered country.
(FILES) In this file photograph taken on August 31, 1968, a pair of child soldiers of the Biafran army, Moise, 14 (L) and Ferdinand, 16 (R) speak in Umuahia as the Nigerian federal troops continue their advance during the Biafran war. Francois Mazure / AFP
The leader of the breakaway Republic of Biafra, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, went into exile for 13 years before being pardoned. He returned to Nigerian politics but was detained for 10 months in prison.
Leading Nigerian intellectual Pat Utomi says that many Igbos — the country’s third-biggest ethnic group after the Hausa and the Yoruba — still feel marginalised.
One key event was when current President Muhammadu Buhari — then a military chief — seized power in 1983, and stopped the only Igbo aspirant to get close to leading Nigeria since the war from becoming head of state.
“In the early 1980s, people had forgotten about the war, but this succession of poor leadership brought bitterness among the new generations,” Utomi said.
‘More Divided’
Nowadays any incident — from the closure of the only airport in the southeast last year to the sacking of Igbo shops by customs officials in economic hub Lagos — can cause grievances to flare.
“It’s important to deal with history, to write it down. In Nigeria, we try to cover it up,” Utomi said.
“We are more divided today than we’ve ever been before the civil war. We learnt nothing from it.”
In order to try to heal the rifts, Utomi helped organise a “Never Again” conference aiming to bring together key cultural and political figures to discuss the lessons of the Biafra war half a century after it ended.
He is also a patron of the “Centre for Memories” in Enugu, a combination of a museum and library where visitors can come and “dig into history”.
‘History Is Essential’
History itself has been absent from Nigerian schools.
The current government reintroduced it only from the last term as an obligatory subject for pupils aged 10 to 13, after more than a decade off the curriculum.
“Teaching history is essential to build our identity as a country, and defend our patriotic values,” said Sonny Echono, permanent secretary at the education ministry.
But schools still remain woefully short of qualified history teachers and there is no unified narrative about the civil war which does not figure in the lessons.
“We need to teach the war in our schools,” said Egodi Uchendu, a history professor at the University of Nsukka, in the former Biafra territory.
“Eastern Nigeria is completely different from how it was experienced in other parts of the country. We need to bring in the different angles to it.”
Chika Oduah, a Nigerian-American journalist, has crossed the country to collect hundreds of testimonies of the victims and combatants of the Biafra conflict which she publishes on her website Biafran War Memories.
She says that for many of those she interviewed it was the first time they had retold the horrors of the period.
“A 70-something former soldier… broke down crying, when he told me how he lost his brother during the war,” she said.
She herself only learnt at the age of 17 that her mother as a child spent two years in a camp for displaced people.
“Our parents wanted to move on, not look at the past,” Oduah insisted.
“But we need to talk about it, otherwise we won’t heal”.
Dangote Group has concluded plans to purchase 10,000 light pickup trucks.
But the company appears to have shunned Nigerian carmaker, Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing, IVM, as trucks are coming in from Indonesia.
Putu Juli Ardika, the Indonesian Director of Maritime Industry, Transportation Equipment and Defense Equipment, the vehicles would be purchased by Aliko Dangote through his company, Dangote Group.
Ardika explained that the trucks would be imported into Nigeria to serve as means of transportation to rural communities.
He said the vehicles would be used by farmers and others in Nigeria’s agricultural value chain, to transport water, cassava, and seed processors.
“Dangote’s team will check three units as a sample to be brought to Africa at the end of January.
“The trucks are set to be exported over five years, with 1,000 units to be exported this year and next year,” Putu said.
Nigeria can still redeem itself. It has been 50 years since we proclaimed, “No Victors, No Vanquished.” It is time to truly end the war; and it is not just the war against Biafra, as Soyinka noted, but that against the millions of duped and dispossessed citizens. That is the only way we can avert another war!
January 15 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Nigerian Civil War and the official end of the short-lived Republic of Biafra. It is unlikely there will be any national event to mark the occasion other than the annual Remembrance Day ritual, which has become nothing but a cash cow for those involved in organising the ceremony. But the civil war was not only a defining moment for Nigeria, it has continued to define the country. As Prof Yakubu Ochefu notes in the introduction to the 2013 book, Nigeria is Negotiable, “The corporate existence of the country has been tested twice. It was formally broken once (1967-70) and pronounced broken once (April 1990). It took a horrible civil war to restore the entity when it was broken and an equally brutal attempted coup when it was pronounced.”
Fifty years after the end of the civil war, what lessons have we learnt as a nation? It appears not much. At the end of the war in January 1970, when the remnants of the Biafra high command signed the article of surrender, the victors, the “Federal forces” proclaimed, “No victors, No vanquished.” Unfortunately, 50 years after, it has become evident that the cheque of “No victors, No vanquished” issued in 1970 is not cashable. The debate is still raging whether the war was necessary and if the region that became known as Biafra had a moral right to secede.
Fifty years after, those who still live with the victors’ mentality that because a people were “defeated” in a civil war, they should perpetually stay under have remained in control of the country. Looking back, it appears the vanquished have not paid the full price—whatever that is—for daring to test the supposedly divinely ordained and non-negotiable corporate existence of the country. A little example will suffice. On Sunday, September 29, 2019, I arrived the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport wearing a T-shirt with the inscription, “We Are All Biafrans,” the title of my book first published in May 2016, later updated, and republished in November 2018. I was arrested by officers of the State Security Service and detained for more than six hours, first at their office at the airport and later at their headquarters in the Aso Drive area of Abuja. The first question I was asked at the airport was, “You are a Biafran, how come you have a Nigerian passport?” I am not aware there is a sovereign nation called Biafra and I made that known to my interrogators.
That question was not altogether surprising but coming from what is supposed to be the nation’s elite intelligence agency, it struck me that we were in a deeper mess than I had imagined. We can play the ostrich as much as we want, but the truth is that the division that precipitated and characterised the civil war looms large. We will be deluding ourselves to think for once that the civil war is over. Everywhere you turn in Nigeria, the angst, fear and loathing that were the hallmark of the civil war impose themselves. Fifty years after the end of the civil war, we have expanded the scope of the vanquished. Our country is as divided, if not more divided, as it was at the beginning of the war in 1967.
Today, the chickens of impunity and injustice have come home to roost. Yesterday’s men, who supervised this tragedy in its infancy are today looking for an easy way out. In 1996, exactly three decades after he became head of state, Yakubu Gowon, with the permission of then murderous dictator, Sani Abacha, set up “Nigeria Prays” “to put an end to the various problems plaguing Nigeria.” I am not averse to prayers, but we cannot pray our way out of the current mess whose origin goes back to more than five decades. In what looked like a bitter homecoming, the other retired general, the billionaire businessman, Theophilus Danjuma, who was front and centre in Ibadan in July 1966 when Nigeria’s second coup took place, was in the ancient city again in December 2019. This time, in a sombre mood, he told a bewildered audience: “If I tell you what I know that is happening in Nigeria today, you will no longer sleep.” This catharsis which ought to be a mea culpa came on the heels of his earlier statement describing the Nigerian Army as an army of occupation. All I can say is, speak, general, speak! Say what you know. The country needs to reconcile its past with the present.
As part of the healing, on Monday, January 13, there will be a “Never Again” conference in Lagos to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the civil war. Organised by Nzuko Umunna, a pan-Igbo socio-cultural group comprising Igbo professionals both at home and in the Diaspora and Ndigbo Lagos in collaboration with civil society organisations, the aim of the conference is to address the “seeming lack of political will towards a robust and focused interrogation of the civil war, its causes, and hard lessons.”
The January 13 conference is aptly named “Never Again.” It is going to be a tall order because remembrance entails an appreciation of history, that is, where it exists. Today, there is no official history of the Nigerian Civil War, not even from the “victors.” Last year, I attended the public presentation of the book, Elections in Nigeria: The Long Road to Democracy by Prof Shehu Abdullahi. Both retired generals, Olusegun Obasanjo, a civil war commander, and Yakubu Gowon were at the event. Obasanjo joked about how his boss, Gowon, set up a high-powered committee at the end of the civil war in 1970 to write the history of the war. By the time Gowon was overthrown by Murtala Muhammed and his cohorts, which incidentally included Obasanjo, on July 29, 1975, not a single line had been written. The audience erupted in laughter. That is the tragedy of Nigeria!
Nigeria can still redeem itself. It has been 50 years since we proclaimed, “No Victors, No Vanquished.” It is time to truly end the war; and it is not just the war against Biafra, as Soyinka noted, but that against the millions of duped and dispossessed citizens. That is the only way we can avert another war!
Onumah is author of We Are All Biafrans, A Participant-Observer’s Interventions in a Country Sleepwalking to Disaster
Anthony Sani, secretary-general of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), says the Igbo community cannot pursue their agitation for Biafra and presidency at the same time.
Sani said this while reacting to an article on the advice of Isa Funtua, an associate of President Muhammadu Buhari, gave to the south-east on its aspiration for the number one seat in the land.
Funtua had asked the Igbo to review their ways of playing politics in order to get the presidency. This had generated different reactions.
But Sani said Nigerians would be too scared to entrust the Igbo with the presidency in 2023 if “they are seen to also be agitating for secession from the federation”.
He described the Igbo as suffering from “superiority and inferiority complexes”, accusing them of playing both victim and also having a sense of entitlement.
“When I read a letter by one Frederick Nwabufo on page 18 of The Nation newspaper under the caption “Isa Funtua, Igbo and 2023 presidency” in which the author berated Isa Funtua of being an arrogant man who suffers from a sense of entitlement, I wonder the wisdom,” Sani said.
“As far as I am concerned, it is Igbo who is obsessed with a sense of entitlement by their insistence that it is their turn to produce the president in a country which boasts of over 250 ethnic nationalities. Igbos suffer from both superiority and inferiority complexes.
“At one point, they tout their superiority by claiming to be over and above any other nationality in Nigeria because they are better at the use of their superior commercial acumen for trade.
“At another, they play the victim by crying of marginalization the most. Power in a multi-party democracy is never secured through threats and intimidation, nor is it obtained by jeremiads out of pity.
“This is because democracy is a contest of ideas and reason and is never a bullfight.
“Igbos cannot agitate for separation and hanker for president by still expecting the country would not be scared of voting them for the presidency.
“Igbos may wish to recall that Senator McCain lost the elections because he had [Mrs Palin] who was governor of the state of Alaska. This was also because her husband was accused of attending a meeting of separatists who wish the state of Alaska to leave [the] USA and join Russia.
“I do not see how somebody from Scotland, Catalan, Quebec, Aceh or Xinjiang could dream of being voted president of their countries. Reason: Such a person would most likely play Gorbachev.
“So when Isa Funtua says Igbo should belong, he meant “belong to where the majority [is]”. That is to say, Igbo must develop their winning game plan by reaching out to build bridges and break barriers.
“The North does not comprise the caliphate alone but is very diverse. In fact, the caliphate today is not ruled by the ruling party.”
According to Sani, Nigerians would be very afraid to trust the Igbo with the presidency in 2023 if “they are seen to also be agitating for secession from the federation”.
He said, “When I read a letter by one Frederick Nwabufo on page 18 of The Nation newspaper under the caption “Isa Funtua, Igbo and 2023 presidency” in which the author berated Isa Funtua of being an arrogant man who suffers from a sense of entitlement, I wonder the wisdom. ”
“As far as I am concerned, it is Igbo who is obsessed with a sense of entitlement by their insistence that it is their turn to produce the president in a country which boasts of over 250 ethnic nationalities. Igbos suffer from both superiority and inferiority complexes.
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“At one point, they tout their superiority by claiming to be over and above any other nationality in Nigeria because they are better at the use of their superior commercial acumen for trade.
“At another, they play the victim by crying of marginalization the most. Power in a multi-party democracy is never secured through threats and intimidation, nor is it obtained by jeremiads out of pity.
“This is because democracy is a contest of ideas and reason and is never a bullfight.
“Igbos cannot agitate for separation and hanker for president by still expecting the country would not be scared of voting them for the presidency.
“Igbos may wish to recall that Senator McCain lost the elections because he had [Mrs Palin] who was governor of the state of Alaska. This was also because her husband was accused of attending a meeting of separatists who wish the state of Alaska to leave [the] USA and join Russia.
“I do not see how somebody from Scotland, Catalan, Quebec, Aceh or Xinjiang could dream of being voted president of their countries. Reason: Such a person would most likely play Gorbachev.
“So when Isa Funtua says Igbo should belong, he meant “belong to where the majority [is]”. That is to say, Igbo must develop their winning game plan by reaching out to build bridges and break barriers.
“The North does not comprise the caliphate alone but is very diverse. In fact, the caliphate today is not ruled by the ruling party.”
