Paul Mason’s book on the rise of social and labour movements is out, which includes a chapter on Nigeria’s unions and slum dwellers. He’s used typepad to produce a very nice complimentary site, which I shall be pointing various author friends to as an example of how it should be done…
Vanguard reports good news and bad news from Delta State today.
First the bad news: State Deputy Chief of Staff, Chief Emmanuel Ejiofor has offered N1 million in cash to any ward that delivers 90 percent vote to the governing PDP party’s governorship candidate, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan.
The good news is the Delta State PDP has disowned him.
According to Vanguard, Delta State PDP Campaign Organization’s Director of Press Relations, Mr. Felix Ofou said:
For the avoidance of doubt, we wish to state that Chief Ejiofor though an important member of our party, is not a member of the campaign organization, neither has he participated in any of the rallies that have taken the PDP victory train to all the nooks and crannies of the state.
[…] It is on record that the PDP in Delta state has ran an issue-based campaign and that we intend to win based on the three-point agenda of engendering greater peace and security; human capital development and infrastructural development as widely popularized in our manifesto.
Two cheers are in order. The third can be in May, if Delta State can run a clean election.
‘This Day’s’ Yusuph Olaniyonu has written in defence of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commisssion’s work:
For close to two months now, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and his commission have been under serious onslaught […] EFCC had forwarded to the federal government a list of politicians who; according to its investigations, have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
[…]
If Ribadu and his men are afraid of bringing Obasanjo and his friends or loyalists to justice on issues of corruption, let us leave them to deal with the others knowing that one day he will not be in that office and not all his successors will see Obasanjo and his loyalists as untouchable.
[…]
The present campaign against EFCC is aimed at turning public opinions against its operations by deliberately confusing issues. This campaign will in effect demoralise the operatives and make them the bad men of our society. The general public should beware. Nigerians should not play the game of those who have kept the nation perpetually on its belly since independence.
The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once observed that if you put America on its side, Los Angeles would be the place where everything loose would fall out.
(Los Angeles is a place I’ve never been to, and I expect neither have you. But the idea of Los Angles seems so vivid through American movie and television culture that we all can feel we get the joke.)
Reflecting on my experiences as an observer of Nigeria’s 2003 elections, I am left wondering if the Niger Delta - somewhere I have been - might be the place where all the loose parts of 21st Africa would fall out if you shook it hard enough.
