Let me use this yuletide season to shine my torch on Pastor Yemi Osibajo who at the moment is top most Christian official of the country and a person who has never lost sight of such a responsibility by behaving and acting appropriately. Such quality has silently endeared him to the people and due to his nature you can only know that when you personally ask peoples opinion about him or APC and 2023.

Due to his nature that I have described above and his not being the everyday politician, he may not be the favorite for political headlines by media and pundits but people like us who take extra mile to observe and analyze our everyday changing and growing democracy do see so many likely permutations of which Osinbajo appears the most likely for consensus sake all the way.

Let me make a reminder to my earlier article of November 4, 2019 titled ‘Pantami as near perfect fit for 2023 permutations’ https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2019/11/04/isa-ali-pantami-as-near-perfect-fit-for-the-2023-permutations-by-hashim-suleiman/ where I had identified Tinubu’s clear interest in the game but could be stalled by a likely need for pairing with a Muslim like Pantami which is doable but with its attendant challenges and as such a pairing of Pantami with a Christian could be a more perfect fit. Such a Christian is gradually turning out for me to be Osinbajo.

Events have come and gone after the above article and in fact the race for the 2023 is becoming clearer with so much interests for the presidency in the APC and none of them is likely ready to shift grounds for the other, little wonder why Pastor Tunde Bakare had to attempt to shut some of those camps who are hell bent on truncating Asiwaju Tinubu’s ambition for the 2023 presidency bid.

It is not likely that those camps are going to pull back their ‘shakabula’ guns as a result of Bakare’s sermon and one thing Bakare also forgot is that in politics such guns may not kill but they may be spoilers in a supposed well planned operation.

Regardless of all these however, Tinubu has continued his reach out to all parts of the country from Sheikh Bin Usman’s daughter’s wedding in Kano to Maiduguri on a condolence for the incident at Jere local Government.

Furthermore, it is not longer news that Kayode Fayemi and his crew are nursing their own agenda with him being the presidential candidate or pairing with a northerner as vice. The Goodluck Jonathan card is also flying and a friend just recently whispered another card of Orji Uzor Kalu perhaps to placate the Igbos. The people who fly these cards are mostly those who are vehemently against Tinubu’s candidature and I’m not sure they are ready to support it for whatever reason and I’m also not sure if Asiwaju himself is ready to go ahead with his agenda without all these erring groups in the APC or in other words the APC being intact.

Make no mistake to think the Asiwaju who is a benefactor of Osinbajo is not fully qualified or does not enjoy my personal support for the presidency owing to my belief in his progressive principle which I had also enumerated in the November 4, 2019 article I made reference to in the third paragraph above but the realistic fact is there are so many land mines which do not appear pleasant for both his party and himself should he insist to go ahead.

The first major challenge will be that of the religious pairing unless well insist to have a repeat of the muslim-muslim ticket of 1993 and whether such would fly could be left to the further strategy meetings that would be held and such meetings must be made with sincerity of purpose, lucky enough Osinbajo had informed us in one of the Colloquiums that Tinubu holds his meetings with such openness during his governorship days and could give in on superior progressive arguments.

The second major hurdle would be those other groups who would back out in the event of the emergence of an Asiwaju candidature. Such would leave the APC very weakened to go into the election and there would also be anti party activities.

Against the backdrop of all of the above, Osinbajo appears to be the most perfect candidate to mitigate all of the above challenges. He is a Christian of repute who could easily fit into pairing with another Muslim of repute. He fits into the class of the new breed politicians that the Nigerian youths clamor for on a daily.

Apart from being a graduate of the Asiwaju School of progressive politics, he is a very close friend and confidant of all the other groups who might be opposing an Asiwaju candidature. Osinbajo had worked as meticulously as bagging enough friends from the opposition PDP.

If all of these are not enough pointers for a likely date with destiny then what could ever be more. Time shall tell however, but it’s instructive for the APC family to look inwards and make appropriate decisions against the 2023 elections which is fast approaching.

But Osinbajo does appear as the most suitable consensus candidate for the APC.

*Hashim Suleiman wrote from Abuja. He can be reached via @oneheartnaija

BY: Dr. Osmund Agbo

Who could have predicted that the enormous, dazzling statue with feet of  baked clay that Daniel prophesized to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar is indeed a sixty-eight-year-old diminutive figure from Iyamho, Edo state. This khaki aficionado, who was t​​he hero of organized labour in the early part of my adult life, is now the poster child of Nigeria’s transactional politics.

The year 2023 is still a little farther down the road, yet the APC circus is already out in its mesmerizing glamour. This time, It came packaged with a full compliment of conviviality. One of the bullwhip crackers in the Dog and Pony show, Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole is not a happy camper. The ruling party’s shenanigans stopped him in his track and a whole lot of us are not unhappy. 

A celebrated labour leader, a two-term Governor, one of the longest surviving national chairman of a ruling political party in Nigeria. His country home is a mouth-watering earthly paradise, complete with Olympic size swimming pool. Adams heralded his grand entry into the world of the Nouveau riche in May 2015 when he imported his trophy wife Lara, all the way from the island of Cabo Verde.

For a man who once was going street to street, sewing torn clothes just to eke out a living, life didn’t turn out bad after all. The only problem is that while reveling in his new found status, Adams ditched the very people that cheerleaded him to stratospheric success. He must now incur the wrath of Edo god, Osanobua.

Adams got his big break as a union leader in 1982, when he was appointed the General Secretary of the National Union of Textile Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria. It was a 75,000-member strong workers union at the time.

Speaking out forcefully on behalf of a tribe of workers who were being short-changed by their company’s chief executives, the rise of Hurricane Adams as he was once referred to by a popular commentator, was meteoric.

To burnish his credentials, he would later leave for UK and enrolled in Ruskin College where he majored in both economics and industrial relations. Upon his return, Adams attended the National Insitute of Policy and Strategic studies, Kuru and later had a brief stint at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Armed with strong credentials and a knack for effective mobilization, he was elected first deputy president of Nigerian Labour Congress in 1988. About a decade later, precisely on January 28, 1999 he became the substantive labour leader. One of his landmark achievement during his tenure as NLC president was the successful negotiation of a 25% wage increase for public sector workers during the Obasanjo administration.

He also led labour to a couple of industrial actions meant to pressure the Nigerian government into improving public sector working conditions. In 2009, he was rumored to have been abducted by men of the State Security Services. For a big part of the nineties, Adams was the darling of labour movements and became the face of the Nigerian workers’ struggle. His leadership profile continued on an upward trajectory.

When in March 20th, 2008, Edo State election tribunal nullified the election of Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor and declared Oshiomhole the Governor, the mood in the state that prides itself as the heartbeat of the nation was ecstatic. It was God’s answer to a festering political problem of godfatherism in that part of the country.

It was unprecedented at the time that a candidate personally handpicked by late Chief Tony Anenih, Mr. Fix it and the godfather himself could suffer such a devastating blow.

Mr. Oshiomhole went on to declare the concept of God fatherism dead in Edo, choosing to do so at no less a place than the palace of Oba of Benin. But that was our good old Adams of yesteryears. The new one had undergone a complete metamorphosis and is now utterly unrecognizable.

The problem started shortly after Governor Obaseki was sworn-in and Adams wished to continue to run the show in Edo state as the de factor ruler. He believed he placed the new governor in his position and so Godwin Obaseki and the people of Edo state were beholden to him. When Obaseki refused to dance to his tunes, the APC party machinery under Oshiomhole was quickly mobilized for a fight.

It was such a nasty and long drawn battle that ultimately forced the exit of a sitting Governor out of the party under whose platform he came into power. A pure Machiavellian politics at its most primitive form. It seems like Adams Oshiomhole has become the very devil he fought as a candidate for governor of Edo state just few years earlier.

He is now wishing us selective amnesia into believing that the wonderkid he sold passionately to Edo people in 2016 is now a monster.

The events of the past few weeks however, have been pretty sobering even for the Omo ‘kpanabiewho(one man like a nation) of Auchi kingdom. The same could also be said of his friend and mentor, the Jagaban himself.

When you sow the wind, you sure will reap the whirlwind. Both may have learnt a lesson or two on the vanity of life and the ephemeral nature of power. Adam is now forced to heed the wise words of Confucius:
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

 
Dr. Osmund Agbo is the President/CEO of African Center for Transparency.

By Osy Agbo

There is no reason not to eulogize western civilization having saved Africa from her primitive pre-colonial past. An Africa which though still trapped in a nonremedial cycle of crippling poverty and excruciating underdevelopment, no more kills her twin children or sacrifices her people to the gods.

The one little problem remains that at a time when the colonial powers were working really hard to save us from those vices using the instruments of Religion, they held the strongest of our young men and women with arms and feet bound in chains, thrown into the middle of the ocean while waiting to ship to a land far removed from home.

So in the end, Africa’s children still managed to get dehumanized and brutally murdered. Just that the killing fields were located in the plantation fields of Europe and the Americas, under the scorching sun.

Which begs the question, was Religion introduced to Africa for its spiritual value or was it just an effective tool to help the colonialists in their conquest?

I for one, don’t have all the answers but what is not in doubt is that countries that escaped colonialism and so weren’t gifted with the western style religion tend to fair much better in today’s world. If in doubt, just look around, and am not even talking about the far away China. You just have to look at Ethiopia close by and compare her to the rest of the nations of Africa. Same African people with different mindset and yes, very different results.

One of the reason why Nigerian government is unable to contain the virus that is Boko Haram insurgency remains largely do to the existence of an inexhaustible supply of uneducated, jobless, hopeless and hungry group of people called Almajiris. The Almajiri is an Islamic educational system that encourages parents to give up their responsibilities to the attached Islamic school.

Even if you were to concede that the goal is to raise pious kids who will follow on the footsteps of Prophet Mohammed, you still find that the working of the system is a study in unconscionable child abuse and neglect. The system unleashes thousands of young people unable to count the first ten letters of the English alphabet and daily moving around in the streets begging for what to eat.

I have often wondered where that concept originated from given that we are not aware of its existence in countries where Islam is even the State religion. If such practice does not exist in Saudi Arabia, whose idea was it to raise an army of homeless people with a limitless capacity to be exploited for evil in the name of religion? Of course we know the answer. But today, it’s not just about Almajiris and Boko Haram. It’s about a continent that has turned religion on its head in a self-defeatist mindset.

In the book of Genesis, the bible reminds us that God created us in his own image and likeness. If you believe that to be the case, then you should know he expects us to live not just any kind of way but in a manner that reflects a sense of peace and purpose. In order words it was the almighty’s grand design to make his children a spiritual being. 

Religion on the other hand is a totally different matter and God in his infinite wisdom didn’t find it necessary to create one. Humans did.

The very essence of Religion is to fulfill humanity’s aspiration to unite as a group of people under the same values and belief in other to facilitate their collective and individual communication with a superior being. Fact.

The problem is that there is a disingenuous effort on the part of some faith leaders to try to equate Religion with Spirituality and nothing could be further from the truth.

The later is your destination whereas the former is a vehicle designed to take you there. Religion therefore is meant to facilitate our Spiritual experience. The bigger question is if indeed that promise holds true in today’s world? Well, maybe in some cases but I will submit to you that there is nothing spiritual about the murderous religious sect called ISIS.

You must know that the world has witnessed too much deception, stealing and savagery by men that dress up in immaculate white robes preaching prosperity every Sunday morning. We are all too familiar with folks who lost their lives in the hands of those that answer to the muezzin’s salat calls five times a day. Those are all religious people.

It’s impossible to have an honest discussion about Africa’s intractable sectarian violence and extremely poor economic performance in the global stage without recognizing the ignominious role played by religion. Though the two major religions practiced in the region originated from outside of the continent, our practice of it is so remarkably different that you begin to wonder if we imported a counterfeit.

In spite of all the issues raised above, there is no denying the fact that religious bodies in many instances have played a crucial role in shaping our society as a force for good. Both Christian and Muslim charities have lifted the downtrodden and attended to the sick and dying children all over the world during a time of war or peace which is highly commendable. But that right there is human spirituality at work and not necessarily because of religion.

There are atheists and agnostics who had done more and even gone ahead to adopt the service of others as a creed of their very own existence.

Of course am pretty sure the topic of this discus may sound very controversial to many or even outrightly scandalous to some. But am lucky enough to reside in a space where my safety and freedom to pen my thoughts is not in the least threatened. I do not have to worry about a certain Sheikh issuing a fatwah over my head or face the vitriol of “Men of God”.

Today we will challenge Africa to a new cultural paradigm. There is no better time than now to cut loose from the shackles  of religion and join the rest of the civilized world in emphasizing spirituality. A renewed African spirituality will change our mindset as well as define a new set of goals and values. With that we will rise up and shine bright in God’s mighty image and then proceed to liberate ourselves and our people from the pangs of hunger and poverty.

Osmund Agbo, MD, FCCP writes from Houston