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Jonathan meets PDP, opposition leaders tomorrow Wednesday, 13 April 2011 00:00 From John-Abba Ogbodo (Abuja) and Eno-Abasi Sunday (Calabar) News - National

Prev1 of 2NextNorth Central restates support for President

PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo have continued their reach-out to political and opinion leaders in the country to get their support for the presidential election holding this Saturday.

After Jonathan’s meeting with political leaders from the North Central geo-political zone on Monday night, the participants resolved that the other five zones in the country should be brought into the new deal.

Consequently, it was resolved that the Presidency holds another interaction with all the leaders from the nation’s six zones tomorrow, an advice Jonathan reportedly accepted.

Sources at the talks held at the official residence of the Senate President David Mark, it was learnt evaluated last Saturday’s National Assembly polls and the strength of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the North.

Sources at the parley said the leaders greed that although the party did well in the North, there was room for improvement so that the PDP could convincingly win the presidential election this Saturday.

The meeting will also involve politicians from some of the opposition parties that are putting up strong showing and with whom PDP has been discussing. The meeting is expected to give the PDP leadership the picture of what to expect this Saturday.

In attendance at the last meeting were Governor Gabriel Suswam of Benue State and his Nasarawa State counterpart, Aliyu Akwe Doma, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Minister Bala Mohammed; FCT Senator-elect, Philip Aduda; former Information Minister, Prof. Jerry Gana; one-time Senate President Ameh Ebute; erstwhile Military Governor of old Bendel State, Tunde Ogbeha; Bala Tikaya; Senator Jonathan Zwingina; Second Republic Deputy Senate President Wash Pam, among others, who allegedly pledged to mobilise their people to vote for Jonathan this Saturday.

The meeting agreed that everything should be done in the campaigns to carry along most Nigerians, including the opposition for the victory of the President.

According to sources, the meeting had representatives from Borno, Benue, Niger, Nasarawa, Plateau, Adamawa, Gombe, Bauchi, Taraba, Kaduna, Yobe, Kwara, and Kogi states.

Jonathan allegedly appealed to the meeting not to give room to the ethnic card being dangled by some people to sway their position, stressing that Nigeria is one entity that must be preserved.

“I am optimistic that the issue of North/South dichotomy will gradually fade away; in the new Nigeria, we shall be talking about Nigeria, not ethnicity or religion, we shall focus on the economy, infrastructural development, employment and security of lives and property.

“This is my covenant with Nigerians; I promise I will not disappoint you,” he said.

A statement issued by the Chief Press Secretary to the Senate President, Paul Mumeh yesterday, said both Jonathan and Sambo congratulated Mark on his victory at the senatorial poll for the fourth consecutive time, pointing out that it was a testimony of his acceptance by the people of Benue South whom he has been representing.

President Jonathan, Vice President Sambo, Governor Suswam of Benue State and his Nasarawa State counterpart, Akwe Doma, have also congratulated Mark, over his victory at the polls last Saturday.

“Specifically, President Jonathan noted that Mark’s election for the fourth time is a rare feat in our contemporary history”, saying: “I congratulate you for making history. To survive one legislative session is a herculean task and to survive it four times is a miracle. It goes to show that you are truly in touch with your people.”

Speaking when he held parley with leaders of the Middle-Belt region along with Sambo and the Senate President on Monday night in Abuja, Jonathan added that Mark’s overwhelming victory is a manifestation of his leadership qualities appreciated by his people.

He thanked the people of Benue State for electing Mark again, saying: “The Senate President is a good strategist, a mobiliser and a goal-getter whose services are needed by the nation”.

In his comment, the Vice President noted that Mark’s victory at the polls is a testimony of his peoples’ desire to have good leadership.

Like the President, Sambo enjoined the people of the Middle Belt to mobilise the electorate enmasse to vote for the PDP at the presidential election.

Welcoming Mr. President and delegates to the parley at the Apo Legislative Mansion, Mark urged the people to examine the shortcomings of last Saturday’s election and come out in large number to vote for the President on Saturday.

Mark implored PDP faithful to work as a team so that “we can win overwhelmingly and convincingly”, expressing optimism that the “party will still be in the majority.”

Mumeh also confirmed that his boss hosted the meeting “which also discussed ways of moving the nation forward.’’

To those thinking that Jonathan may go through a re-run before claiming victory in Saturday’s election, Deputy Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, says it is time to have a rethink.

According to Ndoma-Egba, in an interview in Calabar, Cross River State, the President will not have to go through the rigours of a re-run as the pendulum would definitely swing in favour of Jonathan because, “I think the President will win in the first ballot with a very clear win. Those who are hoping for a re-run will be thoroughly disappointed.”

INTERVIEW FROM COMPASS NEWS PAPER:

Godwin Igile from Asiga in Cross River State has his sights on the chairmanship seat of Yakurr Local Government Area presently occupied by Mr. Ubi Itam Etta. In this interview with Nicholas Kalu, Igile,

who intends to run on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which the incumbent chairman also belongs to, speaks on why he wants to lead his people at the grassroots, his programmes, among other issues.

Why are you going for the chairmanship of your local government?

I have the basic educational skills and competency to manage the local government as a chairman and a large part of my life has been spent managing resources, men, material, money and operations. I want to transfer all that to the management and administration of my local government. Principally, to ensure lasting peace so as to allow for the lofty programmes of PDP and the governor’s projects to be properly executed for the benefit of the people. I don’t want to be chairman to make money. I want to bring peace and establish a system to ensure that there is no corruption. Corruption would be minimized to the barest minimum, and public funds used effectively to meet the objectives of the state government. We will reduce waste in all ramification and bring to all the peasants.

You seem so confident you would occupy the seat even when there is an incumbent who may want to return?

I acknowledge past chairmen and their contributions, but Asiga has had the least representation in both the state and local government administration. That is why I know that the PDP will choose me as the chairmanship for the local government and I am going to win the election.

Yakurr is homogenous. The fact that we have constituency I and II is for simple administrative purposes. I belong to constituency II, and I where Ugep Urban falls has had more percentage of the council chairmanship so far.

What if the PDP cabal decides to pick someone else?

We don’t operate a cabal in Yakurr politics. I am convinced that the leadership of PDP in Yakurr will give me the ticket because I am neutral. I don’t talk of people, but issues. I will perform and bring peace to our people so that the tourism potentials of Yakurr to be properly exploited for the benefit of all. We need peace in that area and I am the unifying factor. I know I have the respect of my people.

We have electoral reforms nationally. For us in PDP, we are one family. We have a democratic procedure for electing the flagbearer in any election. We don’t have any problem. I can assure that after the primaries I would emerge the candidate of the party.

What programmes do you have in mind for your people?

There is a major objective I have and that is establishing a State Polytechnic in Yakurr local government area. There is available land already. I know the Yakurr will fall behind me and my team for the state polytechnic to be established.

Yakurr has all the population and feeder population from Abi, Biase, Obubra and even neighbouring Ebonyi State. Besides there is sufficient manpower to teach management sciences, engineering and environmental science. We will pursue the project through a public private partnership arrangement. We will all contribute morally, financially and otherwise and I am sure we will also get support from the state and local governments. Since the Calabar Polytechnic was converted to a campus of the Cross River University of Technology, the state has been in dire need of a polytechnic.

With a good proposal and justification note, the governor of Cross River State will appreciate the polytechnic to be sighted in the land between Ugep and Ekori.

Also, I want to ensure that government’s programmes are well implemented at the grassroots level. I will ensure that the FADAMA III project for high agricultural productivity is well implemented according to instruments establishing that concept.

We will target bringing bursaries for our tertiary students. We will assist farmers to increase cassava production. We will key into the Roll back malaria to eliminate malaria.

You don’t seem to be a grassroots person. How do you intend to win the people to your side especially at this level of grassroots politics?

That impression is incorrect. I am a grassroots person. That is why the people want me. Everybody who knows me, knows I am a grassroots person. I have lots of concern for students in my area and have helped those I can. I funded the electrification of an entire area in Asiga and I spent over N1.6 million on that project. I have also funded a women organisation in my community for their wellbeing. From time to time, I visit village heads in my locality and I contribute significantly to community development. I am a member of many organisation in my community. These are indications of a grassroots person.

Duke, Imoke and Gershom: The 3 Musketers of power in Cross River

Politics Nov 19, 2010 By John Ighodaro

IT is alleged that just before the current democratic dispensation emerged, three young men in Cross River State who were then in their thirties sat down and reached an agreement on how to take over the administration of the state. Their story is the stuff by which folklore is woven.

Today, in Cross River State, they are known as The Three Musketeers: Mr. Donald Duke, Senator Liyel Imoke and Mr. Gershom Bassey. Part of the alleged agreement they reached was that they would rule the state as governors in that order.

Mr. Donald Duke has ruled as governor for eight years. Senator Liyel Imoke is in the saddle now as governor just as it was planned and agreed on and Mr. Gershom Bassey is on queue.

Gov. Imoke and Duke

Consideration that they were young men at the time this plan was hatched, it is doubtful whether the discussion took place over a bottle or bottles of beer. It couldn’t have been because these young men sat down discussed and hatched a plan that has arguably been controlling the destiny of a state and the lives of millions of people for over ten years.

So these must have been three serious young men with ambition, zeal and vision. To have a glimpse at the quality of their discussions and agreement at that historic meeting one only needs to remember how Cross River used to be perceived and how it is now seen.

Today, we have the Tinapa Leisure Resort, the Canopy walkway in Boki, the Marina Resort, the Obudu Cattle Ranch, the Calabar annual carnival and Calabar’s fame as the cleanest city in Nigeria _ offshoot of the meeting of the three young men. They didn’t plan to be headmasters of a primary school in the remote parts of Cross River State but to be governors of Cross River State and like a home video they are acting out the script.

Like children in a family however, these young men grew up and grew away. Children grow up, get married and leave, that is, grow away! No one outside their circle can categorically explain what happened to the 3 Musketeers, but one can look deeply into their activities in the past ten years and try to understand what must have happened to them.

Mr. Donald Duke as governor engaged in big money_guzzling projects in his determination to turn Cross River from a mere civil service state to a world tourist destination.

It was as if he felt Cross River was at a disadvantage as_a_not_too_big oil producer by Niger Delta standards and therefore decided to create its own oil wells in such projects as Tinapa Leisure Resort, Obudu Cattle Ranch, Calabar Carnival and others which are expected to be churning out billions of naira as oil wells do in some other parts of the Niger Delta.

The reality today, however is that these laudable projects have left huge debts which the government of Governor Liyel Imoke has been servicing and this has been gulping the scarce resources of the state.

Then came the loss of Bakassi and with it, the loss of oil wells. Subsequently, the state suffered yet another setback_the loss of 76 oil wells to neighbouring Akwa Ibom State.

Donald Duke campaigned heavily for Imoke while he was leaving office and when Imoke took over he tried to bear the burden of debt servicing with magnanimity. For starters, Duke was not just his political ally, they were and are family friends.

Duke was close to Imoke’s Mum and Imoke is close to Duke’s Mum. We are looking at a situation where Duke’s mother would run into Imoke at a function and ask “how is your brother? (meaning Duke). In an African setting, you must protect and defend your brother.

Somewhere along the line however, Duke grew up and grew away. He had eyes for the presidency. He had come to understand that he stands no chance of picking the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket as a presidential aspirant.

Everything seems to be walking so well and smoothly for President Goodluck Jonathan and it appeared he would be there for no one knows how long, so Mr. Duke resigned from the PDP and threw stones at the PDP. Naturally Imoke expected Duke to join another party or form a new party which Duke would also have to support at the local and state level.

And this would mean that Duke would have to campaign for whoever would run for governor in Cross River in his new party. In other words, Duke would have to campaign against Liyel Imoke in the state. The people of Cross River were about to see a situation where one of the three Musketeers (Duke) would be campaigning for a 4th Musketeer against one of the original three Musketeers for the post of governor. This seemed against the original plan of the three Musketeers at the very beginning.

Governor Liyel Imoke has not completed eight years and Gershom Bassey is waiting in the wings and the victorious balloon of the three Musketeers seemed to have been deflated by Duke after having fully benefitted from the original arrangement. So Duke and Liyel Imoke fell out. They are still brothers.

This writer has spoken to each of them in the absence of the other and they let you know without mincing words that they are still brothers.

Duke is smart, so one may never understand why he left PDP the way he did only to indicate later that he might not run for president in the next election as he initially planned.

After what he said about PDP, he is not likely to go back to the party ever again since he is not Chief Orji Uzor Kalu who prides himself as a man who easily takes decisions not minding the quality of such decisions.

Duke is in a quagmire of some sort because if he still wants to have a go for the presidency, he would have to wait for some years because he is not likely to run in 2011. And in 2015, one would like to see how he would convince the North that another South Southerner should step into Jonathan’s shoes if Jonathan wins in 2011.

Duke perhaps has walked into a political wilderness and perhaps not, because he is full of ideas. He could come up with a thing or two.

And as for the third man among the Three Musketeers, Mr. Gershom Bassey, in a private chat he didn’t appear keen on taking over after Governor Liyel Imoke. He said a new understanding was brewing in Cross River which seems to embrace the idea that any governor after Imoke should come from the North of the state and he and Donald Duke happen to come from the same area of the state. Talk about zoning.

''paradoxical Commandments of leadership''

''Here is what it says''

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives---- do good anyway.

People are illogical,unreasonable and self-centered-----love them anyway.

If you are successfull, you will win false friends and true enemies------ succeed anyway

The biggest man with the biggest ideas can be shot down by smallest man with the smallest mind--------think big anyway.

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BLACK LEADERS IN THE U.K.'s notes

ReportThe Wealth Of The West Was Built On Africa's Exploitationby BLACK LEADERS IN THE U.K. on Saturday, 16 October 2010 at 19:14

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?

These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.

Beckford's experts estimated Britain's debt to Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.

Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.

Joseph Inikori's masterful book, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, shows how African consumers, free and enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant manufacturing industry. As Malachy Postlethwayt, the political economist, candidly put it in 1745: "British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation."

In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern industrial economy. To his two answers - abundant coal and New World colonies - he should have added access to west Africa. For the colonial Americas were more Africa's creation than Europe's: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough, for European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious metals to buy Asian luxuries, returning home with profits in the form of textiles; only through exchanging these cloths in Africa for slaves to be sold in the New World could Europe obtain new gold and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian companies led ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century humiliation of China.

Africa not only underpinned Europe's earlier development. Its palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in particular gold were and are crucial to the later world economy. Only South America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks Africa's contribution to the growth of the global bullion supply.

The guinea coin paid homage in its name to the west African origins of one flood of gold. By this standard, the British pound since 1880 should have been rechristened the rand, for Britain's prosperity and its currency stability depended on South Africa's mines. I would wager that a large share of that gold in the IMF's vaults which was supposed to pay for Africa's debt relief had originally been stolen from that continent.

There are many who like to blame Africa's weak governments and economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of two centuries of slaving, followed by another of colonial despotism. Nor was "decolonisation" all it seemed: both Britain and France attempted to corrupt the whole project of political sovereignty.

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