adamawa politics Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Blueprint Newspapers Limited

Atiku has hijacked Adamawa PDP structure, Chieftain cries out

November 7, 2017 Admin III 0

A former Special Assistant to Vice President Atiku Abubakar and chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Umar Ardo has advocated for the cancelation of the results of last Saturday ward congresses in Adamawa State. Dr. Ardo made the plea Tuesday shortly after submitting a petition to the Adamawa State PDP Congress Appeal Panel in Abuja. He said the Read More

Adamawa politics: A dicey 2019 for Gov Bindow

October 14, 2017 Admin III 0

The political permutations as at now, in Adamawa state, is so dicey for the incumbent Governor, Mohammed Umaru Jibrilla Bindow, and this from all indication would be the situation in 2019. Happenings on ground in the state are so dicey for the incumbent governor. The loyalists of former Governor Murtala Nyako are poised to be the stumbling block for Read More

Of politics, governance and loyalty

September 22, 2017 Admin III 0

It baffles me to note that in Nigeria everything is about the next “election” rather than the governance issues. Let’s insist on good governance for the existing mandate. In my understanding, there is diff erence between “politics” and “governance”. According to Section 99 (1) of the Electoral Act 2010 as amended the period for electioneering campaigns is 90 days before Read More

Adamawa: Bindow returning government to the people

June 21, 2017 Admin III 0

How has he fared in the last two years? n the word of former US President, George W. Bush “use power to help others for we are given power not to advance our own purposes, not to make a good show in the world, not a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve Read More

Atiku and the politics of Waziri Adamawa

June 20, 2017 Admin III 0

Zayyad I. Muhammad The lifetime ambition of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is to be the president of Nigeria and to have absolute control of Adamawa politics. Atiku’s pursuit of this super-ambition dates back to nearly 34 years. When a typical Nigerian politician rises to a new position of traditional power and eminence, he or she becomes more ambitious and Read More

Adamawa: Jimeta’s comments and politics of 2019

April 18, 2017 Admin III 0

The dust raised by the comments of Abba Jimeta, Chief of Staff (COS) to Governor Jibrilla Bindow, is yet to settle, having polarised the state chapter of the ruling APC, still threatening unity in the party ahead of the 2019 general elections. IBRAHIM ABDUL’ AZIZ, reports Already the political temperature in Adamawa known to be one of the complex states Read More

Adamawa politics and December 16

December 14, 2016 Admin III 0

Yakubu Uba Almost everybody knows December 25 of every year is Christmas day, in Adamawa, this coming December 16 is going to be “the Christmas before the Christmas” simply because it is that date that the Supreme Court fixed for a judgement that’s a source of concern to most politicians that matter in the state politics. The judgement has to Read More

Politics didn’t harm my relationship with Buhari – OBJ

October 4, 2016 Admin III 0

Atiku explains absence at book launch Gowon, Tinubu eulogise president By Abdulaziz Abdulaziz and Abdullahi M. Gulloma, Abuja Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, yesterday, said his relationship with President Muhammadu Buhari remains cordial in spite of political differences and upheavals over the years. Obasanjo, who described President Buhari as forthright and gentlemanly, spoke at the launch of a book: “Muhammadu Buhari: Read More

Politics of adoption, consensus in PDP North-east congress

May 20, 2016 Admin III 0

The North-east zonal congress of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), took place Saturday, May14, in Jalingo, Taraba state and adopted Senator Ali Modu Sheriff as its national chairman. STEPHEN OSU writes on the behind the scenes story. The beginning Before the zonal delegates congress proper, the state congress took place Tuesday, May10, but before the state congress, there were that Read More

In all these years, I was told, there was never a Christmas that Lawal did not visit my parents. He always enquired how I was doing and was in awe of all the places he was told I had been at. We got to meet in 1995 when I was first home on holidays after almost a decade. I observed that my friend had changed a lot. His parents had passed away, and Ori too. All the cattle were gone. After decades of wandering across the vast millennial savannah, by now married with grown up children, Lawal had moved into the neighbouring town and had virtually become a ‘Fulanin gida’ (home Fulani). But I could see that something was amiss – the magic and spark were gone. Lawal, I was told, had taken to too much alcohol. Mother Dearest — ever observant, with a great power of intuition — sadly noted that what Lawal was up to was ‘more than just alcohol’. I brought him gifts from abroad – shirts, a watch and things like that. Lawal quietly reminded me that our friendship – our ‘zumunci’ — went beyond any material things. He held the gifts disinterestedly with a sad, distant smile. Lawal passed away the following year after a brief illness. He is a friend and brother that I will cherish for all eternity. Today, a new breed of Fulani are on the rampage throughout our country. They have killed and maimed and wiped away entire villages in what amounts to a genocidal war. From the Jos Plateau, to Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa, Benue, Taraba, Adamawa, Kogi and as far down as Delta and Ondo, they have left nothing but dead bodies and ashes on their trail. Gurara Forum is a gathering of young men and women — most of them students – from Southern Kaduna. With their own limited resources, they have tried to document all the Fulani atrocities in Southern Kaduna. Their website provides a grim picture gallery of some of the recent killings committed by the herdsmen. Viewer discretion is counseled in visiting the site (http://www.guraraforum.org/gallery/). These mercenaries have been armed with the most sophisticated weaponry imaginable while their victims are not allowed to carry even bows and arrows in self-defence. Nobody has been arrested or convicted for these crimes. When, recently, they went on another killing spree in the village of Agatu in Benue State, all we heard are plaintive promises that grazing land will be carved out for them, with grass to be imported from Brazil. From the statistics that we have, possibly a 40,000 souls have perished under these herdsmen of our doomsday apocalypse. Rural livelihoods have been destroyed, with a looming food crisis rearing its ugly head for the first time in the Middle Belt, which remains incontrovertibly the bread basket of our country. Many reasons have been adduced from this unfortunate turn of events. There are those who blame the devastating impact of climate change – desertification — and the lot. There is also the Malthusian demographic nightmare of population increasingly geometrically against dwindling water and other natural resources, including land space. I would also point to the factor of politics. In our political era, politicians have been known to import mercenaries and millions of illegal immigrants to boost their potential voting blocs and also to use them to settle differences by the barrel of the gun. Some crypto-communist pseudo-intellectuals have whitewashed these atrocities as anodyne problems of ‘cattle rustling’ and ‘rural banditry’. And anybody who expresses anger and outrage is committing ‘hate speech’. To my mind, those who implicitly deny the sanctity of human life while covering up diabolical atrocities in meaningless intellectual abstractions are the real purveyors of hate, not we, the victims. Nobody has been held to account for any of these killings. Probably more souls have perished from these genocidal killings than from Boko Haram. The recent attempt to conflate Boko Haram with the marauding herdsmen is nothing short of sophistry at its worst. Boko Haram and the marauding herdsmen are different species of the same rampaging Jihadist tiger. But they are not interchangeable, even if they belong to the same ruling spirit of violence and death. They may well be part of the overall strategy of conquest and subjugation by force of arms. The Middle Belt are what they are because they were never defeated by Jihad. What their forebears could not achieve, their misguided progenies of today believe they can by chicanery and sheer wickedness. Those who live by the sword will surely perish by the sword. I humbly submit that most of these so-called ‘herdsmen’ are mercenaries from outside Nigeria. They cannot be relations of my late friend and brother Lawal or my uncle Mallam Baanni. They are foreign mercenaries imported into our country to kill, overwhelm and colonize. Whose ancestral land is going to be handed over to foreign marauding mercenaries who have committed murder on such a scale? For me, the only prudent way of tackling this menace is to for the Nigerian military to restore the dispossessed people back to their villages and to enforce the rural piece across all the troubled areas. We need a proper census of all the Fulani herdsmen and their cattle. Those of them who are not bona fide citizens should be repatriated to Mali, Niger, Chad, Cameroon or wherever they are supposed to have come from. The Government of Ghana, ever more efficient and more vigilant than ours, recently repatriated over 50,000 Fulani herdsmen and their cattle, with a terse warning that they would never be permitted to get away with the kind of violations they have perpetrated in Nigeria. I am not opposed to the idea of grazing reserves. The idea, which goes as far back as the days of Ahmadu Bello, the first Premier of the Northern Region, has never proven successful. In the far-North, it was tried without much success. Indigenous Hausa-Habe farmers were much opposed to it. The Fulani themselves could not be forced to reinvent themselves as sedentary people. In Kachia, in my own homeland of Southern Kaduna, a huge grazing reserve was carved out for Fulani communities some thirty years ago. Until today, none of the indigenous communities have been compensated for the forcible dispossession of their land and the turning-over of ancestral to an alien people. Not only have these Fulanis been involved in violent killings of local people, they are now claiming autochthonous usufructuary rights to the land and are asserting their entitlement to a separate chiefdom. As far as I know, this amounts to an act of colonisation by theft and gerrymandering subterfuge. This is not to say that grazing reserves should not be revisited. I would encourage such reserves to be created in the States of the core North where the Fulanis naturally belong. Land for such purpose should be negotiated with local communities and properly gazetted on 99-year leaseholds, with adequate compensation by the States and the Federal Government. Such reserves can also go with the grass importation proposition that Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbeh is coming up with. For more than a century, the Enclosure Movement in England was provoked by the same problem of relentless clashes between farmers and herdsmen. The rural communities were so fervent in their campaign that the British Parliament had to pass the Enclosure Act 1773. By this act, herdsmen were required to keep their cattle within bounds. Until today, any animal that trespasses into the farmland of an Englishman ipso facto becomes his property. It has brought peace and prosperity to the glorious English countryside. We in Nigeria need to borrow such a piece of jurisprudence. Peripatetic cattle rearing is not only primitive; it is irksome to the common peace. Cattle that travel up and down lose half of their economic value compared to those that are kept in one place. I believe our government owes responsibility to promote the development of the Fulani as a community. When I was an undergraduate of Ahmadu Bello University, our then Vice-Chancellor, Ahmadu Abubakar told us a deeply moving story about his upbringing. He lived in rural Adamawa as a Fulani shepherd boy. While tending the cattle he would eavesdrop a classroom to hear what was being taught. He was captivated with arithmetic. The teacher, noticing his curiosity, enquired about his parentage. His father was approached to allow the boy to join the school. After much persuasion, and with the greatest reluctance, young Iya Abubakar was allowed to join the class. He turned to be a mathematical prodigy. After a brilliant performance in elementary school he gained admission into the prestigious Government College, Zaria (now Barewa College). He distinguished himself in Zaria and was admitted into University College, Ibadan, where he graduated with First Class Honours in Mathematics. From there it was on to Cambridge University in England where he bagged a brilliant doctorate in Applied Mathematics. Iya Abubakar became a professor of mathematics at ABU Zaria at the uncommon age of 27. A consultant to NASA, he is one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians. I believe there are more Iya Abubakars among the Fulani youths tending cattle all over our country. Instead of them being armed with AK-47s and fomenting trouble everywhere, we should nurture them to bring out their talents and genius. A more sedentary lifestyle might have to be enforced as the Brits did with their Enclosure laws at the end of the eighteenth century. This madness must stop.

May 16, 2016 Admin III 0

In all these years, I was told, there was never a Christmas that Lawal did not visit my parents. He always enquired how I was doing and was in awe of all the places he was told I had been at. We got to meet in 1995 when I was first home on holidays after almost a decade. I observed Read More

No rift in Adamawa APC, says party elder

April 13, 2016 Admin III 0

By Ibrahim Abdul’Aziz Yola An elder in the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Adamawa state, Ahmed Song, has dismissed speculations of a split in the Adamawa State APC chapter, describing the rumours as a product of mischief designed to pit the former Vice President against President Muhammadu Buhari. Ahmed Song, a two-time gubernatorial aspirant in the state, said in a Read More

Notable new openings in Adamawa state

February 11, 2016 Admin III 0

I arrived in Yola on Monday this week, for my first visit since 2013. But the prelude to this trip came four days before the gubernatorial election last year. As is my wont, I had written my column in the early hours of the Wednesday before the election, during which I endorsed a couple of candidates: Kashim Shettima in Borno; Read More

Sacked Adamawa SDP lawmaker to run on KOWA party

January 19, 2016 Admin III 0

Ibrahim Abdul’Aziz Yola Mr. Laori Kwamoti, who lost his seat as member representing Numan/Demsa/Lamurde Federal Constituency in Adamawa, is to contest the seat again under the platform of KOWA party. Kwamoti who was the only Social Democratic Party (SDP) member in the National Assembly lost his seat in September last year when the Court of Appeal in Abuja upheld the Read More

Understanding Badaru’s politics

December 24, 2015 Admin III 0

By Lawal Jet Kaugama Recently, top national leaders of the APC thronged Jigawa State to witness the unprecedented defection of 365,000 PDP members into the ruling APC in Jigawa State. In attendance were the Governors of Kebbi, Sokoto, Adamawa, Zamfara, Niger, Borno and Yobe states. Other top officials of the APC in attendance were the party’s National Chairman, Mr. John Read More

Adamawa PDP assembly primaries’ logjam

December 8, 2014 Admin III 0

The rigmarole going on in Adamawa state, following the last Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) primaries in the state represents another disturbing signal to the nation’s democracy. It is a threat to the principle of level-playing field as the nation sails close to the 2015 general elections. For weeks before the primaries, Governor James Ngillari and his foot-soldiers worked stridently to Read More

Adamawa: Is 2015 PDP zoning pact binding on Ngilari?

November 17, 2014 Admin III 0

In this piece, SAMUEL OGIDAN examines politics in Adamawa state as regards the alleged plan by the leadership of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to cut off Governor Bala James Ngilari from contesting the 2015 governorship election, on the premise that the position has been zoned to Adamawa Central and that there was an agreement entered by the party and some Read More

2015: Ngilari may get PDP ticket in Adamawa

November 7, 2014 Admin III 0

By Bode Olagoke Abuja There are indications that despite the zoning of the governorship ticket to Adamawa Central, there has been a fresh plot to concede the position to Governor Bala James Ngilari, even though stakeholders in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state are opposed to his candidature. Blueprint gathered yesterday that some highly placed persons in the Read More

Adamawa: Danger of zoning governorship to stop Ngilari

November 5, 2014 Admin III 0

There is a saying that “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” This depicts the politics now playing out in Adamawa state, a state that is captured partly by the Boko Haram sect. The Adamawa political chessboard betrays the interference of a cabal that control its affairs from Abuja to the detriment of the people of the Read More

Adamawa politics: The twist, the turns

October 13, 2014 Admin III 0

By Livinus Menedi In a dramatic twist of fate, and even what the new Governor of Adamawa, Barrister Bala James Ngillari, himself described as the ‘act of divine providence’, former governor Murtala Nyako has finally taken his rightful place to steer what many have called the state’s floundering ship since he was impeached on July 15. Ngillari becomes the fourth Read More

Lamido, Aliyu and the politics of survival

September 29, 2014 Admin III 0

Jigawa state governor, Sule Lamido, is a towering figure. Standing at over six feet, with his long cap and flowing babbar riga, he can be intimidating. But beyond his physical size, his overbearing attitude (some say haughtiness) has been known to reduce some people to nervous wrecks. And Sule Lamido is always ready for a good fight. Or so it Read More

Adamawa: Why we agreed to step down for Fintiri – Gundiri

September 26, 2014 Admin III 0

One of the governorship aspirants in Adamawa state October 11th by-election, Engr. Marcus Gundiri, in this interview with selected Journalists in Abuja, revealed reasons why some of the contenders backed down on their ambitions and why the acting governor, Umar Fintiri, will not contest in 2015 among other issues. BODE OLAGOKE was there. You are one of the candidates who Read More

Shun politics of hatred, Rep counsels Adamawa PDP

April 16, 2014 Admin III 0

A member of the House of Representatives from Adamawa state, Hajia Aishatu Dahiru Ahmed (Binani), has appealed to members of the state chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to bury their differences and re-unite ahead of the 2015 polls. The lawmaker, who chairs the House Committee on Constituency Outreach, similarly asked party chieftains and members to avoid politics of Read More

Adamawa politics: Enter Boni, exit Tukur

February 24, 2014 Admin III 0

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) crisis which emanated from Adamawa state has cost Bamanga Tukur his seat as the national chairman of the party; forced Governor Murtala Nyako to defect to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC); altered the political equation of the state and catapulted Boni Haruna’s political status to another level. These sudden political happenings at this crucial Read More