ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — If you listen to the African leaders addressing the U.N. General Assembly this year, the message is emphatic and unanimous: The continent is done being a victim of a post-World War II order. It is a global power in itself and must be partnered with — not sidelined.

Most of Africa has logged a lifetime of independence — roughly 60 years — and the continent of more than 1.3 billion people is more conscious of the challenges stifling its development. There’s also a new boldness that comes with the African Union’s G20 seat.

“We as Africa have come to the world, not to ask for alms, charity or handouts, but to work with the rest of the global community and give every human being in this world a decent chance of security and prosperity,” Kenyan President William Ruto said.

In recent years, Africa has been clear about its capacity to become a global power, from efforts to tackle climate change at home — such as the existential threat of climate change upending lives and livelihoods in the region, despite Africa contributing by far the least to global warming — to helping to foster peace elsewhere, like in Russia and Ukraine.

In his address, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo blamed Africa’s present-day challenges on “historical injustices” and called for reparations for the slave trade. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said the continent is poised to “regain its position as a site of human progress” despite dealing with a “legacy of exploitation and subjugation.” Nigeria’s leader, Bola Tinubu, urged his peers to see the region not as “a problem to be avoided” but as “true friends and partners.”

“Africa is nothing less than the key to the world’s future,” said Tinubu, who leads a country that, by 2050, is forecast to become the third most populous in the world.

With the largest bloc of countries at the United Nations, it is understandable that African leaders increasingly demand a bigger voice in multilateral institutions, said Murithi Mutiga, program director for Africa at the Crisis Group. “Those calls will grow especially at a time when the continent is being courted by big powers amid growing geopolitical competition.”

A PARADOX, YET UNSTOPPABLE

On the U.N.’s sidelines, the African Development Bank mobilized some political and business leaders at an event tagged “Unstoppable Africa,” a phrase seen as reflective of the continent’s aspirations just days after the first-ever Africa Climate Summit called richer countries to keep their climate promises — and invest.

But with a young population set to double by 2050, Africa is the only rapidly growing region where its people are getting poorer and where some are celebrating the rampant takeover of their democratically elected governments by militaries.

“Africa is a paradox,” said Rashid Abdi, Horn of Africa/Gulf chief analyst at the Nairobi-based Sahan Research think tank. “It is not just a continent of dwindling hope, there are parts of Africa where we are seeing innovation, progressive thinking and very smart solutions.”

Abdi said the world is becoming more interested in Africa and how it contributes to current global challenges.

“There is definitely potential for Africa to be more assertive and to drive progressive and fairer change in the global system,” he said.

For Ghana’s Akufo-Addo, correcting an “unfair” world order must begin with the payment of reparations from the era during which an approximated 12.5 million people were enslaved, according to the often-referenced Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

“It is time to acknowledge openly that much of Europe and the United States have been built from the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the centuries of colonial exploitation,” Akufo-Addo said.

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

The continent relies heavily on foreign aid for its development needs, receiving the largest share of total global aid, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Still, it continues to suffer from a global financial system that forces its countries to pay eight times more than the wealthiest European nations, resulting in surging debt that eats up what is left of dwindling government revenues.

In 2022, Africa’s total public debt reached $1.8 trillion, 40 times more than the 2022 budget of the continent’s largest country Nigeria, according to the U.N.’s agency for trade and development.

“Africa has no need for partnerships based on official development aid that is politically oriented and tantamount to organized charity,” President Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo said. “Trickling subsidies filtered by the selfish interests of donors will certainly not allow for a real and effective rise of our continent.”

Tshisekedi’s country has the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and is also one of the largest producers of copper, both critical for clean energy transition.

What Africa needs instead, according to Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi, is a more inclusive global financial system. In such a system, Nyusi said, Africans can participate as “a partner that has (a) lot to offer to the world and not only a warehouse that supplies cheap commodities to countries or international multinational corporations.”

The coronavirus pandemic laid bare how the challenges could be life-threatening: Officials were forced to confront that barely any drugs or vaccines were made on the continent, and that more solutions need to start at home.

CHALLENGES LIE AHEAD

Africa’s capacity is not only in its population but also its rich natural resources. However, speaking with a collective voice is stymied by national-focused, rather than regional, policies , said Ibrahim Mayaki, the African Union’s special envoy for food systems.

“The main obstacle to Africa’s development is its fragmentation in 50-plus countries,” said Mayaki at a New York event organized by the Africa Center think tank.

As African leaders spoke glowingly about the continent as a force on the global stage, some at home said the leaders must begin by delivering the dividends of democracy to their people.

In this richly endowed region, at least half of its 54 countries are among the 30 least developed in the world, according to the latest U.N. Human Development Index.

“People will respect you naturally if you’re doing well as a leader and they see your people are not suffering,” said Grace Agbu, a resident of Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. “You don’t beg people to respect or partner with you.”

In Nigeria, chronic corruption and bad governance have robbed millions of the benefits of being Africa’s largest economy.

And on the day Ghana’s Akufo-Addo demanded equal rights and justice for Africa in his address, police officers in his country were arresting dozens protesting the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.

“If Africa wants to be taken seriously, its leaders need to address the serious challenges the continent confronts including preventable ones such as acute conflict in several parts of Africa and a wave of coups, some driven by despair among the population about a failure to deliver security and basic governance,” said the Crisis Group’s Mutiga.

Guinea’s military leader told the General Assembly the continent’s challenges sometimes have to be addressed by soldiers like him when elected presidents fail to do so. He took power after a 2021 coup.

“The era of the old Africa is over,” Col. Mamadi Doumbouya said. “This is the end of an unbalanced and unjust era where we had no say. It is time to take our proper place.”

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• Nigerian Political Buccaneers.
• Book Title: Buhari:Tinubu – How they snatched, shared power
• Author: Maazi Ochereome Nnanna
• Publishers: Inteksbooks Publishers
• Reviewer: Emeaba O. Emeaba
• Pages: 270

If you think the eagle is not a wizard, try grabbing a piece of wood with both your feet. Analogously, this rusty old saw reminds me how it is not easy being Maazi Ochereome Nnanna. Other than the lack of a bone stuck in his nose and his eyes not ringed in chalk, the man is a shaman. Nnanna, who has been chronicling history in a hurry for onwards of forty years, drew blood when he outs and asks in his book, Buhari-Tinubu: How they snatched, shared power: “Exactly what manner of president-elect did INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, present to Nigerians after the 2023 presidential election? An identity impostor? Certificate forger? Drug lord? Lagos State treasury looter? The deadly mafia political leader? The ethnic profiler and commander-in-chief of the Jagaban Army? Or, was it Tinubu, the fiscal gamechanger in Lagos State, the assembler of high-capacity men and women, the overcomer of rough weathers, the man who knows what he wants and how to get it? Or both at the same time?”

You better believe you are in for a heart-stopping surprise. Nnanna, an award-winning newspaper columnist who has anchored the People and Politics column in Vanguard Newspapers since 1994 where he delights in making waves—okay, maybe tsunamis—as he chronicles Nigeria’s political history, writes with that belligerent but perceptive viewpoint of a University of Nigeria Nsukka journalism product. Demonstrating his shamanistic wizardry, he has given us a many-sided portrayal of Buhari and Tinubu’s quest for the office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and how the sleight of hand—the book’s subtitle is “How they snatched, shared power”—was perpetrated. It is a prodigiously researched account of the spread of whodunit. Dubbing the duo of Buhari and Tinubu as nothing but buccaneers, Nnanna takes us on a narrative guide to the planning and execution of the feat. Displaying his vast knowledge of current affairs, politics, and history, he uses Tinubu and Buhari as his leitmotif as he follows the duo; and through their stories, we see specific instances of the culture of Nigerian politics throughout the book.

Using a journalese that is extraordinarily smooth, and effortless, the book—an eleven-chapter tome of elaborate, but tightly packed prose—provides the reader with a uniform, and entertaining rendering of the rise of Tinubu from his Lagos fiefdom to his more potent incarnation—first as a money bag, then as a king maker, and finally as the kingmaker-turned-King. Steeped in research and analysis, the story is of Buhari and Tinubu as they slalom their ways to the front of Nigeria’s political history through 1990 to 2023. Nnanna holds you by the hand and gives you a Kafkaesque tour of this Made-in-Nigeria type politics and democracy. He delineates, in vivid figures, how only the muck of our society, adept in the use of meanness that is their stock in trade: institutional inducement of extreme poverty, and the use of instruments of state security for intimidation—are able to gain power.

Nnanna is very much able to do this arduous job that he sets for himself—the four-in-one job of the accuser, the mediator, the executioner, and the undertaker. The good thing is, he is a perceptive and subtle critic who has hobnobbed with the very perps at the end of his rapier, in every corner of the Nigerian political business.

Nnanna’s interpretation of the progression of the Buhari-Tinubu odyssey is deucedly clever, intriguing, exceptionally revelatory and overwhelmingly lethal. In this enthralling, readable work, the author examines with unloving care, the crudely successive vocations of the two, each of whom attained imperial heights without the necessary certifications (and where there is one, definitely an Oluwole-type!) Meticulously researched and clearly spelled out, the narrative is eloquent of Nnanna’s writing capabilities. He writes in such a lucid, astute text that unpacks the myths of Nigerian politics to help explain present-day motivations and actions. It is tense, twisty and so incantatory and primeval that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it any time soon.

As a precursor to his rapid-fire presentation of the Buhari-Tinubu bubuyaya, he first describes them in their excellencies, warts and all. Tinubu is the political evil genius who, racked by a debilitatingly irksome malaise that sometimes transmogrifies some of his speeches into gobbledygook, is still able to concoct the potent brew that results in his being in Aso Rock. Buhari is the very metonymy for geriatric languor who basks in issuing commands, reading prepared speeches and doing nothing else. Where Tinubu lives ahead of his time, painstakingly plotting, skillfully engaging the right stakeholders, parrying blows along the way, and plain displaying political sorcery, Buhari is an archetypal zany who wears nepotism as a badge of honour and ends up picking up the first prize for the most clueless leader, ever.

Each chapter explores a specific aspect of the quest for finding a successor for President Muhammadu Buhari. The author reminds us that the APC was not alone in the project; emphasizing that three other characters form the dramatis personae of the comedy of errors.  Nnanna tells us about Alhaji Atiku Abubakar (PDP), Mr. Peter Obi (LP) and Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso (NNPP), and then provides historical context and many examples of their entries and exeunt, including when democratic principles are undermined or ignored.

For such a sweeping, often chaotic, and prickly subject, the author maintains a succinct, unswervingly revealing narrative that explicates key terms and hypothetical contexts in a way that should engross an eclectic audience.

This ambitious book tackles major Nigerian questions, and answers them in a unique, enthralling and reportorial method. “This is the first ever book about the political history and power play in Nigeria in the past 33 years with particular reference to Muhammadu Buhari and Ahmed Bola Tinubu as the leading characters who dragged Nigeria down to the status of state failure;” Nnanna gushes as he analyzes the underhanded schemes, the well-calculated machinations, the broad-daylight duplicities, the sadism, the state-sanctioned killings, the skullduggery of state institutions, the dissembling, the wickedly rancorous propaganda, the extreme favoritism, nonstop invasions of the country’s collective purse and the bungling maladministration visited on Nigeria and its unfortunate citizens by these power hucksters, and their partners. Nnanna is a skillful guide, taking you through the daunting convolutions that is the Nigerian politics that produced these conflicts.

Poisonously decent, and with surprises right up until the final parts, Nnanna is unrelenting, pointing out that the duo was the first major political partnership to form a party—the All-Progressives Congress (APC)—plotted, and successfully defeated an incumbent political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) with Dr Goodluck Jonathan as the president in 2015.

As you read this gripping book, you get the sense that with Nnanna’s considerable literary firepower, he could very well have written about any subject if he had wanted to. A quintessential newsman, Nnanna is blessed with razor-sharp journalistic instincts, hereditary cynicism, and a truck-load propensity for ferreting out information and presenting same in its gore and glory. For example, he accedes that the feat of unseating an incumbent government had never happened before in the history of Nigerian politics. This, he said, is because, when a political party has produced leaders for more than two consecutive maximum terms of office, corruption would have taken over where one “godfather” or a gang of them would have hijacked power, such that no one else could come near.

Here, Buhari had taken the first shot as president for eight years, and then handed it to Tinubu on the 29th May 2023 through a contentious election blatantly compromised by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) led by Prof. Mahmood Yakubu.  Nnanna argues, “a system that was bold enough to rape the electoral process in broad daylight and announce an abortion of a result in the dead of the night while people slept, showed how determined the state was to give power to a preconceived winner.”

Nnanna laments “After winning three presidential elections (2015, 2019 and 2023) it is up to the readers and, in fact, all Nigerians to decide for themselves whether the Buhari/Tinubu phenomenon in Nigerian politics was nice to their body, their pocket, or their life.” Rhetoric, in his sarcasm, he asks, “If you knew what you now know, would you have done the same thing you did back in 2015?” That sounds like a jeremiad—a listing of woes which seems to me a wistful shifting of responsibilities. He offers no solution to what ails the political system. Then again, Nnanna is a journalist—journalists have never been in the fixing business. However, the joy of his book is in both the knowing adumbration of who and what brought Nigeria to this sorry pass, and the strong emotion that endows his accusation with its charge and edge. The book concludes that Bola Tinubu has successfully knocked everyone aside (including former President Buhari) to get what he wanted; and now, fully in charge of all the instruments of state, including the Judiciary; it is a given his inauguration on May 29, 2023 has essentially trivialized the Tribunal’s business to a mere academic exercise (…knock on wood!)

While the rest of us uncommitted may stand askance and wonder what is Nnanna’s problem, those other angst-imbued victims of the concert, will splurge on the never-ending plethora of piquant disclosures, new perceptions, and impudent sentiments he serves up. Students of political history and the rest of us would have a problem putting the book down.

A copy of this book is available on Amazon.com, or directly from the author himself: ocheromen@gmail.com.

Dr. Emeaba, the author of A Dictionary of Literature, writes Dime novels.

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“The scepter of criminal law is permanently blind to human compassion, emotions, or interests. Making Trump and his cronies pay dearly for their crimes is justified, at the least, in terms of deterrence and retribution,” —Anthony Ogbo

Thursday, former President Donald Trump was booked on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. His mugshot quickly turned into a piece of illustrious image canonized by the rightwing media and glorified like a martyr of political persecution. In less than two hours after Trump’s booking, his mug shot was already a hot cake.

His joint fundraising committee sold T-shirts, mugs, beverage coolers, bumper stickers, and other merchandise featuring his booking photo.

There were also reports that Trump and his team literally strategized on how to turn this historically horrible event into an image-hyping and money-spinning bonanza. They had a discussion as to what the mug shot would look like. Trump reportedly wanted to look “defiant” to justify his claims of a politically motivated witch-hunt. In fact, in a fundraising email, Trump said he “walked into the lion’s den with one simple message on behalf of our entire movement: I will never surrender our mission to save America.”

So, what exactly are Trump and his Republican Party devotees celebrating? – Conspiring to attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election? Criminals should not be celebrated!

Charges against Trump are very serious. He was indicted on 13 counts of criminal felonies, including an alleged violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico). The racketeering charge alone carries a maximum 20-year jail sentence; making false statements carries a penalty of between one to five years in prison or a fine, and a person convicted of first-degree criminal solicitation to commit election fraud will face between one to three years in jail. The charges revolve around Trump’s and 18 co-defendants’ efforts to overturn the will of the voters and interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Therefore, it might be a self-damaging miscalculation if Trump and his team believe these charges would help his campaign. It is understandable that the MAGA confederacy stands behind his transgressions, but America thinks otherwise. For instance, a new POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll provides some negative figures likely to take a toll on his general election prospects. The findings are not encouraging at all on his part

• • Most Americans believe Trump should stand trial before the 2024 election
  • About half of the country believes Trump is guilty in the pending prosecutions
  • A conviction in DOJ’s 2020 election case would hurt Trump in the general election
  • Half of the country believes Trump should go to prison if convicted in DOJ’s Jan. 6 case
  • Fifty-nine percent of respondents — including nearly two-thirds of independents — said that the Justice Department’s decision to indict Trump in the 2020 election case was based on a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law.

But the scepter of criminal law is permanently blind to human compassion, emotions, or interests. Making Trump and his cronies pay dearly for their crimes is justified, at the least, in terms of deterrence and retribution. The law must act in full force, to deter prospective offenders from following Trump’s amoral and criminal standards. Besides, this process would enhance faith in law enforcement and the government that the criminal procedure is works effectively.

Finally, we must note that former presidents or top government officials are not Jesus. They are humans, and they are average citizens. From Jacob Zuma, a former president of South Africa; Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and many others, top leaders who left office have been jailed or prosecuted in several countries — including in major democratic jurisdictions. The relevance is that the laws apply equally to all citizens. Donald Trump and his coup-plotting ensemble are no exceptions.

♦ Publisher of the Guardian News, Anthony Obi Ogbo, Ph.D. is a visiting professor at the Texas Southern University. He is on the Editorial Board of the West African Pilot News, and the author of the Influence of Leadership (2015)  and the Maxims of Political Leadership (2019). Contact: anthony@guardiannews.us

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