Beyond ‘street protests and sit at home orders’ By Mohammed Adamu

Mohammed Adamu

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NOTE: Given the deluge of responses to last week’s ‘BIAFRA: IN PEACE OR IN PIECES’, I have decided, this week, to give up the page to those who feel strongly for or against the views I canvassed. Enjoy them:
BIAFRA’S OKAY, BUT THERE’S NO BASIS FOR IT!
Online:- “Those who advocate that the ‘Czechoslovakia Formula’ out of which Czech and Slovak republics emerged, be applied to Nigeria simply forget, or are not aware

On Justice Ononghen by Mohammed Adamu

THURSDAY Column with Mohammed Adamu

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The late American humorist, Art Buchwald said about the ‘law’ that “the more complicated lawmakers make it, the more work it generates for lawyers”. Had the ‘Ten Commandments’ been written by a lawyer, he said, “Moses could never have carried them on a stone tablet”. It would have been so voluminous, Moses would have had to haul it “down from Mount Sinai on to the Rock of Gibraltar”. Besides, such ‘divine judicature’ sullied by the pedantic pen of man, would also have been so verbose, Moses himself would have had to require an encyclopedia or concordance of ‘words’ and ‘phrases’ to decode.
Lawyers would not have written the ‘Mosaic law’ in the simple, verbial imperative of ‘thou shalts’ and ‘thou shall nots’ –because these would not lend to the contrapuntal legalism that man-made law is always hostage to. Such categorical imperatives would not have been ‘complicated’ enough to mystify the ‘law’ and thus to create the schisms necessary to generate work for lawyers. In fact if lawyers had written the

Integrity and the war on corruption by Mohammed Adamu

 

Friday Column with Mohammed Adamu

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Note: a rehashed version of ‘Random Musings on Anti-corruption’; published Jan/19/2016.

Yes, ‘integrity’ is critical to the fight against corruption. But concerning political leadership ‘integrity’ is merely a ‘moral necessity’. It is not a requirement of the law. It may be useful in winning election; but it is the prerogative of the electorate to notice or to ignore. Which is not to suggest that a ‘political leader’ fighting corruption should have only the ‘legal authority’ to do so. To be more effective it is desirable that he should also have some ‘moral authority’ to boot. Which again is not to

‘2016: Diary Of A Columnist (I)’ by Mohammed Adamu

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‘Biafra And The Sesesionist Right Of A Minority Revisited’
And although the American Constitution, as Abraham Lincoln posited “contained no prohibition of secession or enforcement language to preserve the Union”, it did –like all other democratic constitutions- specify an oath of office mandating the President “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”. And if so, what can be more deserving of the President’s ‘preservation’, ‘protection’ and ‘defense’ -in a constitutional democracy- than the territorial integrity of the State? And thus said experts that in the true interpretation of ‘sovereign power’, “since the people had not vested the President with the authority to fix the terms of separation”, Lincoln was right to make “war the inevitable consequence of secession” and to declare himself “constitutionally unable to stop it”. And as Lincoln himself eloquently said, whereas the secessionists had “no oath registered in heaven to destroy” the union, he as President had “the most solemn one to ‘preserve’, ‘protect’ and ‘defend it’.”
Lincoln said whenever “the people grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of

Buhari’s baptism of fire revisited by Mohammed Adamu

by Mohammed Adamu

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As I still struggle to come out of Sallah mood, I thought I should serve you a slightly rejigged version of Buhari’s baptism of fire, published sometime after Saraki’s emergence. Now that the ‘usurper’ Senate President stews in his own pot –or as the English would say ‘as he is being hoisted in his own petered’, I thought we should take a look again at Parliament and its many headaches. Enjoy.

“Soon after Gen. Buhari became President-Elect, I wrote four pieces almost in a sequence, viz: ‘BEFORE WE CRUCIFY BUHARI’; ‘BUHARI: BEWARE PARLIAMENT’; ‘BUHARI AND THE EIGHT PARLIAMENT’ and ‘THE JUDICIARY WAITING FOR BUHARI’. While appraising the different theoretical presumptions and practical realities about the democratic, the legislative and the judicial processes of government I tried variously to provide the basis –with the advent of Buhari- for caution against the expectation of quick democratic dividend. I also tried to warn that the Legislature, unless it is handled by sticks-and-carrots, could be a systemic drag rather than an incentive to our democracy

Of ethnic champs and Buhari’s appointees by Mohammed Adamu

General Muhammadu Buhari

 Mohammed Adamu (08035892325 sms only) | dankande2@gmail.com

They say that President Buhari should respect the sensibilities of a heterogeneous society and subject every appointment to geo-ethnic balance. I say that he should remain numb and unfeeling to the retrogressive tendencies of old that have stunted our growth and arrested our development. It was why we voted for ‘change’. So that for the first time things should be done differently; -and which is what ‘change’ is all about: -substituting something for another.

Those days should be long gone when political appointees were like dogs of hunt scavenging on behalf of sectional enclaves in a virtual ‘State of Nature’ that PDP had turned Nigeria into, where only the fittest survived. Back then and especially leading up to Jonathan’s roguish, geo-ethnic government, it seemed justified for Nigerians to feel a sense of aloofness from