Bamanga, the cat
Like the fictional character Amalinze the cat in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, his back is yet to touch the ground in the ceaseless political wrestling that has been his lot since his surprise elevation to the slippery position of PDP chairman. Speaking of his uneasy tenure in a statement which he personally signed and […]
Like the fictional character Amalinze the cat in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, his back is yet to touch the ground in the ceaseless political wrestling that has been his lot since his surprise elevation to the slippery position of PDP chairman. Speaking of his uneasy tenure in a statement which he personally signed and issued this week, the former Ports Authority boss said: “I had hardly settled down in office when some newspapers predicted that I would not last three months. Later some newspapers wrote that I would resign in December. Another one said two days ago that I had been asked to resign.”
The PDP chairman is now gloating that he has news for all those who have been obsessed with his departure from the party’s chair. “Well, I have spent more than one year in office and they still continue to write same and same thing all over. I really do not understand whether Bamanga Tukur is really the media problem or the problem of faceless individuals who are manufacturing the miserable reports.”
Whatever may be the case, the PDP chairman is not about to throw in the towel in spite of the best effort of his opponents to create a siege mentality around him. “Let me reiterate that I am not resigning and I have no intention of doing so as elected National Chairman of the PDP.”
Bamanga’s statement reminds me of the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous “the lady is not for the turning” statement. As if to prove the quote about all political careers ending in disaster, Thatchers was no exception. While Thatcher’s tenure changed British politics and economy in undisputable way, it is unclear what Bamanga’s one year tenure has achieved.
Indeed it reminds this column of an interview that the former Ethiopian strongman, Mengistu Haile Mariam, had with the defunct Africa Now magazine. Mengistu was asked about his achievement 25 years after the revolution he led and which made him become Ethiopian Prime Minister. Mr Haile Mariam paused for a long time before he gave an answer… “I have survived”. It appears that one year after he became party chairman, all that Bamanga Tukur can point to as his achievement is his survival. Given the determined way that his opponents have been sniping at him, it may be sooner rather than later when, as in the case of Mengistu, even surviving may not be for much longer.
The chairman from hell
With every new public statement it is clear that a costly mistake has been done by the presidency in appointing the former Managing Director of Nigeria Breweries, Eze Festus Odimegwu, as the chairman of the body responsible for conducting credible census in the country, the National Population Commission (NPC). While he appears to have antagonized his colleague commissioners at the NPC to the extent of majority of them placing an advertisement in the newspaper to distance themselves from his utterances, he is also engaged in a very public verbal war with his predecessor, Chief Samu’ila Danko Makama, and the immediate past Director General of the NPC, Jamin Dora Zubema. All this is aside from his war with the labour union of the commission.
This column actually wonders whether the Eze who is always flaunting his first class degree in Chemistry and a PhD in some other field cannot see how antagonizing everyone and discrediting everything done before him will enable him achieve his aim of giving Nigeria the first credible census. It is really strange that instead of trying to build consensus that will enable him and his commission to carry out a census in 2016, he is obsessed with denigrating all past censuses and is also bent on including religion and ethnicity in the line up of questions during the census . For those who may not have taken notice, let me just share three quotes from Festus Odimegwu. “ No census has been credible since 1816.Even the one conducted in 2006 is not credible”. “The crude fact is that our demographic exercises have been more political and served devious and primordial ends”. “Nigeria has run on falsehood for too long. We must stop this falsehood and put a stop to all this.”
You can imagine the horror of the officers in the NPC who have been saddled with a chairman that is busy trying to bring the house down so that he can rebuild it in his own image. To achieve that Eze Odimegwu is proposing a budget of 600 billion naira even though the last census in 2006 was conducted on a budget of just 38 billion naira! Clearly the presidency needs to step in quickly and bring the former brewery boss down to earth before he does more damage to NPC and the country at large.