News
Ndikelionwu people move against ‘sit-tight PG’ *Want Soludo to reverse tenure extension
Nothing short of the immediate reversal of the tenure extension granted Edozie Obasi, President General of Ndikelionwu Welfare Association (NWA), will satisfy the community currently protesting the gesture extended by the government of Anambra State.
Community leaders who trooped to Ajali, headquarters of Orumba North Local Government Area are accusing the embattled PG of deceiving Chukwuma Soludo, Anambra State Governor into endorsing the extension, by providing him with false report of the situation in the town.
Contrary to the dummy he allegedly sold that those opposed to the governor were fomenting trouble in the community and were after him for the massive support he had been mustered in the last governorship election, the leaders insisted that the PG’s motive for his sit-tight agenda was actually to cover his track over multiple infractions, ranging from land-grabbing in the community to a plot to transmute into the traditional throne of the ancient kingdom.
Leaders, who led a delegation to the council headquarters in Ajalli, on Wednesday, took turns to brief Casmir Nwafor, its chairman on the details of the PG’s activities, including how he deliberately bungled the NWA elections, scheduled for December 27, last year, thus handing him an alibi to seek the extension.
On the contrary, the community told the council boss, a retired captain of the Nigerian Army of their love for the governor, culminating in their donating a massive 98 per cent vote for him during the November 8 polls, making them the community with the highest votes in that regard in the council.
Those in the delegation, that also handed the council boss a letter to Soludo appealing for a reversal of the tenure extension, included Mazi Fortune Ike the Palace Secretary; Mazi Okechukwu Okereke former PG; Mazi Emeka Nwankwor; former NWA Assist Secretary, Robinson Obidigbo the community’s Youth Leader, and the Emmanuel Nwene who spoke on behalf of the village chiefs.
Hear him: “We’re here to acquaint the Mayor that we need elections between now and Easter. The tenure of the last one elapsed on 27th of December 2025. So, we’re surprised when we heard of a one-year extension, which is not in our constitution.
“We are in support of the Solution Government. We’re not against any development. What we’re saying is that we’re against any tenure elongation, since we have capable men to take care of the affairs of Ndikelionwu people. That is why we are here to make it known to the Mayor that we are in support of the APGA government.”
Nwafor, who received the letter from the protesters thanked the community for their orderly conduct and promised to pass the message to the governor for immediate action, adding that based on the fresh information provided, he was sure justice would be done to all sides.
Cheered in agreement by the crowd, gave further details about the botched election and the demands of the community, Obidigbo, said the people were ready for the election anytime it was called, but would not accept tenure elongation.
His words: “The former executive, they had finished their first and second tenures with the last one expiring on the 27th of December. On the day of election, they gave us details of their stewardship and Ndikelionwu General Assembly dissolved them. Now, the electoral committee, which began their work, now read to us that it is only the financial members that were eligible to vote.
“After several questions and back and forth, they insisted that it was a constitutional matter and it must be followed strictly. Some of us, now agreed that if that was the case, let it be so. We now demanded for the list of financial members. But surprisingly, the same union could not provide the nominal role of the financial members of Ndikelionwu Welfare Association. That became the confusion.
“That bastardised our election. That was the betrayal of our election. If the town union wants to conduct an election and they say it is the financial list of nominal roll, our constitution, article 14.6, item E, has it that the Financial Secretary is responsible for the production, update of the nominal roll of the Ndikelionwu Welfare Association.
“How come they could not provide it on the day of the election? To so many of us, it was a calculated attempt to sabotage our election. Now, the same town union that has been dissolved, brought a letter to us that their tenure has been extended. Now, we begin to question, we don’t know how. But there was a story around obtaining that extension. The question the people of Ndikelionwu are now asking is what is that story.
“Ndikelionwu people are supporters of Solution government. We’re supporters of Solution project in Ndikelionwu. We voted massively for Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, because we believe in him. The question then is who must have done this?
“That is why we’re here. Now what the people of Ndikelionwu are saying is that we want town union election. If you give it to us today, we’re ready for it, if you give it to us tomorrow, we’re ready for it, if you give it to us next tomorrow, we’re ready for it. We don’t want extension. It is illegal in all forms.
“Ndikelionwu people are peaceful people. Ndikelionwu people are ready anytime, any day to collaborate with Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo. We provided our land for development, we’ll continue and we’re ready to provide more. This is why we have come.
“We know our Mayor is a man of justice. He is a youthful Mayor. Our Governor, Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo is a youthful governor, he cannot encourage such a thing. That is why we’ve come to tell our own side of the story. We don’t want tenure extension. We want immediate election. This is what we’re asking for.”
Ike, the palace Secretary, who expressed surprise at the turn of events, explained that the mission of the community was based on the record of Soludo’s government for justice and open-handedness, expressing confidence that such attributes would not change in the case of the community.
“Nobody has given us any cogent reason for not having our election. What we heard is tenure elongation. We’re not happy about it. We demand election and not elongation. All these placards are showing our message. Soludo is our man.
“We’re enthralled about his wonderful record. But unfortunately, we’re hearing a different story when it got to our turn. There is light everywhere and the roads are being expanded and everything is happening good. Let this election be icing on the cake.”
Welcoming the delegation, the council boss, Nwafor, who thanked the community for the massive votes given to the governor, expressed his personal love for the people of the community, the reason he said he picked his deputy from the town.
“Ndike is so dear to the governor and to the local government. Being dear to the governor is not just by empty words. He has demonstrated it by bringing a massive project to your community. So, the governor has special love for Ndikelionwu community.
It is because of that love that he doesn’t want your community to be in crisis. Last year, we were informed in Awka and the local government that Ndikelionwu will have their elections. We sent a delegation to ensure there was no problem. But unfortunately, we heard there was no election. I wasn’t there.
“But when I asked why, I was informed of the list of financial and non-financial members. Of course these things are usually well-stated. Before becoming Mayor, I was PG in Oko. We have the same way of doing it. When we say it is only financial members, it is usually well-stated.
“I don’t know how you conduct your own. It is only now that we’re getting further details. But the governor had reasoned in his own wisdom that instead of leaving your community without a leader, and because nobody came to explain this, he should give these people time to conduct a proper election, so that the project at hand in your community would not be jeopardised.
“We don’t intend to undermine your community. The step was taken in the interest of peace – to ensure that the project in your community is well guarded. But now, we’ve heard you people.
“I’m now going to forward your message to the governor today and not tomorrow. You did well by coming to me first. Some people would have proceeded to Awka first. I like the procedure you took and the peaceful nature of your protest. Everyone has a right to demonstrate. I must commend you that you came here peacefully.
“I particularly notice that your delegation is not made up of anyhow people. You have the timber and calibre of your community here. Fortunately, our governor is a listening governor. We’ll take your message to Awka.
“We’re going to explain to him and see how he could help you to conduct an election, which is what you want. Our governor believes in democracy. He’s not an autocratic human being. So, I’ve heard what you people came for and we’re going to do the needful.”
By Sunny Igboanugo
“If you woke me up today and put the question – who is the most patriotic businessman in Nigeria in recent history – the answer will pop-up out instantly – Mike Adenuga! I won’t even have enough time to wipe my drowsy eyes or clear my head out of the sleepiness. It is an answer that has lived in my sub-conscious for years.”
These were my exact words last year. I wrote those words out of a thankful heart to celebrate the multibillionaire, whom, I have just learnt, also goes by the sobriquet – The Chairman or The Great Guru – thanks to Uche Nworah – Ezeudo Ozonmkpu of Enugwu-Ukwu na Umu-Nri – a guru himself in many respects – who has just delivered a heartwarming dissertation on the telecommunications magnate from an insider’s perspective.
I also wrote those words out of great pains and immense regrets that The Great Guru doesn’t own a refinery – just yet – because if he did, Nigerians would not be subjected to the hellish, harrowing and nightmarish experience they are forced to undergo today by the present-day shylocks playing in that field. I won’t name names. Take your tongue and count your teeth.
Just as I commented on Uche’s emotion-laden essay on his ex-boss, if Mike Adenuga owned a refinery today, Nigerians might not be buying petrol above N300 per litre. Reason is he would have found some magic to get around all the arguments offered by the shylocks that have made them continue to see shege banza as the cost of the product, which has remained central to their very existence continue to soar.
You might dismiss this as foolhardiness or ignorance. But I have my reasons. As I wrote last year – Mike Adenuga, has done what I have never seen any other Nigerian do in my long years on earth – sacrifice profit for the benefit of the masses. The introduction by GLO of per second billing in Nigeria, years ago, is the reason you and me are not swimming in the pool of our own tears today.
It was the game-changer that actually put telephony in the hands of the ordinary people – the reason that you could be calling your mother in the village from as far as the UK, US and even China, outside Nigerian cities of Sokoto, Osogbo or Umuahia.
Else, were it not for this move, GSM, would still remain a big luxury like the days of the 090 – naught nine naught – days – telephony will still be a status symbol in Nigeria today – not because of the actual global cost implications – of course neighbouring countries like Togo, Ghana and Benin Republic – far less endowed – had been using it for years – but simply because the shylocks had cornered it.
Remember all the excuses they had offered on why per second billings were impossible in Nigeria. Don’t they sound similar the arguments being made about fuel today. Aren’t they same as the reason for why the cost of owning and maintaining DSTV is higher in Nigeria than any other country the services exist?
Now don’t get it twisted. I was one of the highly privileged here. For one, I wasn’t subjected to some of the hard experiences some people went through. Sampler! Less than a week GSM came into Enugu, I was sitting at 23 Edinburg Street, office of The Guadian, when some gentlemen walked in and handed me a package containing a GSM handset, SIM card package and scores of N1.500 recharge cards.
This was at a time anyone who wanted to key into the new status symbol would go to the courts to swear affidavits, return to the banks to pay a whopping N25,000 – close to N1million in today’s reckoning before being allowed to purchase a GSM SIM card. I didn’t go through the riguours. That was even long before GLO made it to the scene.
So, as a typical Nigerian, I ought to be grateful having a place in the “I better pass my neighbour” list in this regard. But the sheer thievery that followed would not allow that. You know in those days, these shylocks configured their billing to the model that if you generated a call you paid and if you received a call you also paid. This was the level the got. That was until the advent of GLO that changed those thieving models.
I had been wondering why Adenuga chose that game-changer model, which had been declared IMPOSSIBLE before then. Recall that it took the other networks some months to adjust to the per second billing which they must have taken more out of the force of business losses than compassion for the people or change in their original business environment to adjust. For all the variables and excuses they had cited for their shylock behaviour were still in place when they began to copy GLO.
So, I could relate with Uche when he wrote these words: “The Guru is the most kind and greatest benefactor that I know. He gifts, gives, and ‘dashes’ staff, friends, associates and others cash in naira and foreign currency, cars, watches, jewelries, choice drinks and other items. No wonder Dele Momodu uses the phrase ‘the spirit of Africa’ to describe him.
“I am a great beneficiary of his magnanimity as a staff. Not only does he pay above market salaries, he also gives staff money ‘under the table’. The special word for this is in Globacom is ‘stoning’. It is common to hear staff saying; “Mr Chairman ‘stoned’ A & B’. When you are ‘stoned’, you are not expected to tell the other person. It is frowned at in the system to avoid unsettling those who were not ‘stoned.’
Mr Chairman is famous for giving people gifts, even people he doesn’t know, but reaching him to thank him becomes impossible. He does not expect a thank you and also usually doesn’t expect any return favours. He once told us a story during a meeting, of how when he started making money newly, he started buying Rolls Royce cars and other luxury cars.
“He said after sometime he began to realize the vanity in such purchases, so he distributed the whole collection among traditional rulers nationwide. It is a known fact that many people have become multimillionaires just from Mr Chairman’s stoning alone.”
Who else could have chosen that route rather than teaming up with the shylocks to make mega bucks than a man with such a large heart. Without him, Nigerians would probably still be paying as much as N300,000 for SIM cards and cost of calls would still be hitting the rooftops for such mundane, obtuse and criminal reason(s) like – telephony is an international business.
Or haven’t you heard so in DSTV, in petrol and other commodities – as if Nigeria is a different world! So, thank you Uche Nworah. Now we know! I hear it is The Chairman’s birthday, Today, Wednesday, April 29, 2026. May I join the world in saying to the The Great Guru: Hhappy 73rd! We won’t forget.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice!
All over the world the media are always among the first line of victims whenever and wherever democracy dies and dictatorship or autocracy is enthroned. Through the emasculation and asphyxiation of free speech and or freedom of speech, the media become the immediate target in such circumstances.
From the look of things, I don’t think Nigerian journalists are at home with this reality. No! Not just yet! I don’t know why it seems so. But I could hazard some guesses and build up some scenarios which I believe could suffice in assessing the situation.
Perhaps, it is because many of those who lived this reality in the last days of military dictatorship in Nigeria, have since exited the profession, climbed to higher grounds or just receded to the background, as consequences of natural sequence of events where the old is supposed to give way to the new.
Perhaps, it could be the direct result of the evolution in the profession – one of them – the introduction of electronics – if not the substantial or even total reliance on it as news-gathering instrument, which has made the job less cumbersome – thus introducing a pattern of ease in this regard.
Perhaps, it could be the direct consequences of the dearth, diminished impact and even subdued relevance of the print media, which led in the past, now taking a back stage in the new reality of the dominance of the electronic media.
Most probably, the influence of the social media has played a fast one in determining the direction of the industry to the extent that it is now the main source of news even for the traditional outfits, as much as it serves substantially as a distracting, if not distabilising factor.
But whatever it is, either singularly or by a collection of these factors, there is evidence of a demonstrable detour or bypass of the traditional role the media played in Nigeria that helped to shape its history – including dragging it out of the dungeon of military rule into the globally-acceptable arena of what is supposed to be democratic ethos.
Tempered by the new realities of the current generation, the Nigerian media have not only lost the fight in them but had their fangs and claws so smoothened that they now end up as instruments for caressing the patrons and purveyors of bad behaviour the tore at and clawed deeply in the past.
In other words, they have lost the plot. Otherwise, how could the media watch Nigeria suffer this level of degeneration after its chequered history of practically fighting with a million dark spirits and other anti-democratic forces to extricate itself from the vice grip of military rule?
It takes the Nigerian media which has degenerated into an insufferable degradation and complacency to watch the country gravitate towards a one-party state and pretend that they have no role in stopping the drift. Such never happened in the past.
Before 1999, the Nigerian media fought a bloody war against the military, beginning with the brutal era of the late Muhammadu Buhari, who after emerging the Head of State in 1983, launched the most draconian rule that had journalist caught in the crossfire, accentuated by the infamous Decree 2 of 1984, emblematised by the ugly fate of Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor.
Then came the eight years of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) nicknamed Maradona fashioned after the immense dribbling skills of the Argentine legend, Diego Maradona, which ended with the disastrous June 12, 1993 presidential election saga. Again, the Nigerian media marked the gap-toothed General, man to man and never allowed him breathing space.
Then came the most brutal of them all – the Abacha era, where the war assumed a cataclysmic dimension with Sani Abacha, the merciless military despot that took over from IBB, receiving an equal amount of blitzkrieg as he unleashed on the media even with the clear mismatch of the arsenals on both sides.
It was this media that made Abdulsalami Abubakar, who took over from Abacha to bail with his feet, completing the transition programme that in chaos after 12 years in just one year and handed over to Olusegun Obasanjo, rather than share in the experience of his predecessors.
Even Obasanjo, throughout his eight years, had his feet under fired by a watchful media, culminating in another internecine war that saw the third term agenda, one of the features of that era, crumbling under its own weight and by the force of massive onslaught launched against it.
Today, where are the same media? They have turned out – at best – some beggarly, acquiescing and insipid entities – and at worst – some undiluted, unapologetic and rabid enablers of the same anti-people, anti-democratic forces they fought in the past at the risk of tears and blood. How tragic!
What do you see today? Rather than attacking the bad behaviour that threaten the polity, it is rationalisation. So, in 2023 when a totally staggered nation was reeling in pain as the courts churned out some of the wackiest, basest and most confusing reasons to support the mindless heist against the people’s mandate, it was a that told his bemused audience – public opinion is kilometres away from law.
Today, victim-blaming has become the answer to the clearly dangerous and life-threatening crisis of Nigeria’s drift to a one-party state where President Bola Tinubu could even emerge as a monarch, with limitless powers, if not limitless tenure.
Now, where is the agenda-setting function of the media? It is the function of the media to ferret out malfeasance, maladministration, and bad behaviour, without which governance will degenerate into an irresponsible cabal or a syndicate that perpetrates its actions in darkness. Unfortunately, that is where Nigeria is today. Else, when the media launched the fierce battle against the military, was it for the absence of the mistake on the opposite side. When the media joined the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) in its battle to revalidate the June 12 election and enthronement of full-blown democracy led by Moshood Abiola, was it that the patrons of that war were all blameless.
Yes! In spite of the large baggage Abiola, an acolyte of the military, this ugly record was pushed to the background in the interest of the bigger good – democracy. Going by today’s standard, Nigerian media would have focused on the Abiola’s association with the military and other faultlines as a basis to blame him.
Had that happened, where would Nigeria have been today? But because the media were focused on the larger picture, they in the realization that whatever touches the nose is already close to the mouth, they fought relentlessly. That is how we got here. Could that be said of the situation today.
Joseph Pulitzer once admonished: “There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”
How much has compromise – imbued by pecuniary, ethnic, religious and other primordial sentiments allowed this work? For how long do you blame INEC and the judiciary without blaming the media? There you find the danger – the TRAGEDY.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m the Tiny Voice!
President Bola Tinubu, on Tuesday, secured the nod of the House of Representatives to borrow $516,333,700 million in syndicated financing from Deutsche Bank AG.
The approval was consequent upon the presentation of a report by Abdullahi Rasheed, Deputy Chairman of the House Committee on Aids, Loans, and Debts Management, who said that the loan is expected to fund the construction of sections of the Sokoto–Badagry Super Highway.
Tinubu in a letter to the National Assembly, last week, seeking the $516.3 million loan from Deutsche Bank to support the construction of the road, had said the facility, to be sourced from a syndicated financing facility, would fund sections 1, 1A, and 1B of the project, which covers about 120 kilometres.
Tinubu requested a resolution in line with Sections 16 and 21 of the Debt Management Office (Establishment) Act, 2011, to enable the Federal Government to secure the financing for Sections 1, Phase 1A, and Phase 1B of the project.
The project is a flagship initiative of Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and is targeted at enhancing national connectivity, improving the movement of goods across key economic corridors, and drastically shrinking travel time.
The 1,000-kilometre road will link Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Kwara, Oyo, Ogun, and Lagos states, connecting Illela in the northwestern state to Badagry.
According to him, the financing arrangement will be backed by a partial risk guarantee from the Islamic Corporation for the Insurance of Investment and Export Credit (ICIEC).
He said the Federal Government will provide counterpart funding of over ₦265 billion for land acquisition, compensation, and related infrastructure.
The former Lagos governor said the loan is structured for nine years and includes a three-year grace period.
It has an interest rate pegged at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange SOFR plus 5.3 per cent per annum.
Already, the Federal Executive Council (FEC), Nigeria’s apex decision-making and advisory body to the president on policy, has approved the financing plan.
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