12012021 - COVID-19: FG may suspend NIN registration — MINISTER

20 — Vanguard, TUESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2021
Lawan@62: A man of candour and focus
By OLA AWONIYI
HIGH political office is surrounded
on all sides by distractions.
Experience best teaches this. It is not
enough to take into the office a vision and
a mission, you will find once there, enough
to take you off track, to test your character
and agenda. Many failed not because they
were not prepared or well-meaning. They
did because they no longer saw the
goalpost once they found themselves on
the playing field.
Ahmad Ibrahim Lawan is apparently
conscious of that reality. He believes a
political leader must stand for something,
to guide and focus their time and energy. A
leader who does not stand for something
falls for anything. And such is easily
distracted. Because Lawan stands for
something, he has resolutely focused on
what took him from the ivory tower into
politics and on all that he believes in as a
public servant.
Since his emergence as the 14th
President of the Nigerian Senate in June
2019, Senator Lawan’s stand on any issue
is an open book. His candour means that
he takes a firm position even on
controversial issues. And he defends his
positions without playing to the gallery or
fear of a backlash. Such is called courage
of conviction.
Take the proposition in Nigeria for a parttime
or unicameral legislature at the
national level. The proponents were often
led to it by what they hear about the “jumbo
pay” of federal lawmakers and the
‘generous’ funding of the National
Assembly. Lawan, not too long ago,
challenged them to a public debate.
“I am not here to defend the National
Assembly but I’m here to encourage a
debate on what the National Assembly
means to us as a country or what our
legislature means to us as a country and as
a people. If you don’t like the set of
members in the Ninth National Assembly,
change all of us in 2023. Get better people
but help support the system to function
because that is your protection,” Lawan
said at an inhouse
event
in Abuja.
Unfortunately,
no one has
picked up
the gauntlet
for a healthy
Lawan will not
deviate from a
path that has led
to obvious
progress
national
conversation on the issue.
In the Senate, Lawan’s leadership style
projects him as only the first among equals.
He always assert that he owes his
emergence as president of the ninth Senate
to the grace of God and the votes of his
colleagues across party lines. And that has
been his strength and guiding principle in
his roles as the presiding officer in the
Senate. His focus has been to foster
harmony among his distinguished
colleagues in the upper chamber so that
they can deploy their time and energies to
working together for Nigerians and the
good of their country.
This is evident in the seamless passage
of bills and adoption of resolutions on
critical national issues. In the ninth Senate,
every member knows they have the liberty
to express their views but also a
responsibility to respect the views of others.
That has created for them a nice work
environment where respect begets respect.
Lawan is also a firm believer in the
imperative of inter-chamber cooperation.
Even as chairman of the National
Assembly, Lawan refers to the Speaker of
House of Representatives, Hon. Femi
Gbajabiamila, as his “brother and friend.”
That must explain why they often find a
common ground on key national issues.
And that also accounts for the smooth
passage of critical bills through their two
chambers.
Lawan is also convinced of the merit of a
harmonious relationship between the
Legislature and the Executive. This has
drawn him sometimes caustic criticisms
•Senate president , Ahmad Ibrahim Lawan
but he has stood his ground and is
unapologetic.
The benefits of harmony between the two
elected arms of government are there for
objective eyes to see from the past one and
a half years. It has bred mutual respect
among the arms and reciprocity in the way
each treats submissions from the other.
Executive proposals are now treated
without undue delay while Bills passed by
the National Assembly are receiving
prompt presidential assent. That wasn’t the
story before the ninth Assembly.
Signing the 2021 Appropriation Bill into
an Act on the eve of the New Year, President
Muhammadu Buhari revealed that the
2020 budget achieved 97.7 performance,
despite the unforeseen havoc of COVID-
19. This unprecedented success was
facilitated by the early passage of the
appropriation bill by parliament and the
prompt assent given it by the President.
Prompt
assent
There is reasonable expectation that the
2021 budget will perform even better,
having become law before the start of the
year. In the past, budgets dragged into the
middle of the year and routinely recorded
low performance.
Lawan will not deviate from a path that
has led to obvious progress. Having gained
much experience in the parliament, he does
not want the threat to governance posed
by needless confrontation between the
Legislature and the Executive. He has opted
to promote harmony in governance for the
good of the people.
And he has taken his message of harmony
beyond the gates of parliament and
government and out to the larger political
field. Only last month, he appealed to the
Southeast geopolitical zone to continue to
work with the other zones towards and
beyond 2023 in building the Nigeria of our
common dreams.
The Senate president canvassed national
unity at Igbere in Abia State where he was
honoured with a chieftaincy title. Lawan
made it clear at the event that every part of
Nigeria is needed to make the country
work.
Hear him: “Let’s unite ourselves in this
state and indeed in the Southeast. Let’s face
common agenda of being in the center of
Nigeria. In fact, let’s even attempt to be
the leaders of Nigeria because it is a valid
aspiration. Let’s not stay away from being
part of the real centre of action in Nigeria.
That we can achieve when we sit together
and talk among ourselves. Time is of
essence. Nigeria needs all of us to be
united. Nigeria needs all hands to be on
the deck. Nigeria needs the effort of each
and every part to make it work and we can
make it work.”
The Yobe State-born politician is
providing purposeful leadership at the
National Assembly and helping in building
an environment conducive for national
development. This is just a tribute to wish
him a happy 62nd birthday.
•Awoniyi is Special Adviser on Media to
the Senate President
Trump’s willing coup plotters
•President Trump
aggrandisement and the purported
advancement of God’s war against the liberal
anti-Christs would do well to confess their sin
and seek forgiveness from the citizens they
misled and God whom they mocked.
How the passions and energies of nearly half
of the adult population of America were stoked
and mobilised to lead to the storming of
parliament at the precise moment that the will
of the people was to be affirmed must be the
question all sane citizens should answer now.
Why, they must ask themselves, were they so
willing to suspend reason; to spite every ethical
principle, moral teaching and humane value
imbued by church, family and country?
Trump’s litany of cruel and calculating acts
did not stop with the instances earlier
mentioned. He had been giving notice of his
essentially devious character long before he
announced, almost as a frat house prank, that
he would run to be president of the United
States.
On the campaign trail, he put on display his
rude, crude, bullying and boorish behaviour
that would outrage any parent, never mind
born-again Christians. His loathsome
behaviour as a private citizen might have been
deemed harmless, more notorious than
poisonous.
No matter if he would discriminate against
Blacks by refusing to lease property to them; if
he set up a university to scam students; if he
took out a full-page newspaper advert to
campaign for the death penalty for five non-
White youths wrongly accused of murder; or if
he proudly claimed leadership of the birther
movement whose only goal was to deny Barack
Obama’s American citizenship and
delegitimise him as president of the United
States. Why did the Republican Party and
Christian evangelicals, millions of ordinary
citizens, condone every immorality and
willingly follow Trump till he led them, on the
strength of the biggest of his countless lies, to
trash parliament and defile democracy?
Undergirding the depravity of Trump’s
thoughts and actions is a shocking compulsion
to lie, no matter the occasion. But what
rendered him so irredeemably prone to lying?
The answer, as the experts - including his own
niece, a clinical psychologist - have proffered,
is to be found in his traumatised childhood, in
the toxic relationship with his stern and
foreboding father.
Which turned him into a pathological
narcissist. Saddled with an insatiable ego,
Trump would distort every reality and twist
every fact that did not flatter his image of
himself as the greatest and the best. Crippled
by a destructive inferiority complex - note how
he is haunted day and night by his predecessor,
Obama, whom he had fought tooth and nail
to diminish but who still towers above him
even after he has himself become president -
the only compensation was to become an
extreme present narcissist. His whole being
became an altar of self-worship that must be
worshipped by others who like him must do
away with empathy, a concept that by
definition accepts the existence of others and
their experiences. It is a short breath from there
to being a sociopath; to holding in the White
House a gleeful
Trump had been
giving notice of his
essentially devious
character long before
he announced that he
would run for
president
watching party
of the
murderous
horror he had
just unleashed
on his own
government.
Lacking the
By OGAGA IFOWODO
AS the world gasps and recoils from the
tragic spectacle of the storming of the
Capitol, the parliament of the United States,
just as Vice President Mike Pence presided over
a joint sitting to certify the electoral college
votes that would affirm Mr. Joe Biden as the
duly elected 46th president, it must be a subject
of wonder that the horror took so long to occur.
And remember that there had been a dress
rehearsal for the shameful event in the
attempted kidnap and possible murder of
Michigan State governor Gretchen Whitmer
by the Trump-inspired Wolverine militiamen
a mere three months earlier.
They should remember that Trump had put
his army of White supremacist storm-troopers
on red alert when he ordered them to “Stand
back and stand by,” rather than condemn their
noxious beliefs and activities and that he
proudly described himself as White nationalist.
And that any of the rallies where Trump stoked
his audiences to incendiary frenzy against his
2016 rival Hilary Clinton (“Lock her up,” he
had them chant lustily), or demonised
journalists and a fact-based press as “enemies
of the people,” or very carefully targeted
congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rasheeda
Tlaib as non-Americans who should be sent
back to their original shithole countries, could
have exploded in bloody street brawls.
Then there was his calculated cultivation and
coddling of white supremacists, most notably
in his claim that the neo-Nazis brandishing
burning torches and chanting “Jews will not
replace us” as they stomped in the streets of
Charlottesville were “fine people,” just like the
anti-racist activists who opposed them, one of
whom was murdered. Did I mention his cold
and cynical downplaying of the coronavirus
pandemic, his turning of the commonsense
public health requirement of wearing a mask
to prevent the spread of a deadly disease to
ideological warfare even as hundreds of
thousands of the citizens he swore to protect
died and millions choked the hallways of
hospitals?
The overwhelming majority of the
Republican Party and so-called Christians
known as White evangelicals who enabled
Trump’s madness in a devil’s bargain for self-
m e n t a l
capacity to deal with complexity, an inescapable
fact of life, politics no less, lying became his chief
weapon for procuring sacrifices to ego. Inevitably,
he embraced Joseph Goebbels’ doctrine of
propaganda and demagoguery. Goebbels, a
virulent anti-Semite even among Nazis, was Adolf
Hitler’s propaganda minister. He is generally
believed to have laid down the unfailing formula
for effective propaganda: “If you tell a lie big
enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it.” And so for two
months, Trump repeated ad nauseam the
patently false claim that the 2020 presidential
election was stolen from him, dinning it without
a shred of evidence. His proof lay entirely in
his repetition of the assertion in spite of the
unambiguous rebuttals of his own election
security officials, the wholesale dismissal of
sixty or more petitions he filed in court (many
of them thrown out by judges he appointed),
and the certification of the results by
Democratic and Republican controlled states
alike.
All the evidence points to a mentally unstable
man incapable of handling his own affairs -
we may cite his failed businesses resulting in
six declared bankruptcies and indebtedness to
the tune of nearly half a billion dollars and not
mention his failed marriages - who would not
be a fit and proper person to be mayor of a
one-horse town, never mind electing him to
the most powerful political office in the world.
He does not understand what greatness means,
so it was obvious that he meant something
entirely different with his campaign and
governing slogan, Make America Great
Again. If nothing else disclosed his true intent,
his response to Charlottesville did: Make
America White Again.
Hence, the alternate rendition of MAGA:
Taking back “our” country, as if the United
States belongs only to the deranged members
of Trump’s personality cult. He would affirm
the racist animus of his vision of America in
the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests
against systemic racism, seizing every
opportunity to demonise the movement and
diminish their cause while hailing the white
supremacist infiltrators who caused mayhem
at protests.
No one was surprised when he stoutly
defended a 17-year-old boy, Kyle Rittenhouse,
who travelled across states and shot and killed
with a military-style rifle two unarmed persons
protesting yet another black man killed by the
police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
•Continues online:www.vanguardngr.com
•Ifowodo, lawyer, poet and public
commentator is also a former Assistant
Professor at Texas State University
C
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