Opinion

Here is the full speech delivered today by President Muhammadu Buhari at the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly. It is totally different from the fake version earlier circulated today.

An operational code name requires creativity, it is meant to be a cover up, hide the real intentions of the operation, achieve a public relation stunt if possible, and ease communication and strategic documentation within the military hierarchy.

Mama Taraba also said: “If today Mr. President says he is running in 2019, I will go to him respectfully and thank him for giving me the opportunity to serve and then tell him that I have to resign because my political godfather may be running.”

When President Muhammadu Buhari, renowned for his integrity and anti-corruption stance, appointed a professor of law and civil rights activist, Itse Sagay, in August 2015, as head of the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption, close friends described it as one appointment whose time had come.

Even though the Nigerian military, like the military all over the world, is used to christening its strike operations scary cognomens, finding out what informed its latest operations in the South East which it codenamed Operation Python Dance may open a vista into what the military thinks of us as a people.

Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, the army chief, is a famous snake farmer. Naturally, he had no hesitation in unleashing pythons on south-eastern Nigeria to enforce the peace. The pythons have been dancing dangerously.

No matter how irritating IPOB must have been to the current administration, it scored an own goal by deploying soldiers to the south east. Even if the soldiers are taken away from the streets today, the damage has already been done.

The military involvements in politics for twenty-nine years out of Nigeria’s fifty-seven years of independence has drawn back and miniaturized the sense of democracy and good governance among Nigerian political leaders so much that political discussions are no longer issue-based or interesting.

There are also other instances, such as the recent removal of the former Director General — Ms Chinelo Anohu-Amazu — and the entire management of the National Pension Commission, where the rights of the Presidency to execute such orders are being contested.

The controversies trailing the deployment of armed soldiers to the hitherto peaceful South East of Nigeria has brought to the fore several fundamental issues that ought to be sufficiently addressed regarding the foundation of the military institution in Nigeria.

Those who thought that Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting would be the political funeral for Minister of Women Affairs Aisha Alhassan may have exaggerated her dilemma after all.

The third point is a corollary of the second and it is their tendency for unmitigated self-destruct. Nothing but a mighty fall awaits people who fail to learn from the past.

So much dust, which all amounts to a huge storm in a tea cup, has been raised about the statement made by Aisha Alhassan, the Minister for Women Affairs and Social Development, that she would support former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, against her current boss, President Muhammadu Buhari, in the 2019 presidential race.

Mama Taraba is Senator Aisha Alhassan, the current Minister of Women Affairs in the Muhammadu Buhari cabinet, and arguably the most influential female politician in Taraba state today. She did something shocking and unusual in Nigerian politics during the last Eid-el-Kabir holidays.