I must thank my friend, Daniel Hannan, a Member of the European Parliament, who invited me to the 2017 Conservative Party Conference in Manchester.
It was a beautiful and mind- expanding experience attending the conference as an official delegate and my democratic experience and temperament is all the better for it.
One of the best parts of the experience was that on Monday October 2, 2017, I met and was photographed with Prime Minister Theresa May and I must say that she is the epitome of simplicity and a specimen of good upbringing and class.
Prime Minister May gave me audience, listened to me and took a picture with me and then sat directly behind me without a single noticeable security aide for the entire Monday session where the Chancellor of The Exchequer, Philip Hammond, gave his inspiring speech. Imagine if this were in Muhammadu Buhari’s Nigeria, would such an honour have been done to a person without much status in Nigeria?
Would the security detail around the President even allow that? I leave you to answer that question. But that was not even the best part for me.
After meeting Prime Minister May on Monday, I was interviewed by a BBC crew and I informed them point blank that democratically unseating President Muhammadu Buhari is my greatest human ambition other than making it into God’s kingdom when I die.
President Muhammadu Buhari is President of Nigeria for now, and I will respect that, but when the time comes (and it is coming soon), I will do all that is legally and humanly possible to democratically unseat a man who I believe has taken Nigeria more than a decade backward. By now, my readers must have either heard of or read the letter by the minister of state for petroleum resources, Mr. Ibe Kachikwu, to his senior minister, who also happens to be President Muhammadu Buhari. In that letter, Kachikwu states that not only has he, as chairman of the board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, been sidelined by the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Maikanti Baru, but the entire board has, allegedly been made redundant.
Appointments that are heavily lopsided in favour of the North have been made by Baru without recourse to Kachikwu or the board of the NNPC. But perhaps most troubling is the fact that, according to Ibe Kachikwu, contracts worth $26 billion have been awarded by Baru, without recourse to due process.
$26 billion. Imagine that! Of the 55 senior management positions recently made by Baru at the NNPC, only 19 of those appointments went to Southerners while 36 of those appointments went to the North, a region that produces no oil.
Does this not corroborate what Malam Nasir El- Rufai said about President Muhammadu Buhari on October 6, 2010, to wit that Buhari’s “insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus are already well-known.”
