Rimi inspired a generation of young men, most of whom are now in their late fifties with the consciouness of the radical propensity for service as the reason for politics and governance

First things first: As we RiPPLE along this morning, we should first get this our well known obsession with  GMB, his government, party and politics out of the way for starters.

“From relative obscurity, each generation discovers its mission; and fulfills or betrays it”. I have since 1979 always had these, or words to that effect ascribed to Frantz Fannon or was it Amilcar Cabral?, as a powerful motivation for any political activism I have been involved with. This phrase was drummed into our ears in the first set of Political Science 101 tutorials, at the “8pm to infinity” sessions of Late Dr. Bala Muhammad in 1979 at the Bayero University (BUK) Kano.

Since the return of General Buhari in good health last  year the political atmosphere has been revving up ahead of the mother of all battles in 2019.

I am no doubt obsessed with General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB). This is obvious to all who have been reading RIPPLES since we started our weekly chat on these pages. Like many others inexplicably obsessed with GMB and his Government and Politics. And what he does, what he doesn’t do. Plus of course, loads of things needing to be done that he hasn’t done.

It is pathetic how those desperate to sack the Buhari Government don’t seek the right tools to fight the President. They invoke corruption as the genie to do GMB and his government in. The tar of corruption can’t work.

The National Assembly (NASS) reordering of elections is all over the news. So too the ill advised intervention of INEC trying without much success to bar the Legislature from performing its constitutional responsibility.

Mamoon Baba-Ahmed  who died at slightly over 70 years of age, last Friday (February 9, 2018) was a great broadcaster, a courageous one who did his job with uncommon passion, not minding whose ox was gored, so long as he was sure of what he was about.

The first instalment of this column last Friday ended on the note that General Obasanjo refused to emulate the one-term, stabilizing role played by late President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Read on.

This is one of the many reasonable submissions by Chief General Olusegun Matthew Okikiola Obasanjo, Ph.D, GCFR in his celebrated Open Letter to the President, General Muhammadu Buhari released on January 23, 2018.

My initial plan this morning was to chat on the national youth service corps (NYSC) scheme which has been around since 1973/’74. I was motivated to do so because my daughter, whose 3 months old baby boy, Jabir is much too tender for the hustle and bustle of camp life, has been posted to the middle belt state of Plateau as part of the batch meant for camp on Tuesday 16th January. 

He is not the spokesman of the North. He is not that of ACF or NEF, and he is not so old as to count in the circles of the gerontocracts who lead the two Northern Elders groups that address issues of concern and interest to the North. Yet, whatever he says is invariably the position of the aggregate of Northern Elders.

A re-edited “Dandalin Siyasa” platform exchange reproduced here reveals certain expectations on GMB shortly after the 2015 elections. Though he’d been ill half the time since then, the facts suggest that the PDP way of doing things seems to have prevailed thus far. Will it prevail all through?

The hearing was a huge success. It came on the heels of the first state visit by General Muhammadu Buhari to Kano. As a follow up to the visit that was mainly to work to Governor Ganduje and his group’s agenda in APC, the President was advised by a Kano NGO, Kano LEADS Initiative to adopt the OBAMACARE strategy in addressing the drugs menace in the state.

It is so sad that one has to keep on talking of GMB and things around him in a weekly chat of this type that RIPPLES is, time and again. But these days there is nothing as engaging as the actions and inactions of GMB, our President.