WITH the People’s Democratic Party, PDP,  national convention slated for Friday October6 in Port Harcourt, River state capital, the stage is now evidently set for this crucial  political exercise designed to elect the party’s presidential flag bearer in the 2019 presidential election. Although over seventeen aspirants are jostling to clinch the party’s presidential ticket to challenge the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari in an epic political battle, one aspirant stands out as one who holds a strong ace and therefore greatly dreaded by the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC. He is Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso.

Towards 2019 general elections in Nigeria

ON 7th August this year, the Federal Government commenced the Tradermoni scheme in Lagos. 

I DID not see any reason to join in the national discourse on the flim flam of party defection, not even after Dr. Eweta Emmanuel Uduaghan, the immediate past governor of Delta State, and an Itsekiri man, decamped from the People’s Democratic Party,  PDP, to the All Progressives Congress,  APC,  on a not too convincing reason that his defection would stabilise the polity of the Niger-Delta region. To a  large extent, the notoriety of party defection by the political class  has not helped the political narrative of a nation ranked among the poorest in the world. Politics is ideology-based. In other civilised climes, party membership is traditional.  Most times, membership is carried through a second to a third generation. Suffice to say that in Nigeria, party membership is munificent and frivolous!

I RECEIVED a phone call on September 16, 2015 from someone who turned out to be  Joe Ayonmike. He was commenting on my article of that day titled Britain at Sunset. He said he usually picked a thing or two from my columns, but on this day, I used a word he had never heard  before: morganatic. He jokingly said he prides himself as  attending the best schools, including one of the best universities in the world; the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE, and lived in England, so was surprised to come across an English word he never knew existed. He asked the school I attended. I replied: “Araromi Baptist School, Lagos and Methodist Boys’ High School, Lagos.” “University?” “Ife.” He joked: “So you never schooled abroad and are teaching those of us who did.”  We laughed.