JOIN NOW, EARN 50% OF OUR TOTAL REVENUE MONTHLY

Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State has said there is nothing worth celebrating about the visit of Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to the US.

El-Rufai stated this at the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential rally in the state yesterday, January 18th. This is coming after Atiku visited the US for the first time in 13 years on Thursday.

The APC had repeatedly said he was running away from investigations by the US authorities. Commenting on the visit, which has got many people mocking the APC, el-Rufai said members of the PDP should be crying for Atiku instead of celebrating him.

“Atiku is in America after begging for 12 years to get visa and people in the PDP are celebrating instead of crying. So all of a sudden, going to America is an achievement?

“Mr. President, I first went to America when I was 23 years old, it is not an achievement, but in the minds of the PDP, getting a visa after begging for 12 years is an achievement.

“Do you want to vote those who will go to Trump before they come back to Nigeria? Do you want those who will take all your money to America? Atiku Abubakar should be explaining to Nigerians why he did not go to America for 12 years,” el-Rufai said.

Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, has revealed the outcome of his meeting with the US Chamber of commerce.

Atiku, who is currently in the US for the first time after almost 13 years, had a business roundtable with the USCC. Shortly after the meeting, the presidential hopeful took to his Facebook page to reveal the outcome of the meeting.

During the meeting, Atiku said he shared his plan to get Nigeria working again. He wrote,

“At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business roundtable, I shared my plan to get Nigeria working again. I also reiterated my commitment to devolution of powers at the centre thereby allowing for a smaller, and more effective federal government. #LetsGetNigeriaWorkingAgain #BetterNigeria.”

The former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, has today again blasted the president Muhammadu Buhari alleging that Buhari is in “mad desperation” to win the presidential election.

In an open letter titled “Point for Concern and Action” which he distributed to journalists at a press conference held at his house at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta, Obasanjo alleged that was acting like a former military dictator, Sani Abacha.

Abacha, a military man, ruled Nigeria between 1993 and 1998, he died in 1998 at the presidential villa in Abuja.

“He went for broke and surrounded himself with hatchet men who on his order and in his interest and at high costs to Nigeria and Nigerians, maimed, tortured and killed for Abacha. Buhari has started on the same note on the same path in mad desperation,” Obasanjo said.

“Buhari has succeeded in deceiving us the first time and we will be fools to allow ourselves to be deceived the second time,” Obasanjo added.

US involvement in Syria — hesitant, misguided, quixotic — has been benighted from the beginning.

Donald Trump wants to pull US troops out of Syria as quickly as possible. Well, it’s Friday, so that’s what the president wants now. Tomorrow, who knows, maybe he’ll insist that Syria pay for the pullout. Maybe Trump will decide to hold a summit with Bashar al-Assad after deciding that the Syrian leader’s not such a bad guy after all, since he also doesn’t like the Islamic State and owes his position to Russian support. Maybe Trump will team up with Turkey to build a wall around Syria because “if we stop them over there, we won’t fight them over here.”

With Trump, all options seem to be in play, and it all depends on what Fox News covers, what the last autocrat or three-star general whispered in his ear, and whether the president’s spleen is acting up or not. The opinions of his own advisors or the foreign policy commissariat seem to matter little. If anything, Trump delights in confounding the experts. After all, he believes himself to be the expert-in-chief.

Foreign policymaking in the Trump era is a lot like curling. Trump lets loose the stone and then the other members of the team start sweeping at the ice in an attempt to alter the trajectory. Sometimes Trump throws in the general direction of the target. Sometimes his aim is so errant that there’s nothing the sweepers can do.

So, after Trump tweeted his new Syria policy, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went into action to alter its trajectory. In an attempt to placate allies aghast at Trump’s decision, Bolton put so many conditions on the pull-out as to seem to render the announcement null and void. Pompeo similarly tried to assure Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf States that US policy remains steady: defeat the Islamic State, shut out Iran.

This cavalcade of caveats accomplished little more than to confuse allies and mystify observers. Bolton angered Recep Tayyip Erdoğan so much with his remarks about continued US support for Syrian Kurds that the Turkish president refused to meet with the national security adviser when he visited Ankara this month. A prominent pro-government newspaper decried Bolton’s “soft coup against Trump.”

Trump has subsequently changed his mind about Syria, somewhat, but it wasn’t at the behest of Bolton or Pompeo. The president was persuaded to go slow on the withdrawal when he received a briefing in Iraq from a lieutenant general who explained that the military needed more time to wrap up operations in Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had probably said the same thing to Trump. He resigned when the president ignored his advice. Mattis had disagreed one too many times with the president and thus undermined his authority. With Trump, proximity breeds contempt.

Trump originally demanded that troops withdraw in 30 days. Now, the Pentagon has four months to redeploy the couple thousand troops. The rush to the exit will be more like a covert crawl. And they won’t likely be going very far. The latest reports suggest that the redeployed soldiers are heading for Iraq, to bases in Kirkuk and Anbar.
A History of Ambivalence

Trump has been roundly criticized for the incoherence of his policy toward Syria. But let’s face it, Washington has never figured out how to deal with the country — its ruthless leader, its fragmented opposition, its breakaway Kurds, its covetous neighbors — since the Arab Spring protests broke out in 2011. At the very outset, the Obama administration hesitated to throw its support behind pro-democracy demonstrators and was even more ambivalent about intervening militarily when the demonstrators chose to take up arms.

This was not surprising. Obama had been slow to withdraw support from Hosni Mubarak in Egypt earlier that year when crowds gathered in Tahrir Square. When civil strife broke out in Libya, Obama was equally reluctant to get involved, finally opting to “lead from behind” in the international effort to oust Muammar Gaddafi. The situation in Syria promised to be even more complicated and volatile.

Eventually, the Obama administration dipped its toe in the water with two principal programs, one run by the Pentagon, the other covertly by the CIA. The Pentagon’s program was a spectacular failure, with graduates either exiting the program to fight for radical groups the United States disdained or going on to ignominious defeat on the battlefield. This initiative ended in 2015. The CIA program, Timber Sycamore, funneled billions of dollars of arms and equipment to fighters on the ground in Syria, thanks to Saudi financing and Turkish logistics. This program, too, encountered many difficulties. For instance, arms ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda sympathizers. The United States was also reluctant to go all in for fear of provoking Russia. In 2017, Trump canceled the program.

Trump or no Trump, the United States faces myriad problems in Syria. Assad has consolidated his position, with the help of Russia and Iran. The Islamic State has been reduced to a beleaguered fiefdom, but religious extremism hasn’t disappeared and a pretty unsavory group remains in control of Idlib province. The Kurds in the north have established an autonomous region, with US assistance, but the Turkish government considers them a mere extension of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that it is fighting within its own borders.

The United States can’t expect to influence this state of play in Syria, and certainly not with only 2,000 troops. So, it makes a lot of sense to pull them out. Let the Israelis and Saudis get angry, and let the Russians, Iranians and Turks rejoice. US involvement in Syria — hesitant, misguided, quixotic — has been benighted from the beginning.

Trump recently tweeted in support of his action that the United States must “stop the endless wars.” That makes eminent sense. But don’t be fooled into thinking that Trump actually believes what he tweets. Even as he was making his withdrawal announcement, the president was directing the Pentagon to increase its air strikes on targets in Syria.
More War, Not Less

It’s ludicrous to paint Donald Trump as a peace president. The man is only selectively anti-war. He just doesn’t like the wars that other presidents started. Trump threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea. He considered military options in Venezuela and discussed the potential of a coup with dissident army officers.

But it’s Iran that’s served as the focus of Trump’s most hawkish ambitions. The president hasn’t been content just to unravel the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration, alongside representatives of several other countries, negotiated with Iran. Nor does Trump want to stop at simply applying another round of economic sanctions against the country. In September, John Bolton asked the Pentagon for military options to strike Iran. “It definitely rattled people,” a former senior White House official said. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

But Trump’s confrontational approach to Iran preceded the brashness of Bolton, who has openly advocated regime change in Iran. Shortly after entering the White House, Trump began pushing for the Pentagon to blow up Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf. Mattis, who’d been fired from the Obama administration for his anti-Iranian obsession, thought the plan was ludicrous and never provided the plans Trump wanted.

Countering Iran has been an organizing principle of the administration’s foreign policy, from helping the Saudis in Yemen to pressuring countries worldwide not to trade with Tehran. In his recent speech in Cairo, Secretary Pompeo made clear that even with the Syria pullout the administration remains focused on countering Iran, which “has spread its cancerous influence to Yemen, to Iraq, to Syria, and further into Lebanon.”

With Bolton and Pompeo by his side and Mattis departed, Trump may well go with his gut and attack Iran militarily. He’ll be encouraged in this delusion by Israel and Saudi Arabia. He’ll be looking for some way to distract the media and the American public from his disastrous record as president and the multiple investigations into his affairs and policies. He won’t care about the consequences. The forever war in the Middle East is far from over.

Donald Trump is as obsessed with breaking records as he is with breaking agreements. The Daily Devil’s Dictionary explains.

US President Donald Trump has set in motion a national counting game exploited by the media on a daily basis. It stems from the drama of his frustration with the political obstacles to obtaining the funding he believes is needed to build his border wall, which — just as fervently — he also believes is needed. Every media outlet now spends time updating the shutdown count with affirmations similar to this one from Business Insider: “The government shutdown is in day 27 and has shattered the record for the longest shutdown in history.”

Articles that mention this record are careful to highlight the downside, which deepens the competitive drama: The fact that the shutdown has put 800,000 people out of work, depriving them of income and, for many, throwing their private lives into chaos.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Record:

A performance that surpasses all past performances and, therefore, constitutes in and of itself a news story
Contextual note

Today’s consumer culture, especially as it has been elaborated in the United States, reduces practically all human activities to two contrasting categories: competitive and boring. And while the government shutdown has proved painful not only to those who have been arbitrarily deprived of their livelihood, but also to businesses and citizens who depend on the public services they provide, the daily breaking of the record shutdown’s duration hasn’t yet become boring, though there is a risk that that may even happen after a while. Unless at some point the entire nation revolts.

But can anything provoke Americans to revolt? Master pollster Nate Silver has been tracking the dramatic drop in Trump’s approval rating, which correlates with his stance on the shutdown. Silver believes Trump will survive it. “But will any of it really matter to Trump’s political standing, in the long run?” he asks. “The glib answer is ‘probably not.’” He cites what he calls “the insane velocity of the news cycle under President Trump” that is a kind of record-breaking pace in its own right.

The culture of competition that dominates not only sports, the media and politics, but even the arts and art education — where everything is rated, graded or priced — imposes two essential rules. The first is that for every human event, someone must win and someone must lose. The second is that over time, records must be broken. If the first principle is obvious, the second plays a dual role in the contemporary economy. Contests between competing performers create immediate suspense, but the drama of record-breaking adds the arrow of time to the repetitive, cyclical back and forth of winning and losing. In so doing, it produces what is perceived as “news” — i.e., something that has never happened before. It thus becomes a source of an essential human activity in today’s dynamic society: talking about what we do more or less routinely as if it were more important than it actually is.
Historical note

The breaking of records also helps to establish and consolidate an essential belief about history itself. We may not easily recognize it, but contemporary civilization requires that when speaking seriously about anything, we expect or hope for progress and growth. We worry when we hear that they may not happen.

If Barack Obama’s sense of competition motivated him to cultivate the image of the best modern president ever — according to the tacit but well-established rules of the game of “being presidential” — Trump has stayed true to his reality-TV personality shaped by Shark Tank and The Apprentice. He competes to be the most talked about president ever, a goal he achieved even as a candidate, when, instead of spending money to be seen on TV, he had the media spending their money to give him and his every provocative performance air time on TV. Trump’s political career has validated the truth of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” and this other bit of American wisdom, often attributed to P.T. Barnum: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

President Trump himself claims that everything he does, every executive order he signs, every challenge he launches, is a record-breaker — the first, the best, the greatest and the most — as he contradicts everything past presidents have routinely done, which basically amounts to polishing the pillars of empire and, when necessary, filling the cracks. Although he seems obsessed about building a bored wall — the greatest, most beautiful ever — he has spent far more energy hacking at the pillars that have kept the American empire standing, from civil rights to the vaunted rules-based (i.e., tacitly managed) world order.

Trump is so good at getting himself talked about that he has set a new standard for the image of an American president. Candidates must henceforth sell themselves as doers rather than thinkers or mere managers. Nate Silver’s observation about the “insane velocity the news cycle” implies that Trump has effectively created a methodology of government enabling him, at will, to break all records in the art of being talked about.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

Lobi Stars’ 1-0 loss away to ASEC Mimosas of Cote d’Ivoire has set the Makurdi-based Nigerian champions up for a tense war in Group A of the CAF Champions League, as the pool is so tight after two match days. While Lobi fell on the road in Abidjan, the team they beat 2-1 in their first game of the groups tage, Mamelodi Sundowns of South Africa won by the same margin against Wydad Casablanca of Morocco.

Lobi will be up next against the 2017 champions, who have the Nigerian duo of Michael Babatunde and Okechukwu Gabriel on their cards, such that a feisty battle is expected, and only the tougher side will rule.

This was after the Nigerian ‘truncated’ league winners slipped in a 1-0 loss away to ASEC, who had Ahmed Herve Diamonde’s 38th minute spot kick to thank for securing three points in Abidjan.

On the other hand, Themba Zwane was the hero for Sundowns, as his well-taken brace ensured Mohamed Nahiri’s first-half pile-driver proved nothing more than a consolation for Wydad.

The South African midfielder’s goals came either side of Nahiri’s effort for Wyday, and left all four teams equal on three points in Group A, thereby creating room for a terse run all the way to the final match day.