Governance

INTRODUCTION

After months of turning the blind eye to the criminality in the northeast, Nigeria’s embattled president, Goodluck Jonathan, confessed last week that his government all along took Boko Haram for granted!

Amongst the audience in Parliament’s public gallery for President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) last week was a Palestinian freedom icon who carried with her the hopes of all Palestinians that the ANC government would begin making moves towards cutting ties with Israel.

Last Thursday night in Cape Town’s Parliament hall, South Africa’s newest and cheekiest political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), fought gamely but lost their two-dozen seats for the evening.

On 8 December 2014, I travelled to Caracas, Venezuela, on behalf of the Social Democratic Party of Kenya (SDP) and Kenya-Venezuela Solidarity Committee (KVSC), to attend and participate in a conference of artists, intellectuals and social movements.

The title of this piece is a modified version of John Campbell’s 2010 masterpiece, ‘Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink’.

INTRODUCTION

Strange and interesting times are here! A crucial decision to postpone national elections was taken and the President and Commander In Chief of Nigeria’s Armed Forces has just confessed that he was taking a nap!

We regret that the continuing misrepresentations of Alex Obote-Odora’s latest disingenuous response to us compel us to respond to him one last time.[1]

Taking his major misrepresentations in the order that he himself presents them:

Mr. Obote-Odora's statement that he has seen no evidence that the RPF shot down the plane is astonishingly bizarre since the evidence for it has been in the prosecutor's hands at the ICTR since 1997 when Louise Arbour ordered an investigation into the shoot down of the presidential plane.