🔥 Breaking News: Sam after 5, by way of Azu Ishiekwene

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If it kind of feels like simplest the day gone by when the capital injection of LEADERSHIP, Sam Nda-Isaiah, kicked the bucket, it’s as a result of he’s nonetheless right here within the provide worrying. Yet it’s possible you’ll disagree in case you are searching for him within the unsuitable position. Let me reduce your confusion.

If, for instance, you continue to hope he’d name at 2.30 am to wake you up and ask why you’re asleep at the moment, which he did and not using a trace of irony, and such calls have stopped since, then you might imagine him a part of the previous.

There are different footprints. His hearty laughter, or the echo of his stuttering voice as he marshalled details in a heated argument. These idiosyncrasies, now silenced since that December 11 Friday night time 5 years in the past, might also look like a part of the previous.

Yet, those memories, like recollections from the Magdalenean scene on the Talpiot tomb in Jerusalem centuries in the past, are incorrect as a result of they believe Sam out of doors the world the place he made his most vital have an effect on.

He’s no longer in his learn about at his space or on his long ago from Hawaii, Beijing, Singapore, or any of the ones unique locations he liked to consult with. Nor is he sitting within the nook of his favorite brown leather-based chair in his place of business, passionately debating the difficulty with Nigeria together with his buddies.

Another realm

Sam lives on in any other realm, the world of phrases, the place he made his maximum super have an effect on. And in that realm, there’s no previous worrying, just a consistent, unrelenting dialog with the prevailing within the hope that if we heed, we may but have a greater long term. Sam’s platform used to be his weekly Monday column, “The Last Word.”

I’ve been studying lots of them not too long ago, and also you could be forgiven for considering they had been written the day gone by. I’m no longer speaking in regards to the selection of articles he wrote and revealed underneath the identify ‘Nigeria: Full Disclosure’, as a columnist with Daily TRUST ahead of founding LEADERSHIP in 2004. That used to be somewhat one thing.

Yet, between the newsletter of ‘Full Disclosure’ and 10 years later, when, actually talking, Sam suspended his column at gunpoint to contest the presidential primaries of the All Progressives Congress, APC, he wrote many extra exciting items about many stuff, from politics to governance, and from corruption to the judiciary and worldwide affairs.

Bosom of his phrases

Many of the articles are recent and poignant. Take the only entitled, “The PDP Civil War,” for instance. Sam, being Sam, he believed former President Olusegun Obasanjo used to be most likely Nigeria’s largest drawback and rarely spared him. On the eve of that birthday celebration’s presidential primaries in 2010, Sam tested the quite a lot of forces at play, tracing the absence of inside democracy within the PDP to its militaristic roots and the hijack of the birthday celebration by way of Obasanjo.

The PDP number one of that 12 months used to be like no different. It featured the birthday celebration’s largest heavyweights from army president General Ibrahim Babangida to General Aliyu Gusau and, after all, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The line-up used to be the surest signal that the Northern political status quo had parted tactics with former President Goodluck Jonathan and would give him a battle to the end for “betraying” a gentleman’s settlement to do just one time period after finishing the past due President Umaru Yar’Adua’s time period.

The coming conflict

For non-public and political causes, Sam, a founding member of Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, disliked the PDP. He stated it used to be a felony organisation, with just a few excellent other folks. His article, revealed ahead of the birthday celebration’s 2010 number one, used to be interesting.

“I think the coming war in PDP,” he wrote, “will not be fought with machetes, cutlasses and guns. It’s going to be fought with weapons of mass destruction, WMD. And, ultimately, it is in the interest of the nation that the party breaks. In its present form, it is an ogre that does no one any good.”

If Sam exaggerated the demise of the PDP, most likely he used to be extra incorrect about its velocity than about whether or not it will occur in any respect. Plenty of the actors have modified, however the birthday celebration, nonetheless determined to dedicate suicide, now hangs by way of a thread.

Meanwhile, the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, of which Sam used to be a founding member, has grown so massive and filthy rich that it will be lucky to flee the illness that inflamed and killed the PDP.

Reality of terror

Then there used to be any other piece he wrote in December 2010, entitled “The Reality of Terrorism in Nigeria.” That used to be when Boko Haram, even though nonetheless in its infancy, confirmed that it used to be just a subject of time ahead of it will venture building into unattainable, fatal mutations.

Around this time in 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian, attempted to explode a aircraft heading to Detroit, US. A 12 months later, bombs had been detonating in Jos, Plateau State, and somewhere else in Nigeria, killing many of us – one thing which, in Sam’s phrases, evoked the spectre of puts like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“If after all the killings of the past several years in Jos,” he wrote, “the October 1 mass murder in Abuja and the several Boko Haram murders in Maiduguri, not a single criminal has been sentenced to death and executed, I wonder…they will happen again and again until we start punishing those who commit crimes.”

Sadly, 14 years on, with hundreds useless, hundreds of thousands wounded or displaced, and lots of extra dwelling in concern, some nonetheless consider that negotiating and paying ransom to felony gangs is the most efficient type of punishment.

Worth demise for?

Sam hated injustice, a state of affairs regularly worsened by way of impunity and corruption. After months of writing in useless to get President Yar’Adua’s govt to do something positive about it, Sam wrote a piece of writing in 2008 calling at the govt to claim a “National Rogues Week.”

The level of the object, entitled “Is Nigeria Worth Dying For?”, used to be what Sam regarded as a grave injustice that have been finished to Nuhu Ribadu, who used to be no longer simplest got rid of because the Chairman of the EFCC on the time but additionally demoted in his police rank.

Ribadu had trampled such a lot of large feet within the battle in opposition to corruption that corruption used to be no longer simply preventing again; it used to be preventing large, led by way of forces that had taken Yar’Adua hostage.

Since Ribadu’s crime used to be tackling the sacred cows, for which he used to be fired as an alternative of promoted, Sam steered that the federal government will have to designate per week when rogues may obtain their plants or even be inducted right into a corridor of repute. “Crooks have benefitted more (from the system) than honest men,” he wrote.

The state of affairs has modified for Ribadu nowadays, and he may in truth argue that Nigeria is value risking one’s existence for. However, Ribadu’s tale rarely displays the struggling of hundreds of thousands of voters, terrified by way of concern and poverty and denied the sense that truthful, arduous paintings manner anything else.

Finished or no longer?

Looking again, apparently that Sam wrote “Political Decline of the North,” or “Atiku is Finished,” in an excellent technology. Of path, there are nice Northern minds terrified by way of deficient, crooked innovator that has wrecked the area. Yet, Northerners who helped to hasten the decline Sam wrote about now have kids and grandchildren who’ve joined the corporation of no longer simplest killing the North, but additionally doing so briefly.

As for Atiku being completed, his philandering is known, together with his wild oats scattered around the primary political events, apart from those who haven’t begun to be shaped. Perhaps Atiku nonetheless has one thing left within the tank?

I will listen Sam pronouncing, “Dam’bura…!” as he rocks with laughter. And then, pausing: “You’re very stupid, Azu!” as he explodes once more in laughter that even Atiku can’t withstand becoming a member of!

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📅 Published on 2025-12-12 01:38:00

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