Opposition unleashed, by Donu Kogbara

I host an X (Twitter) Space discussion programme for members of various Opposition parties every Monday night at 8pm with Nana Kazaure. It is called OPPOSITION UNLEASHED. Please find below some of the memorable comments made by some of our recent guests:

QUOTES FROM DONALD DUKE (presidential candidate of PRP, former Governor of Cross River State).

1. “It’s not just getting rid of APC and President Bola Tinubu. It’s redirecting the country.”

2. “We are cliffhanging right now, and our arms are getting weary. The cliff, the edge of the cliff, is eroding.”

3. “The reason for having a government in place is to ensure the optimal productivity of its citizens within a safe and orderly environment.”

4. “I don’t want to be an onlooker. I want to be in the field of play. In the field of play, I could perhaps determine the play.”

5. “We are a people with a loveless leadership. Love is sacrificial. The opposite is selfishness.”

6. “You can’t give what you don’t have. If you don’t like your people enough to go back and think of solutions to their problems, you can’t lead them.”

7. “The biggest impediment to growth in this country is inflation, but selling petrol at ₦1,200 is the single most inflationary item in the books.”

QUOTES FROM PROF. PAT UTOMI (Senior Peter Obi ally)

1. “What we call subsidy is, first and foremost, corruption writ large. Because if you go back to the history of how petrol got distributed in Nigeria, my father worked for British Petroleum and the refineries were working.”

2. “If your desire is to lower prices for people, you come in, you go to the heart of the matter, kill the corruption, create a market that anybody who wants to sell petrol can do whatever, and then competition will bring down the price.”

3. “The focus must be on how to make that bottom of the pyramid productive. And if you can make the bottom of the pyramid productive, then you are doing something that will have a much more sustainable impact on the lives of the people.”

4. “You are as rich as your people are poor.

5. “My view of the Nigerian state today is that it’s a criminal enterprise.”

6. “The simple laws of economics: if you play around, you will eventually get the result you want. Economics is a science of incentives. If you create an incentive for people to smuggle, people will smuggle.”

7. “The subsidy is useful when it is stimulating production. When you subsidize consumption, you are basically making people dependent.”

8. “If you want to help the poor, don’t subsidize petrol for everybody. Put the money into mass transportation, make transportation affordable, make food available and affordable, and target the things that actually affect the lives of the poor.”

QUOTES FROM KENNETH OKONKWO (spokesman for AlhajiAtikuAbubakar)

1. “When Atiku gets to power, there will be immediate, immediate intervention, immediately, in the way of supplying crude at a discounted rate. Then there will be security provided, energy provided and then the value of Naira increasing every day.”

2. “So Atiku is saying, subsidize production so that if the refineries produce at a cheap rate, Nigerians will have it at an affordable rate. So this is basically what Atiku’s plan is all about for now.”

3. “What was the solution that would have benefited the poor masses? Repair the refineries. You have them. If you can’t repair them, privatize them.”

4. “Atiku is going to restore subsidy with the same speed by which it was removed. So, if you read literature, it is just like saying, if this thing was done in such a terribly bad way, a good man can restore it in such a terribly good way without any waste of time.”

5. “What will it take a president to make an order immediately that crude should be supplied immediately to Dangote? What will it take? Because the devil is in details. If you are importing oil, it is a different thing. If your refinery is not working, it is a different thing. You have your oil; you have your refinery.”

6. “Crude is our product. And the local refineries will not be paying for the cost of shipping, which they will pay bringing in crude, which they will pay exporting the finished product. You take it from the soil, you put it to the refinery, you sell it back to the people.”

*Quotes from Oseloka Henry Obaze (politician, author and staunch Peter Obi ally)

1. “I am someone who believes that God has blessed Nigeria. We have an abundance of human resources, natural resources, but we have wasted them all because we have poor leadership.”

2. “The day we start defending people based on ethnicity, then we can kiss our democracy goodbye because at the end of the day, we are going to be fractured, we are going to be splintered.”

3. “In my 70-odd years of life, I think the present administration is just about the worst that I’ve seen. You cannot live beyond your means. We can’t expect a revenue of N25 trillion and we’re doing a budget of N50 trillion. It does not make sense.”

4. “Every voter is an agent and What you owe to the opposition, to Peter Obi and Kwankwaso, is to go back to your ward and deliver your polling unit and your ward and defend those votes.”

5. “I think Tinubu’s governance modality has gone off-kilter. His administration is so undisciplined. The government has no compassion. They have no moral compass.”

6. “If you really have a strategy and you put it in the open, it’s no longer a strategy because the other people that you’re trying to use it against… will know what you’re planning to do.”

7. “You are elected to solve problems. If the problem of the country is hunger, you solve it. If the problem of the country is transportation, you solve it. If the problem of the country is food insecurity, you solve it.”

8. “Our four refineries are not working. In the entire Nigeria, the only refinery that is working is Dangote’s Refinery. If we cannot run four major refineries, what we need to do is to give licences to 100 people to run modular refineries. You don’t have to import fuel. It’s as simple as that.”

DONU’S WORLD

I have a YouTube channel. It’s called DONU’S WORLD. 

https://youtube.com/@donukogbara?si=bBm_IPdFZ_wUyKYq

NIGERIA UNFILTERED – spicy commentaries on Naija issues – appears every Wednesday, while DONU’S WEEK appears on Fridays and is international as well as local and covers a mish-mash of soft and tough issues around my personal life, my work and my worldview.

Two days ago, in this week’s Nigeria Unfiltered video, I talked about the 59th anniversary of the Asaba Massacre. 

Please check out my Donu’s World library (dating back to early 2024) on YouTube, plus the new videos I produce every week. I would love to hear your opinions and any constructive criticisms you may have to offer. And I will be very grateful if you “like”, subscribe and share!

RESPONSES TO donzol2002@yahoo.co.uk or to 0805 404 6887.(TEXT ONLY). PLEASE NOTE THAT UNLESS YOU REQUEST ANONYMITY, YOUR EMAIL OR TEXT MAY BE PUBLISHED WITH YOUR NAME AND CONTACT DETAILS ATTACHED.

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