Amupiutated – In Touch, The Nation newspaper

By Sam Omatseye

The man in the nightmare of Atiku, Mark, Aregbesola and company must be one Nafiu Gombe. He was a sore thumb on creation day. That is, when the rains started to beat the coalition. He did not resign. No one has asked what the fellows in the Ralph Nwosu-led executive took from the army of occupation that Gombe did not get. They did not drop out for nothing. ADC was not formed for charity. It was no virgin asking for a rapist. The coalition of the wounded gave something. We want to know why and what.

We should also know why Gombe has not flinched. Did he get the offer and look the other way? Was he not ready to succumb for the cheap. What was the scale and character of the settlement?

Many media folks and reporters love the ADC folks too much to expose them? Maybe the few reporters and editors who want the truth ought to dig and soil their shovels. In Warri, in my boyhood years, we delighted in the phrase, “cheap article dey run belle.” It simply means, if you prefer to buy infested piece of food because it is cheap, a running stomach awaits you. ADC is in the belly of storm.

The ADC folks did not want to do the work of forming a political party. They settled for the aje butter formula. They want what is easy instead of what is true. They did not want to sweat, wait, get bruised, stumble and follow the narrow path. When they tried, they formed ADA. It sounded like a sister’s name. Then they learned it was a copycat. They did not know how to even name a party. So, they wanted a soup already cooked. Now they are having running stomach and they are blaming someone else who spent all day in the kitchen deploying heat and ingredients. What ADC has done is what Eleyinmi in Village Headmaster will call “nonsense and ingredients.”

Let us have some language lesson with the word ante bellum. It is latin, and we know lawyers have afflicted themselves with that ancient language. So, we can start with ante, and it means ‘before,’ ‘in front of’ or ‘prior to.’ Bellum means war or warfare. INEC chair Prof. Joash Amupitan has cleared the fog in his interview with Arise TV anchor Reuben Abati.

The folks in the ADC and their television lawyers are alien to this fact. When the Court of Appeal says the factions should revert to the status quo ante bellum, it means before the war in the ADC. So, when did the war in the ADC begin? Was it not when David Mark and his disciples browbeat the party executive to stand down? They did not resign a bloc. There is no constitutional recognition of group abdication. They did as individuals. Their trouble is with Gomb, who says it is his emilokan moment to be the party chairman.

ADC says he resigned. He said he did not. ADC is circulating what looks like a letter. It reads like a form. Did the ADC produce a stock letter for resignation whereby a person fills his name like a form? Everyone resigns for different reasons. But the letter in circulation looks like one written as though everyone must sign with the same reason and the same language. Even the handwriting in the same so-called letter is not consistent with a conflict of cursive and straight penmanship. Again, the letter was sent to INEC about four months after his purported resignation. Mariama Ba wrote a work titled: So Long a Letter. For ADC, so long a letter travels. We want to know if the ADC has the audacity to tender a forged letter in court; if, that is, Gombe’s denial is right. It will be defending a crime with a crime. It is also called double jeopardy. Fela would call it deady body get accident… Deady body break bone..Na double wahala for deady body and the owner of deady body.

The subplot of this drama is a battle of memory. Are they trying to play with the remembrance of things past, apologies to Marcel Proust. It is not like Proust which happened a long time ago. This is just months. Or is it like when Shakespeare says that they are making “a sinner of memory to credit a lie.”?

So, ante bellum means before that moment when the hostilities fomented, and it means before Mark was installed. Gombe never accepted Mark, and he believes he (Gombe)is the authentic chairman. That makes, in his lights, Mark a usurper.

Because the ADC folks are no respecters of the law, they have vowed to conduct their conventions and congresses, even though the court warned against any act on both sides. It means the folks are not serious. One Chidi Odinkalu said the professor – and Chidi is nowhere near a professor – who is INEC chair should not interpret the court verdict. A hollow man indeed he is. He wants Amupitan to go seek legal clarification in court. I know Chidi and his folks cannot write a manifesto yet, but who stops him and his ADC from going to court to seek same?

They cannot form a party. They cannot take over a party. They cannot settle everyone. They cannot interpret a court decision. They cannot write a manifesto as yet. They cannot obey court order. They are busy playing a club of political retirees without knowing it. They even have representatives abroad. Maybe they should ask for that task one of their stars, Rabiu Kwakwanso, who has been barred for terror reasons from the United States. He, too, should go to the Hague. Chidi should be his attorney for top dollar. ADC can pay.

They see themselves in ADC as a kaleidoscope of our politics. ADC glitters but no gold. Real gold takes a lot of digging. They should ask the president how he did his work. Some of the ADC men like Rauf know it.

Tinubu started his work years ago, and his political career in this republic began with the Alliance for Democracy. He did not found it but he ran from its grassroots to be governor. Just like his tour as president, he started with crisis. He did not cry. Rather he tackled the foes. One group was the elders of the Afenifere who wanted to lord it over him. They wanted to make him a marionette. They tried to impose Ganiyu Dawodu, who almost purloined his victory for Funsho Williams. He did not cry but worked within the party to get it back. They wanted to control Tinubu, his policies, his appointees. He defeated them. The trojan Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), who was Tinubu’s chief of staff tells for my upcoming book an incident when he banged the table in his office about not ceding an inch to them. The other battle was with Obasanjo, who planted spies and worms in the AD, wanted to weaken the party for the 2007 polls, a story told with Pathos by Olawale Oshun in his book The Kiss of Death. Tinubu did not cry like ADC about OBJ trying to kill his party. Neither did he compromise. He manoeuvred and blindsided and ambushed the general by forming the Action Congress. The stealth and imagination that led to the formation of AC reads like the story of witchcraft. But the details must not be unveiled here until my book tells it blow by blow. It was a political thriller. Even OBJ cannot tell it in public to save his ego. And some of those who took part in the scheme did not know who was pulling the strings and why. In an interview with one of them, he confessed, “But I was not aware.”

Yet, in the 2003 elections, when other states fell in the Southwest to the OBJ shenanigans, Lagos State was left unscathed. How did Tinubu ride the Tiger to his destination and the tiger was thankful and only growled away. Both beast and rider waved goodbye. He was going to beat the tiger later and reinforce the image of the last man standing.

Even if OBJ did sweep the Southwest states for his men, the same Tinubu did not weep. He went to work and the states, Edo, Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, Ondo, all became progressives. In a famous Fashola line, they came back “one by one by God.”

After that, Tinubu pitched for the centre. No one can doubt that he was the architect and spirit behind the fall of PDP with Jonathan’s ouster. In one sweep, he redeemed Buhari and ended what was dreamed as a dynasty for 60 years.

Emilokan and Olule came as a war cry from Abeokuta. He beat his party leaders. Not strange to him. He did that in Lagos with Afenifere. He had said in Yoruba that they who wanted to scuttle his ambition with fuel and currency scarcity did not know the way home. The rest is history.

The ADC folks are crying because Amupitan obeyed the law. They were Amupiutated and they are crying. No legs to kick and hands to blow. The Supreme Court has not ruled, yet they are taking the laws into their hands. They plan to scare us by catastrophising the situation. They are imagining hell because they have no power to fight. They boasted over FCT polls that it would be bellwether of their popularity. How hard they fell.

As the cliché goes, you cannot make an omelette without breaking an egg. They want it served hot. It invokes Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick where an ambitious amputee captain goes to sea to avenge of a white whale.

Amupiutated – In Touch, The Nation newspaper

General Chris Musa, Hi-tech Fencing of Nigerian Porous Borders and the Foolish Pride of Sowore

By: Bodunrin Kayode

This is like a distraction to my daily routine in Maiduguri but there was no way my binoculars could miss the recent unnecessary rant of Yele Sowore who dared to demonize one of the warriors of the “hadin kai” theatre General Chris Musa by calling him a “foolish” man simply because he rightly suggested that we need a fence to protect residents from our known and unknown enemies. A high tech fence that can even compete with what the Israelis have against their known enemies. I told myself I had to leave whatever I was doing to defend the General and the Borno people. And to correct the ignorant impression he has painted with such misplaced comments.

Reading such despicable bile coming from someone who is not in touch with the trauma of Borno residents and has never visited even the capital city of Maiduguri spells volume about a man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of the armed forces yet so ignorant about Nigeria. He sounded so daft in his presentation that one begins to wonder if indeed he was educated as he claims to be. He actually spoke as if he was paid to do so because nothing happens in the vacuum in Nigeria these days.

You are very wrong Yele

Let me educate him on why this fence will help our war Commanders in the operation Hadin Kai especially if the contract would be given to military engineers who will build with one hand and handle weapons for protecting themselves with the other hand. This is because no civilian contractor will be safe enough to take such a big risk meant to stop insurgents to cross cross as they will.

Borno is the only State sharing massive borders with three African countries. Chad, Niger and Cameroon. That places the State in a very critical situation when it comes to the management of intelligence and warding off the criminals related to the 16 year old lingering insurgency war. It puts our Intel agencies at a vulnerable defensive state rather than proactive position of strength to help the military.

And indeed, like several other countries have done to protect their people, hi-tech fences were built with sentry towers to ward off external aggressors. In our case, those enemies of state who will get to terrorist cells in Libya, Mauritania and even the Magreb region to train and return with standby mercenaries to kill, steal and destroy the existence of our people. They have been doing it since 2009 and will not stop till General Chris Musa succeeds in positioning a memo that will sail through the national executive council for the first phase of the fence building spree to commence.

I watched Sowore vomit so much gibberish recently about General Chris Musa that i wonder if he knows that he can never rival the pedigree of the Minister of defence. He should equally know that he is just a confused brat in terms of pedigree compared to the towering image General Musa has built for himself. Sowore therefore is not qualified to de-market the Minister for any reason at all under the sun. He is rather the “foolish” one using his language, that needs to apologize to Gen Musa for talking out of point. How much will it cost to build the Israeli type of fence even if we must get it from the stolen commonwealth EFCC and ICPC are recouping daily for government?

Yele’s lack of focus and failed Presidential ambitions

Sometimes I wonder if we as Africans don’t believe in reverencing our role models rather than spending time firing arrows of the Pull Him Down syndrome (PHD) against them out of foolish pride and envy. That Yele contested for the position of President on the platform of an obscure party does not mean he is qualified to hold the political position of councillor even in his state Ondo. He should go start at the level of councillor to see how acceptable he is before daring to want to be our Commander in Chief which he will never get.

He even had the audacity to call General Musa “foolish man”. I don’t blame him, its because talk is always free in Nigeria. If not, that people like him give unnecessary importance to themselves even without electoral value who would have known him even as an ordinary ilaje boy. How on earth do you demonize a man who is fighting to save his country from eminent collapse so we do not have a repeat of what happened in Afghanistan here. A situation where after a long generational fight of asymmetric warfare, the Americans had to leave the county for their very enemies, the Taliban to take over the reigns of government.
I used to think Omoyele had some grits around his persona but it is obvious he is just a confused empty barrel fit for the noise he makes around himself.

Sowore who has never held a political position in his life should know that right thinking people in Nigeria do not take him serious because of the lack of focus in his pattern of activism. I wonder why anyone would think building a fence like other countries faced with terrorism is a stupid idea when he has not come to Borno for an informed survey on the matter. Sowore has really touched the raw nerve of Borno people by de-marketing an actionable idea which most of the informed residents here think will make sense. How foolish he looks now!

Yes Borno needs a hi-tech fence with all the sophistication of technology we can get

You really need to be in Borno state to understand why President Tinubu must build a fence to restrict infiltration of criminals into the country. For as long as there is a sahelian insurgency going on in Mali and Libya, we really need to build that fence as quickly as possible. Mali alone has a coalition of two groups liked to ISis and Al-qaeda while Libya is equally polluted because they have a massive power vacuum created after the death of Gaddafi. From Mali, fighters are passed through Niger into our territory.
For the information of Yele, Saudi Arabia built a fence to stop Iran long time ago from having incursions into their territory and today they can sleep with their two eyes closed. The Saudi Kingdom started the 900km fence against terrorists from Iran in 2014 and are trying to fence the entire country against extremists bent on bringing them to their knees. Pakistan equally has a 2,600 km fence with Afghanistan to prevent smuggling and religious extremism caused by incursions. Many countries with similar challenges are thinking about it so why should Nigeria be different? At least 40 countries have constructed security fences around their borders to avoid extremists infiltrating into their communities since 9/11. America isn’t exempted either.

So what is Sowore talking about? As far as I am concerned , he does not live in Borno and is not qualified to know what is biting the residents on ground. Someone should tell Sowore to stop that foolish rant he started against a solid professional like Minister Musa because it is an unsellable and unwinnable campaign. The proposed fence will generate over 5000 jobs and we in Borno are waiting for it.

Bodunrin Kayode writes in from Maiduguri

General Chris Musa, Hi-tech Fencing of Nigerian Porous Borders and the Foolish Pride of Sowore

Public Institution Should be Run with Integrity, Efficiency and Vision- Justice Umar

By: Michael Mike

Honourable Justice Mainasara Ibrahim Kogo Umar, Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal of Nigeria, embodies discipline, depth, and judicial conviction. A man of impeccable character and tested integrity, he is widely regarded as dependable in moments that demand courage and clarity. With decades of experience in legal practice, public service, and institutional leadership, he stands as one who has truly “been there and done that.”

His record reflects landmark contributions—both individually and collectively—shaping conversations around accountability, constitutional responsibility, and anti-corruption enforcement. Justice Kogo Umar represents a compelling study in legal pragmatism, institutional reform, and principled leadership.

In this interview with a select group of journalists, he speaks candidly about reforming the Tribunal, strengthening anti-corruption mechanisms, and his broader vision for justice and public governance in Nigeria, excerpts:

Question: Good afternoon sir, can we meet you?

My name is Mainasara Ibrahim Kogo Umar. I hail from Katsina State. I come from an aristocratic background, but over the course of my journey in unionism and activism, I became deeply influenced by Marxist ideals.
I have been involved in many spheres of life, particularly activism and legal practice. I have fought against corruption for several decades. Currently, I serve as the Continental President of the African Transparency Front, among other responsibilities.

I was appointed Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal on 13th July 2024, after 23 years of leaving the organisation. I previously served here as a young lawyer and later as Chief Registrar of the Tribunal before pursuing other endeavours.

By God’s infinite mercy, I have returned as Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal. My appointment generated some controversies because the President deemed it necessary to revitalise this very important institution.

The Code of Conduct Tribunal is the only judicial institution specifically mentioned in the Constitution under the Fifth Schedule. It tries public officers on matters relating to breaches of the Code of Conduct, abuse of office, illicit enrichment, ostentatious living beyond legitimate earnings, and issues of ethics and morality.

As Chairman, one must be above board. You are the arbiter who determines the personal and official conduct of public officers.
The Constitution clearly defines who public officers are. They include the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Vice President, ministers, members of the National Assembly, members of the diplomatic corps, service chiefs, judges—including Justices of the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice of Nigeria—members of academia in public institutions, and anyone at the federal, state, or local government level who earns a salary from public funds.

The Tribunal’s mandate is not restricted to asset declaration alone. Even if you declare your assets beyond three months after assuming office, you are already in breach. Subsequently, every four years—whether appointed, elected, or employed—it is mandatory to declare your assets. This serves as a benchmark to determine whether your acquisitions align with your legitimate earnings.

Public officers are not permitted to engage in private business or trade while in office, except farming. If you wish to enter politics, you must resign before contesting.
Upon appointment, the Chairman of the Tribunal can only be removed under three circumstances:
1. Upon attaining the age of 70;
2. By voluntary resignation;
3. For misconduct or breach of the Code of Conduct, in which case both chambers of the National Assembly must invoke their constitutional powers to remove the Chairman.

The Senate, on 20th November 2024, exercised this power and removed the former Chairman on grounds of abuse of office and misconduct. On 26th November 2024, the House of Representatives affirmed the removal with an overwhelming majority.

On 20th February 2025, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation presented my appointment letter, backdated to 20th November 2024. I was subsequently inaugurated by the President and sworn in on 7th October 2025.

What was the state of the Tribunal when you assumed office, and what are the current challenges and your vision?

When I assumed office, the Tribunal was in a very poor state. Staff morale was low, infrastructure was dilapidated, there was no electricity or water supply, and furniture was grossly inadequate.

I immediately restored electricity and water supply, reactivated boreholes, revitalised transformers, and sought technical assistance. Through outreach to international agencies, we secured computers, laptops, photocopiers, and other equipment.
I restructured the institution by expanding it from three departments to thirteen, aligning it with my vision.

One major vision is to transform the Tribunal into the Code of Conduct and Anti-Corruption Court, in line with Section 15(5) of the Constitution, which mandates the State to abolish corrupt practices and abuse of office. A bill to that effect has passed second reading at the National Assembly. If passed, anti-corruption agencies would prosecute relevant cases here.

How does the Tribunal collaborate with agencies like EFCC and ICPC?

Currently, the ICPC prosecutes at State High Courts, while the EFCC prosecutes at the Federal High Court. However, under the proposed reform, cases involving public officers could be prosecuted here.
This Tribunal operates summary jurisdiction. Before assigning hearing dates, I require lawyers to file all written submissions in advance. After reviewing them, hearings focus on adoption and cross-examination, and judgments are delivered promptly. Ideally, no case should last more than six weeks.

The Constitution prescribes specific penalties, including removal from office, disqualification from public office for up to ten years, and forfeiture of ill-gotten assets. These are without prejudice to other criminal penalties under the law.
We have also created departments for international liaison—including collaboration with Interpol and international courts—and enforcement of judgments.

How do you ensure fairness in high-profile cases?

The Tribunal does not initiate cases. The Code of Conduct Bureau investigates and refers cases, while the Attorney General prosecutes. We handle adjudication.
We do not consider status or public pressure—only facts, evidence, and the law. Decisions are reached collectively by a panel of three judges. Public expectation, institutional responsibility, and the demands of the law must be carefully balanced.

How many cases have been referred since your assumption of office?
I inherited thousands of cases, some dating back over two decades. After discussions with the Bureau, we agreed that only cases within a reasonable timeframe—preferably within three years of occurrence—should be referred to ensure effectiveness.
Currently, we handle between two and five cases weekly. The Bureau determines which cases to refer.

What is your vision for the Tribunal in the next five years?

In the next five years, the Tribunal should be placed on first-line charge to guarantee financial independence. We should expand to at least 36 judges, with judicial divisions across the six geopolitical zones and Abuja.
Funding must increase significantly to support infrastructure, security, and institutional growth.

I have served in public service for 36 years and have never taken illegal money. A significant portion of my earnings has gone to charity. My goal is to reposition this institution as a model of public governance and exemplary leadership.

Within five years, once the institution is fully reformed and functioning optimally, I intend to step aside. I do not wish to remain in office until retirement age. My mission is to rebuild, reposition, and leave behind a strong, sustainable institution.
I aim to demonstrate that public institutions can be run with integrity, efficiency, and vision.

Public Institution Should be Run with Integrity, Efficiency and Vision- Justice Umar