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Extensive investigations by Saharareporters have uncovered details of the secretive maneuvers and hig
h stakes politics of greed and dishonesty that resulted in members of Nigeria’s powerful “Governors Forum” frustrating Goodluck Jonathan’s acquisition of real political power. In what one of our sources described as “the invasion of Aguda House,” the governors met with “acting President” Jonathan and delivered to him a set of strange orders that effectively changed his status from hopeful substantive “President” of Nigeria to a lame-duck who may remain Vice President to ailing Nigerian ruler, Umaru Yar’adua. During a fiery meeting with Jonathan two nights ago, the governors queried his decision to appoint a Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) without consulting them. They accused him of selecting men and women who are ‘paperweight’ in their various states. Above all, they said Jonathan overreached himself by app
ointing such a powerful committee with a Northern Christian and Southern Christian as Chairman and Deputy Chair respectfully. They also asked Jonathan to shelve the plan to invoke section 144 of the constitution at yesterday’s Federal Executive Council meeting, insisting that Yar’adua should continue as President while Jonathan should remain “Acting President.” Two sources told Saharareporters that Jonathan looked dazed and helpless. “He was especially stunned when the governor of his home state, Timipre Sylva, became very vocal and confrontational at the meeting,” said one of the sources. The governors also bitterly complained about recent press interviews by Minister of Information, Dora Akunyili, accusing her of causing “disaffection and overheating the polity” by her utterances. They asked Jonathan to censure her 
immediately. When the meeting was over, the governors took over the airwaves to announce a rash of decisions and orders given to Jonathan. As soon as they left, the PDP leadership also came up with its assault on Jonathan. The party leaders told Jonathan to forget the idea of running for presidency after his tenure as Acting President. “After what happened two nights ago, the governors have effectively stripped Jonathan of most of his power to take presidential decisions,” said a source close to one of the governors. He added: “They have also restored the Presidency t
o an unseen and unwell Yar’adua.” “It’s a victory for Turai Yar’adua who will wield those powers on behalf of her sick husband,” a diplomatic source told Saharareporters. “It’s a sad reversal for Nigerians and one hopes that it’s only a temporary setback.” The governors’ move to checkmate Jonathan has been described as an “expedient volte-face driven by greed and avarice.” A few weeks ago, the same state governors – some of Nigeria’s most rabid looters – boosted Jonathan’s path to presidential power when they met and decided that Yar’adua’s prolonged absence from Nigeria was overheating the system. The leader of the group, Bukola Saraki, was particularly miffed that he was rebuffed when he visited Saudi Arabia a few days after Yar’adua was evacuated from Nigeria on medical emergency. On his return to Nigeria, Governor Saraki used his father to push a series of campaign against Yar’adua through his “Northern Union” pressure group.
For discerning persons who know how the Yar’Adua administration has worked since inception, the controversy that Vice President Goodluck Jonathan called Turai Yar’Adua, the first lady, to get directives on performing the duties of the president is really no news. With the structure at the seat of power in Abuja, it would not have been surprising to Aso Rock insiders that Jonathan called Turai to intimate her of political developments. A few weeks ago, the Federal High Court, Abuja ruled that the vice president could perform the duties of the president in the latter’s absence. Controversy broke out in the media when it was reported that rather than follow the ruling, the vice president was awaiting the reaction of President Umaru Yar’Adua or his wife. Specifically, Jonathan was said to have telephoned the first lady to intimate her of the ruling by Justice Dan Abutu and ask for directives on what to do. However, the vice president in a statement signed by Ima Niboro, special assistant on media, denied calling the first lady to take directives. Stating that Jonathan last spoke to Turai on January 5, after he had spoken to Yar’Adua, the statement declared that the vice president was not indecisive but was in charge and able to discharge the responsibilities of the office of president without seeking instructions from anyone. But Turai, in the power structure in the presidency has before now been one who has always called the shots. Her authority and hold on the levers of power have not even diminished by her absence due to her husband’s illness. Turai has always been the power behind Yar’Adua — in the home, when he was governor and now, that he is president. An incident of many years ago perhaps best dramatizes the power that Turai has always wielded in the president’s life and work. The words, words of wisdom as it turned out, were sown over two decades ago. But they have germinated in the pregnant belly of time and have finally been born in the political events that currently haunt Nigeria. In 1991, Umaru Yar’Adua, then somewhat a political neophyte, aspired to contest in the governorship race in Katsina State. Ordinarily, the election would have been a walk over. After all, his elder brother, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, a retired major general, was one of the most influential men in the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and the strongest political force in the state. But the older Yar’Adua would not support his brother. In fact, he was reported to have given tacit support to his brother’s opponent, Saidu Barda, candidate of the National Republican Convention, NRC. When SDP stalwarts went to the retired general to appeal to him to change his mind he reportedly asked them whom they wanted to put in Government House, Katsina; Umaru or Turai, his wife?
Writing about the prevailing pains, trauma and frustration of Celestine Vigale.Kegiri, the 34-year-old skilled carpenter and wood specialist reminds me of two seminal books I read with passion as a secondary school student: God’s Bits of Wood (1960) and A walk in the Night and other stories (1962). The former was written by Sembene Ousmane (January 1, 1923 – June 9, 2007), my departed friend, a celebrated Senegalese writer, Marxist and film director. The book is a fictional work set in colonial Senegal, the French speaking West African country. The theme of workers strike permeates the book. Workers strikes’ in the book is triggered by the poor working conditions of the railway workers. The latter was authored by Alex La Guma (1925 - 1985), the famous South African journalist, author and anti-apartheid activist. In the above novella, he fictionalized the suffering of workers in Apartheid South Africa. Ousmane and La Guma are deeply concerned about the predicament of the working peoples be they in Senegal, Mali or South Africa. Whether workers at the railway stations, mining pits or cement factories, working class peoples always bear the blow of injustice, greed and manipulation by those who control the means of production.
Adokiye Amiesimaka, former Green Eagles player, former Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Rivers, former Chairman of Sharks Football Club has been castigated for saying that Fortune Chukwudi, captain of Nigeria's Golden Eaglets is at least 25 year old.
Mr. Chukwu registered as a youth player with Sharks in 2002, as an 18 year old (which could still have been above the age limit for this competition). Adokiye was Sharks Chairman at the time and knows the player very well.
Please find attached photograph taken in 2002(7 YEARS AGO) at Sharks Stadium, Port Harcourt of some members of the feeder team of Sharks. Standing 4th from left is current U-17 captain of Nigeria at on-going FIFA U-17 WC in Nigeria. To his immediate right is James Peter who played for Premier League Sharks until 2 years ago. To his immediate left is Oyinkuro Sinclair, son of coach Monday Sinclair. Standing 3rd from the right is Belema Fenibo who also played for the senior team of Sharks for several years and is now with Ocean Boys.Can those who insist that Chukwudi is U-17 provide proof? Chukwudi may not be the only over-aged in this team, but he is the one where is proof now.Nigerians should not allow some greedy, corrupt elements to waste our national resources on old people parading as U-17 players.All those involved in this should be explaining what they know about this scandal, including FIFA's silence.
The Indian School of Business, backed by some of the leading global companies, 
has been dealt another black eye with an executive board member charged over the largest hedge fund insider-trading scheme.
Billionaire Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam and five others, were charged by U.S. 
investigators on Friday in an insider-trading case, generating profits of more than $20 million over several years.
Among those charged, Anil Kumar, a director at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., is on the executive board of the Indian School of Business (ISB), a premier management institute which was placed second among Asia's business schools this year.
"The incident is strange and shocking," said Rishi Sahai, managing director of Cogence Advisors, a New Delhi-based corporate advisory firm. "Greed has overpowered all the corporate and management rationalities."
Kumar, 51, a resident of Saratoga, California, is a friend of Rajaratnam's and a direct or indirect investor in certain Galleon funds.
Located in the southern Indian city and technology hub of Hyderabad, the school's governing board reads like a mini-Who's Who of global business, drawing on leaders from LVMH and Dell to Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
The school has academic alliances with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the London Business School with an aim to bring in the best of global management practices.
Desperate, the established serial thief who was once governor of Delta State, James Ibori, is well underway in his character-laundering scheme, a project Saharareporters forewarned Nigerians about on September 23 2009.One of Ibori’s main themes is also to smear the name of Saharareporters, as if that will make him appear to be innocent. Ibori told a TV Continental interviewer in Lagos last Saturday, for instance, that his multiple convictions for stealing and dishonesty in London are only from the imagination of Saharareporters.This is proof that the Ibori is also a serial liar. But by choosing this approach, he gives us an opportu
nity to remind Nigerians of how early his life of crime began, and remind Ibori himself that the court of public opinion is based not on conjecture, but on facts. If Ibori has become a symbol of greed and corruption in Nigeria, it is from the work of his own heart and his own hands.
h stakes politics of greed and dishonesty that resulted in members of Nigeria’s powerful “Governors Forum” frustrating Goodluck Jonathan’s acquisition of real political power. In what one of our sources described as “the invasion of Aguda House,” the governors met with “acting President” Jonathan and delivered to him a set of strange orders that effectively changed his status from hopeful substantive “President” of Nigeria to a lame-duck who may remain Vice President to ailing Nigerian ruler, Umaru Yar’adua. During a fiery meeting with Jonathan two nights ago, the governors queried his decision to appoint a Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) without consulting them. They accused him of selecting men and women who are ‘paperweight’ in their various states. Above all, they said Jonathan overreached himself by app
ointing such a powerful committee with a Northern Christian and Southern Christian as Chairman and Deputy Chair respectfully. They also asked Jonathan to shelve the plan to invoke section 144 of the constitution at yesterday’s Federal Executive Council meeting, insisting that Yar’adua should continue as President while Jonathan should remain “Acting President.” Two sources told Saharareporters that Jonathan looked dazed and helpless. “He was especially stunned when the governor of his home state, Timipre Sylva, became very vocal and confrontational at the meeting,” said one of the sources. The governors also bitterly complained about recent press interviews by Minister of Information, Dora Akunyili, accusing her of causing “disaffection and overheating the polity” by her utterances. They asked Jonathan to censure her 
immediately. When the meeting was over, the governors took over the airwaves to announce a rash of decisions and orders given to Jonathan. As soon as they left, the PDP leadership also came up with its assault on Jonathan. The party leaders told Jonathan to forget the idea of running for presidency after his tenure as Acting President. “After what happened two nights ago, the governors have effectively stripped Jonathan of most of his power to take presidential decisions,” said a source close to one of the governors. He added: “They have also restored the Presidency t
o an unseen and unwell Yar’adua.” “It’s a victory for Turai Yar’adua who will wield those powers on behalf of her sick husband,” a diplomatic source told Saharareporters. “It’s a sad reversal for Nigerians and one hopes that it’s only a temporary setback.” The governors’ move to checkmate Jonathan has been described as an “expedient volte-face driven by greed and avarice.” A few weeks ago, the same state governors – some of Nigeria’s most rabid looters – boosted Jonathan’s path to presidential power when they met and decided that Yar’adua’s prolonged absence from Nigeria was overheating the system. The leader of the group, Bukola Saraki, was particularly miffed that he was rebuffed when he visited Saudi Arabia a few days after Yar’adua was evacuated from Nigeria on medical emergency. On his return to Nigeria, Governor Saraki used his father to push a series of campaign against Yar’adua through his “Northern Union” pressure group.
