With Thursday’s judgment of the Supreme Court affirming the electoral victory of President Bola Tinubu, the Labour Party (LP) has alleged that the legislative and judicial arms of government have been hijacked by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

At a press briefing hours after the apex court dismissed the appeals by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar; and his LP counterpart, Peter Obi; LP’s Chairman, Julius Abure said the party is disappointed but has decided to charge on and remain optimistic for what the future holds for the nation.

A seven-judge panel led by Justice John Iyang Okoro ruled the opposition appeals over claims of fraud, electoral law violations, and Tinubu’s ineligibility to run for president lack merit.

The apex court affirmed the September 6, 2023 ruling by the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal that upheld the victory of APC’s Tinubu.

According to Abure, what happened from the day of the 2023 presidential election to now showed that the nation was sliding towards dictatorship.

“We are indeed very shocked and surprised that even the apex court will toe the line of an earlier judgement in spite of all the flaws associated with the judgement delivered by the Presidential Election Appeal Tribunal.

“Having conclusively exercised our fundamental rights as gifted to us by the laws of the land, we have no other choice but to move on. We may be disappointed and dismayed by the outcome of the exercise but we have chosen to trudge on and to remain optimistic of what the future holds for the nation.

“We weep for our institutions that cannot rise to the occasion and courageously defend democracy and the voices of our people.

“However, there are great lessons to be learnt. What transpired in Nigeria since the February 25 presidential election is a clear testament that our institutions are not working and that we may be sliding towards dictatorship. It is very clear that the executive has hijacked both the judiciary and the legislature. This is so unfortunate for our democracy and it is even more for the people of Nigeria.

“All what our forbearers taught us has been destroyed within a short space of time because of the unbridled ambition of a few. The founding fathers fought with their lives to achieve independence for the country.

“People lost their lives for the struggle to keep our democracy and all these years people have been struggling to achieve electoral and constitutional reforms. Regrettably, all of these efforts and struggles have been destroyed today,” Abure said.

The Labour Party chairman also alleged that some leaders of the party including himself and Obi have been marked by the government for vilification in other to suppress the party and its goal for a new Nigeria.

He called on the international community to rise to the occasion to defend democracy in Nigeria.

“Your voices were loud and clear in condemnation of the outcome of the presidential election. As we approach the next stage of our democratic journey, we call on you to stand by the millions of Nigerians who are already pushed beyond their limits into unnecessary hardship and penury,” he said.

He also urged Nigerians not to lose hope in the country, adding that “we are hopeful that we will get to our destination someday because where there is a will, certainly, there will be a way. A new Nigeria is still possible.”

By Babatunde Jose

“You shall do no injustice in judgment: you shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness you shall judge your neighbor. . . . nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor: I am the Lord. . . . (Leviticus, 19:15-17)”

As Muslims, our heartfelt wish is for the anger and hatred on both sides to die down, for the bloodshed to stop, and for peace to come to both lands. We oppose both the radical Palestinians bombing of innocent Israelis and Israeli killing of innocent Palestinians.

But would the interlopers, do-gooders and Munafiqun allow genuine peace to reign? Chief among them is the ‘Great Satan’, United States of America. No doubt America is not an honest broker. With a flotilla of aircraft carriers, destroyers and other weapons of mass destruction dispatched to Israel, including the preparation of 2000 troops to be sent to Israel for operation; and a proposed $40 Billion in aid to Israel: Talking about peace or settlement is a transparent sham.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is therefore doomed, intractable, complicated, and deadlocked. Today, we seem to be turning tragedy into a calamity. Only on Tuesday, 500 people were killed in a bomb raid on a Baptist hospital in Gaza. The gory scenes from the genocidal reprisals in Gaza have been variously described as a massacre, slaughter, and bloodshed. It’s like the holocaust revisited.  Latest death toll stands at 3,860 Palestinians and at least 1,403 people killed in Israel since October 7.

Since the tragic turn of events, there has been much equivocation and doublespeak on the part of many interested parties that the whole issue has become mired in semantic confusion.

President Biden advocates that Israel should wipe out Hamas but at the same time should not make the mistake of leveling Gaza. How is that possible? He also said that Israel should keep space open for settlement with Palestinian. A recipe for Peace indeed!

The status quo is killing Israeli and Arab children, their mothers, fathers, and grandparents. It is a return to the primitive on both sides. It should be noted that even some Israeli media, including the editorial board of Haaretz, have the good sense to state the obvious: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government bears responsibility for this war. On the other hand, Hamas is unwittingly playing into the hands of Netanyahu at the expense of the Palestinian population. This is very gross.

Identifying the causes of conflict and stating them openly are, on the contrary, the first steps in resolving the problem. Unfortunately, the peace makers are shy of doing just that.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all militarily occupied people have a right to resist their occupation, even militarily.

In view of the devastation of the land and people of Gaza, Hamas stands condemned for targeting Israeli civilians of any age or gender. Such targeting belies Hamas’ Islamic identity. Islam forbids the killing of innocent children and women, including elders.

Hamas succeeded unwittingly in giving a higher moral ground to Israel which has always stood condemned for its apartheid policy and in the process the excuse to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its citizens and bombing them to oblivion.

But we must condemn Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinian children and women and men in Palestine.

There is talk in the western media of an unprovoked attack. What more provocation is needed than what Israel has done to the Palestinian people for 75 years.

Apart from the obnoxious policy of stealing of Palestinian lands, Israel stands condemned for its incursions into houses of worship in Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Despite a 93-year-old ruling on the ownership of the place. Except that today, Israel claims it does not recognize the International Court of Justice.

Western ‘do gooders’ also stand condemned for shedding crocodile tears when Israelis are killed but feel unconcerned when Israel kills, incarcerates Palestinian men, children, and women, evicting them from their homes and denying them all fundamental rights. Where were the British Prime Minister and EU leaders when Israel was killing, incarcerating and stealing the lands of the Palestinians?

There needs to be an end to this hypocrisy.  The US Secretary of State, the Secretary for Defense and the President, including the British Prime Minister all visited Israel to show solidarity. These were all empty shows that did not succeed in changing anything.

As the Israel-Hamas war intensifies amid growing anger across the Middle East, the region looks like it’s spiraling downwards in a familiar pattern.

Biden’s trip was thrown into disarray after a meeting in Jordan with Arab leaders was called off following an explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City that killed hundreds.

That catastrophe sparked a firestorm of protest, with most of the Arab world — already seething over the death toll in Gaza — blaming Israel.

For the president, the promising diplomatic drive for a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia is on ice. One of Biden’s main objectives in visiting Israel was to deter Iran, Hezbollah, and other regional actors from entering the conflict. That might be a tall order as there have been tough talks from these quarters of grave consequence if Israel carries out its plan to level Gaza.

“Relations between Israelis and Palestinians backed by the wider Arab world are in a brutally ugly phase — a reminder that such deeply rooted conflicts never really go away.” — Karl Maier

The President was rebuffed by the Arab leaders he wanted to summit with. I wonder what he wanted to tell them. What a nerve.

That primary responsibility for the antecedent conditions that most of the world recognize as having led to this latest escalation – namely, the apartheid regime imposed on Palestinians – lies principally with the West, and the US, their duplicity, complicity, and connivance. They see Israel as a strategic geo-political bulwark, buffer, and insurance for the cheap oil they get from the region. This is rather unfortunate. If the push comes to shove, and the Arab countries are forced in sympathy to retaliate by engaging in another oil embargo as they did in 1973, the West will experience a Winter of hardship.

The injustice against the Palestinian nation has become so obvious that public opinion in the West is moving against Israel, even if leaders remain blind to this fact.

We are watching an occupied, oppressed people face annihilation by a nuclear state with the full backing of the western world. This is not – and has never been – an ‘equal fight’. Right now, it is a massacre on a scale we’ve never seen before.

6,000 bombs dropped in 6 days on a strip of land just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point. Whole neighborhoods flattened. Families wiped out. Hospitals collapsing under the weight of the casualties. On a population of 2 million – half of them children. 70% of them are refugees. One Palestinian child has been killed every 15 minutes since Saturday 7^th October.

And now, the forced displacement of 2 million people is tantamount to ethnic cleansing. The fact that it is impossible for that many to leave means that a genocide is in the making.

All the tragedy that has happened – and continues to happen – in Palestine is traceable to the application of the Zionist ideology by its leaders.

A political turn was given to Zionism by Theodor Herzl, who in 1897 convened the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland, which drew up the Basel program of the movement, stating that “Zionism strives to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Hence, the famous Jewish phrase “Next year in Jerusalem”.

When the Ottoman government refused Herzl’s request for Palestinian autonomy, he found support in Great Britain. In 1903 the British government offered 6,000 square miles (15,500 square km) of uninhabited Uganda for settlement, but the Zionists held out for Palestine. And the rest they say is history.

Thus, 50 years after the first Zionist congress and 30 years after the Balfour Declaration, Zionism achieved its aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, but at the same time, it became an armed camp surrounded by hostile Arab nations, and Palestinian organizations engaged in armed resistance. The status quo has not changed today.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict which continues to impact the life of both peoples.

Throughout the world today, many intellectuals, politicians, and historians oppose Zionism. Various Christian and Jewish thinkers and authors condemn it, as do various academics in Israeli universities such as the late Israel Shahak or Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who criticize Israeli violence directed against Palestinians and who maintain that peace can be achieved only when Israel forsakes its Zionist ideology.

Spiritually, it is a duty in the eyes of God to put an end to the fighting, which is dragging both sides deeper into unending violence.

Say: “O People of the Book! Let us rally to a common formula to be binding upon both us and you: . . . ..” (Quran, 3:64)

By using the principles of tolerance and moderation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has caused so much bloodshed over the last 75 years, can be solved. In our view, establishing peace depends upon two conditions:

1.    Israel must immediately withdraw from all the territories it occupied during the 1967 war and end the resulting occupation. That is an obligation under international law, various U.N. Security Council resolutions, and mere justice itself. All of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be recognized as belonging to an independent State of Palestine.

2.    East Jerusalem, the site of significant places of worship belonging to three divinely revealed religions, must be administered by the Palestine authority. However, it must have a special status and be turned into a city of peace that all Jews, Christians, and Muslims can visit comfortably, in peace and well-being, and where they can worship in their own sanctuaries.

Barely one week after leading a two-day nationwide warning strike,  the organised labour on Tuesday threatened to begin an indefinite strike should the Federal Government fail to meet its demands at the end of a 21-day ultimatum which will expire in approximately one week’s time.

The workers union said the proposed strike was necessary following the failure of the Federal Government to provide palliatives to assuage the Nigerians hardships as a result of the fuel subsidy removal.

The Nigeria Labour Congress said the industrial action which may commence any day from next week would lead to an indefinite shutdown of commercial and economic activities across the country.

Speaking with The Punch on Tuesday, the National Assistant General Secretary of the NLC, Mr Christopher Onyeka, said the FG was wrong to share a bag of rice to a dozen citizens while reportedly giving N100m palliative to each member of the National Assembly.

The union had on September 1 handed down a 21-day ultimatum to the FG over the delay in sharing of palliatives, saying it might be compelled to declare an indefinite labour action if its demands were not met.

“If the government fails to provide the appropriate responses to our demands, we encourage you to maintain your steadfast resolve. The same passion and determination that fuelled this warning strike will be crucial if we find ourselves compelled to embark on an indefinite nationwide strike,’’ the labour body said in a letter to the FG.

To demonstrate its seriousness, the NLC mobilised workers for a two-day warning strike on September 5 and 6, partially grounding social and economic activities in several states with banks, ministries, agencies and departments closed to the public in some states.

The NLC leadership had said the action was in preparation for a total shutdown which would start at the expiration of the ultimatum next week.

Among other demands, the NLC and the Trade Union Congress were asking for wage awards, implementation of palliatives, tax exemptions and allowances to the public sector workers and a review of the minimum wage.

Though the FG made a commitment to restructure the framework for engagement with organised Labour on palliatives, the eight-week timeframe set for the conclusion of the process expired in August with no action whatsoever.

The committees were given eight weeks to conclude their assignment and hasten the implementation of the framework in cushioning the effect of petrol subsidy removal on Nigerians but weeks after the timeframe expired, the sub-committees had yet to meet or actualise their mandates.

President Bola Tinubu had since June 19 set up the Presidential Steering Committee and various sub-committees to discuss the framework to be adopted on the palliatives.

The sub-committees had been created to implement FG’s palliative package in areas such as Cash Transfers, Social Investment Programme, Cost of Governance, Energy, and Mass Transit and Housing.

This was a fall-out of the President’s closed-door session with the leadership of the NLC and the TUC during a nationwide protest by the organised labour.

Nationwide protest

Giving an update on the planned walk out following the lukewarm attitude of the government, Onyeka insisted that the FG had absconded from the negotiation table, noting that it had also failed to meet the workers’ demands.

The union leader hinted that the strike would not notify the government before carrying out any action it deems fit.

He said, “We sent the letter to the Federal Government on September 1, 2023, so by September 22, 2023, the 21-day ultimatum will end.

“We have made it clear that the Federal Government has abandoned and absconded from the table for negotiation; that government is no longer negotiating with Nigerians and there is no good faith negotiation that is going on.’’

The Punch