Obasanjo slams Buhari’s critics over school certificate

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has described the controversy over the educational qualification of the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, as the degeneration of political campaign to triviality.

Mr. Obasanjo who was speaking during the launch of his latest book, “My Watch”, in London, said there was no way Mr. Buhari would have been admitted into the army in the 1960s if he did not have the Cambridge Secondary School Certificate or West African Secondary School Leaving Certificate.

“When I joined the army in the 1950s I needed to have a Cambridge Certificate or West African certificate, GCE, to be able to join the army, and I don’t know of anybody who was an officer at that time that didn’t have similar certificate. Buhari joined the army about four years after me and I needed such a certificate to be admitted into the army, I don’t know how he could have avoided such a certificate,” he said.

Mr. Obasanjo said even if Mr. Buhari did not have a secondary school certificate as alleged, the training and education he received while in the military surpassed the secondary school certificate, which is the minimum qualification under Nigerian law for anyone running for the office of the president.

“Assuming he avoided the certificate, Buhari went through a military academy. He went through what we called Staff College, which would be a minimum equivalent of a first degree. He went through, in America, what they called War College, which would have given him an equivalent of Masters Degree and our constitution or electoral law requires school certificate and rather for us to campaign and debate on real issues we then degenerated to triviality,” he said to a loud applause from the audience.

The educational qualification of Mr. Buhari, who is a former Head of State and retired Major General, became contentious after he submitted an affidavit to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, saying his academic credentials were with the military. The Military, however, said it was not in possession of Mr. Buhari’s credentials.

Following the controversy, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party pushed for Mr. Buhari’s disqualification from the presidential contest, but Government College, Katsina (formerly Provincial Secondary School, Katsina), which is the school he attended, later released Mr. Buhari’s secondary school certificate examination results.
The PDP dismissed the results as forged.

On this date in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison

Nelson Mandela, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid was released from prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.

 

In 1944, Mandela, a lawyer, joined the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest black political organization in South Africa, where he became a leader of Johannesburg’s youth wing of the ANC. In 1952, he became deputy national president of the ANC, advocating nonviolent resistance to apartheid–South Africa’s institutionalized system of white supremacy and racial segregation.

On this date in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. He was a South African political activist and member of the African National Congress…..
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the Madiba clan in the village of Mvezo, Transkei, 96 years ago today on 18 July 1918.
Nelson Mandela personifies struggle. He lead the fight against apartheid with extraordinary vigour and resilience after spending nearly three decades of his life behind bars. He sacrificed his private life and his youth for his people, and remains South Africa’s best known and loved hero.
Mandela held numerous positions in the ANC: ANCYL secretary (1948); ANCYL president (1950); ANC Transvaal president (1952); deputy national president (1952) and ANC president (1991).
His father, Henry Mgadla Mandela, was chief councillor to Thembuland’s acting paramount chief David Dalindyebo. When his father died, Mandela became the chief’s ward and was groomed for the chieftainship.
Mandela matriculated at Healdtown Methodist Boarding School and then started a BA degree at Fort Hare. As an SRC member he participated in a student strike and was expelled, along with the late Oliver Tambo, in 1940. He completed his degree by correspondence from Johannesburg, did articles of clerkship and enrolled for an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, whose Programme of Action was adopted by the ANC in 1949.
Mandela was elected national volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign. He travelled the country organising resistance to discriminatory legislation.
He was given a suspended sentence for his part in the campaign. Shortly afterwards a banning order confined him to Johannesburg for six months. During this period he formulated the “M Plan”, in terms of which ANC branches were broken down into underground cells.
By 1952 Mandela and Tambo had opened the first black legal firm in the country, and Mandela was both Transvaal president of the ANC and deputy national president.
A petition by the Transvaal Law Society to strike Mandela off the roll of attorneys was refused by the Supreme Court.
In the ‘fifties, after being forced through constant bannings to resign officially from the ANC, Mandela analysed the Bantustan policy as a political swindle. He predicted mass removals, political persecutions and police terror.
For the second half of the ‘fifties, he was one of the accused in the Treason Trial. With Duma Nokwe, he conducted the defence.
When the ANC was banned after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, he was detained until 1961 when he went underground to lead a campaign for a new national convention.
Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, was born the same year. Under his leadership it launched a campaign of sabotage against government and economic installations.
In 1962 Mandela left the country for military training in Algeria and to arrange training for other MK members.
On his return he was arrested for leaving the country illegally and for incitement to strike. He conducted his own defence. He was convicted and jailed for five years in November 1962. While serving his sentence, he was charged, in the Rivonia trial, with sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A decade before being imprisoned, Mandela had spoken out against the introduction of Bantu Education, recommending that community activists “make every home, every shack or rickety structure a centre of learning”.
Robben Island, where he was imprisoned, became a centre for learning, and Mandela was a central figure in the organised political education classes.
In prison Mandela never compromised his political principles and was always a source of strength for the other prisoners.
During the ‘seventies he refused the offer of a remission of sentence if he recognised Transkei and settled there.
In the ‘eighties he again rejected PW Botha’s offer of freedom if he renounced violence.
It is significant that shortly after his release on Sunday 11 February 1990, Mandela and his delegation agreed to the suspension of armed struggle.
Mandela has been awarded honorary degrees from more than 50 international universities and is chancellor of the University of the North.
He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President of South Africa on 10 May 1994 – June 1999
Nelson Mandela retired from Public life in June 1999. He died on 5 December 2013 at his home in Houghton,
Source: South African News

On This Day In 1984, Michael Jackson’s THRILLER Album Made Guinnes Book Of World Records

 

On this day in 1984, Michael Jackson’s sixth album, THRILLER, was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for best-selling album of all time. What is your favorite song from this THRILLER?

Credit: Michael Jackson’s THRILLER album Cover

Gauguin painting breaks sale record at nearly $300m

 

A painting of two Tahitian girls by the French artist Paul Gauguin has been sold for $300m (£197m), making it the most expensive work of art ever sold.

Nafea Faa Ipoipo, or When Will You Marry?, was painted in 1892 and had been owned by a Swiss collector.

Unconfirmed reports suggest it was sold to a museum in Qatar.

The small oil-rich state paid the previous highest price for a painting, a work by Paul Cezanne which sold for $259m.

Before its sale, the Gaugin artwork had been owned by Rudolf Staechelin, a collector from Basel.

For decades it had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel but Mr Staechelin decided to sell the painting after a disagreement with the museum, US media report.

Mr Staechelin told the New York Times he would not divulge the identity of the buyer.

It was not immediately clear where the sale had taken place.

However the paper, which first reported the sale, quoted sources saying the painting had been sold to Qatari buyers.

Officials in Qatar have not yet confirmed the purchase.

The sheikhdom's royal family has in recent years spent vast amounts of money on Western art.

Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani, a former minister of culture who died last year, lavished more than $1bn of the country's money on artworks.

Qatar sponsored a 2012 Damien Hirst retrospective in the UK which later moved to the country's capital Doha, and has invested large sums of money financing museums of Islamic and modern Arab art.

Queen of the Desert: Berlin Film Festival review

 

The female Lawrence of Arabia’, they call her; ‘the woman who made Iraq’. Events in the Middle East since 2000 have brought about a revival of interest in Gertrude Bell, the archaeologist, explorer, linguist, traveller, Orientalist, writer and spy. Bell wielded enormous influence when the map of the region was redrawn after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One. As Britain’s Oriental Secretary, she set Iraq’s borders, wrote its constitution and lobbied heavily for her man, the Emir Faisal, to be installed as the new country’s first king. She was an extraordinary character and her achievements are doubly impressive given the standing of women at the time. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that the synthetic country she helped create out of incompatible Kurdish, Sunni and Shia populations was an unstable one that collapsed into Baathist dictatorship and today is riven with deadly sectarian tensions. We remember Bell now because we ask: whose idea was all this in the first place?

But watching Werner Herzog’s new film Queen of the Desert, which has just had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, this might never occur to you at all. Herzog’s film is wholly uninterested in the effects of Bell’s achievements, in the repercussions of history or the politics of empires. The film with which it will undoubtedly be compared is David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, which features some of the same characters and dramatises similar historical moments – comparisons which Queen of the Desert invites from the get-go with its sweeping desert cinematography. But even if Lean’s film was dewy-eyed and sentimental about the British Empire, at least it had something to say. Herzog’s film has no comment at all. The whole colonial adventure is merely a colourful backdrop for a standard period melodrama about the two tragic loves of Bell’s life. This is a shame and a missed opportunity: Queen of the Desert takes the life of a woman who defied the conventions of her time, and casts it in the most conventional possible terms. It’s a disappointingly ordinary film from a director whose work is usually so wonderfully strange.

Nicole Kidman as Bell does what she can with the role she’s got. She delivers breathy dialogue by candlelight, squints defiantly at arrogant officials, looks wistfully out of the window and secures wisps of hair coyly behind her ears. James Franco plays the first of her lovers, Henry Cadogan, a junior diplomat at the British embassy in Tehran who woos her with a cheesy card trick and his knowledge of medieval Farsi, then asks for her hand in marriage. Forbidden from marrying him by her father – there are rumours Cadogan is a gambler – and heartbroken by the contents of a letter she receives in England while trying to change his mind, Bell embarks on her adventures in the desert.

There is some sense of Bell’s growing confidence, her affinity with the landscape and its people, their language and way of thinking. But when she meets Major Charles Doughty-Wylie (Homeland’s Damian Lewis) we’re straight back to old-fashioned romance. The other man in her life is TE Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – though he is more gay best friend than love interest. As Lawrence, Twilight’s Robert Pattinson is unconvincing and faintly ridiculous. His first appearance on screen – a keffiyeh on his head so we can’t miss him – caused a ripple of snorts and giggles to pass through the audience in Berlin.

The film passes from episode to episode in a manner so conventional that for much of the film I was sure that Herzog – a film-maker usually so alive to the strangeness of life, to its absurdities and follies – was trying to wrong-foot us; that at any moment some grotesque, wild-eyed character would enter, or some bonkers Herzogian lizard would rise up out of the sands and signal a change of direction. But surprises came there none. There are a few tiny gestures toward the uncanny in the way that animals are filmed, particularly the camels, with their gurning lips and swivelling heads: they intrude humourously on otherwise serious scenes. But apart from this everything proceeds in bog-standard, romantic movie-epic fashion.

Right at the end we meet two new characters – Faisal and his brother Abdullah, sheikhs from the mighty Hashemite family who were installed by the British as the rulers of Iraq and what is now Jordan. They fawn over Bell as “Al Khatun” (the noble lady) and “the maker of kings” and she anoints them, god-like, to their roles.  As far as this film is concerned, what will unfold in these new countries is of no interest or importance. The titles roll over swirling sands