The OBJ's Farm!!!!!!!

[EMTL]

This is sent by a friend who claiemd it was the text of our Presidents Prayer at the national Assembly. Question is will you say AMEN at the end?

President Obasanjo in opening the new National Assembly had his address as follows:-

O God our heavenly Father, we come before you this day to seek help to give our second tenure guidance, direction and purpose because we have already lost control of the ship of state. No Government policy works in Nigeria and this is largely due to our warped sense of policy implementation.

Lord we confess that we have held nocturnal meetings to plan how to rig elections and we call it
strategizing.  We have killed our political opponents and we call it armed robbery.  We have killed our unborn babies and we call it flushing.

We have won questionable elections and we call it landslide victory. We have destroyed the Judiciary and we advise our political opponents to have faith in the election tribunals.

We have manipulated INEC and we call it free and fair elections. ! We have bribed the electorate and we call it 'carry go'.

Top Government officials have bought over all our Government-owned companies and we call it
privatization.

We have created artificial fuel scarcity inorder to raise the prices of petroleum products and we call it commercialization.

We have raised the prices of petroleum products several times without justification and we call it
deregulation.

We have established companies abroad and brought them into the country to win all the big contracts and we call it foreign investment.

Top Government officials have established refineries abroad where they refine our crude oil and bring it back to sell to us and we call it 'offshore operations'.

We have abandoned our country and spent a total of two out of four years in foreign countries and we call it diplomatic shuttling.

We have armed our youths to attack our opponents and we call them local militia.

We have turned our youths into well-armed political thugs and we call it cultism.

We have turned ICPC against our opponents and we call it 'pursuing corruption'.

When our opponents cry we call it destabilization.

When our out-rigged opponents reject election results we call it threat to democracy and national security.

We have destroyed our institutions of higher learning and we call it university autonomy.

We steal money and save it in foreign banks and we call it offshore banking.

In fact we have sold Nigeria and pocketed the money and we call it vision 2010.

May God come down and rule Nigeria Himself.

GOD HELP NAIJA


Will you say Amen?

[al_hamza]

ALLAH-AKBAR

[lionger]

May God come down and rule Nigeria Himself.

Hehe..this is akin to asking for the moon.

[kilishi]

:-Xif words will match action :-[

[Anonymous]

over my dead body,obasanjo is digging graves for himself and co-travellers,the most deceitful person on earth. :-X

[EMTL]

Assalamu alaikum,
I came across this write-up......

I am continually amazed at the attitude the people in Nigeria have towards uprightness of character in public life. There seems to be in their mind ?€" I am talking about the self-acclaimed religious, intelligent, educated and more enlightened leaders who seemingly understand the image problem of the country ?€" a disconnect between the rhetoric they make in public about public accountability and their delivery on those promises.



First, there was the reinstatement of the suspended Plateau State governor Joshua Chibi Dariye in spite of the "grave" allegations against him which the President Obasanjo himself considered as a moral burden on the nation?€™s psyche. Now this week, reports had it that President Obasanjo?€™s farm at Ota in the South West is raking in an income of ?€˜30 million Naira ($250,000)?€™ every month.



So far, so good. But on the last point, what are the president's tax and accounting responsibilities to the nation on account of his corporate income? Well, I do not intend to go into an elaborate list here because I am not privy to that information. However the purpose of this piece is to provoke the answer(s) from the President himself. Adam Smith, the Scottish founding father of economics who developed much of the theory about markets that we regard as standard theory now once said: ?€˜Where there is at least a general suspicion of much unnecessary expense, and great misapplication of the public revenue, the laws which guard it are little respected.?€™
 

To start with, it is not enough for the President to publicise the monthly corporate income from his farm in order to ?€˜quell rumours that he was stealing money from the Nigerian state?€™ without equally making public how much of this goes into the nation?€™s treasury by way of taxation. The public needs to know this because a great reluctance on the part of almost all of us to pay taxes has been in existence in the country for years and our entire tax system has been plagued by the existence of tax avoidance techniques that are seemingly available to the wealthy in our society. Many of us are forced to arrive at the opinion that the men and women of importance who are well-connected and who have large estates and watchful lawyers always find ways of evading or avoiding the tax burdens.



In an ideal world, those who consume government services should pay for them through the tax system. Cheating on the nation?€™s tax system is all pervasive in all classes; except perhaps among the compulsively honest, cheating usually occurs in direct proportion to opportunity. The vast majority of the Nigerian public believe, as I do, that everybody else is engaging in tax avoidance or outright tax evasion. This has a far-reaching effect on the behaviour of the nation?€™s macroeconomic variables such as inflation and industrial production growth rates and the consequence of this is that the poor majority who pays tax is forced to carry a heavier tax burden on the services they render and purchases they make thus becoming poorer and poorer.



These compulsively honest taxpayers (i.e. the poor majority) are an eclectic group.  They include ?€˜danfo?€™and taxi drivers, civil servants, market men and women, labourers, nurses, doctors, high school teachers, and many, many self-employed with marginal businesses wanting one thing or another from government, etc. Of course, it could be argued that anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it and no citizen has a moral obligation to assist in maintaining the government, but I think that every good citizen should be willing to devote a brief time during some one day in the year, when necessary, to the making up of a listing of his income for taxes in order to contribute to his government, not the scriptural tithe, but a small percentage of his net profits.



Nigerian is in need of effective and stable tax systems to finance the public sector. Tax evasions are impediment to progress. The propensity to evade tax must be linked to endogenising honesty by this government famed for its loud noise about probity. To this end, corporate income must be taxed when is earned by any corporation whether dealing in farming activity or not and, the tax should also extend to the corporate stock when is sold if its value has increased by the retention of previously taxed income. Nigerian economy is excessively inflationary. Inflation however creates some capital gains even where there is no real income, hence chargeable disposals or assets must also be subject to tax as well.



Last week, the Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala condemned the Transparency International for ranking Nigeria as the most corrupt country in Africa, the third most corrupt country in the world. Perceptions may be wrong but they are realities. Transparency International has in the past been challenged by governments which are not happy with how their countries were classified. President (Carlos) Menem (Argentina) ran a campaign against it and now he is running the campaign from the prison where he is for corruption.



The avoidance of tax may be lawful in Nigeria as is the case in developed nations like Britain, but it is not yet a virtue. And, as the foremost citizen of Nigeria, President Obasanjo has an obligation to the country's tax system and he should therefore render to the public his tax and accounting responsibilities on all his assets.



In addition, the President should also take up the gauntlet thrown at him by the suspended Plateau State governor Joshua Chibi Dariye whom he just reinstated. The latter this week, in response to the Federal Government?€™s letter alleging ?€˜grave?€™ impropriety against him retorted:  ?€œAll of us are living in glass houses. Let no one start throwing stones?€??€? How far that is true, the ball is in the President?€™s court and must play it now without delay.



Abdulsalam Ajetunmobi

[bobboss]

i was really interested in politices, not  until OBJ AND HIS CREW CAME ON BOARD ,your prayers i mean your friends prayers is really the true picture  of event in this country.am so ashamed of our so leaders whose personnal interest is all they care about.ya allah ka destroying na su all some one say amin

[Nuruddeen]

He(OBJ) always parade himself as a 'born-again' afterall he is not even a bonafide and devoted practitioner of his religion'cos he has portrayed himself as a person without compassion. God forbid.

[kilishi]

politics for this country don tire me,may Almighty Allah save us,now the national political dialogue is in the corner,starting on the 21 of this month we shall wait and seee,even the representatives selected by our northen govn failed the dialogue b4 it even startd :(  :(