News
US President-Elect, Joseph R. Biden Jr, Shaped By Tragedy, Tradition

Thirty-three years ago, he was the fast-talking junior senator from Delaware with a chip on his shoulder, desperate to prove his gravitas during a brief, ill-fated presidential run.
The next time around, in 2008, he was the seasoned foreign policy hand and veteran lawmaker who strained to capture the imagination of Democratic presidential primary voters.
As he weighed a third attempt at the presidency last year, many Democrats feared he was too late. Too old, too moderate, too meandering to excite ascendant voices in his party, too rooted in the more civil politics of the past to nimbly handle Donald Trump.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. ran anyway. He ran as a grieving father who connected with a country in pain. As a relative centrist who emphasized character, stability and belief in bipartisanship over the particulars of a policy agenda. As a flawed, uneven campaigner whose vulnerabilities were ultimately drowned out by his opponent’s outsize weaknesses, and eclipsed by the seismic issues at stake, as the nation confronted the ravages of a deadly pandemic.
In many ways, he ran as the politician he has always been. And for one extraordinary election, that was enough.
“They’re not so much saying, ‘I’m investing in Joe Biden because of his philosophy,’” said former Senator William S. Cohen, Republican of Maine, who served with Mr. Biden and supported him this year. “They’re invested in Joe Biden because of him, of who they see as being a human being.”
Mr. Biden’s victory on Saturday is the culmination of a career that began in the Nixon era and spanned a half-century of political and social upheaval. But if the country, the political parties and Washington have changed since Mr. Biden, now 77, arrived in the Senate as a 30-year-old widower in 1973, some of his attitudes — about governing and about his fellow Americans — have hardly changed at all.
He still reveres institutions, defiantly champions compromise and sees politics more in terms of relationships than ideology. He has insisted that with Mr. Trump out of office, Republicans will have an “epiphany” about working with Democrats — a view that elides the fact that Republicans were rarely interested in working with the Obama administration when Mr. Biden was vice president.
Those beliefs, coupled with his reputation as an empathetic and experienced leader, made Mr. Biden acceptable to a broad coalition of Americans this year, including independents and some moderate Republicans.
Now, Mr. Biden’s convictions about how to unite the country and move forward will be tested as never before.
He will take the helm of a nation devastated by a health crisis, reeling from an economic downturn and divided over virtually every major political matter of the day, from how and even whether to confront climate change and racial injustice, to baseless questions from some of Mr. Trump’s supporters about the very legitimacy of free and fair election results.
His first priority, Mr. Biden has said, will be to bring the coronavirus under control, as he also works to invest in infrastructure and to promote economic growth. Mr. Biden has released a series of policy plans around all of those issues, and has made clear that a national emergency calls for urgent and ambitious action.
But the president-elect, a 36-year veteran of the Senate who has never embraced the most far-reaching progressive proposals, is also well aware that the partisan makeup of Washington may limit the scope of his agenda. He is unlikely to press for rapid, transformational change of institutions like the Supreme Court or to embrace the boldest proposals in the Green New Deal.
Yet for all of his instincts for consensus-building, he will face enormous and conflicting pressures when he returns to Washington.
Progressives who papered over their differences with Mr. Biden in the name of defeating Mr. Trump will quickly turn to fighting for their priorities, which may not always align with Mr. Biden’s goals or timeline.
“Where the progressive energy will really turn angry is if we see Biden really compromising on core principles,” warned Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Even his closest allies believe there are elements of his long record that should be reconsidered from the White House, including the legacy of the crime bills passed during his tenure in the Senate. Mr. Biden for years served as a tough-on-crime Democrat, and he has sometimes struggled to account for his leading role in the 1994 crime bill, which many experts now associate with mass incarceration.
“He needs to put together a commission or a committee to study the 1986 and 1994 crime bills,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black official in Congress, describing mass incarceration as an unintended consequence. “We’ve got to rectify.”
And Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the powerful Republican leader, has a relationship with Mr. Biden — but he is unlikely to be moved by encomiums to bipartisanship and civility.
“Joe is a peacemaker — he’s always tried to get along with Republicans,” said Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat and the former Senate majority leader.
But he was skeptical that Republican leaders in Congress would feel similarly about curbing divisiveness in Washington.
“I just hope Joe’s right and I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t see that coming to an end.”
Mr. Biden was a mediocre student with big ambitions, a gregarious young football player from an Irish Catholic family who overcame a stutter and dreamed of running for president.
In the meantime, he settled for school politics, serving as class president at his Catholic high school and adopting an approachable manner that he would deploy decades later on the campaign trail.
“The joke was, if Joe stood next to a light pole, he’d strike up a conversation,” said Bob Markel, a childhood friend of Mr. Biden’s. “You were talking to him for 20 seconds, he’d put out his hand and say, ‘Joe Biden.’”
He came from a line of politically engaged Pennsylvanians on his mother’s side, with a great-grandfather who served as a state senator. His father was a dignified man who had struggled financially, “a student of history with an unyielding sense of justice,” Mr. Biden said in his eulogy. Joseph R. Biden Sr., who moved the family from Scranton, Pa., to Delaware when Mr. Biden was 10, shaped his son’s moral compass and instilled in him a strong sense of identity; his story looms large in Mr. Biden’s efforts today to connect with working-class Americans.
Mr. Biden enrolled at the University of Delaware, where he threw himself into politics as freshman class president. He participated in the occasional high jinks, though even then he was fairly conservative in his personal manner.
“It’s the same style that I think we’ve seen since he was a teenager,” Mr. Markel said. “That moderation can be seen when he was in his teens. He was a fun-loving guy, certainly outgoing, but he didn’t do crazy things.”
For all of his political ambitions, he was at a remove from the antiwar activism taking hold among his peers in the caldron of the 1960s, and he was not one for protesting. After graduating from law school, he followed a path into institutional Democratic politics: young lawyer, part-time public defender and rising star within the Delaware party establishment.
At the end of that decade, party elders suggested he try his hand at a seat on the New Castle County Council.
“I spent most of my time in heavily Democratic precincts,” Mr. Biden recalled, describing the race in a memoir. “But I also spent a great deal of time going door to door in the middle-class neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. They were overwhelmingly Republican in 1970, but I knew how to talk to them.”
At the age of 30, Mr. Biden was moving swiftly in his political career. But personally, he was a broken man.
In a day, he had gone from a married father of three who won a startling victory in the 1972 Senate race to a widower with two toddlers in the hospital after a car crash killed his wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter, Naomi.
For months, he struggled to adjust to the Senate job he had wanted so badly.
Decades later, one of his surviving sons, Beau, would die of brain cancer. Mr. Biden, by then vice president, would be shattered anew.
Yet those staggering personal losses, friends say, shaped Mr. Biden’s uncommon ability to empathize — perhaps his greatest strength.
On the campaign trail, he never spoke with deeper authority than when he promised a grieving voter that one day, the memory of a loved one would bring a smile before a tear. His skill at connecting with voters in pain, allies say, uniquely prepared him to run for president amid a pandemic that has killed more than 237,000 people in the United States and upended the lives of many others on Mr. Trump’s watch.
“He understood the emotional trauma that Trump has inflicted on the country in a way that most of the other candidates didn’t,” said Shailagh Murray, who was a top aide to Mr. Biden as vice president.
After the 1972 accident, Mr. Biden slowly began rebuilding his life, later marrying Jill Jacobs and having a daughter, Ashley.
And eventually, he settled into Washington, too, where his early instincts for bipartisanship and working within the system were reinforced by mentors like Mike Mansfield, the longtime Senate majority leader.
Mr. Biden rose to lead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. He advanced signature policy achievements like the Violence Against Women Act and an assault weapons ban, and he developed relationships with leaders around the world. He torpedoed the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court, a setback that some Republicans remain bitter about to this day, and championed the confirmation of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
His tenure in the Senate is also associated with what many Americans see as the mistreatment of Anita Hill before his committee during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas; with his vote for the Iraq war and his opposition to busing; and with his leading efforts on the 1994 crime bill that troubled some voters throughout the campaign.
As he navigated Congress, Mr. Biden built relationships with similarly consensus-minded Republicans like Senators Bob Dole, Arlen Specter and John McCain.
But Mr. Biden, who has said he was motivated to run for office in part by a belief in civil rights, was also willing to work with even the most virulent segregationist senators. And perhaps, the most controversial speech he has given was his eulogy for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
“At least there was some civility,” Mr. Biden said at a fund-raiser in June 2019, citing James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia. “We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done.”
Under fire, Mr. Biden ultimately expressed regret for the way he invoked segregationist former colleagues.
He did not apologize for the instinct.
The stature Mr. Biden gained in the Senate did not always translate on the presidential campaign trail.
His 1988 race ended in humiliation amid a plagiarism controversy.
In 2008, Mr. Biden struggled to stand out in a talented and crowded field that included Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He dropped out after Iowa, after cementing his reputation for verbal gaffes by referring to Mr. Obama as “articulate and bright and clean.”
But as Mr. Obama’s vice president, Mr. Biden was in many ways back in his element.
“Every time we had a trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me,” Mr. Biden said at that 2019 fund-raiser. “Because I demonstrate respect for them.”
Sometimes that approach got him results — he helped secure three Republican votes for the economic stimulus bill in 2009, for example.
On other occasions — including a major gun control effort after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut — it ultimately did not.
Mr. Biden, like many of his fellow Democrats, was enraged by the Trump presidency and fearful about the corrosive effects of four more years of extraordinary divisiveness.
But he was also closely attuned to moderate, older Black primary voters and had carefully followed which Democrats won in the toughest districts in the 2018 midterm elections. As Mr. Biden mulled a third presidential bid, he was skeptical of tacking far to the left in response to Mr. Trump and his Republican allies. And he was convinced, based on his own experiences, that he could help find common ground.
“Through very difficult periods in the country’s history, he believes he has been able to bring people together,” said Mike Donilon, Mr. Biden’s chief strategist, citing the 2009 stimulus bill and his efforts on a sweeping health measure at the end of 2016. “Beyond the politics, there are also just fundamental judgments about how to treat people, how to talk to them.”
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Biden has championed that approach, sometimes with a touch of performative defensiveness.
“We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country,” he said in a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last month. “I’m accused of being naïve. I’m told, ‘Maybe, that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way anymore.’”
“They can and they must if we’re going to get anything done,” he said.
Mr. Biden, of course, has a policy agenda too, one that he has addressed often in recent months.
He ran on a platform of expanding health care access through a public option, and promoting the middle class. He promised to tackle climate change and to combat racial injustice, acknowledging that America has “never lived up” to the promise that all Americans are created equal. After the pandemic hit, he grew increasingly open to more ambitious social and economic proposals.
But more than anything, he ran as himself, with all of the convictions and the flaws he has displayed over a half-century in public life.
There were the exaggerations and verbal blunders and the flashes of temper. He lost the first three contests, and his campaign was practically moribund when Black voters in South Carolina, who saw him as a familiar and reassuring figure in troubled times, rescued his bid.
“We know Joe,” Mr. Clyburn said as he endorsed Mr. Biden. “But most importantly, Joe knows us.”
And through those peaks and valleys, Mr. Biden hewed to one consistent message: that the turmoil of the Trump era was an existential threat to the character of the country — and that he was uniquely equipped to lower the nation’s temperature and try to bring the country together.
“Has the heart of this nation turned to stone?” Mr. Biden said recently, speaking in Warm Springs, Georgia. “I refuse to believe it. I know this country. I know our people. And I know we can unite and heal this nation.”
In some ways, it is a promise he has been preparing to make for his whole career.
This time around, a majority of American voters decided to believe him.
News
Shettima In Ethiopia For State Visit

Vice President Kashim Shettima has arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for an official State visit at the invitation of the Prime Minister, Dr. Abiy Ahmed.
Upon arrival yesterday, Shettima was received at the airport by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia, Dr. Gedion Timothewos, and other members of the Ethiopian and Nigerian diplomatic corps.
Senior Special Assistant to the Vice President on Media and Communication, Stanley Nkwocha, revealed this in a statement he signed yesterday, titled: “VP Shettima arrives in Ethiopia for official state visit.”
During the visit, Vice President Shettima will participate in the official launch of Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Programme, a flagship environmental initiative.
The programme designed to combat deforestation, enhance biodiversity, and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change targets the planting of 20 billion tree seedlings over a four-year period.
In line with strengthening bilateral ties in agriculture and industrial development, the Vice President will also embark on a strategic tour of key industrial zones and integrated agricultural facilities across selected regions of Ethiopia.
News
RSG Tasks Farmers On N4bn Agric Loan ….As RAAMP Takes Sensitization Campaign To Four LGs In Rivers

The Rivers State Government has called on the people of the state especially farmers to access the ?4billion agricultural loans made available by the State and domiciled in the Bank of Industry.
This is as the State Project Implementation Unit (SPIU) of Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project (RAAMP), a World Bank project, took its sensitization campaign to Opobo/Nkoro, Andoni, Port Harcourt City and Obio/Akpor local government areas.
The campaign was aimed at enlightening community dwellers and other stakeholders in the various local government areas on the RAAMP project implementation and programme activities.
The Permanent Secretary, Rivers State Ministry of Agriculture, Mr Maurice Ogolo, said this at Opobo town, Ngo, Port Harcourt City and Rumuodumanya, headquarters of the four local government areas respectively, during the sensitization campaign.
Ogolo said apart from the ?4billion, the government has also made available fertilizers and other farm inputs to farmers in the various local government areas.
The Permanent Secretary who is the Chairman, State Steering Committee for the project, said RAAMP will construct roads that will connect farms to markets to enable farmers and fishermen sell their farms produce and fishes.
He also said rural roads would be constructed to farms and fishing settlements, and warned against any act that will lead to the cancellation of the projects in the four local government areas.
According to him, the World Bank and Federal Government which are the financiers of the programme will not condone such acts like kidnapping, marching ground and other acts inimical to the successful implementation of the projects in their respective areas.
At PHALGA, Ogolo asserted that the city will benefit in the areas of roads and bridge construction.
He noted that RAAMP was thriving in both the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja; Lagos and other states in the country, stressing that the project should also be given the seriousness it deserves in Rivers State.
Speaking at Opobo town, the headquarters of Opobo/Nkoro Local Government Area, the project coordinator, RAAMP, Mr.Joshua Kpakol, said the programme would reduce poverty in the state.
According to him, both fishermen and farmers will maximally benefit from the programme.
At Ngo which is the headquarters of Andoni Local Government Area, Kpakol said roads will be constructed to all remote fishing settlements.
He said Rivers State is lucky to be among the states implementing the project, and stressed the need for the people to embrace it.
Meanwhile, Kpakol said at PHALGA that RAAMP is a project that will transform the lives of farmers, traders and other stakeholders in the area.
He urged the stakeholders to spread the information to their various communities.
However, some of the stakeholders at Opobo town complained about the destruction of their farms by bulls allegedly owed by traditional rulers in the area, as well as incessant stealing of their canoes at waterfronts.
At Ngo, Archbishop Elkanah Hanson, founder of El-Shaddai Church, commended the World Bank and the Federal Government for bringing the projects to Andoni.
He stressed the need for the construction of roads to fishing settlements in the area.
Also, a former Commissioner for Agriculture in the state and Okan Ama of Ekede, HRH King Gad Harry, noted that storage facilities have become necessary for a successful agricultural programme.
Harry also stressed the need for the programme to be made sustainable.
In their separate speeches, the administrators of Andoni and Opobo/Nkoro Local Government Areas, pledged their readiness to support the programme.
At Port Harcourt City, the Administrator, Dr Arthur Kalagbor, represented by the Head of Local Government Administration, Port Harcourt City, Mr Clifford Paul, said the city would support the implementation of the programme in the area.
Also, the administrator of Obio/Akpor Local Government Area, Dr Clifford Ndu Walter, represented by Mr Michael Elenwo, pledged to support the programme in his local government area.
Among dignitaries at the Obio/Akpor stakeholders engagement is the chairman, Rivers State Traditional Rulers Council and paramount ruler of Apara Kingdom, HRM Eze Chike Wodo, amongst others.
John Bibor
News
Tinubu Orders Civil Service Personnel Audit, Skill Gap Analysis

President Bola Tinubu has ordered the commencement of personnel audit and skill gap analysis across all cadres of federal civil servants.
The president gave this directive in Abuja, yesterday, while speaking at the International Civil Service Conference, reaffirming his resolve to achieve efficiency and professional service delivery in the civil service.
“I have authorized the comprehensive personnel audit and skill gap analysis across the federal civil service to deepen capacity. I urge all responsible stakeholders to prioritize timely completion of this critical exercise, to begin implementing targeted reforms, to realize the full benefit of a more agile, competent and responsive civil service,” the president announced.
Tinubu further directed all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), to prioritise data integrity and sovereignty in national interest.
He called for the capture, protection and strategic publication of public sector data in line with the Nigeria Data Protection Act of 2023.
“We must let our data speak for us. We must publish verified data assets within Nigeria and share them internationally recognized as fruitful. This will allow global benchmarking organisation to track our progress in real time and help us strengthen our position on the world stage. This will preserve privacy and uphold data sovereignty,” Tinubu added.
President Tinubu hailed the federal civil service as the “engine” driving his Renewed Hope Agenda, and the vehicle for delivering sustainable national development.
He submitted that the roles of civil servants remain indispensable in modern governance, declaring that in the face of a fast-evolving digital and economic landscape, the civil service must remain agile, future-ready, and results-driven.
“This maiden conference is a bold step toward redefining governance in an era of rapid transformation. An innovative Civil Service ensures we meet today’s needs and overcome tomorrow’s challenges.
“It captures our collective ambition to reimagine and reposition the civil service. In today’s rapid, evolving world of technology, innovation remains critical in ensuring that the civil service is dynamic, digital” the President said.
Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Didi Walson-Jack in her welcome address told the President that his presence and strong words of commendation at the conference has renewed the morale and mandate of public servants across the country.
Walson-Jack described Tinubu as the backbone of driving transformation in the Nigerian civil service, and noted that the takeaways from past study tours undertaken to understudy the civil service in Singapore, the UK and US under her leadership, is already yielding multiplier effects.
Walson-Jack assured Tinubu that her office, in collaboration with reform-minded stakeholders, will not relent in accelerating the implementation of the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan, FCSSIP 25.
She affirmed that digitalisation, performance management, and continuous learning remain key pillars in strengthening accountability, transparency, and service delivery across MDAs.
Walson-Jack reaffirmed that the civil service is determined to exceed expectations by embedding a culture of innovation, ethical leadership, and citizen-centred governance in the heart of public administration.