Author: The Nation

By Mike Kebonkwu

Sudan is in turmoil and on the verge of collapse as anarchy reigns supreme. From the Horn of Africa, to the Congo, to Central Africa down to the West African sub-region, there is one crisis or the other threatening the stability of our countries. We are so rich but Africa has remained the poorest continent as Europeans, Americans and Asians harvest our rich minerals, flora and fauna, with their advanced technologies while we are bogged down by crises of underdevelopment and poverty.

Just about the time combatants in one crisis have worn themselves out and exhausted, another is brewing. It is either terrorism by ideological zealots, insurgency and banditry, war for control of mineral resources or political brigandage. It has gotten to a point where one begins to wonder if Africa is not indeed bound to violence.

 At the root of it all is corruption, disruption or collapse of the rule of law and institutions of State. Why are they fighting in Sudan? It is a struggle amongst the elites for power and control of the wealth and resources of the country; not for the general good to improve the living standard of the people. This is the political malaise plaguing Africa without exception.

Members of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Force (RSF) are running amok in Khartoum. They have turned their guns on the people and national infrastructure. Foreign embassies have since evacuated their staff and nationals except for some African countries still struggling to extricate their stranded nationals; Nigeria is one of them. There is a huge displacement of the population with many running into neighbouring countries as refugees. For those caught in the crossfire who cannot escape, they are in a dire situation lacking basic essentials to survive, food, water and electricity.

The hospitals and medical facilities have been overwhelmed and at breaking point without necessary replenishment. This is a country that relies on food aids from donor agencies and countries in the normal course of events now thrown into crisis of full-scale armed struggle between two generals.

 Africa has proved incapable of governing itself and has continued to live under the epidemics of inept political leadership and corruption. Our political leaders have an insatiable rapacious appetite, stealing our common patrimony and what they do not need. We want the Europeans to pay reparation for what they stole from our continent as a result of slavery and colonialism. Since independence, our political leaders have stolen far more from the people than the period of slavery and colonialism put together. Yet we are not asking our political elites for reparation. We fight their battles for them to continue to oppress the poor and manipulate every electoral cycle to subvert the will of the people.

The footage of the streets of Sudan show the primitive and barbaric savagery of Africans to themselves, butchering his type without empathy, women, children and the elderly. If the crisis ends today, Sudan certainly will not remain the same again, rebuilding the damaged infrastructure and reconciliation of the tribal groups.

The crisis is made worse due to the availability of light weapons which are as easy to get as vegetables in the local markets. We receive weapons from European merchants and turn them on our brothers and sisters and keep the continent permanently on the ground. In spite of all the miracle workers in the churches and mosques, Africa has remained in endless crises as if we are under a spell. For weeks running, the parties in the conflict in Sudan have turned Khartoum, the capital, to Golgotha. Civilians are the vulnerable population, receiving bullets for the greed of the military elite and their political leaders.

Serious countries and embassies have evacuated their nationals hurriedly, but Nigerian nationals, especially students, are still trapped and stranded and held in border countries of Egypt and Chad who make conditions for their passage difficult. They cannot but treat our citizens the way the world sees our government treat us at home. Nigerian citizens and students are economic refugees fleeing from insecurity and harsh economic conditions; education is just a facade.

Nigerian youths are trooping to study in higher institutions abroad while our graduates, doctors and other professionals look for greener pastures abroad. Our leaders have destroyed our public school system; so those parents that can afford it send their children and wards abroad. With our endowment, Nigerians have no business going to Sudan to study. Today, Nigerian youths form a huge percentage of foreign student population in Cotonou, Ghana, Gambia; indeed, every other country within the sub-region and beyond.

It is a shame that our country has never been able to respond timeously to distressed Nigerians outside our shores during emergencies and crises. Our embassies and high commissions exist only as text book theory, and we have envoys that do not even have records of Nigerians in their countries of assignment.

Events in Sudan are a big lesson to us.  Like Sudan, we also have proliferation of firearms in all the geo-political zones of the country in the hands of non-state actors acting with reckless impunity. The government is unable to mop up the arms. To make matters worse, we are arming paramilitary organisations that are supposed to perform simple civil functions amongst the populace without considering the security implications. We have the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) in the Northeast. Hisbah Police operate in some states like private armies. The war against insurgency will end someday, and what happens to these elements that have had some form of military training and are battle-tested fighting alongside with soldiers?

The National Assembly is busy making laws arming paramilitary organisations like the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps who are not supposed to perform military functions.  The next would be the Road Safety Corps and Boys Scout. We do not want to think about the implications of throwing light weapons and small arms all over the country. These are people without proper training and good mental attitude to bear arms. This is in addition to the fact that they do not have secured armouries like the Armed Forces, and, to some extent, the Nigeria Police Force. It is also easy for criminal elements to capture these weapons from these agencies, or their operatives, using it for illegal purposes as reports are showing. The military high command that is in a position to advise on such things shy away from doing so in order to be politically correct and not be seen to be opposing civil authority.

The civilisation of Sudan has been laid waste due to bad leadership. There is even speculation that some faction in the conflict is contemplating engaging mercenaries from Russia. For those who care to know, mercenaries do not win wars, they are merchants of death; we can see that in the Russia-Ukraine war.

If we want to live in peace, we must stop the war drums and inflammatory rhetoric setting one ethnic group against the other just because elections have been lost and won. Let us allow the judiciary to prove that justice and the rule of law are still possible in our country, until they prove the contrary. When the scourge of war comes, everyone will taste from the bitterness of its poisonous vial. Sudan is so far but so near!

•Kebonkwu, mikekebonkwu@yahoo.com

Back in March, Ike Ekweremadu, Beatrice, his wife, and Obeta, their daughter’s doctor, were convicted under Britain’s Modern Slavery Act for organ trafficking by a jury that ruled they criminally conspired to bring a 21-year-old Lagos street trader to London. They were last week sentenced to various jail terms with Ekweremadu receiving nine and a half years, his wife six, and Obeta, ten years.

While sentencing them at London’s Old Bailey criminal court, Justice Jeremy Johnson did not forget to let them know that “The act of extracting human organs is a type of servitude which reduces human beings and their physical forms to commodities that can be traded.” Although from his charity work and attestations of Nigerians, including law makers, a former Nigerian president and some clergy men, Justice Johnson was in no doubt Ekweremadu was a good man. But being celebrated as a good man could however not vitiate the argument of the investigating and prosecuting officers that Ekweremadu was criminally minded. For the judge, therefore, the law is the law.

Indeed, the investigation and prosecution proved Ekweremadu and his other two accomplices convicted for what the judge described as “a reprehensible business” are all criminally minded. Justice Johnson was therefore persuaded that Ekweremadu, who lied freely through his teeth and was also accused of involvement in bribing a medical secretary (an Igbo interpreter) at the Royal Free, during the trial, masterminded the act. His wife also lied. Obeta, who helped organise the organ harvesting plot after he himself had received a kidney transplant at the Royal Free through human trafficking, was similarly criminally minded. This was a doctor who took N4.5m from Ekweremadu on behalf of a victim he only paid N270, 000.

Of course, the victim was not any less criminally minded. Determined to benefit from his own victimhood, he escaped when he was about to be returned to Nigeria following the failure of their plan. He sought police protection by lying he was a 15-year-old gullible poor boy picked up from the street of Lagos without being told he was coming to London for organ harvesting. But he was 21, and this was after the victim had signed all the papers and claiming he was a cousin to Ekweremadu’s daughter. In fact, it was not until this development that Ekweremadu, who had thought he was on top of the game, realised the victim had his own plan to “japa” to seek greener pastures in Britain. It is a case of “a cunning man died; a cunning man buried him.”

Except that being criminally minded is a common affliction among Nigerians, Ekweremadu, who according to the judge had over 400,000 pounds deposited in his account in six months while in detention doing nothing in addition to a record of over 40 houses across the globe, had enough resources to take care of his daughter. After all, struggling middle-class Nigerians routinely travel abroad for organ transplants. The problem is that some criminally minded Nigerians just believe they must cut corners.

In this regard, it was very clear Ekweremadu and his chosen victim are two of a kind. What counted against Ekweremadu was that he was trying to exploit the poor and weak in spite of his stupendous wealth, which but for his greed, was enough to build a kidney transplant clinic in his Enugu State.

And similarly, from all indications, his victim was not as innocent as the British prosecution and investigation officers would want us to believe. This was a young man squaring up in a game of roulette hoping to outwit Senator Ekweremadu. What worked in his favour despite being equally criminally minded were the testimonies of British medical/psychological experts that indicated he did not fully understand the consequences of his action, which could have led to his untimely death.

And the British experts attributed this to desperation and poverty. And who else carries the can for the ravaging poverty in a country described by a former British prime minister as very corrupt but politicians like Ekweremadu, who has been in the senate since 2003 and has thrice served as deputy senate president?

Of course, Ekweremadu was also haunted by his past. In today’s globalised world, the British authorities know he has always cut corners. They remember how in 2015, he and Saraki literally stole the senate presidency and senate vice presidency. They know how the Nigerian lawmakers, described as “pen robbers” by Olusegun Obasanjo, cornered 25% of the nation’s budget to reposition themselves as the highest paid lawmakers in the world. They know it was the senate that in 2000 created fuel scarcity that allowed them to increase the number of fuel importers from the initial four multinationals to over a hundred. They remember that it was that instrument the lawmakers, PDP stalwarts and their children, deployed to forge documents to swindle the Jonathan government to the tune of N1.7tn in the name of fuel subsidy ‘without importing,’ in the words of Audu Ogbe, one time PDP chairman, ‘a pint of fuel.’

But weep not for Ekweremadu. The truth of the matter is that there are just too many criminally minded Nigerians. In politics, they want to reap where we did not sow, or pull down the edifice on their heads. In the name of business, some criminally minded Nigerians import fake and substandard goods, including drugs, killing not only our budding industries but snuffing life out of innocent Nigerians.

Ekweremadu’s tragedy has only shown that cutting corners irrespective of one’s wealth or poverty status has become an affliction among many Nigerians. Your mechanic, plumber, electrician, POS operator, all share the same mindset with the country’s political and economic fraudsters.

Criminally minded Nigerians abound in the church where they sell grace and promise the poor wealth without work, even when God has decreed every man must live by his sweat. They flourish in the media where, in the quest to protect the rich and powerful from whose table they get some crumbs, they suppress the truth. While fighting the battle of their masters as slaves, they give the impression the state, saddled with the responsibility of protecting the rest of us from the antics of some criminally minded powerful Nigerians, is the enemy. Show me one newspaper or TV platform that published the possible source of Justice Thomson angst- the fact that Ekweremadiu had over four hundred thousand pounds deposited in his account in six months while in detention doing nothing.

The judiciary has its own share of many criminally minded individuals. Magu, the immediate past EFCC chairman, told us that some SANS were given a brief to prosecute criminals on behalf of EFCC but ended up shielding such criminals. It is on record that many of them have become experts in defending government illegalities, thieving governors and bank owners that defrauded their depositors.  One of them described Saraki’s trading off the victory of his party for a pot of porridge and Ekweremadu’s opportunism as ‘real politick.’

But in every adversity, there is opportunity. The fall of Ekweremadu from grace to grass, after spending twenty years in the senate and serving as number four citizen for twelve years, provides an opportunity for us to look at ourselves in the mirror. Ekweremadu is not the only criminally minded Nigerian public servant smiling to the bank with four hundred pounds every six months for doing absolutely nothing. For far too long, we have played the ostrich.