Category: Sam Omatseye

I like to think we are in a dream, and waking is not permitted. For barely a month, I have hardly heard of a herdsman rampage. Or is it that no dying man is crying, no daggers flying, no widows have found funeral clothes, or are the predators acting by stealth?

No Miyetti Allah caper. No smokes signalling a barbarian bonfire in a remote hamlet. Or are we witnessing a recess, a holiday from the familiar rhythms of slaughter? I like to know. We have not seen what in proper conflict is called an armistice, an agreement to lay down arms, to renegotiate brotherhood.

We hear of a skirmish here and there. But even journalists, now immune to fire and fury, will admit to a lack of primitive excitement to write about. Such little fights are called low-intensity conflict. I heard this phrase for the first time in a literature class at the University of Toronto, and the professor said it referred to fights of relatively fewer casualties. I asked further, is it low-intensity conflict to the families whose hamlet is washed into oblivion? He chuckled and said it would be their holocaust. I also wondered when a history class at Ife was designated the “far east.” Is it far to those who live there? Many Nigerian families have witnessed private holocausts.

Such designation was condemned by French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wondered why humans use language to oppress others. Yet, we cannot but say that even in Zamfara, the conflict is no longer high-intensity. Taraba, Benue, Nasarawa, Adamawa, Plateau et al. This is a bout of good fortune, it seems. If it is an armistice, let’s keep all arms at ease.

It is clear though that no negotiation happened. No summit cooled the landscape. It was the power of arms. It is hard to simplify why a horde of barbarians go down in silence. But it is easy to say, we have used a modern-day answer to the human beast: the air force. The answer is a massive machine from the Russian deadly bouquet: it is called Mi 35.

We have had this when many were crying for he federal government to stop the killings. We had this when they rammed into Benue and led to a mass burial and a venal outcry. We had it when Mambila wept. It was a quiet monster when Zamfara governor symbolically dropped his position as chief security officer. When Plateau crawled with blood. We had it as IDP camps swirled. We did nothing. We had it when the police chief disobeyed the president and got away with it, or when the president asked his visitors to abide with its neighbours.

We had it when we were complaining about the failure of intelligence when Daura was more interested in settling political scores. Edmund Burke, an arch philosopher of conservatism who resisted the French Revolution, shunned inaction and said “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Even conservatives want change, if it brings peace. The government did nothing. It dithered. But Buhari started to deploy the Russian air machine, the landscape of horror fell silent. The landscape, with its trees and bare stretches, with ponds and huts and rolling and undulating menaces, were tapestries of swagger for the so-called herdsman. Now, they can hardly ride on their motorcycles because of a bird of prey. The military aircraft is the metaphor for the bird of prey. It is the greatest fighting machine in the modern era. The so-called marauder, or what we call herdsman, has no answer to them. No matter what AK 47 they wield or if they run like a rat, they cannot escape the revanchist rat-tat-tat of the gunship. The Mi 35 is one of the world deadliest war helicopters. Not as nimble as the American Apache, but the Mi 35 is an upgrade of the  forbear, the Mi 24, and Russian soldiers call it the flying tank, or the crocodile because of its camouflage quality. If the killer squads want to attack either under the benevolent light of day or the night blanket, the Mi 35 has eyes like the owl and swoop into play. Like the eagle that kills even the earthbound predator like the cheetah, the Mi 35 sees the Nigerian killer squad as mincemeat. Like the Ted Hughes’ poem Hawk Roosting, the M1 35 can boast like the hawk that “I kill where I please because all is mine/there is no sophistry in my body.” It is equipped to vanquish army tanks and formations. If a horde of two hundred killers on motorcycles or on foot go after a village, it is little pickings for the machine. As a proverb says, “an eagle does not catch flies.”

The aircraft does not romanticise its missions. Like Hughes’ hawk, it does not spare. It has precision capacity to kill a single foe or pulverise a squad with its unrelenting cannonade. As the writer James Richardson noted, “birds of prey don’t sing.” Rather they sting.  The Mi 35 is meant for bigger conflict than what has ruffled the polity for over a year now. The helicopter can take off from anywhere in the north or middle belt and its speed is over 300 miles per hour. What marauder can match that on foot, in a van or motorcycle?

That is why governance is not only about taking the right decision, but also about taking them on time. We would have saved so many lives if we had acted on time, rather than allow the defence minister, in his tendentious ignorance, to argue over trade routes, or Audu Ogbeh to snort over what we have not done for the herdsman, or Buhari bellyaching over the neighbours accommodating each other.

The machines have come to our rescue because we have decided to use what we have. They are no longer our birds of prey. They are doing well, so we can call them birds of praise. This column had earlier suggested that if these hoodlums were hiding in the forests, the aircraft could wipe them out with ruthless sorties.

But it is not enough. What we need now is to use intelligence to pick them out, and make them face the full intention of the law. Without that, we have done nothing. They will seek other ways to revive their barbaric schemes, an antediluvian renaissance of the blood. An armistice does not guarantee everlasting peace.

I said in this column that the goons are no spirit. We just decided not to see.  We who were blind seem now to see. If Buhari was able to take that action and send his generals to battle, he should learn that a stitch in time saves nine. So many wounds to stitch still. But do we know how many lives we have saved in the past few weeks, thanks to the Russian gunship?

It is no time for complacency, but vigilance. Whether Buhari can sustain the dividends of peace, we shall know. For now, his critics have little say. It is up to him whether to arm his critics or harm the predators.

An air of vanity has bustled into our politics. Not since the prelude to the Nzeogwu coup of the 1960’s. The National Assembly stalemate examples it and has proved that we the people weigh like dust in their regal hands.

The quiet imbroglio brawls. But on the streets, indifferent silence. The vanity of politicians squelches the interest or welfare of the masses. The masses, ever their own enemies, have done their best to bolster the political class who look down at us in the malignancy of their disdain.

We have abided the impunity of political parties. So, the politicians do what they please as they please. I have said all along that we have had crisis in the APC since the upswing of this administration, and the APC is not, in a classic sense, a political party.

The idea of a political party is still foreign to this clime. Political parties are like football teams. Arsenal buys a Drogba today, and plays against Messi in Barcelona. Tomorrow, the players switch sides. In the easy morality of soccer adventurism, no one questions the moves. Each side hails the switch if, in their calculations, it will earn them the trophy at the end of the day.

Political parties are not conceived that way. Its members come as apostles and foot soldiers of an idea, borne out of historical exigencies. The members join to advance the world. But politics in Nigeria is immune to such high-wire thoughts. The highest we have travelled in this regard is to sacrifice the polity to the idol of the tribe or the altar of faith, or both.

We have followed this wounded path and taken it for granted. It is the tribal provenance of politics. But the National Assembly has fallen many steps lower in the moral slope. This is the nakedness of personal interest. It is not about anything but where bread is buttered, even if the society is not bettered.

We are simultaneously in the Machiavellian hole and Hobbesian jungle.  A man like Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki is holding the Senate to ransom. He is supposed to convene but he wouldn’t. It is not because it is in the interest of the country. It is because he wants to know if it will not become a gravedigger’s moment for his prestige as the number three citizen.

Both sides are guilty here. The APC wants him to convene to stir a house to bipartisan melee. Saraki is afraid he may fall to the guillotine. On the surface, it looks like a balance of power. But it is a balance of fear.  Each side is on a suicide march like the character in Sophocles play, King Oedipus. He sees his death and fall from grace but his suicidal impulse goads him to his end. The literary critic Killam calls it “insistent fatality.”

APC will suffer much if it turns the house of law into a template of anarchy. Saraki may suffer a loss of authority. Unlike Eleyinmi of Village Headmaster, Saraki does not like open confrontation. He is a sly, calculating villain, a subdued showman and a reptilian stalker with a Mephistophelean eye for the easy kill. Eleyinmi of Village Headmaster craved the bloodstain, the head butts, the mud splash of conflict.

That is why we are not having the kind of parliament in Medieval Poland that a critic described as a “divinely ordained confusion.” One thing is clear: this is a moot senate, with nothing serious on its agenda. The so-called tiff over INEC money is a storm in a swimming pool when no swimmer stirs the water and no breast stroke is splashing. In the end, a presidential power can enable the spending. We have operated an insipid, braindead chamber, with no romance of ideas or a pulse of the street? Between now and May next year, they would have only a mercantile zeal, sharing booties, hooting to the bank and plotting their return to the same parliamentary brothel of deals and sleaze.

Since they were prorogued, what have we missed as a nation that we did not miss before when they sat without their jaws locked? Nothing except vacuous theatre. Now that their jaws are locked, we miss nothing. It reflects why scholars call developing countries weak states. They are not strong enough to affect the literacy rate, make a difference between poverty and prosperity, between safety and violence. This senate has failed in that regard aplenty.

So, we are not missing Saraki. Rather, in an access of vanity, he is mistaking the headlines for popularity and paying homage to Obj and joining the recent series of dubious pilgrims making progress to Ota in a parody of John Bunyan. He who presided over  the demolition of three major banks with their blood trails of suicides, deaths, miseries and families ruined. That makes him Nigeria’s chief financial undertaker. He who never ran anything other than his own prosperity. He who survived a Supine Supreme Court verdict, an illiterate juridical handout by so-called wise men, who said it was a rumour that he anticipated his own prosperity in his assets declaration. I said he claimed to be a prophet of his own prosperity. He wants to be president. With all those credentials, no one else qualifies to be president. A tear for him.

Nor is APC acting mature by haranguing Saraki. There is nothing substantially useful for this country even if Saraki is ejected. It is no more than revanchist agenda. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo should be a playbook for governance for the red chamber. In a few days, he made impotent the concept of the state as impotent. With his SARS order, he gave us a glimpse into tomorrow, an argument for state police without ruffling the law. A triumph of imagination over technicality. A riot of debates bows to the quiescence of an order. He threw a dagger at impunity by ousting Daura.

We are quietly joyous at a tamp-down in the herdsmen crisis. This column had suggested that the air force should strafe the forests. That’s what they have done, and the guns, machetes and the swagger in the dark are fading. The air force, as angels over our soldiers, have made the sky lord over the so-called herdsman’s earth. For about a month now, Benue, Taraba, Adamawa, et al, have breathed relative peace unknown in the past year. Plateau knew peace until the bloody spasm winked into silence. To Buhari’s credit, this predated his leave. What we need now is the sustenance of peace, and justice on the arrested predators.

While the executive can boast a few kudos in spite of its major shortcomings, the senate, including Saraki, has not justified Montesquieu’s idea of the separation of powers.

Morning with the Nobel Laureate

In 2008, I had a conversation with Olawale Edun, the chairman of Vintage Press that publishes The Nation. He is one time commissioner in Lagos. He was hosting world renown writer V. S. Naipaul. My blood ran to the hilltop and I requested an audience for an interview.

“S’o mo npa e,” he asked in Yoruba. Translation, “Are you versed in such matters.” I said of course. He trusted me and set up an audience in his Ikoyi residence for the Nobel laureate. I had heard many things about Naipaul. He could walk out of an interview in a huff. His temper could boil like a volcano and he could cheer like a golden retriever. That morning I was to travel to Ekiti to deliver the Adekunle Fajuyi lecture organised by the cerebral governor-elect Kayode Fayemi, Jimi Agbaje, Femi Ojudu, etc. I wanted a quick interview.

Naipaul materialised from a car with his wife Nadira, and we chose Edun’s hefty library as the propitious place for such a fertile exchange. The interview lasted about two hours, and it was principally of a conversation about literature from Conrad to Dickens to Achebe and the relevance of the novel in this age. I remember asking him to pick his forte in the three planks of good writing: observation, perception or language. He chose observation and language. Of course, his spare and beautiful style earned him the comment as the best “writer in English writing today.” He had few kind words for Achebe, asserting he had little to write outside the customs of his people. After Things Fall Apart, his ink ran dry. He was quick to say, if he had offended anyone, “I am sorry.” But the bard had dropped his barb and darted out of town. After the interview, he said no one had tasked him as I did in the interview. Farewell to Naipaul, who passed on last week at 85.

Men in black. Hooded like goons of robbers. Eyes pop as though out of the dark. Mute, ominous guns like growls about to be heard. Gates on lockdown. Lawmakers cannot cajole but holler in vain. A dawn undone.

It was not a building complex that was under siege. Not the brick and mortar of the National Assembly. It was our memory. The fired DSS director, Lawal Daura, harked us back to our jackboot days. Do you remember June 12, and its many sieges? The siege of the press, the siege of the labour union, the streets as blood pedestals, the arrests of dissenters, the cacophonies of clampdowns. Smackdown on fragile voices.

It was no joy. As George R. R. Martin wrote in A feast for Crows, “A siege is a deadly dull.”

When you lay siege to a memory, you lay hold on a people’s future. So, that morning, when hooded men cordoned off the lawmakers access to their chambers, we were reminded that our democracy operates still without self-confidence. Behind it stood shadows of hooded men. Daura was, perhaps, a chief hooded man, more hooded than the muscular presences that morning. We saw them. He hid in the shadows. You will not see him and live.

We had seen it long ago. His defiance, his sense of primitive entitlement, his patrician airs, his disdain for the rule of law. The media cried, the civil society wailed, the law squealed. Daura’s ears could not hear. He did it with the dollars in Nigeria’s most famous apartment. He was stung by an onslaught on judges. He bifurcated the presidency. He became both the executive and legislative branches. He became the dispenser of religious justice to el-Zakzaky. He roared in steely silence to the courts by keeping Sambo Dasuki under leash.

He probably had read or heard of a French philosopher called Montesquieu, who gave the world the doctrine of the separation of powers. If he had heard of him, he had contempt for him. Hence he acted as though the government is one lumbering bully of a monarchy, where the people account to the rulers. Hence he by-passed his bosses and acted in cahoots with Saraki over the nomination of Ibrahim Magu as the EFCC boss.

He had no regard for the concept of a secular state even when the constitution is unambiguous in that sphere. So, he treated el-Zakzaky as though he manipulated Islam, thereby suffocating the secular commands of the law.

August 7 was only an emblem of his serial contempt for the higher principle of democracy. What he did first was to take a full measure of his bosses. He saw he could get away with insolence. The world was open for his antediluvian horrors. He took advantage.

We all saw on television as the female lawmaker screamed in a hysteria of rage and righteousness against the hooded men. They neither flinched nor assailed her. They planted their feet, their eyes unfazed, their guns unstirred. They knew all she could do was rant. Her voice would expire. Her muscles would mellow. She would acquiesce to  superior arms. She did. That was how Daura behaved. The civil society would scream and media would rage but Daura did what Daura would do.

Of course, until the reckoning. It came hours later when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo whisked him out of office. To those who first heard it, it was as though they dreamed. Daura probably thought that Osinbajo was a figurehead, and he, Daura, a figurine in the sacred grove.  The figurine inspires worship, trepidation and veneration as the symbol of the gods. No one eyes the statuette, not to talk of touch it, a sanctuary unto himself.

But the so-called figurehead Osinbajo knocked off the divine figurine Daura out of the grove. The figurine dropped and broke into a hundred splinters. How are the sacred fallen!

Questions have been raised about Daura’s collusion with the PDP folks. Some have even said that the APC folks had met and the PDP men were there early to overthrow an attempt to impeach Saraki. The interim report from the inspector general of police has not answered the questions. Is the IGP, a fellow traveller and partner in impunity with Daura, capable of a believable report? I doubt it.

First, what were the lawmakers, who usually traffic in absenteeism and often never show up at all or show up in late morning and afternoon, doing very early in the morning? Ben Bruce made a laughing stock of himself when he announced that APC folks were inside. How foolish the assertion! No such evidence unless the APC folks turned into spirits.

If the DSS men were there to stop the PDP men from frustrating the APC men, it clearly is not true because they were not inside. The APC has not the numbers to remove Saraki, and any such meetings will make no sense unless the APC plots of a kangaroo session, which will be unconstitutional. So, whose interest was Daura serving? Was he acting alone?

It still baffles many why Daura would want to embarrass his own mentoring figure, the president, especially when he was out of town. If he wanted to do in Osinbajo, he had his comeuppance. What is obvious is that the vagrant was allowed too much elbow room for too long to foment nuisance. He should not have been allowed if he was not endorsed. He had already done so much havoc and thrown the administration in defence mode. The case of Jones Abiri hangs over the government still. Even the NUJ and the information minister had been caught in the web of authoritarian lies. It is not over until a new atmosphere of rule of law prevails. It is then we shall know whether it is just Daura’s stone-age volition, or whether others buy in who have not freed themselves from the impulses of the barbarian.

Osinbajo would not have fired him if he cleared from him? We need to get to the bottom of this. Saraki “Eleyinmi” has denied any hands in it. But his name has figured because the former DSS chief seemed to have cooperated with him more than Buhari in the course of his disgraceful stewardship. But no evidence. So, the charge makes little sense.

Daura has gone, and I hope he has gone for good. He held periodic meetings with editors and acted as though he was a feudal lord talking in contempt as though he owned the country. I had told some of my colleagues that if I ever attended any such meetings I would have been walked out after giving him a piece of my mind.

August 7 should never come our way again. It was a caveman’s moment in our democracy, what Joseph Conrad calls “a night of first ages.”

Seiyefa, the man of letters

Mathew Seiyefa, who replaced Daura as DSS chief, was my classmate in Government College, Ughelli, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear of his new posting. Nothing about him made us think he would end up as a secret service mogul. To us, he was a man of letters. He was perhaps the best student in the whole class of September 1973 in English. He wrote clear, elegant sentences with an eye for images and ear for music.

I recall his essay published in the school magazine, The Mariners. It was titled, “Guy way: an incessant cankerworm.” It was an essay that I read many times in those days for its beauty and message. The term “guy way,” as he put it “entailed extremely immoral acts,” and described the guys as “social misfits” “never-do-wells,” “the most undesirable” persons who “were in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He also said they had no place in civilised society. Seiyefa earned A1 in English at school certificate and no one could expect anything less.

I recall once when our English teacher, a Ghanaian named Tieku, who graduated from Pennsylvania, asked us to write an essay. He singled out Seiyefa’s as a model essay and read it out to the class.

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen the secret service in him. He was a cheerful and dignified introvert, a lethal virtue in a secret service person. From his essays we also could have gleaned his social conscience. The guys, Seiyefa wrote, were antipodes of revolutionaries.

One of the images of him was when we were preparing for school certificate exams. The introvert walked up to the blackboard and wrote, “Barely three weeks to exams, boys still unprepared.” He verbalised it with an impish smile.

The choice of verb distorted the news headlines. Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki did not defect from the APC. He was forced to defect. “Was forced” is a passive tense, which connotes that the subject, that is the senate president, did not take the action out of his own volition. He was temporising. But word leapt to his ears that a query letter was in the offing from Oshiomhole’s office.  Eleyinmi fled in spite of the billowy pride of his agbada.

You cannot expect him to respond to the query. The police had just chafed him, and Eleyinmi scoffed back at the IG, acting above the law by not showing up at an invitation. To wait for an APC censure would make him a query letter writer. That would sully his status as a man some people have started to designate “oga na master.”

He stepped out of the APC portal because he had to follow his troops, who had gone to prepare a place for him in the big PDP mansion he had abandoned with regal flourish only a few years ago. Since his men had moved, the clamour revved up for him to scoot over to the other side of the senate aisle. Some wondered why he sat transfixed. But it was the immobility of indecision. The plan had not panned out as envisioned. Some bigwigs had retreated, like Wammako, who thundered into Sokoto last Saturday. Shehu Sani, his near-bouffant hair unfazed by age, looked the other way as his colleagues faded away.

So, Saraki goes over, his hands clipped like the authentic Eleyinmi. And unlike Eleyinmi, some of his colleagues disappointed him by baring their hands of a different political hue. It was like what was said of the Renaissance and reformation era in Europe. “Erasmus laid the egg,” went the saying. “Martin Luther hatched it. But Erasmus said the plumage of the bird was of different colour from what he expected.”

Saraki and his gang laid the defection eggs but, in the fullness of time, some eggs did not hatch. Saraki would call them bad eggs. Saraki waltzed away as the leader of a minority. He did not want to go over naked, exposed as the usurper. A usurper morally, if not legally. By remaining as senate president, he is overthrowing a throne that he once occupied.

He has handed over to himself without a ceremony or oath, or Koran, especially without a holy book since he has embarked on an act of political sacrilege. Like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he is having a wedding and a funeral on the same throne simultaneously. He is mourning, without admitting it, his office as senate president but he is having a new wedding with it as a minority leader still sitting still on an immoral throne. He is also wedding again a party he jilted about four years ago. He is like Banquo being haunted by the legitimate owner, Macbeth, except that he still sees himself as Macbeth. The usurper in him is yelling out Banquo’s words as Macbeth arrives: “Avaunt and quit my sight/ let the earth hide thee/ thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.” Only a cold, calculating Eleyinmi can pull off that farce of spectacular somersault and schizophrenia.

But more striking has been Eleyinmi’s trouble with the father figure. He has never loved to bow to a father. He started it in his biological state in his relations with his father Oloye. It is a classic Sigmund Freud drama playing out before our eyes. Freud gave birth to psychoanalysis with his theory based on the myth of King Oedipus. The playwright Sophocles turned it into an immortal work of art. The man married his mother and killed his father.

Bukola Saraki takes from father but hates to show gratitude to father. Oloye loved him, nurtured him, and even started him off on the path of commerce. But he was not a good manager. He ruined a major bank in the country with his managerial ineptitude. He became a governor in the shadows of Oloye, and that made him see himself as the master of the Kwara universe, even if his stewardship was not transformational. The story goes that when he was governor, he never wanted to be in town or at venues where his father was scheduled to appear. This was a case of oedipal self-regard. He gave his father a black eye. He never wanted to be a father’s “son.”

This sort of ingratitude only comes out of insecurity. Greek historian and philosopher Tacitus calls that a fear of gratitude.   He said “men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden…”  So apart was he from his father as he dabbed about on his peacock throne as governor that some mischief makers went about with unfounded allegations of his paternity. Make no bones about it. Oloye was his father. Eleyinmi only had anxiety about his sonship. He was uncomfortable accepting authority.

As governor, he did not feel his powers complete, hence he wanted to become president. In that position, he would have outflanked his father. But he could not do much in the PDP. He had a problem with the hierarchy. He wanted to be seen as the heir but the north thought he was not north enough, and the west and south thought he was not south enough. He became, and still is, a factor of ambiguity in Nigeria’s geopolitics. It is unfair to him, I must say. He should be seen first and foremost as a Nigerian. This anxiety of geo-identity may lay at the bottom of his oedipal problems with party hierarchies. Oloye has been supplanted by party hierarchs as father figures in his life.

He glided over to the APC, and it became the same story. He seemed to have eaten the humble pie by withdrawing any zeal for the post of president. Alas, he was forced again to look for a position of president that would work under another father figure also designated president. Even to obtain that, he fought by stealth. The hierarchs did not want him. He slunk his way like a night cat onto the position of senate president.

Having given his party leaders a punch in the nose, he expected them to kowtow to him. He had not stooped, but he conquered the house. He met a President Buhari, who was too lofty to stoop. It became a standoff of one father against son who did not want a father. For him, it has not always been about vision, but spoils. Was it a Freudian slip when he complained about juicy offices he wanted and did not get? He lamented about “Lagos, Lagos” and Katsina, Katsina.” He did not say “roads, roads,” or “schools, schools,” etc for the poor. He said he did not care for position. So why not step down? This is hypocrisy writ large.

That standoff led to the worst senate in history. He has now moved over to the other side. A new act has begun in Saraki’s quest to exorcise a father. Will he find fulfilment there?

The point as to whether he might become a senate president till the end of this tenure or whether he should be removed is a moot point to me. The eighth senate is, to all intents and purposes, a dead chamber. It cannot achieve much. If Saraki wants the perks and insolence of office till May next year, it will not extricate him from the shadow of historical infamy of a man who usurped a throne until it expired. If the senate prorogues indefinitely, the president has the executive powers to fund INEC elections and other necessities. Eleyinmi already has met his Balogun. It is all over but the puffing.

An Imam of peace

The Imam was the man. Not those who wielded guns and machetes and spilled homesteads and streets with the gore and blood of their fellow humans. He was a cleric in his soul, not for the ceremony of piety or extravagance of sacerdotal powers. Abdullahi Abubakar kept about 300 Christians in his mosque and looked the goons in the eye and said he was not hiding any Christians. That is what Biodun Jeyifo called truthful lie in his book on Nigerian literature. The 83-year-old man did not blink. He could not fight. He had no arms. He had love and his tender heart routed the army of jackals in the name of God and tribe in the recent Plateau genocidal rumble.

Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State gave him due recognition, brought him before camera lights to his office. The man looked fragile but his act rippled with muscles. He is a Muslim, but he is a lover of God first. He is not a sectarian bigot. His blood hums with universal sentiment. Governor Lalong also recommended him for national award. This is the sort of national recognition that makes sense, not the ones handed to charlatans who con us in the name of God, in the name of the people and in the name of tribe.