The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • FOR NGUGI WA THIONG’O (1938-2025)

    FOR NGUGI WA THIONG’O (1938-2025)

    In the eloquent water of the River Between

    Minnows argue the terror of the shark

    Rifted mountains hold hands

    Across a vast and breathless silence

    A soil unspeakably rich:

    Red-rooted vegetables beckon from roadside stalls

    A corn-covered distance connects my eye

    To a yearning horizon

    Bleating sheep romp in temperate coats

    Unmindful of donkeys trotting under

    Their missionary burdens, trailed by tough-limbed

    Peasants sobered by the vagaries of the market

    Voices and echoes

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    Across rifted silences

    Echoes and voices

    Of half-told stories and syncopated songs:

    Of the grain of wheat

    Which feeds succeeding seasons,

    The long, sweat-soaked journey

    From grass to bread…

         In a house

         Somewhere there in Kamiriithu

         A story-teller was born

         Whose tales traverse the world

    •This tribute first appeared in “Flowers of the Rift Valley”, a section on Kenya in my book, If Only the Road Could Talk: Poetic Peregrinations in Africa, Asia, and Europe, published in 201

  • Babachir Lawal: from hysteria to boastfulness

    Babachir Lawal: from hysteria to boastfulness

    In the run-up to the 2023 presidential election, former secretary to the government of the federation Babachir David Lawal was livid when he was overlooked for the running mate ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC) standard-bearer Bola Tinubu. The party decided that a Muslim-Muslim ticket was more likely to fetch it the presidency than the politically correct option of balancing the ticket along faith lines. Mr Lawal, who together with former House of Representatives speaker Yakubu Dogara had briefly formed an alliance to undermine the APC, their party, described the same-faith ticket as a satanic option that would destroy the ruling party. Not done, he also described running mate Kashim Shettima, a former Borno State governor, as an excessively ambitious politician with unflattering image, a Greek gift from the northern governors.

    The maligned APC candidate went on to win the presidency, and Mr Lawal’s hysteria and dire prognostication proved misplaced. If the election had been a two-horse race between President Tinubu and former vice president Atiku Abubakar, the APC candidate would have had some difficulties. But nature intervened and made the poll a three-horse race, thereby rendering Mr Lawal’s choice and self-proclaimed Christian champion, Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), a spoiler. His former ally in rebellion, Mr Dogara, saw through the fog and reluctantly backed Alhaji Atiku, the PDP candidate.

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    But Mr Lawal has not learnt any lesson from his woebegone political tactics of opting for and operating from extreme positions. He is once again shouting himself hoarse over the 2027 presidential election, bellowing that the coalition he is masterminding with the Atiku and Nasir el-Rufai crowds would win the next poll even if all the 36 governors defected to the APC. Obviously exasperated with the defections rewriting Nigerian politics and redrawing the country’s political map, he alludes to some mysterious and inscrutable inner workings of the coalition to bolster his predictions. But history and experience should instruct him to weigh his options far gentler and more rationally than he did in the last poll. Alas, it is not in his nature to pontificate with caution. He would rather let the chips fall where they may, and risk being left once again to hold the short end of the stick. Mr Lawal writes beautifully and, despite his frenzied summations, speaks eloquently; surely, he must know what it means to be hoisted with his own petard.

  • Danjuma and the ‘Too Little, Too Late’ radical essay

    Danjuma and the ‘Too Little, Too Late’ radical essay

     In late April, the social media was abuzz with a long, driveling piece titled ‘Too Little, Too Late’, attributed to T.Y. Danjuma, a former Nigerian Chief of Army Staff. It was a trenchant and rambling commentary on Nigeria’s social and political malaise, suffused with warnings of looming apocalypse. The piece was gleefully and widely circulated, believing that General Danjuma’s name lent it credibility and stamped finality and inevitability on its doomsday predictions. How anybody could attribute authorship of the write-up to Gen. Danjuma is hard to explain. The retired army general has over the years been frank, urgent and even prescient on Nigerian affairs, but the irascibility the piece presumed to him, not to say the egregious grammatical and factual errors scarring nearly every paragraph, is uncharacteristic of him.

    There is not one paragraph or even a sentence in the piece that has redemptive value. And despite its strident tone, there is not a single conclusion that does not proceed from utterly false premises. It begins with a very poor understanding of the forces that shaped Europe in the 1930s and 40s, carelessly drawing a parallel with Nigeria’s current affairs. It mischaracterises Axis powers for Axial powers, and fails to understand the purport of the pacts and agreements that culminated in the Rome-Berlin Axis of 1936 and the Tripartite Pact of 1940, not to talk of how the treaties influenced the outbreak of World War II. Worse, it also characterises Japan as the Red Dragon, instead of China. Gen. Danjuma is supposed to have authored a piece that, in its opening paragraphs, contains such shocking blunders that no military officer appears capable of.

    Every paragraph contains a mistake or a mischaracterisation. It is unlikely that a Nigerian army general would not be familiar with the battle tactics of both the Napoleonic wars and World War II. He would know enough to spell a few notable battle zones right, such as the Bataan Peninsula and island fortress of Corregidor in Luzon, Philippines (which Gen. Danjuma supposedly spelt wrong as Beaten and Conequidor) defended by the United States Army under the command of General Douglas MacArthur-led United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). Gen. Danjuma may not have doubts as to the seriousness of the existential crisis facing Nigeria, and may have commented openly and persuasively on what could be done to mitigate the danger of all-out war, but even he would be reluctant to engage in the hyperbole the writer of the ‘Too Little, Too Late’ commits by comparing Nigeria’s internal fractures with the face-off between the Allied and Axis powers in World War II.

    The putative author of the piece devotes whole paragraphs to obsessing over the Yoruba reluctance to confront the evil machinations coming from the North, insisting that in 2018, 2019 and 2020, he had had cause to warn the Southwest as well as the entire South of the coming apocalypse. He blames the Yoruba – yes, the Yoruba alone – for treating the warning with levity because of 2023. The author is clear in his mind that the Yoruba alone are to blame for misreading the handwriting on the wall. Hear him: “Where is the leadership today in Yorubaland? Where is courage and proactive thinking in the nation? Indecision, self-seeking, personal glory, love of pleasure… indifference. The Oyo House of Representatives member, Mrs Sadipe, declared the other day that in her constituency farmers could no longer go to farms because herdsmen had wrecked (sic) havoc everywhere. Didn’t Yorubas hear her? Has there been any plan of action both then and now? That is the modern Yoruba: no balls, no action, empty and loud-mouthed, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.”

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    Gen. Danjuma can sometimes be vexatiously forthright, but to equate the intensity of his concerns for peace and progress with the unrestrained uncouthness the writer summons in carpeting the Yoruba for the Nigerian crisis and engaging in ethnic bigotry is rather hysterical. The writer betrays his Christian and southern background by proceeding to vilify the judiciary in a replication of the Obidient language coarsely deployed during the multiple litigations of the 2023 presidential election. At a point he becomes an apologists for former Rivers governor Peter Odili and former Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and recklessly indulges in imprecates, including railing against “the forces of fascism and Islamofascism in all their disguises, mutations and progression.” He also adds that “They have taken over the Judas-iary. They control the Legislature – a body full of nihilists, moral anarchists, scavengers, drug addicts, sex- slaves, fraudsters with a sprinkling of few principled men too few to make any change. Need I talk of the Executhieves…” It is harmful, of course, to spew these hateful and inaccurate words, but to try to lend it legitimacy by seeking out a known name to associate it with is unpardonable. Former British prime minister Tony Blair once suggested that the social media had become a feral beast ripping and destroying reputations. And Prof. Wole Soyinka also wondered whether the social media would not one day provoke World War III with brazen mendacities, ethnic and religious bigotry, and orchestrated slander.

    The ‘Too Little, Too Late’ piece was posted in late April. But it was not until some nine days ago that Gen. Danjuma, who was alleged to have authored the piece, became aware of it. He declined to refute it, he told a friend, because it would amount to engaging in social media piffle and giving it traction. Surely, he drawled, no one would think him capable of such incalculable coarseness. For a man so self-assured as not to retain the services of a publicist either personally or even for his TY Danjuma Foundation, it is understandable why he would sneer at the idea of dignifying a thoroughly disreputable piece of forgery with any refutation. But what of the government, particularly the security services? Not only was the piece inciting, it was also incendiary, a deliberate and lethal concoction to inflame the country. The piece and its author should have been investigated, and the forger called to account. To wave it off as one of those cranky outrages on social media implies a shirking of responsibility, especially when the forgery has implication for ethnic and religious amity as well as national security. The forger mischievously rails against any attempt to regulate social media, but by his unconscionable act, which has become standard menu on many platforms using Artificial Intelligence and other tools, he makes the case for regulation more urgent and necessary.

  • Two years of Tinubu presidency

    Two years of Tinubu presidency

    Three days ago, President Bola Tinubu‘s administration marked two years in office. Before then, even before it marked one year, two years had seemed a bridge too far, as if the day would never come. He had surmounted impossible obstacles to win an election everyone seemed to hope or expect he would lose. His hostile party men and elders had a head start in upstaging him; too many of his Yoruba kinsmen resented him; former presidents and top political leaders scorned him; many Christian leaders forswore the tenets of their faith to conspire against him; and the former president and his ministers, including the managers of the economy, all craved his fall. That he won was less because of his talent at devising political strategies and cobbling together a rainbow coalition than the unmistakable celestial intervention that pitted candidates and parties against one another and helped pave the way for him to the throne.

    Even after he assumed office, his opponents, many of whom remorselessly postured as enemies, wanted him to have a short reign, perhaps just months, or failing that, at worst, absolutely nothing more than one term. Some advocated a coup d’état, and others called for popular uprising. They were more than willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. If getting him out of office led to the collapse of democracy, they were willing to endure the trauma. If it led to anarchy, as indeed some of the end-hunger protests that broke out after his one year in office planned to accomplish, they believed they could manage the ensuing chaos. That the conspirators failed was again less because President Tinubu managed the protests well than the intervention of unseen forces. Now, if the president is smart enough to understand the forces arrayed against him, he will know that the opposition to his administration is unconcerned with the phenomenal reset he has achieved for the economy and contemptuous of the favourable ratings his reforms are beginning to attract globally.

    In the next 18 months or so, President Tinubu must know that his opponents will fight him to the bitter end, using all the lethal and unscrupulous weapons at their disposal. They will ignore his economic reforms and the recovery well underway, and they will use religion, yes, religion, ethnic arguments, particularly as it concerns appointments, and they will twist facts, figures, and logic to achieve their predetermined goal. They will give no quarter, and they will brook no challenge to their persons or their fallacies. They will incite, ridicule, open old and fresh wounds, and engage in the most abusive and egregious campaigns ever. Nevertheless, in one form or the other, they will get a coalition off the ground, but it would lack coherence and ideology, seeing that it is meant only for the purpose of unseating the president, and it would be a dismal and fragile arrangement. All that is clear is that the 2027 elections will be the bitterest ever. The reason is simple: all of the leading lights of the opposition think this is their last chance to win the presidency. The administration must, therefore, fortify itself against formal and informal coalitions prepared to go for broke. Nothing matters anymore, not for former vice president Atiku Abubakar, nor former Anambra governor Peter Obi, both of whom were candidates in the last presidential poll.

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    This writer pored through the editorials of many newspapers as well as the opinions of the ordinary Nigerian unscientifically polled on the social media, and was struck by how incredibly uninformed they were. There has been no effort at any objectivity at all. They glossed over the situation before 2023 and concentrated largely on their observations and conclusions that the people are worse off today than they were before the election. Last year, leading global newspapers had been scathing about President Tinubu’s reforms and had warned of impending catastrophe. The Nigerian media eagerly and lavishly culled the editorials and opinions. But while the same and even more respectful media outfits have begun to warm up to the reforms and are applauding the progress so far, the Nigerian media have been less celebratory. The conclusion is that too many Nigerians actually loathe reforms and change, preferring instead their society to collapse in order to justify their baleful predictions. Policies that looked like opening the doors of hell in 2023, like the floating of forex rates and removal of fuel subsidy, have today revived an economy that had tanked. This is why hardly any governor is opposed to the administration, and those of them who knew the dire conditions of the economy pre-2023 are more sanguine, if not ecstatic, about the reforms.

    If hypothetically the opposition wins the 2027 poll, none of their potential candidates will undo the reforms being doggedly implemented by the current administration, regardless of any oath they might have sworn before the electorate. The economy is being rebuilt, with new foundations, but it will take time before the goal of cheaper food trickles down to the poor, most of whom have remained uninformed about the damage done to the economy years ago and how close to the precipice the previously mismanaged economy was. Some of those who know the facts and acknowledge the effectiveness of the reforms have taken refuge behind ethnic arguments about unfair appointments in order to avoid being ridiculed for deliberately and mischievously ignoring or misinterpreting economic principles. Some political and faith leaders simply abjure knowledge, and have persisted in scaremongering. Just last week, the critical former Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan, concluded, as he did before the 2023 poll, that President Tinubu would not win the 2027 poll except it was rigged. That his implausible analysis is as defective as the Christian doctrinal principles he has anchored his unremitting criticism does not seem to matter to him. Here, he is of one accord with the bilious opposition who dismiss as servile and sycophantic any essay favourable to the administration.

    Notwithstanding the intensity of the opposition against his administration, President Tinubu is unlikely to abandon his reforms, most of which are already revivifying the economy. From the merging of forex rates to removal of subsidy, and on to tax reform bills, legacy infrastructural projects, loan repayments, payment of forex obligations to foreign airlines, establishment of federal universities and zonal development commissions, and restructuring of the healthcare, mining and petroleum sectors, the president will remain steadfast. He will not relent. He is the first economically literate president Nigeria would have, an adept at number crunching, and the first to assume the presidency unencumbered by special interests or power mafias. It is astonishing that those who should value the quality and relevance of the president’s reforms as well as appreciate the independence his presidency has won from ethnic and religious oligarchies are still too befuddled by the old dynamics of Nigerian politics to support and nurture the new freedoms and restrict themselves to objectively criticising the reform policies.

    Elections 2027 may have started earlier than is desirable. However, indications so far point to the fact that the vaunted opposition coalition will eventually emerge, but it will not be the deus ex machina their leaders hope, and it will in all likelihood be countervailed by the ongoing defections to the ruling party. The deplorable resort to ethnic and religious baiting will in the months ahead make a dent on the popularity of the president, especially in the face of mounting and probably targeted violent conspiracies and attacks in the North and Middle Belt, but it will in the end be insufficient to dismantle the administration’s efforts and successes in the past two years. 

  • On Loyalty: Five exemplary paradigms

    On Loyalty: Five exemplary paradigms

    Under the spreading chestnut tree, you sold me and I sold you — George Orwell

    The concept of loyalty, which is fidelity and absolute faith in an ideal, a set of objectives, or fanatical attachment or devotion to a person or the apex leader in a party, movement, cause or organization, is universal. But its application or applicability varies from society to society and nation to nation depending on how cohesive, organic and well-structured such societies and nations are. For example, in many societies, loyalty is often sealed and cemented by strenuous oath-taking. Betrayal and perfidy are often at the pain of exile or even death. But it is a two-way traffic and not a question of master-slave dialectic. In ancient Yoruba societies, the king was often asked to ‘open the calabash”, a euphemism for ritual suicide, once it was established that his actions constitute a gross betrayal and disloyalty to the greater interest of his people.

       In deeply fissured and ethnically polarized postcolonial nations, loyalty is often brittle and unstable. They are a “free trade zone”; a normative no man’s land in which there is no deeply held principle or fanatical attachment to any person or cause among the political elite except the grub principle or what is known as politics of the belly or more famously as the law of stomach infrastructure. In the postcolonial pabulum or open space eatery, the Cameroonian proverb says it all: “the goat eats where it is tethered”. The Yoruba equivalent is even more poignant: “What the bird eats is what the bird takes off with”. The preaching, sermonizing and hadiths can continue from here till eternity nothing will change until there is a fundamental reengineering of our destructive habits.

       Only the deep can call to the deep, Chief Obafemi Awolowo reminded us. But by that token, only the deeply loyal can be called upon by the deeply loyal. Where nothing is deeply held, nothing can be deeply fashioned or deeply put together. It will come to naught. Around 1958, Chief Obafemi Awolowo took a sharp lurch to the left in his thinking and political praxis, believing that only a socialist reengineering could transform Nigeria from a feudal backwater and deeply unequal society to an egalitarian nation with an all-inclusive redistribution of our God-given resources. The behemoth north rumbled in deep distaste but knew what to do to contain and demobilize the Awo threat. It was not clear at this point whether the Ikenne titan figured out whether his own party was and remained an unstable ensemble of progressive, conservative, royalist and monarchist forces tensely cohabiting together in paradoxical but antagonistic complicity. It was very vulnerable to infiltration and cooptation.

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      Among the leftist Action Group radicals egging Awolowo on was Samuel Goomsu Ikoku, an ideological sophisticate of the old Nkrumah Marxist School who was known to have contested against and defeated his own father in a local election. The crisis of identity in the Action Group simmered on until the 1962 convention in Jos when the party fractured irretrievably. Samuel Ikoku replaced the Secretary General,  Chief Ayo Rosiji. Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola who knew something about human nature, particularly its Nigerian franchise, was known to have chuckled that he had never heard of circumstances in which anyone would willingly give its own to an Ikoko. (Ikoko was Yoruba for wolf and a deliberate misprision of Ikoku’s name) Ta ni nje fo mo fun Ikoko? The great orator wondered.

      Meanwhile Ayo Rosiji, the ousted General Secretary of Action Group, rather than spend the rest of his political life opposing his leader, the patrician and noble Egba man opted out of politics entirely and devoted the rest of his life to his thriving business. I have it on the authority of a childhood friend from Safebirth Street off Ikorodu Road, Otunba Tunde Onakoya, who was the Managing Director of the Rosiji Group that the relationship between Rosiji and Awolowo remained very cordial throughout their lifetime and each Christmas was marked by a generous exchange of gifts. Talk of nobility in human conduct.

      Always finicky and meticulous in his preparations, Chief Awolowo left nothing to chance. Such was the high level of his organizational ability and administrative wizardry that twenty four hours after the military authorities lifted the ban on political activities in 1978, the Ikenne sage announced the formation of a new political party: the Unity Party of Nigeria. Nigerians should have been alerted. In an earlier interview with Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, the famed columnist asked Awo whether he would return to politics when the ban on politics was lifted, the old man chuckled. “Gbolabo, you can only return to what you have left”, Awo parried.

         It was sixteen years after the Jos Convention and twelve years after he was released from jail. In an intriguing twist of fate, one of the new political adversaries lined up against Awo was none other than Samuel Ikoku, his old protégé and ideological acolyte from the Action Group. Ikoku was vehemently opposed to his former leader and mentor. It led to a celebrated spat between the two in which Awo dismissed his former colleague and political godson as a reprobate. In an equally acerbic response, Ikoku ended by asking the federal authorities and security agencies to take note of the barely veiled threat to his life by Chief Awolowo. From there, there was no stopping Ikoku as he descended to the pit of political infamy transiting from a defender of the feudal oligarchy to a full blown cohort of retrogression and right hand collaborator of military despotism.

      But if Awo thought that that was it, there were more surprises for the poor man from his own backyard. By 1983, a few of those associates regarded as his blue-eyed boys had gone rogue in protest against allocation of patronage and preferment. One of them had written a pedestrian and wishy-washy chapbook about Awo and Awoism. But the great man lapped it up causing great disaffection among his core loyalists. From a neighboring Yoruba state another favoured associate, a strong man in the real sense of the word and justly celebrated for his prodigious physical and metaphysical exertions, became hysterical and uncontrollable when Awo’s carefully considered succession plan for the state did not favour his ambition. Taken together, these flagrant rebellions and acts of disloyalty which show inability to discipline, domesticate and sublimate the wild ego in the service of a greater cause almost sank the UPN until a military coup put the heavy boot in at the end of the year.

      For holistic analysis, we can now bring up a few paradigms of loyalty from other climes to see how they shape up in contention with the Nigerian postcolonial paradigm. One is from Communist Russia at the high noon of Stalinist cruelty and state repression, the other from Hungary as a satellite of the Soviet Union, the third from Nazi Germany as the monstrous system faced its final moment and the last one from Mao and Deng’s China. Taken together, they show how social and intellectual forces shape human history and societal evolution and how human history and societal evolution in turn shaped by human consciousness and psychological alertness.

      At the infamous Moscow Trials held between 1936 and 1938 with which Josef Stalin finally put away his greatest rivals and former adversaries in the Communist Party, many following the proceedings were astonished by the grim spectacle unfolding.  Rather than berate Stalin and the monster they have put together in the name of Communism, these great individuals, one or two of them far more gifted than Stalin himself, chose to lie against and slander themselves rather than the system they willed into place by extraordinary acts of human heroism. In what must rank as the greatest act of self-abrogation, they all went down without a whimper as the bullet exploded their brains. Later in Hungary, many were surprised that Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician and culture critic, allowed himself to be thrown into jail together with the puppet Prime minister his known intellectual adversary and avowed political enemy. Lukacs retorted that as long as his enemy was in jail they were in it together but once they came out, they could resume their quarrel.

      And then on to the last days of Hitler and Nazi Germany. As shells from Russian tanks exploded on the streets of Berlin turning the city into a vast apocalyptic rubble, the dazed and embattled Fuehrer summoned Josef Goebbels, his beloved confidant and favourite intellectual , to his lair and ordered him to prepare for the challenges ahead by taking over the structure remaining. But Goebbels who was described by Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper as “maniacally brilliant” knew stark and irreversible defeat when he saw one. He defied his leader and declined the offer, arguing in his last testament that he did not wish to be caught up in the “delirium of treachery” welling and swirling against his leader. Instead of complying, he gathered his family together in a room gave the children, all six of them, poison vials and then shot his wife and himself. Thus ended the life of one of the greatest propagandists of all time.

     Let us end this with a story of hope and human redemption, and it is from Communist China. Deng Xiaoping was a friend and loyal comrade of Mao Tse Tung. They marched together during the long trek,  and suffered untold hardships and deprivations together. But after the Communist triumph, he soon fell out of favour with the Communist hierarchy and was repeatedly purged, disgraced, ignored and humiliated. He was shunned and sidelined by the leadership of the party with Mao’s connivance. During the Cultural Revolution, he was purged again and sent to work as a factory hand for four years. He was denounced as “a capitalist roader” second only in the hierarchy of national villains. But Deng was a great survivor. He could see what Mao could not see. China was an ancient civilization with a thick overlay of antiquated dynasties and countervailing aristocracies. While Mao was the quintessential revolutionary who favoured great disruptions, terminal ruptures and complete annihilation of the old order, Deng was the quintessential conciliator and system stabilizer. He was cultured, well-read and from a more aristocratic background of land owners than Mao. But he also knew that without Mao’s revolutionary animus and anger against the old feudal order, there would have been no Chinese revolution. When he finally maneuvered his way to power, Deng harbored no animosities against his old tormentors and detractors. With his great intellect, he offered a new roadmap which opened the route to great prosperity and national revival without reversing or undermining the basis of the new communist order, particularly the speedy trial and summary execution of economic miscreants and other saboteurs. This is the foundation of the great Chinese reawakening we are witnessing. If Mao is the revolutionary visionary of a new China, Deng is the architect of its modern prosperity and global relevance. It is an exemplary paradigm of contrastive personalities united by their loyalty to a higher ideal.

  • And big Don downs “em all

    And big Don downs “em all

    Perhaps the title of this piece should have been, Unquiet Flows the Don. Readers might have heard of the captivating novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a stirring epic about life and love in early Soviet Russia. The Don is a mighty river in Russia which almost centrally lacerates the region. This time around, another Don seems to have erupted in North America, flowing unquietly and uneasily through the precincts of the American White House sweeping and uprooting everything along its path. The Don is not a river but the big Chief, the Capo di tutti capi of all America, the new Taoiseach of the United Tribes of North America and law giver plenipotentiary to all habitants of the land therein. The Don is a great hulk of a person who reminds one of a massive anaconda lurking in the deep Amazon River basin. It is not a creature to be toyed with at all. Thrice within a spate of two months, one has seen it take down and gobble up three presidential games from Africa, Middle East and Europe and perhaps the most famous educational institution on earth. How any digestive system could take in such a menu of disparate metabolic imperatives remains a miracle.

      Last month as Volodymyr Zelensky, the feisty Ukrainian president, strolled jauntily through the lawn of the White House for a scheduled briefing, one had a premonition that one was about to witness a high-tech presidential lynching followed by ritual burial. First, Zelensky committed the sartorial error of appearing in military fatigues. This was like triggering the alarm bell of psychological insecurity. Zelensky was hoisting the twin flag of courage and native nationalism and no one wants to be reminded of what they are not. Who does the uppity little fellow think he is, one could almost hear the Don grumbling like an upset child? The demolition commenced without any formality. It was more like grilling a prisoner of war. Surrounded by a crowd of hostile interlocutors and with the Don himself hen-pecking and hemming him in, Zelenskyy had no hell of chance. By the time he was thrown out, he appeared disoriented and thoroughly ruffled. The Arab king, a trained fighter pilot and tested soldier, whose mother was also British like the Don’s, got a massive slap-down before back-heeling.

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    Next to fall was Cyril Ramaphosa, the urbane, cultured and amiable South African president. Eager to please, Ramaphosa was soberly suited and bore the depressed mien of a bankrupt banker. It was to no avail. South Africa has been punching above its weight at the ICC. Suspicion should have been roused when a few minutes earlier some high-tech honchos were seen wheeling television sets into the Oval war-room. The mugging and muzzling began immediately with the anaconda moistening over the cranium of the poor fellow with manic relish. Ramaphosa winced and grimaced like an African wildebeest about to be swallowed. By the time he was spat out, the old trade unionist could barely walk upright and could be seen heaving and sighing with relief.

      Here is a travel advisory for feckless and heedless African leaders trying out their luck with the Big Don. Do not approach his dreaded vicinity without your Isanusi or principal juju man and with the full complement of traditional African charms such as Gbetu-gbetu, Okugbe, Onde, Kanako, Afeeri, Ayeta, Ikunpa, Igbadi, Eedi, Balu- balu and Egbe, the king of all amulets which will transport you back to your bedroom once the anaconda topples you over with its harpoon tail. It is all shaping up to something not very nice. But then even the first nation founded in a set of ideals needs this kind of massive disruption to shake it out of complacent lethargy. 

  • Atiku, Obi in yo-yo politics

    Atiku, Obi in yo-yo politics

    It will take a few more weeks, perhaps months, for the frothing politics of former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s and former Anambra governor Peter Obi’s presidential aspiration politics to settle down. For now, the country must be contented watching with amusement the exploratory activities of the two aspiring contenders, the first a veteran contender, and the second a latter-day and opportunistic contender. Before the 2023 presidential poll was conducted, both gentlemen started out in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), having carried over their ambitions from their unsuccessful 2019 presidential contest. Vice president Atiku had in the 2019 poll run on the same ticket with Mr Obi, and performed quite creditably to give the eventual winner, All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate’s Muhammadu Buhari, a run for his money.

    But in the 2023 poll, Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi parted ways, with the latter sensing that he could take the opportunistic wind of the Christian vote to soar to victory. The maths did not of course favour him, but he was Machiavellian and naïve enough to believe he could win. Still he performed surprisingly well to nearly equal the votes of his former PDP standard-bearer (6.10m to 6.98m in an election in which over 93m people registered and a little less than 27 percent voted compared with about 35 percent that voted in 2019 out of a little over 83m who registered). Nearly two years after the 2023 presidential poll was done and litigated, both politicians have belatedly and grudgingly acknowledged that the division in their camp led to their defeat. Since then they have indulged in the most unpredictable form of politics that sees them oscillating like a yo-yo, from one excitable high one day to a depressing low another day. They are no longer ambiguous about their loss, thank God, but they are even far more ambiguous about their future.

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    In the past few weeks, they have issued statements and granted interviews about how they planned to approach the 2027 presidential poll. Having reluctantly agreed that they would need a coalition of political parties to swing the next poll, they have nevertheless proceeded to flip flop on who should anchor the coalition, which political vehicle to use, and which two politicians should be on the presidential ticket. The only thing still firing Alhaji Atiku’s interest in presidential politics, nay politics at all, is his ambition to rule Nigeria. But sensing mounting opposition inside and outside his political party to his being on the ticket, he has quibbled about the subject and, in a few galling moments, feigned disinterest in becoming the standard-bearer. He has pretended that all that mattered is ‘saving Nigeria’ from ‘misrule’. At other times, he has also hinted very broadly that with Mr Obi joining him on the ticket, they would not only win the presidency, he would be quite willing to cede a putative second term to his running mate, the overrated former Anambra governor and Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the last presidential poll.

    While it is almost certain that Alhaji Atiku wants to run for the presidency for the last time, if he can get a platform, Mr Obi has dissembled even much more, insisting in one breath that he is not as fanatical about contesting for the position as he is in midwifing sound governance for Nigeria. And in another breath, he is promising to run for office because the country needs the services of people like him. He and Alhaji Atiku have conducted joint exploratory work on running on the same ticket. His party, the LP, is distressed, but so is the PDP on which the former vice president still holds high hopes. But in the interim, both gentlemen are also looking in the direction of a few errant parties posing naked on the fringes and seducing political wayfarers and ambitious aspirants to turn in and climb under their duvets. There was mention of one Social Democratic Party (SDP), but that one regained its senses and decided not to play whoredom. Then there is also mention of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), a single parent party seemingly averse to celibacy. But even here too there are stirrings of revolt by its kept men. Perhaps they will finally create a new party altogether.

    Clearly, many permutations will remain tentative in the weeks and months ahead, as both Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi make up their minds regarding which party to use, being themselves incapable of loyalty to one spouse; or which ticket to cobble, especially considering that both men have suggested that this might be their last contest. If the lure of winning does not trump their principles forged from the push and pull over ageing and presidential contest, then they might conceivably go their separate ways by trying their luck on different platforms. But if what matters to them is winning, then they might sink their differences, abandon principles, and in stark embrace of realpolitik, join forces to try to take the presidency, whether Alhaji Atiku ends up betraying his one-term presidency pledge or not. Whatever they end up doing in the months to come, don’t count on making sense of what they say now or what positions and arguments they advocate in the interim.

  • The Wike-Makinde kerfuffle

    The Wike-Makinde kerfuffle

    Of all the troubles the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has managed to get itself immersed, it is astonishing that it should allow a new front to be opened within the erstwhile group of merry rebel friends, the Group of Five (G-5), whose rebellion upended the opposition party in the last elections. Given FCT minister Nyesom Wike’s brittle ego, no one thought he would be able to sustain the unity and purpose of the G-5. But, even then, few thought the small group would implode so soon, and on an issue that has sundered their larger party and put their leaders at daggers drawn. When Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde is thrown into the volatile mix, especially at a time he has started to visualise himself as a future presidential candidate, it is all but certain that what the All Progressives Congress (APC) alleges are his unctuous political speeches and smiles would scatter the group.

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    Mr Wike blames Mr Makinde for the current round of destabilisation in the party at a time former Kwara State governor and senate president Bukola Saraki was saddled with the task of repairing the party’s broken hedges. The FCT minister alleges that Mr Makinde and Enugu State governor Peter Mbah are behind the current round of crisis provoked by the struggle for power between Samuel Anyanwu and Ude Okoye over who should be the party’s national secretary. They had, according to the FCT minister, forged a gentleman’s agreement at the Abuja residence of Dr Saraki to let Mr Anyanwu retain his position until the reconciliation efforts were consummated. Angry and feeling betrayed, Mr Wike went for broke and decided to call off any truce or agreement. The distemper in the party reminds the judicious of what the Bible says about mending a new garment with old cloth, leading to a worse tear. Until the PDP returns to the basics, any remedy its bumbling leaders attempt would end up superficial and disastrous, as exampled by the Wike-Makinde kerfuffle.

  • Malcolm X and Africa

    Malcolm X and Africa

    In the African-American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, Malcolm X’s mission was to assert the equal humanity of Blacks. This principally meant fighting against the lynching of Blacks, the setting of dogs against Blacks to tear off their flesh, the brutalisation of Blacks by the police, the washing of Blacks down the drain using water from high pressure hoses, and other sundry racial indignities in America. It also meant challenging the government for passing civil rights legislations without the ability or willingness to enforce them and the inequitable refusal to offer Blacks reparations for centuries of slavery to propel them to economic respectability.

    Within the African-American community itself, Malcolm was committed to inspiring Blacks to have a sense of positive self-esteem or racial pride in and unity amongst themselves, and the promotion of the desire to exert themselves optimally to free themselves from the racial quagmire of America. He also believed that America did not have the capacity to solve the problems of Blacks by itself when considered as civil rights problems, and that the problems needed to be internationalised as human rights problems. The starting point in this regard was to reach out to Africans and African governments to let them know the true condition of Blacks in America.

    In carrying out his mission, Malcolm was conscious of the power of the media to misinform and misrepresent, and famously said, “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”  So, he counselled: “Never believe what you read in the newspapers. They’re not going to tell you the truth.”

    Relatedly, a 19 December, 2023 report of ThisWeekInLibraries noted about Malcolm X: “Firstly, he urged individuals to question the motivations behind media messages. He encouraged people to consider who owns the media outlets, and what their interests might be. This could help to reveal any potential biases and agendas. Secondly, Malcolm X emphasized the importance of seeking out alternative sources of information. He believed that mainstream media did not always provide a complete or accurate picture, and that it was essential to look to other outlets for a more balanced perspective. Lastly, he advocated for the creation of independent media … to combat the misrepresentation and give a voice to marginalized communities.”

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    Malcolm also noted: “The best thing the White man ever did for me was to make me look like a monster all over the world, because I can go any place on the African continent and our African brothers know where I stand.”  And Malcolm X did travel widely in Africa, and he was cordially received by various African heads of government.

    In a speech titled “OAAU Homecoming Rally (November 29, 1964)”, he said that, over an 18-week period, he visited Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea Conakry, Algeria, and Senegal. According to Malcolm X, “in all the travelling that I did in … Africa, everywhere I went, I found nothing but open minds; I found nothing but open hearts; and I found nothing but open doors. Our people love us. All they want to know is do we love them.”

    Malcolm also declared: “My main theme while I was travelling with our brothers abroad on the African continent was to try and impress upon them that 22 million of our people here in America who consider ourselves inseparably linked with them that our origin is the same and our destiny is the same. … [So] what is necessary, we have to go back [to Africa] mentally; we have to go back culturally; we have to go back spiritually, and philosophically and psychologically; and … when we go back in that sense, then this spiritual bond that is created makes us inseparable.”

    With this, Malcolm opined, “they can see that our problem is their problem, and their problem is our problem. Our problem is not solved until theirs is solved; theirs is not solved until ours is solved. And when we can develop that kind of relationship, it then means that we will help them solve their problem and we want them to help us solve our problem. And by both of us working together, we’ll get a solution to that problem. We’ll only get that problem solved working together.”

    Malcolm reiterated: “This was the essence of any discussion: that the problems are one; that the destiny is still the same; the origin is the same; even the experiences are the same. They catch hell, we catch hell. And no matter how much independence they get on the motherland continent, if we don’t have … respect over here, when they come over here, they’re mistaken for one of us and they’re disrespected too. Well, in order [for them] to be respected, we must be respected.”

    Malcolm was most irked by the colonial administration of Congo by Belgium which he described as “one of the worst racist governments that have ever existed on the face of the earth.” In an 18 July, 2023 YouTube record titled “The speech that got Patrice Lumumba killed,” at Congo’s independence ceremony in Leopoldville, King Baudouin of Belgium praised his country’s colonial record and patronisingly counselled the new Congo government not to change the colonial policies. The Belgian colonial legacy being glamourised here is one which was so racistly brutal that it reportedly caused the death of over ten million Congolese.

    Patrice Lumumba, the new Prime Minister, responded at the event: “Today, we have won our struggle for independence. I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. To you all my friends, who have fought without respite at our sides, I ask you to make of today, this 30th June, 1960, an illustrious day that will be etched on forever on your hearts, a date whose significance you would pass on with pride to your children who in turn will pass on to their sons and grandsons, the glorious story of the struggle for our liberty.”

    Lumumba continued, listing the evils of Belgian colonial rule: “We have known ironies, insults. We have had to submit to beatings morning, noon and night, because we were Negroes. A Black was always addressed in the familiar form, certainly not as a friend, but because the respectful form was reserved for the Whites. We whose bodies have suffered under the colonial oppression, we say to you, it is all over now.” After that brave and patriotic public challenge of King Baudouin, Lumumba became a marked man.

    Shortly after independence, disagreements began between Lumumba and the President, Joseph Kasavubu. These created an opportunity for a military intervention on 14 September, 1960, led by Congolese Chief of Army Staff, Col. Joseph Mobutu (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko), and it resulted in the arrest of Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was assassinated on 17 January, 1961 at the age of 35 within the territory of Moïse Tshombe, the President of the secessionist mineral-rich Katanga State (from 1960 to 1963) and later Prime Minister of Congo (from 1964 to 1965).

    As Britannica.com reports, “Lumumba and his associates were … executed by a Katangan firing squad, under Belgian supervision, and in the presence of Katangan and Belgian officials and officers. The bodies were then thrown into shallow graves. A Katangan government official later ordered that the bodies disappear. At that point, a Belgian police officer led a group that searched for the graves, dug up the bodies, hacked them to pieces, and dissolved as much of the body parts as they could in sulphuric acid. Anything that remained was set on fire.”

    Condemning Tshombe who was believed to have collaborated with Belgium and the United States to murder Lumumba, Malcolm said passionately: “If there’s the worst African that was ever born, it was the man who, in cold blood, cold blood, committed an international crime, murdered Patrice Lumumba, murdered him in cold blood. The world knows that Tshombe murdered Lumumba, and now he’s a big partner of Lyndon B. Johnson [the 36th President of America]. … Johnson is … propping up Tshombe’s government; the murderer.”

    Imam Omar Suleiman, in a 21 February, 2021 Al Jazeera article reported: “Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of Black people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late James Cone states, ‘Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how Black people thought about themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After Malcolm, he helped us become Black.’”

    Given that on 5 May, 1962, Malcolm said to Black women, “We teach you to love the hair that God gave you,” how would he have reacted to today’s ‘educated’ African women’s still self-hating humongous investments on different kinds of wigs or ‘hairs’ to make them look like White women? And how would he have reacted to Nigeria’s japa syndrome, considering the fact that he said that he insulted the African-Americans he met in Ghana who cut themselves off the Black struggle back in America and were living in luxury in Africa?

    Considering the state of leadership in Africa today, and possibly because he died at the young age of 39 in 1965, Malcolm X’s vision of an Africa which would unite with the African-American world to carry out joint actions for the mutual benefit of both partners seems not to have gained much traction. All the same, Malcolm has set down an invaluable template for current and future African leaders.

    On Malcolm’s personal identity, Omar Suleiman noted: “In championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him, intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: ‘For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.’”

    On 7 March, 2024, Aaron Bonderson of Nebraska Pubic Media reported: “On Sept. 12, 2022, Malcolm X became the first Black man or woman voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. By May, a bust of Malcolm X will be inside the Nebraska State Capitol, along with 26 other Nebraskans.” Moreover, as Jake Anderson reports in a 19 May, 2025 story, in MSN, “Omaha is celebrating its hometown hero and civil rights icon on Monday. It’s Malcolm X Day. The city issued a proclamation in honor of the 100th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s birth. Malcolm X was born in Omaha in 1925.”

    Malcolm X’s birth was a boon to humanity. He was not just an American phenomenon, but also a pan-African star, and, above all, an exemplary human being.

  • Calling on governors: Variant of herdsmen terrorism is taking over Southwest streets

    Calling on governors: Variant of herdsmen terrorism is taking over Southwest streets

    Or how come, to quote a trending WhatsApp chat, that they  are the only ethnic group in Nigeria that is at war with the  Eggons in Nassarawa, the Tivs in Benue, the Idomas of Agatu, the Beroms of Plateau, the Adaras of Southern Kaduna, the Mumuyes & June 4 District on the Mambilla, the Hausas of Zamfara, the Igbos of the South East, and the Yorubas of the Southwest?” – the columnist in:

    ‘Rampaging Fulani Herdsmen: The Akure High Level meeting should have done more, of January 31, 2021.

    “Good morning, Uncle Femi,

    I came across this in a group chat and I read with interest and alarm. I read every word and keenly too. I don’t know who Adedamola Adetayo is but he sounded neither flippant nor unknowing”.

    The immediate quote above is from my dear brother and friend, a Professor of Igbo extraction who I have quoted severally on these pages. Though non – Yoruba, what he read in  one of Adedamola Adetayo’s writings on the menace of Aboki’s in Yoruba land jolted him so much he sent it me, not because I can  do anything to the seemingly untouchable Northern urchins who were trucked  down South by the powers that be in that region during the Buhari years, but at least to allow, through this medium, those we voted into office to ensure our safety in the Southwest not only aware, but do something about them.

    Studies, like that by the China Achebe Foundation, have shown that senior Northern military officers deliberately stand down the rank and file from confronting Fulani herdsmen whenever they attack and it is doubtful if same isn’t happening in the Nigerian police. Add to that the preponderance of Northern DPO’s in the police and you’ve blown the cover of why Abokis are now ravaging the Southwest literally unchallenged.

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    Aboki’s  are some hoi polloi, Northern urchins exported to Southwest Nigeria by Northern governors who, in the name of dividends of democracy, bought them thousands of glittering, brand new okadas and trucked them with these characters, complete with cows, AK 47 and sundry arms and ammunition.

    Readers of this column would remember my oft- quoted Fulani Nationality Movement (FUNAM)directive to these rootless Northern youths:

    “Northern youths should move enmass to Southern States. Relaunch the mass movement in ways they have never seen … If the towns and cities are hostile, hang out on the street corners, in uncompleted buildings, occupy the forests, pitch tents, make any where available as your abode, your rest places, your home. We urge you to be armed as the infidels may want to attack you”.

    One day soon, Yorubas will sing panegyrics to Adedamola Adetayo, the  tireless chronicler of the menace of these Northerners in Southwest Nigeria.

    Below is what space will permit of his recent capture of the horrendous bestiality of these Northerners in Yoruba land as detailed in a WhatsApp post titled: “Before Tomorrow Comes, a Warning”:

    “Just yesterday, I received a report from the IJEGUN area of IKOTUN in Lagos State. It was so troubling that I couldn’t sleep until about 4.30am:

    A shop in the area was burgled in the night. It was a phone shop where some youths sell phones, accessories and do repairs.  Thieves broke into the shop and cleared out all the phones in sight, including the ones for repairs.

    Not long after, an Aboki came into the shop with a phone to repair. It turned out it was one of those stolen. He made to delay the Aboki while he placed a call to the nearest Police post which was Isheri-Osun.

    While he waited for the police, the aboki, sensing danger, wanted to leave.

    He was prevented and trapped inside the shop.

    Next thing he did was to call his kinsmen and gave them his location.

    In a flash they were there in huge numbers brandishing different types of dangerous weapons. They TORE DOWN  the shop, took him out and made away with him before the Police came.

    The report says they encountered the approaching Policemen on the way but it was a non-issue as they openly challenged the police. The Policemen were coming on bikes but had to beat a retreat when they saw the menacing Abokis.

    In fact, two of the Okada riders who brought the Policemen were reportedlyh stabbed.

    What happened, I later learnt, is the standard and regular practice of the Abokis in the area just as it is the practice in Abeokuta and all over the SW right now.

    Indeed, as I also found out, there is  at a location in the ÈJẸDÒDÓ area in the axis, called BOWLER which is the central dump site for all the bowler-bowler Abokis of that area. It  is seething with the lowest dredges of humanity; and terribly dangerous. Equally

    About 80 per cent of Okada riders in the axis ,  just as it is all over Lagos State and Yoruba land, are  Abokis.

    ONDO STATE: Very recently we got news that at least three corpses were seen at different locations in front of the Ondo State Government House. Citizens had come to protest the killings of their Kinsmen by so-called Herdsmen who had killed them in cold blood. Somewhere in Okitipupa came another report that a man identified as an Aboki attacked the grandson of Madam Comfort Ọmọ́gè, the musician and, with a knife, slit his throat in broad daylight.

    Ditto in the Ikare and many other areas of  Ondo State.

     OYO STATE – There is a video all over the internet now in which a truckload of people  was intercepted somewhere on the Ọ̀YỌ́- IBADAN road. It was loaded to the brim with people, motorcycles and was full of arms and ammunition, hidden underneath. The truck was heading for either Ibadan or Lagos.

    And that was just ONE TRUCK out of hundreds which pass that route everyday and  night, most of them unchecked.

    In SASA market in Ibadan, the report was that a group of  Aboki traders killed a Yoruba trader in the course of an argument. By the time the dust settled, there had been a casualty on the side of the Abokis too.

    All hell broke loose and Governor Makinde of the State was later seen receiving a high-powered delegation from the North who treated him as if he was caught red handed in a shameful act. The reader would recall a similar visit to a governor of Oyo state by then General Buhari even when they were the aggressor.

      OGUN STATE – In Ijebu-Igbo, a regular pattern of the most despicable mode of killings repeatedly happens. Innocent citizens, Ijebus, are kidnapped and their families extorted through ransom payments. Yet the victims are later killed, thrown into wells full of water. The few who escaped usually tell their story.

    In  the same Ogun State, a Yoruba Okada rider had an altercation with an Aboki rider and before he knew it, fellow Abokis had surrounded him, beat him silly and thereafter took him and his bike with them to their Leader who forced him to pay the offending Aboki before his bike was released to him and  set free.

    Lllp

    I had a personal encounter in Abeokuta in 2018 in front of my business premises. Two Yoruba youths were in an argument with a single Aboki Okada rider. Before they knew it, about 20 other Abokis had swarmed on him ready to pounce.

    I made an effort to dowse the tension. Before I did that, and that was what saved my life, I placed a call to the nearest Police station for help. The two Yoruba youths had used the opportunity of the distraction to slip out of the crowd and I was the only one left. They were getting ready to MOB me when the police arrived.

    Even at the police station I became the accused and I was going to get locked up in the cell for, apparently, allowing the two youths to escape jungle justice in the hands of the Aboki murderous mob.

    6.  LAGOS STATE – Mr Olatunji Bakare wasn’t as lucky in Apapa.

    He was the LASTMA commander of the sector covering Mile 2, Ijora and Apapa.

    On that fateful day in December of 2016, the Abokis had an argument with some LASTMA operatives.

    In a flash, as they always do, the entire area was swarming with Abokis and they were going to attack the LASTMA operatives.

    Mr. Bakare very unfortunately came from Ijora into the fray to mediate.

    These guys descended on him, and in broad daylight at a location a  mere stone throw from the Army DMI, the Navy Hydro graphics, Police Area B and, in front of many soldiers doing guard duties on Liverpool road, that man was LYNCHED to death!!!

    They beat and pushed him into the gutter and stoned him to death..

    I haven’t gotten over the shock till today, 8 years after. It was that traumatic..

    C: REALITY ON GROUND

    1. There is an unreasonably huge population of Abokis all over the Southwest.

    2. These people are strategically placed in heavily populated  areas of our state capitals, parading  as Okada riders, scrap collectors, beggars, shoe makers etc..

    3. They live in packed colonies on  any available open spaces where they don’t pay any rent.

    4. They seem to be very organised, very mobile and are usually located within close proximities of security installations such as Army or Police Barracks.

    They are excessively aggressive, instinctively violent and all armed.

    5. They are so confident they treat Police with utter disdain and are not  bothered by the presence of soldiers.

    6.They do their washing, toileting, bathing, eating, indeed, everything right on the street thereby constituting an environment nuisance.

    8. If you ever have an argument with them and it lasts for too long it is an invitation to a mob action which will most likely cost you your life.

    9. They are on constant reconnaissance of our neighbourhoods. They know practically every nook and cranny of their areas of operation.

    10. These people have ALL the trappings and resources for TERRORISM”.

    D: WHAT TO DO

    Although Adetayo made some suggestions in this regard, I would rather leave this to our  SOUTHWEST governors and their security councils, our Kabiyesis and  ALL OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES in the SOUTHWEST to seriously ponder and rescue, not only this generation of Yorubas, but those ones coming behind us.