By Olatunji Ololade

One dollar exchanges for 5.74 cedis. The same dollar exchanges for N480. And one cedis exchanges for N90. Nigeria is not the giant of Africa. Ghana is the giant of Africa. Nigeria must learn to be humble.

From its entry point, Ghana’s Kotoka International Airport (KIA) unfurls in grandeur; its clean, polished floors, sparkling toilets, orderly  processions, polite and very professional staff will definitely astound you compared to Nigeria’s much hyped yet under-performing Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA). The Ghanaian civil aviation authorities did really well to harmonise the country’s airport operations with cutting-edge technology; the result is a seamless operation, from passenger check-in to boarding of aircraft.

If entry points are acceptable windows into the soul of a nation, and immigration staff ambassadors of every country, Nigeria stands as a gangrenous sore in comparison to Ghana.

Of course, Ghana isn’t some Eldorado, too much of the country resonates Nigeria but the society works.

Nigeria, on the other hand, flaunts an under-exploited landmass and citizens who passionately believe that their country is a zoo.  Immigration staff ask for tips at entry point. Some do so with a smile, others simply harass you for it.

From check-in to baggage handling, you are accosted by vile, mean-spirited aviation staff and airline officials. The few times you are enjoy the rare luck of a pleasant aviation worker, there must be the possibility of handing out a tip to the individual.

Every Nigerian experiences great shame checking in and out Ghana’s international airport. It dwarfs the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA) in no small measure. As the Yoruba would say, Igi imu jina sori.

It is hardly surprising then that the Kotoka International Airport was recognised as the “Best Airport in Africa” for both 2019 and 2020 by the Airports Council International (ACI).

In examining the Ghana and Nigerian airports, we undoubtedly must face and appreciate the irony of the inherent metaphor. Ghana’s studious uplift of its entry point represents several aspects of its dominance over Nigeria in various phases of existence.

The Nigerian government’s disposition to governance is reminiscent of a has-been nation that is sorely obsessive about her history thus clinging to old glory as a necessary performance of will and pseudo-therapy to withstand the storms of institutionalised corruption and citizenry’s disillusionment.

Investors and tourists are more favourably disposed to Ghana hence they choose the country ahead of Nigeria while making investment and leisure decisions. This has translated to noticeable differences in revenue generated by both countries.

For instance, in 2018, Nigeria recorded $1.9bn in FDI inflows, down sharply from $3.5bn in 2017. Ghana, in comparison, recorded $3.5bn in 2018, up from $3.2bn in 2017 – a remarkable feat for a country with a population six times smaller than Nigeria, argued The African Report.

The intractable failures that afflict Nigeria, from institutionalized corruption, mismanaged economy to abuse of the constitution, substandard education and health care to terrorism in the northeast can be blamed on the masses. More complicit are the country’s political class and the institutions that produce the political elite.

The masses make it possible for an insentient, inept political class to hold on to power to the detriment of the country.

Could Nigerians fare better at choosing their own leaders? First, we must get it right with the citizenship enterprise. Our impoverished minds will never produce the kind of quality citizenship germane to Nigeria’s rebirth.

Sterling citizenship is the fruit of higher learning. In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay titled “Education After Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged” and that “the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be uncovered, examined, and critiqued through education.

There is no gainsaying Nigeria suffers the affliction of moral corruption at insidious and degenerate levels reminiscent of the Holocaust era. To avoid such consequences like the holocaust, the society must foster more progressive scholarship and family institutions. Our schools must teach more than skills.

They have to impart humaneness and values. Failure to do that would afflict us with another civil war, or the kind of Auschwitz Adorno warned us about.

At the moment, Nigeria dissembles to the designs of her corrupt leadership. The latter capitalizes on the heathen dialectic of partisan politics, which  is sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about electorate mind and nature. Nigerians vote for tribe, money, and random bigotries.

Politicians know Nigeria thrives as a tribal cesspit and they encourage the country’s immersion in ethnicised muck. In handling the brewing killer-herdsmen vs farmers crisis, for instance, politicians, state governors, the presidency have successfully weaponized the crisis into an ethnic war.

While urging the citizenry to desist from ethnic profiling, they recruit, arm and empower militia and thugs to foment chaos – as revealed by a herdsman in a trending video.

They have diverted the citizenry’s attention away from the real cause of the crisis; their corrupt, feckless leadership. Using cohorts in the media and across party lines, they have successfully steered the discussion away from issues of their failures at governance, government ineptitude, embezzlement of public fund, nepotism, and instead, instigate the citizenry.

Their subtle admonitions and tough talk must be dismissed as shabby artifice. Their ‘truths’ and ‘solutions’ to the crisis are  products and vectors of toxic altruism, a system of thought that cloaks cunning and subterfuge under the thick veil of patriotism, in a cutthroat jostle for political and socioeconomic resources.

At the backdrop of these shameful realities, the citizenry, mostly youth’s political illiteracy is embarrassingly far-flung and subsumed in sentimentality, that, the ruling class has learned to gleefully re-invent a political devil in the opposition party, community or tribe, to exploit their ignorance and intolerance.

The youth rant that they have been excluded from power at the state and federal level yet they have populated Nigerian politics for 61 years as thugs, murderers, vote-sellers, rhetoricians and canon-fodder for mayhem.

The altarpiece of their presence manifests in every political season, when the incumbent ruling class, comprising men and women, who previously identified as youth five to seven decades ago, deploy them as unthinking muscles, emissaries of death and destruction.

It’s about time the youth participated constructively in the political process. Nigeria’s current dilemma is a consequence of choices and perversions of the incumbent ruling class, whose collective, pathological self-interest derailed a long train of progress, while exacerbating and ignoring existential threats.

The ruling class’ sociopathic need for instant gratification pushed them to midwife equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future.

Thus there is urgent need for Nigeria’s youth to coalesce into more definitive roles and forms and make informed choices – like replacing corrupt, dangerous leadership with humane peers.

Until then, Nigeria will continue to careen down the steep ravine of decline and endure shameful truths like her inferiority to neighbouring countries like Ghana.

In 1983, Nigeria, hard hit by declining oil revenue and corruption, expelled two million undocumented West African migrants, half of whom were Ghanaians thus birthing the ‘Ghana must go’ movement.

Thirty eight years after, Nigerians would happily relocate to Ghana for its stable securities, among other reasons.

By Olatunji Ololade

Very soon, the armed bandits of the north will turn their guns at the northern oligarchs. They will understand that their enemies aren’t the peasant farmers or herdsmen of the northeast, northwest, and north central. The truth shall dawn on them in common hours, that they got it wrong murdering their host communities in the southwest, southeast and south-south.

They shall unlearn the menacing lore of their presumed ‘supremacy’ and ‘right to kill’ other people for grazing land across the country. They shall refute their entitlement to rob, steal and intimidate other Nigerians as maniacally advanced through circuitous hate-speech and tribal warmongering by the northern oligarchs.

As the scales fall from their eyes, they shall attain clarity of purpose and discover that their real enemies are the northern governors, lawmakers, sponsored ethnic cults and the presidency, who have deliberately kept them shackled to poverty and ignorance.

They will understand that the governors urging them to exchange their guns for cows, the clout-chasing clerics visiting them in the forest  for photo ops, the lawmakers keeping them on retainer-ship, and politicians justifying the heinous murders they commit across the country are their greatest foes.

We are at the verge of the hour, when clusters of Boko Haram terrorists and armed bandits shall unite in rare enlightenment and rouse to the bitter truth of their reckoning and their lineages’ betrothal to transgenerational doom. This minute, some Boko Haram commander or bandit leader is awakening to scarce consciousness; he is cautiously but passionately appealing to peers and underlings to stop targeting their guns and explosives at the poor, helpless masses.

At the dawn of their new awareness, they shall turn their guns and machetes against the northern political class. They shall invade the latter’s homes and abduct their trophy wives, daughters, sons, and grandchildren.

They shall whisk the latter off into the heart of Sambisa and the fringes of Zamfara, Kaduna, Yobe, Adamawa’s forest reserves among others. Just like they abducted little Maryam Alhaji-Wakil at the tender age of nine, from her family home in Bama – after killing her parents in her presence.

In 2014, Boko Haram terrorists invaded Maryam’s village and killed her relatives. They burned her home and decapitated her neighbours. Then they whisked her off to Sambisa Forest.

There, she was forcibly married to Modu, a lustful and violent Boko Haram insurgent. In two days, little Maryam was violently thrust into womanhood. Modu, 35, forced his way into her unripe orifice, robbing her of innocence and the mystic pleasure of first and legitimate adult sexual experience.

Modu was hasty and rough thus making her ‘first time’ bestial and replete with pain. She screamed in agony but Modu didn’t care. “The louder I screamed, the more violently he shoved into me until I passed out,” she revealed to me in a personal encounter.

Thus at the tender age of nine, Maryam was violently used and sexually abused. When she could not withstand the misery of living as a sex slave any longer, she opted to serve as one of the terrorist group’s female suicide bombers. Consequently, she was dispatched with a bomb to neighbouring Cameroon; she was taken on a motorcycle to blow up a soft military target in the country. But Maryam had other plans.

When the rider dropped her, she approached the soldiers and told them, ‘I have this thing on my body. It is a bomb. I was sent to kill you. Please, help me remove it.” Instantly, the soldiers sprung into defensive position but realising that she had come to surrender, they approached her, cautiously, and unstrapped the explosive from her body.

Maryam spent several months in the custody of the Cameroonian gendarmes until she was handed over to the Nigerian military. Hard as it is to picture the extent of bitterness devastating her heart, an intense gape into her eyes reveals a girl utterly torn apart. Beneath her pretty face lurks a battered soul.

Now 16 years of age, Maryam is yet to break out of the jailhouse of her past. She is still the frightened nine-year-old that got whisked off to Sambisa Forest, while her relatives and neighbours fell in a bloody heap, to the bullets of Boko Haram’s terror squads.

Maryam relives the days she endured hunger because her insurgent ‘husband’ was too poor and too lazy to provide her food. She remembers the excruciating nights that she laid captive and helpless under his massive bulk, while he violently plowed into her because she  “was an unwilling bride.”

When Maryam eventually discovers that the men and women who were elected to ‘protect and serve her’ as all good leaders should do, were responsible for her misery, should she simply ‘forgive and forget?’

When she discovers that they embezzled the £2.1 billion disbursed to procure weaponry meant to subdue her captors and secure her release and that of the 276 Chibok girls, should she seek them out for a hug and bless their progeny?

Would Maryam be wrong to persistently utter heartfelt prayers that the daughters and granddaughters of the men and women who triggered and accentuated her misery, share similar fate with her?

Would it be humane and politically-correct to do that? Some would claim that it would be wrong to wish such retribution on innocent children of perceived bad leaders. They would counsel forgiveness saying: “Let the actual offenders be punished and not their bloodline.”

In a nation where rich, privileged convicts are given a slap on the hand and pat on the back, would it be wrong to wish that their offspring and wives experience similar tragedies as victims of their inhumanity?

The RUGA toxic rhyme

The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) has perfected its plot to impose the RUGA on “uncooperative” regions through the backdoor. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the initiative as long as it is done in the interest of justice, peace and stability.

Critics argue that by imposing the scheme on southwest communities, for instance, government seeks to compensate killer-herdsmen for the mayhem and murders they continually visit on helpless, indigent farming communities. And what do the latter get in return?

It is extremely devious of any governor of the southwest states, afflicted by killer-herdsmen, to collude with counterparts from the north to impose the RUGA on southwest communities still on the receiving end of wanton killings by killer-herdsmen.

The latest plot involves the deployment of traditional rulers as pawns; the governors seek to bully poor, helpless communities into acceptance of the scheme, using their traditional rulers as muscles.

The latter depend on their individual state governors for their salaries and other luscious forms of patronage – and none of them would dare rebel against their benefactors.

The argument being espoused by the proponents of the scheme is both frantic and whacky; “You better tell your people to accept RUGA now or else herdsmen will kill them all.”

You could be forgiven for likening them to the proverbial huckster, who would market dystopia to seekers of Eden.

The government must adopt  just and humane measures at resolving the farmers-killer herdsmen crisis. The situation deserves better handling unsullied by frantic warmongering, bullying and artifice.

 By Olatunji Ololade

I will not dare to think that this grave we dig today shall bloom  tomorrow. It could. Nigeria could become the varnished tomb of our dreams, flowering with innards of nationhood and bodies of the poor.

This is no country for the indigent. A wretched man is a hideous thing, a tattered crow upon our tree but his existence is politically-correct, going by the leadership of the 36 state governors and President Muhammadu Buhari.

Little wonder they have been unable to commit passion and resources to revivify Nigeria from the grassroots. Many governors currently preside over impoverished states with unexploited consumer markets, untapped potential for commercial agriculture, and under-employed labour pools. Add insecurity to the mix, and you have a perfect picture of their menacing leadership.

The victims of the Zabarmari massacre, the Buni Yadi Killings, the abducted Chibok girls, the Fagba-Agege bloody riots, and the ethnic crisis at Shasha, in Ibadan, Oyo State, are mostly impoverished. They comprise the hapless millions living below poverty line due to unemployment, comatose industry, infrastructure deficits and policy misadventure.

In a nutshell, they are victims of government corruption and leadership failure. And our governors, fearful of what fate may befall them if the victims of their failings, should awaken to the truth, have chosen to hoodwink the populace.

While we must applaud the initiative of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) for sending Governors Abubakar Bagudu of Kebbi, Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano, Abubakar Bello of Niger, and Bello Matawalle of Zamfara, to visit their counterpart in Oyo, Governor Seyi Makinde, over the Shasha ethnic crisis, it need be said that the riot and killings could have been averted if they had devoted themselves to humane governance.

Of course, Nigerians do not want war but we know when we are being hustled. By visiting the scenes of mayhem in Ibadan, the governors peddled a fake fantasy of intimacy with the victims and the citizenry at large.

On their watch, Nigeria has been reduced to a war zone. Our night has murder in the eye, and our noon, murder in the heart; even daybreak drips with blood. One ill begets the other and every tragedy a great deal more.

The solstice of sanity has sagged, and we have become indiscriminate pawns in the theatre of the absurd. Some would call it our drama of carnage and blood.

There is “virtue” in the insanity of the rampaging hordes, according to irate segments of our biased divides, but if you dig beneath our sea of grief, you could discover the politics that incite the murderous rage of Boko Haram, the devilry of armed bandits cum killer-herdsmen, and the death and destruction they incite.

Perhaps you would understand why peace-loving citizens become blood-thirsty brutes and the average human becomes subhuman.

You could understand too, why the Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, could say, tongue in cheek, that Fulani herders wield the deadly AK-47 rifle for self-defence because cattle rustlers are attacking them even as he ignores the hundreds of farmers hacked to death across host communities laid siege to by killer-herdsmen.

You could also understand how Mohammed could fault the quit notice given to Fulani herders in some southern states, particularly Ondo, claiming that the moves of the “southern governors are wrong.”

The Nigeria of our dream is not the Nigeria of their will. That is why every minute they spend in office manifests like grotesque versions of a gory plot; every day a bizarre tragedy thus we suffer through spells of tumultuous seasons and bloodshed.

We do not foresee that terrible thing called betrayal. When we get to breaking point, our leaders shall flee to safe houses abroad with their families. We shall not be the ones to receive political asylum from our neighbours in the “First world” because we are the negligible indices in a state of war.

We shall become the bruises that must be concealed until our sores erupt into blood bursting blisters and lesions.

Reason and morality shall elude us and we shall actualise the worst versions of every tragedy the world should be done with – in the name of tribe, patriotism, mammon and God.

We shall watch the deployment of arms to our youth. Having seen too much bloodshed and suffered it, we shall learn to think with the machete and speak with bullets. We shall hound and hack to death, people with whom we lived as neighbours, in-laws and “best friends forever (BFF)”; simply because they are Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri, Ibibio and so on.

We shall watch our mothers, daughters and wives get raped to death. They shall become sex slaves to rival militia and ‘comfort women’ to at least four or five of our own tribesmen, at the same time.

And when they are delivered of the children that no man will father, we shall name the “poor, regrettable products” of our shame Okwuoeimose (War is ugly), Okwoeinata (Not to be told), Okwoba (Red is the colour of war), Enitaiyeko (The one whom the world rejects), Enitan (Child of intrigue); Aiyeteminimowa (I have come to live my own life); Ogunbayoje (War has destroyed our joy) and so forth.

Our boy-child shall shudder to hold position in the blazing wind, relishing the cold muzzle of an assault rifle over the dullness of a freshly sharpened pencil. Along our deserted sidewalks, within our bombed and cratered streets, we shall avoid and trip over clutters of human bodies and bones decomposing like orange rinds in the dust.

We shall hunt our journalists, poets and writers to the death; we shall crucify them for luring the world to see the septic belly of our pride even as we export our grief to arouse the sympathy and “support” of our “First world” neighbours.

We shall turn our plantations into mass graves while we jostle for aid and confer with dying hope in a dark place. Through the sadism of it all, we shall accomplish the separation we love to talk about. The Igbo may have Biafra; the Hausa/Fulani may have Arewa; the Yoruba, Oodua Republic; and the South-south, Niger-Delta Republic.

Every tribe shall have its nirvana; in those lands of our dreams, the earth shall be fertile but the heat of our greed shall scorch our heaps with the seeds. Our fates will be worse in the dream lands that we seek – whether we like it or not, we shall be led by the same old brutes, and worse, that made Nigeria a living hell.

We shall grope through the lattices of personal disaster into the ruins of national disaster. We shall wonder how genocide found its perch past corruption and greed, in our hearts  even as we burn and blaze in the name of tribe, mammon and “God.”

The language of our mayhem shall not be understood by all even as we are enabled and patronized by all. And after our battles have been lost and won, we shall live to dread the pyrrhic prize for which we ruined our lives.

It’s about time we stopped pounding the drums of war. War, in whatever guise, is never expedient. Yet we who ruin Nigeria are dying to break Nigeria. If we couldn’t love her enough to save her, we shall ruin whatever “Eden” we carve from her.

By Olatunji Ololade

The Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) regards anti-herdsmen dissent as a repulsive social fiction. The dissenters, in turn, scoff at the governors’ pompous hierarchy, labelling it insensate and a scourge to consciousness.

Thus in the wake of political actor, Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho’s ultimatum to killer-herdsmen, it was a given that governors and politicians would startle from inertia.

Suddenly, Oyo governor, Rotimi Makinde, stopped seeing himself as a People’s Democratic Party (PDP) governor, but as an entitled comrade of the NGF, a co-runner of Nigeria’s political space.

By threatening to arrest Igboho, Makinde was speaking for all the other governors, who feel very threatened by Igboho’s militant recourse against the killer-herdsmen’s murderous sprees across the southwest.

The governors, who were hitherto unperturbed, have resorted to face-saving, power preservation stunts. They will not let Igboho steal their thunder. They are threatened by his raucous storms.

Their fears are understandable; if a northern muscle like the Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) should retaliate by re-enacting its 30-day ultimatum (issued in July 2019) to southerners to vacate the north except they accept the RUGA ranching scheme, the situation could aggravate and cause Nigeria to implode. If that should happen, new demagogues would emerge – dangerous and untameable. Some governors will be consumed by the resultant carnage. Their money, positions, and powers would be taken from them, and the NGF will lose relevance.

If Igboho was hitherto a minion or negligible gadfly among the populace, Makinde and the NGF have lionised him. Scared silly, the governors scurried to meet with representatives of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) in Akure, Ondo State to defuse the crisis.

Yet they conveniently ignored their duplicity in leaving out of the deliberation, crucial actors in the conflict, that is, the victims of killer-herdsmen’s murderous quests.

The southwest governors have been faulted as spineless and too eager to curry the favour of the presidency and their ‘superior comrades’ from the north who ordered the meeting.

“Sit! Stand! Run! Speak! Keep shut! Good boys!” ordered their northern counterparts and handlers at the presidency, with a chuckle perhaps.

In a conflict, it is the duty of the umpire to facilitate an equal representation of all concerned parties; the governors could never claim to adequately represent or speak for the victims, given the huge gap that they have painstakingly created between their offices and the people whose mandate they earned or stole to emerge as governors.

However, the southwest governors were only being expedient. In a communique read by the NGF chairman and Ekiti governor, Kayode Fayemi, at the forum’s meeting in Akure, the stakeholders agreed to ban night and free-range grazing, underage herding, and herders’ occupation of state forest reserves describing these as illegal.

Fayemi clarified that herdsmen were not asked to vacate Ondo State as Governor Rotimi Akeredolu did not order the Fulani to leave the state, stressing that, ”The area concerned is the forest reserves and it is about registration and also to work in line with the law. What we are after are the criminals, not Fulani herdsmen. Criminals are criminals irrespective of their ethnic group.”

He said the meeting was conveyed to find lasting solutions to the incessant killings, kidnapping, and crises between herdsmen and farmers in the southwest, and urged states to reduce criminalities by creating economic opportunities for the people.

I agree with Fayemi but I must question as I did in a previous piece, the prevailing political system, and its constitutional pitfalls. While most governors and politicians pay lip-service to fiscal integrity, accountability, patriotism and true federalism, very few among them actually walk their talk.

Governors and deputy governors are entitled to N2,223,705 and N2,112,214 as annual salaries, states the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) but there are numerous allowances, including the controversial security vote not reflected in the figures.

Thus very few individuals, less than 50 in number to be precise, cost over 196 million Nigerians hundreds of billions of naira, every year, as salaries and other allowances for serving as governors.

Lest we forget the NGF’s troubling clamour for increased security votes; security votes are opaque corruption-prone security funding mechanisms, drawn monthly from the federal purse to fund fictive security expenses that have been widely criticised as fuelling corruption, since its deployments are never made public and unaccounted for.

These secretive, unaccounted-for outlays add up to an estimated $670 million (N241.2 billion) annually, according to Transparency International (TI). The international watchdog’s recent estimate, published in September 2018, revealed that the 36 governors spend $670m (N241bn) yearly on security votes which are not subject to audit or legislative oversight.

In just one year, these off-budget expenditures add up to over nine times the amount of US security assistance to Nigeria and the total amount of counterterrorism support the UK promised to give Nigeria by 2020.

Amid the begrimed imagery, some governors covet frivolities, like a frantic and unjustifiable lust to construct airports between states that are less than an hour’s drive from each other, like Lagos and Ogun.

Funding and efforts wasted on such initiatives could be committed to building good roads, water and rail systems, and actual crime-fighting.

The legend subsists of an ex-governor of Ogun State, who at the expiration of his tenure, contacted the state’s Police Commissioner, confessing that he had thousands of arms and millions of ammunition in-store at a secret armoury in the Government House, and that he had decided to hand them over to the police.

The police boss raced to the Government House with subordinates, and on arrival, the governor reportedly surrendered about four million rounds of ammunition, 1,000 units of AK47 assault rifles, 1,000 units of bulletproof vests, and an armoured personnel carrier (APC).

The truckloads of arms and ammunition would have served the police in fighting off killer-herdsmen perpetually prowling the state’s fringes but the governor kept them in his nondescript armoury, claiming he procured them to check the widespread insecurity in his state of less than five million residents.

This is no doubt instructive about what an average member of the NGF would do for ‘security’ reasons.

It’s about time the NGF discarded the serpent desires of power and belly, and seek realistic solutions to the states’ security and development challenges.

Beyond some governors’ hysteric pursuit of unearned clout and their presidential ambitions; beyond their lust to construct airports and embark on borrowing sprees, they could commit passion and resources to re-energise their states from the grassroots.

Many NGF members currently preside over impoverished states with unexploited consumer markets, untapped potential for commercial agriculture, and under-employed labour pools.

It’s about time they imaginatively engaged the grassroots, federal, and state-level actors in driving the economy, combating insecurity, and addressing post-conflict needs.

It’s instructive to note that no governor in the NGF enjoys a cult following save the Governor of Borno, Babagana Umara Zulum. None of them has successfully started a political movement driven by a ‘game-changing’ ideology.

None has initiated a development programme or policy that truly addresses and resolves social, human crises at the grassroots.

None of them enjoys widespread love and goodwill among the citizenry. And none of them has built a name that would outlive him.

By Olatunji Ololade

Nobody knows what it takes to be Garba Shehu. Or what efforts go into the task. Perhaps being Shehu surpasses donning face powder, a poker face, and disdain for everything and everyone perceived to be anti-herdsmen and anti-Buhari. If that is the case, Shehu’s misery is understandable.

Torn between extreme loyalty to herdsmen and his principal, President Muhammadu Buhari, Shehu seems confused about his responsibilities as the Special Assistant, Media, and Publicity to the President. Should his loyalty to Buhari and his beloved herdsmen tower above human lives, justice, peace, and stability of the country?

It wasn’t surprising to see him condemn Governor Rotimi Akeredolu over his seven-day ultimatum to killer herdsmen cum illegal occupants of Ondo State’s forest reserve. Few months ago, he incurred flak for stating that the 78 rice farmers murdered by Boko Haram in Zabarmari, Borno State, didn’t receive security clearance before venturing into their farms.

In a frantic reaction to widespread criticism, he said, “I’m human with tons of compassion and empathy, and could not have said that the victims deserved their fate for ignoring security clearance.”

Being human requires Shehu to understand that it is easier to sermonise and issue contemptuous rationalisations when you aren’t the one on the receiving end of the carnage. It is easier to ask victims of violence to maintain a stiff upper lip when its not your wives and daughters being raped and abducted; when its not your parents and siblings being butchered in their beds and while working on their farms; when it’s not your home being burnt to rubble; and when you aren’t the one who has to sleep with one eye closed in dread of bandits and killer-herdsmen perpetually prowling your neighbourhood to invade your home.

If only he understands, that, his job as a media aide renders him vulnerable to crucifixion and ideological dismemberment. Yes, money could be made alongside diplomatic perks but the media aide soon loses honour, humaneness, and identity to political high jinks. He suffers the conversion of passion to immoderate zest.

Shehu and cohorts must understand that where the collective good is sacrificed to a whirl of expediences and officialese, misrepresentation and errant loyalty, government cartwheels in repute and stymies in the gross continuum of inhumaneness.

It’s understandable that Shehu would do everything to protect President Buhari’s interests – which sadly, does not include “humble service” to every human and geographic segment of the country.

On their watch, armed bandits and killer-herdsmen are allowed to terrorise the country without fear of repercussion. Yet he feels Buhari is being misunderstood and unfairly criticised.

In Shehu’s contrived Eldorado, Buhari is a great worker perhaps, a humane leader, who is just, compassionate, brilliant. A quintessential statesman. You could be forgiven for Laughing Out Loud (LOL) – as the digital natives would say.

It’s about time Shehu startled awake from his alternate universe; in Nigeria and on his principal’s watch, innocent folk are being hacked to death by armed bandits, and murderous herdsmen. Some of them are impostors. And some have been identified as Fulani.

While Governor Akeredolu was tame in his description of herdsmen’s insolence and deadly exploits in Ondo, Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho wasn’t so mild; he ordered all Fulani out of Yoruba land over the killings perpetrated by suspected herdsmen in Igangan, Ibarapa North Local Government Area of Oyo State. Recently, Dr. Fatai Aborode, a prominent farmer and politician was murdered by suspected herdsmen near his farm in the area. Igboho’s ultimatum and subsequent storming of Igangan to the applause of a large, irate mob should be instructive to Shehu and his boss.

But lest we tar an entire tribe for the sins of a few criminals among them, it is noteworthy that even the Fulani suffer wanton attacks from bandits and killer-herdsmen.

The chairman of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association in Ibarapa, Muhammed Bello, told Premium Times that it was wrong for Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho, to associate all Fulani herdsmen with criminality.

He said they are also desirous peaceful environment, narrating how one Alhaji Anji was kidnapped twice. The kidnappers reportedly asked for N3 million but he was able to raise half of it with the promise that if released, he would work hard to get their balance. After he was freed, his abductors kept calling him to ask for their balance, prompting Anji to report to the police. But to everybody’s surprise, he was kidnapped again and beaten mercilessly by the same set of people until he paid the balance, said Bello.

Shame that the incumbent government is bereft of ideas at ridding Nigeria of armed banditry and the killer-herdsmen. Sometimes, the culprits emerge straddling classifications as armed bandits cum killer-herdsmen.

Former finance minister, Olu Falae, who was kidnapped and released after paying N5 million ransom, said he was kidnapped by six herdsmen, Abubakar Auta, Bello Jannu, Umaru Ibrahim, Masahudu Muhammed, and Idris Lawal, at his Ilado farm in Akure, Ondo State.

He said, “Only two of them could speak some English. They were between the ages of 25 and 35. They were Fulani, they spoke Hausa.”

Falae said his ordeal was closely connected to his conflict with herdsmen who consistently invaded his farm over three years. He said, “Because I have a dam on the farm, they like to bring their cattle there to drink water, then they eat other people’s crops…They ate up my maize farm, two hectares. We took pictures, and it was videoed, the police went there. They were asked to pay compensation, they begged and paid half of what we claimed and we accepted it,” he said.

Eventually, the culprits were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment by an Akure High Court.

But while Falae was able to secure justice, lots of impoverished families have been left bereaved and traumatised after suffering worse ordeal without justice.

Over the last decade, more than 8,000 people have been killed – mainly in Zamfara state – with over 200,000 internally displaced and about 60,000 fleeing into Niger Republic. The violence is aggravating other security challenges: it has forced more herders southward into the country’s Middle Belt, thus increasing herder-farmer tension in the region and beyond.

Overwhelmed by the attacks, Zamfara Governor, Bello Matawalle offers two cows for every AK-47 rifle surrendered by ‘repentant’ bandits. It is instructive that he chose to give them cows and not farmlands – apparently because of their history and reality as rogue herdsmen.

Of course, there are herdsmen doing legitimate business but they are carelessly blamed for the sins of criminal elements among them.

Yet President Buhari, speaking through Shehu, expects victims of herdsmen attacks, like the natives of Ibarapa in Oyo State, to bear their ordeal in good faith.

Perhaps he wants them to desert their farms and homes like the poor, helpless natives of the northeast and northwest, who were forced to flee their once peaceful abodes to live as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

Those who dare protest are beaten and brutalised by soldiers escorting herdsmen to graze and destroy farms as it happened in Yewa North Local Government Area, Ogun State on December 19, 2020.

By Olatunji Ololade

Nigeria looms like a gothic platitude of misery and death from the cities to her transit townships yet she is the political class’ bower of bliss.

Picture President Muhammadu Buhari, for instance, in his stately Eden at the Presidential Villa in Aso Rock. There, he lives immune to the vagaries of insecurity and governance failure. And he has a nimble media team to protect him and his ‘interests’ from critics or perceived ‘detractors.’

You could be forgiven for thinking that each member of the presidential media team sits on his haunch, like a hound on its paws outside its master’s lair – forever waiting to lunge with a kill-cry and bare fangs at perceived ‘detractors’ of President Buhari.

Consequently, the media team keeps Buhari insensate to the ravages of ill-will and pent-up fury tearing the natives apart from inside out in the war-ravaged communes of the northeast and northwest, and the killing fields of Ondo, Oyo, Ogun, and other parts of the southwest, where murderous herdsmen paint once peaceful, picturesque domains into human abattoirs.

The presidency and its media office must be having a blast; Buhari, his cabinet members, and aides do not have to rise from their beds every day, with jitters about killer-herdsmen invasion of their abodes and workplace – unlike peasant farmers of the northeast, northwest, southwest and middle belt regions, who set out for their farms daily not knowing if they would return home to their families.

Buhari and cohorts are extremely lucky; unlike Funke Olakunri, the daughter of the National Leader of Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organization, Afenifere, Pa Reuben Fasoranti. Olakunri, 58, was murdered on July 12 by suspected herders on the Benin-Sagamu expressway while on her way to Lagos from Akure in her Land Cruiser SUV after visiting her 93-old-year father.

Police authorities subsequently declared that they have arrested her killers, parading the suspects as Lawal Mazaje (40) from Felele area of Kogi State, Adamu Adamu (50) from Jada area of Adamawa State, Mohammed Shehu Usman (26) from Illela area of Sokoto State and Auwal Abubakar (25) from Shinkafi area of Zamfara State.

Buhari and aides do not have to worry about travelling the deadly stretch of the Lagos-Ibadan highway, particularly the spots where innocent children, mothers, fathers – dependants and breadwinners – are kidnapped and murdered by suspected herders or “criminal elements pretending to be herdsmen” as Buhari, Shehu and company would have us believe.

Of course, this writer recognises that there are peaceful, law-abiding herders doing legitimate business across the country but then, Nigeria must deal with the gruesome reality of the killer herdsmen cum armed bandits.

Worried by persistent attacks against farming communities in Ondo, the state governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, on Monday, gave an ultimatum to herders to vacate all forests while meeting with leaders of Hausa/Fulani and Ebira communities at his office in Alagabaka, Akure, the state capital.

Citing how the activities of the herders have long threatened state security, Akeredolu stated that those who wish to carry on with their herding business must register with appropriate authorities within the next seven days or risk evacuation from the state.

In a swift reaction, the Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said, ”rather the ultimatum and contradiction that may follow the order, the state government and the leadership of the Fulani communities in Ondo state should dialogue for a good understanding that will bring to an urgent end, the nightmarish security challenges facing the state.”

He said, Akeredolu “will be the least expected to unilaterally oust thousands of herders who have lived all their lives in the state on account of the infiltration of the forests by criminals.”

Reacting to Shehu, the Ondo State Government accused him of backing criminal elements masquerading as herdsmen and insisted that herders must obey the seven-day quit order by Governor Akeredolu.

Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Donald Ojogo, stated in a Channels TV interview that it was hard to believe that Buhari endorsed the presidential statement on the issue, challenging Shehu to explain why he has taken up the fight of criminal elements who masquerade as herdsmen.

Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), however, argued that the presidency cannot fault Governor Akeredolu for ordering herders to vacate the forest reserves in the state. In an interview with Punch, Adegboruwa said the presidency misinterpreted the constitution stressing that Section 43 which grants people the right to own properties anywhere in Nigeria, cannot be construed as taking other people’s properties.

“Your right to acquire properties is that you acquire according to law and follow due process. When you get to a forest, it rather belongs to an individual, a community, or government…So, if you want to come to occupy a forest as a stranger, you must obtain the consent of any of the owners. You are a trespasser and any of them can activate a process to forfeit your trespass. This is what the governor has done by giving notice.”

Beyond the arguments and counter-arguments, the presidency must display greater tact, maturity, and statesmanship in handling the issue. The presidential media team must equally display less exuberance and more professionalism at parroting Mr. President and putting words in his mouth.

It is quite amusing that Mr. Garba Shehu was quick to respond to Governor Akeredolu’s ultimatum to herders in Ondo despite his perceived knack for shutting out successive news of herder-inspired carnage in the state.

For instance, Shehu and the presidency were disconcertingly quiet when rice farmer, Jacob Odushe, his son, Adura, and one Victor Ejeh, were reportedly murdered in their farm by suspected herdsmen in Arimogija community, Ose council area of Ondo state. Residents of the community fled their houses following the attack by the herdsmen, alleging that a helicopter once came into the forest of the community and dropped some ammunition for the herdsmen in which they perpetrate criminal activities. According to them, the matter was reported at the police station but no action was taken by the security agencies on the matter.

Shehu was quiet when the Ondo State Security Network Agency aka Amotekun, revealed how herdsmen attacked its operatives while they tried to settle a rift between them and farmers in the state.

Adetunji Adeleye, the Commander of Amotekun in the state while addressing journalists in December last year stated that one of the herdsmen was arrested with dangerous weapons.

He said, “Some farmers from Osi Community ran to the office complaining that their farms had been destroyed by herds. We sent our men there to assess the situation. They found out that the herds were actually on the farm and we invited the herdsmen. But unfortunately, on getting there, they attacked our men with knives and other dangerous weapons. But we were able to arrest one of them, named Abdulkadir Mohammed.”

While great care must be taken to avoid crucifying law-abiding herdsmen for the crimes of certain criminal elements among them, there is no disputing the fact that Governor Akeredolu’s decision to rid Ondo’s forest reserves of illegal squatters and herdsmen must be applauded in the interest of the state.

The presidency’s reactive stance in respect of Governor Akeredolu’s decision, however, reveals a more grievous problem.

By Olatunji Ololade

There is a reason eggheads seldom acquire political power. Intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, pacifists rarely become potentates because they are cast in the mould of Castiglione’s courtiers or the proverbial whore of Babylon. Perhaps the fault is in their stars.

Some assume elevated significance, often self-imposed, and acquired by degrees, position, hard work or repute. Think academics, journalists, technocrats, clerics, among others – this breed cut the perfect portrait of mind’s glory astride brain. Yet grit is what they should seek.

In Nigeria, they sprout and flower as the mystical rose of the mire but by their devices, our chaste, walled garden is made unchaste by brutes wielding unmerited power, like the plundered bower of the country brothel.

Intellectuals parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance, oftentimes. For instance, soon after Nigeria imploded by the #EndSARS protests, several “leaders of thought” justified the government’s flawed response to the youth protesters. Several others advanced homilies on how the youth may reassert presence politically by defying constituted authorities and continuing with the protests. None established for the youths, an instructive or realistic strategy at securing power.

It’s instructive to note that on both sides of the divide – pro-oligarchs vs pro-youths – are self-confessed philosophers and opinion moulders who pride themselves as Nigeria’s intelligentsia.

They pride themselves as the nation’s most dependable compass for navigating a brighter future. They claim that they are in their youth or friends of the youth, arguing that they do a better job projecting a positive image for the country on the global scene by their exploits in academia, entertainment, literature, and digital technology.

More saddening, however, is the intervention of the pro-youth intelligentsia; comprising mostly youths and ‘friends of the youth,’ they argue that the incumbent oligarchs’ shameless corruption, greed, brutishness, inefficiencies, and contempt for the youth pushed the latter to march on the streets, protesting among other ills, police brutality, and corrupt leadership.

But even amid their storms of spunk and slogans, Nigeria thirsts for a liberating elixir. Rarely have we seen or read, post-EndSARS, an instructive and realistic strategy at reclaiming Nigeria from the vulturine political class.

The supposedly fiery intelligentsia believe that their boutique or Ivy League education, international exposure, and friends in high places affirm their sagacity and depth in local politics.

When the hustle pits them on the side of the oppressive oligarchs, they arrogate to themselves a false sense of worth and significance in national affairs. They jostle to be part of the government’s ‘think tanks,’ they lobby to become political aides, playing Goebbel to Nigeria’s Hitlers.

When the hustle pits them on the side of the ‘masses’ or youth divide, they think they are deeply engaged in politics by debating the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or start a #Hashtag for or against anything and everything.

They follow the news presenting sexy realism and varnished perspectives on local and international politics – often rehashing other people’s views. This breed of the intelligentsia will reel by rote why the Arab Spring’s failure must be seen as inversely successful.

They consume political information mainly to mouth off on Twitter and Facebook, and as a way of reinforcing their maudlin fits and bigotries. These people are political thugs and attention junkies.

What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than shooting YouTube comedy skits is to cinematography.

Between their flawed persona and lack of moral substance rids them of grit. Ultimately, they play errand dog and court sycophant to the President, governors, lawmakers, and even the mob of angry youths. They can be likened to the celebrity hairdresser, boudoir confidant or presidential lounge lizard perpetually nodding in affirmative to the caprices of his principal.

They are constantly engaged at the feet and filth attic of the herd, their masters and benefactors. Flattery and malice leap from their forked tongues as they ennoble and attack their principal or quarry’s perceived allies and detractors.

Through dispensations and conflict situations, they are pliable and servile, projecting with slavish plasticity their principals’ whim and wile. Their identities are self-evacuated as they persistently open themselves like a glove to the political palm. Like Castiglione’s male harlots, their shameless self-abasement is unmanly and amoral; they elevate bum over forelock in a flagrant rite of political sodomy.

This is unbecoming of the intellectual class but it’s their fate in contemporary Nigeria. They speak modern in the tenor of savage minions. Their principals, however, attain power through stolen ballots, carnage, and bloodshed. They barge on to the stage like barbarians through the trapdoor.

Having learned to speak bullets and blood-lust, these ‘smart’ actors row with cudgels on a river of tears and blood. With rippling deviltry, they hack their way to public office atop a bridge of corpses and human entrails.

Yet somehow, the modern intellectual believes that this gang of deathly overlords can be removed from public office by protests, sloganeering, and “a free and fair election.” How can the election be fair when the process is skewed to favour the ruling oligarchs?

It’s instructive to note that while the #EndSARS protesters frolicked at street carnivals, the political class released the date of the 2023 elections. Among other things, it revealed how serious-minded and methodical they are in their quest to sustain political power beyond 2023.

The youths, for all their spunk and spittle, will, however, be massively disenfranchised in 2023. This is because they have failed to set their needlepoints astride the prick of pain. Having marched on the streets to protest bad policing, leadership failure, and corruption in government circuits, they failed to seize the priceless opportunity presented by the political class’ jitters, to engage it in constructive dialogue and reassessment of governance and security structures as crucial facets of Nigeria’s political and socio-economic malaise.

To rebuild Nigeria, the youth must seek legitimate means of participation in the political process.

They must seize the moment to regroup, adopt or establish a viable political party, duly registered, and founded on humane principles of nationhood, citizenship, and thought. They must present through legitimate means, to the parliament, a heartfelt wish to participate in the forthcoming elections.

To achieve this, they must urge the National Assembly to normalise the use of the international passport, driver’s licence, national identity card, and BVN (for electronic ballot) as acceptable means of voting at the 2023 elections. Of course, the political class will object to this given their penchant for hoarding voter’s cards to fulfill their rigging master-plans, but it’s worth starting the debate over that.

It’s saddening that Nigeria’s intelligentsia has failed to mobilise the youths towards achieving these lofty objectives or the like. To what end are finely crafted homilies and treatises on the youths’ newfound political awareness if they won’t inspire the youths to participate creditably in the political process?

Progressive citizenship requires more evolved and purposeful engagement in politics than wanton theorising and spouting on barrel heads to be seen.

Anybody can mouth off via the social and mainstream media, true patriots hop in the trenches.