The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Nigeria’s viral reset (1)

    Nigeria’s viral reset (1)

    Ololade Olatunji

    The coronavirus aka COVID-19 affirms the rabid assertions of Nigerian nature. The virus presents Nigeria as a food for worms.

    Faith advocates describe it as a divine punishment for our mortal sins, a viral whiplash mimicking God’s plague on wayward Israel. Atheists argue otherwise. Liberals, scientists, common sense proponents, health experts and political pundits moot dangerous versions of relative truth, arguing that Nigeria would soon be overwhelmed by the disease, because she ignores the strife of contraries that births her plummet down dystopia’s steep ravine.

    The chickens have come home to roost. The depth of decline of the country’s health system is best illustrated by President Muhammadu Buhari’s penchant for medical tourism abroad at the inception of his administration.

    The President, like the very few wealthy Nigerians and privileged public officers, who could afford it, embarked on recurrent trips abroad for medical care. There is no gainsaying Mr. President sought the benefit of state-of-the-art health facilities overseas, necessity persistently denied to the Nigerian citizenry.

    Even as the nation’s public health centres deteriorated, several governors and lawmakers brazenly hopped on a plane to receive treatment for health issues, from the mundane to the severe.

    As the malady persisted, the press, presumably the last hope of the common man, answered differently to the miseries of the downtrodden. Driven by a fixation for politics and desperation to meet the bottomline, a large swathe of the mainstream and digital media scorned the grisly narratives of the citizenry to focus on politics and gossip as prime time news.

    Thus we heard little about the failing health system and its impact on the people. Save a handful of media, the majority focused on illusions. They fed the people comforting myths, often from the perspective of the government and big business.

    The corridors of power thus became our Versailles, from where prominent journalists relaunched their practice as government courtiers. Driven by hunger pangs and a lust for the good life, most TV pundits and supposed leader writers, learnt to beguile the citizenry by the hollow stagecraft of political theatre.

    They gifted the powerful with a fawning forum mimicking a critical rostrum. At the same time, they pretended to have investigated and vetted government claims of efficiency. It was a dirty quid pro quo. The journalists got access to the elite as long as they faithfully doctored their analyses and reports to suit government agenda.

    The culprits forgot that tragedy has a revolving door through which they too, must travel, given their complicity in the poor governance of the nation’s health sector, among others.

    Before the advent of COVID-19, it was hardly surprising to see supposedly well-to-do journalists, brag like their peer in other disciplines, about their medical tourism abroad. “I just came back. I went to London for medical check-up,” they would say. Characteristically, they saw nothing wrong with the ruling class’ inordinate junketing abroad for “medical check-ups.” Hence public officers squandered public fund on reckless medical tourism abroad. Some had the effrontery to add their relatives, concubines and commercial sex workers, often patronised by them, as beneficiaries of such reckless spending.

    Enter COVID-19 and Nigeria undergoes a moral reset. The coronavirus is a status leveller; hence its affliction of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, the Governor of Bauchi, Bala Mohammed, and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s son, Mohammed, among others.

    The sudden death of a former Managing Director of Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), Suleiman Achimugu, who was reportedly the first to die of the dreaded coronavirus in Nigeria has incited morbid fear around his former base in Abuja and the nation’s seat of power.

    Achimugu, who reportedly died over night from the virus in Abuja, was said to have returned from the United Kingdom two weeks earlier.

    Suddenly, the nation’s ruling class have bitten the humble pie. They can no longer embark on reckless medical tourism abroad as their favourite destination points are currently hot-spots of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The truth has dawned on them in a moment of eternal damnation; they and their families are suddenly at the mercy of the health systems they deliberately neglected in savage fits of fiscal and official irresponsibility.

    The consequences of their actions, were hitherto, exclusively borne by the impoverished citizenry, who suffered dearth of quality medical care due to medical braindrain. According to conservative estimates, about 2,000 doctors have departed Nigeria over the past few years, for greener pasture abroad. Many have blamed the exodus on poor working conditions, government insensitivity and illiteracy in health administration.

    The figures are startling; only four percent of Nigeria’s budget is allocated to health annually. While the annual healthcare threshold per person in the United States (US) is $10,000, in Nigeria it is just $6, according to an Al Jazeera report.

    A senior nursing staff at a Lagos tertiary health facility lamented to me, recently, that, aside the inadequacy of medical doctors, the hospital also suffers a dearth of adequate nursing and support staff.

    She lamented that her medical facility assigns two nurses to 15 to 20 patients. “How do you expect them to work effectively? I have to walk the length and breadth of the hospital taking patients to theatre, receiving patients from the theatre, admitting patients and attending to daily callers. We nurses also have to sweep and mop the hospital floor by ourselves, due to lack of health attendants (janitors). We shouldn’t be doing such work but we have no choice since there is just one health attendant serving about eight wards. As a nurse, you won’t leave the unattended wards to stay unkempt.

    “There is also persistent failure of electricity supply. Imagine having to work with torchlight in a hospital ward. Most times, we resort to the use of torches to operate in our hospital wards due to epileptic power supply, and this usually happens overnight,” she said.

    Another grievous failing at several medical facilities across the country is the dearth functional conveniences including ceiling fans and air-conditioners. From the nurses’ rooms to the patients’ wards, many public health centres lack such facilities.

    Consequently, patients blame nursing personnel for failings they have no control over; many patients are admitted into hospital wards with neither fan nor AC units. So doing, they are subjected to unbearable heat by hospital staff, who have to keep the windows locked to keep out armed robbers, rodents and mosquitoes.

    Patients are also human hence it is understandable that they would complain. A recent investigation into the operations of one such teaching hospital revealed that surgical patients are admitted into poorly ventilated wards. Their experiences before and after surgery in the ward beggars urgent intervention; out of the six fans in a cubicle, for instance, just one was functioning and it was faulty as at press time. Due to the extreme discomfort experienced by one of the patients on admission, his relative had to start fanning him with a hand fan.

    Many a patient have likened their stay in such facilities to sleeping in a tomb. Due to poor ventilation, nurses often advise patients coming in for surgery to bring fans from home if they hope for their temporary stay in the hospital to be conducive.

    The toilets are very bad too. Most of them won’t flush; they are broken, discoloured and unusable.

  • Plague justice and 2023

    Plague justice and 2023

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    WHEN the coronavirus eventually afflicts Nigeria’s most senior public officers, and hurls them to life’s precipice, let’s hope they understand the poetry of their flirtation with demise. Let’s hope they appreciate the justice of it.

    In that moment, their “Excellencies” would rue their refusal to build world class health facilities in the country. They will regret the paltry funds they doled out to the health sector, leaving the citizenry to die of misdiagnosis and malaria, while they jetted out to pop a pimple and trim a wart, or treat a minor case of migraine in specialist hospitals abroad.

    Let’s hope the afflicted governor, lawmaker, minister, among others, appreciate how the billions of public fund wildly misappropriated in the purchase of their official cars, their children’s weddings and wives’ shopping sprees abroad, could save lives and guarantee public confidence in the time of coronavirus.

    Nigeria hasn’t mustered a convincing response to the virus; following the brute awakening posed by the Italian patient, about five new cases have reportedly being identified, thus society can no longer dominate the disease psychologically or dismiss it as urban legend.

    Each surge of rumour or news report about fresh quarantine of “suspected cases” booms as a relapse to reason or hypnotic startling to sentience, still. Is Nigeria truly ready to contain the scourge?

    After the Ebola crisis, one would think that every state would build a containment centre with at least 250 beds as a proactive measure against future pandemic – it is noteworthy that besides the containment facility built by the Lagos State government, no other state initiated such a measure.

    Today, every fresh case of coronavirus must be transferred to Lagos to avail the patient of appropriate medical care; in the case of an emergency, the fate of the patient is better imagined.

    As Nigeria grapples with the frenzy for nasal masks, gloves, antibiotics, hand sanitizers and ‘anointing-miracle oil,’ all barely available at prohibitive prices, and lawmakers plan a two-week recess in order to allow management of the National Assembly provide screening and detention facilities at the complex, the presidency has pronounced a ban on foreign trips by public officers.

    Who would believe that there would come a day, when public officers shied from foreign trips?

    Apparently, the incumbent ruling class, faced by its vulnerability alongside 190-million citizenry, or thereabouts, has suddenly stirred to the demands of public office. Struck by morbid fear of the eruption of the virus beyond their gated paradise, they commit to reactionary measures against a plague that has now been pronounced by the World Health Organisation (WHO), as a pandemic. Simply put, public officers only seem to care about their own fate.

    While they fail in several crucial aspects of governance, they allot the lion’s share of public wealth to the fulfillment of their vanities. They prey on the weak and helpless citizenry, deploying the agents and machinery of state – at the backdrop of the situation, certain public officers, governors to be precise, are embroiled in a bitter, war to perpetuate themselves in power beyond the 2023 general elections.

    While they obsess about the 2023 polls, Nigeria reels from the ravage of terrorism, armed banditry and the onset of a pandemic.

    In light of the hardships foisted upon all by inefficient leadership, the onus rests on the citizenry to liberate themselves and the country from their clutches.

    The relationship between a predatory leadership and the citizenry could be likened to that between a property owner and an intruder. There can be no compromise between both; offering the intruder a single teaspoon of the property owner’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender as Rand would say – the recognition of the burglar’s right to one’s property.

    And if I may retell in Rand-speak, the Nigerian conundrum, I would say, that, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between the citizenry and an insensitive leadership.

    Whether we like it or not, there can be no concession or sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. There can be no compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality.

    Nothing corrupts and disintegrates culture and character like the principle of moral agnosticism; that is, the idea that one must be morally tolerant of anything and everything. And that ingenuity consists in never distinguishing good from evil and taking sides. It is obvious who profits and loses by such precept.

    Even as so many of us indulge in the propagation of hatred, for and against the interests, of our preferred politicians and public officers, it wouldn’t hurt to heed the subtle warnings of reason and the caveat of objectivity.

    Given that we put ourselves on trial every time we think and speak, it is only fair that we shun the amoral cynicism and hooliganism that has become the plague of the political space.

    The next general elections is in 2023 but desperate actors in the political class have begun plotting, 36 months early. Governors with presidential ambition, for instance, desert their states and primary duty while shuttling covens where they hatch their frantic plots.

    Such characters conveniently forget that the best plot towards relevance and staying in power is good governance. Rather than institute a sterling culture of governance, they embark on a delirious quest to grab power, outside the considerations of merit and performance.

    As states groan under the burden of infrastructure lapses, education, regulatory and health systems collapse, the citizenry must understand that they are on the receiving end.

    This is certainly not the time to defend unjust privileges of ethnicity, religion, benefactors and godfathers, even as the latter make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and compatriots whose growth is continually stunted by oppression.

    A spectre is haunting the country. Wide-eyed, the electorate entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep leadership on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep our leaders in check.

    As we endure familiar and unfamiliar crisis of citizenship and governance, let us pay good mind to the 2023 electoral march. Come 2023, the citizenry must seek out candidates on the basis of their antecedents in governance and outside it.

    If we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as the argument that some contemptible liar “means well” – that a mooching bum “can’t help it” – that an unrepentant murderer “needs understanding” or that a desperate, power-thirsty politician is driven by concern “for the public good,” the history of our past few decades would have been different.

    Do we know the candidate who could guarantee the provision and sustenance of good roads and electricity, standard and affordable health care, security, a stable economy and quality education among others?

    Shall we now identify and root for the candidate capable of resolving the conflicting characteristics of our tribal mentality? Can we identify the candidate who can validate and attain a worthy equilibrium between the expediency of wiping off our slums vis-à-vis the affordability of beautiful cities and suburbs?

    Can we identify the candidate who can evaluate and project our given concretes by an abstract principle while exacting the most probable if not practicable outcomes? In peace or war, pestilence or health, that would be a leader for all climes.

     

     

  • Shooting pebbles at bandit storms

    Shooting pebbles at bandit storms

    By Olatunji Ololade

    The sun still rises and sets over Nigeria’s blinders and ruined stones. Above the rubble, visages of the world we dream diminish and fade, but we have learnt to romp over the corpses we make.

    We bellow just to hear our voices return from the hills. We watch our lives cascade bloodied ravines, sprawled and littering, where everything morphs to nothing.

    What is it that we seek? To shriek our fears hoarse or inter them beneath the capers of our tragedies and open secrets?

    Perhaps we simply need the landscape to repeat us and replenish every rind of logic that absolves us of blame.

    Who do we blame as our fortune hangs askew? Some have fingered the oligarchs. They say the latter do not believe in self-sacrifice for Nigeria and the common good. Of course, they never have and they never will.

    Their leadership is assured by their full control of the economy and the media. They control the legislature, executive and judiciary; little wonder they wield power as a sharp instrument for personal enrichment and domination.

    Nonetheless, we attack their ocean surge with catapults, hoping pebbles repel their bandit storms. The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis thus the failure of the law, precepts and structures at addressing the country’s major afflictions.

    The foundation for progress is non-existent and that is because the human elements that are meant to erect such monument are spiritless and corrupt. Consequently, we suffer the affliction of a predatory ruling class and a citizenry inclined to fulfill the role of unforgivably docile, self-flagellating lower elements.

    The imprudence of the latter reasserts in the upward mobility of certain crucial members of the divide across class boundaries. Increasing wealth, higher status and social affiliations often alienate this band of circumstantial leaders from the self-confessed values and politics that stood them out as vanguards of rights of the under-privileged.

    Just recently, the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), a coalition of supposedly brilliant, youthful revolutionaries emerged to challenge the dominance of the ruling party, the fast-dissembling All Progressives Congress (APC) and its clownish rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2019 general elections.

    Sadly, these new kids on the block failed to earn Nigerians’ mandate due to their banal theory of rage and aggression.

    Having failed to connect with the grassroots, they embarked on a fool’s gambit, seeking to match the predatory oligarchs, filth for filth, rhetoric for rhetoric, while belting righteous indignation.

    To establish and sustain its integrity, PACT suspended itself in ideological voyeurism and fault-finding, a tactic of assault and defence that eventually became its crucifix and tomb.

    As PACT buried itself in bitter mummiform, Nigerians, the youth especially, consigned the platform and hopes it stoked in them beneath the country’s political thrash pile.

    The PACT disaster is hardly astonishing; the platform and its members, if elected, would eventually play into a stereotype – better they dashed our hopes at the 2019 polls than later.

    Such pitiful waste of potential leaders and emancipators of the masses should never be overlooked. Even so, they are considered as the lucky few who made it to the spotlight. Politically, they are the smarty pants who dared the system and acquired the title of “Former Presidential Aspirant.” They are the nouveau riche, who inspire anecdotes for attaining success and deep pockets despite all odds.

    How many Nigerians succeed so in real life? How many definitions of “success” aren’t deductive from “cheating the system” or defrauding it at all cost?

    Money changes everything. An obsession for it corrupts the elderly and youth alike. While loving it could be practical, an inordinate lust for it drives the covetous to the brink. It shows the oligarchs upside-down and inside-out as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn against statesmanship and the collective good.

    For the love of money, several armed robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists, in their youth, have wasted innocent lives. Many “woke” youths and misguided millenials have equally justified taking bribes, and playing ruinous muscle to the ruling class, claiming its their “share of the collective wealth that they steal from us.”

    Whatever justification they choose to give to it, a bribe is a bribe. And it often changes relations. Once accepted, it reduces the recipient, making him inferior, like the proverbial impotent, who pays to be sodomized by a horse, thinking it would cure his impotence and aid him to sire by his woman, a blessed child.

    The folly of our ways have dawned on us. The oligarchs we enabled with power have evolved some of the worst tyrannies across the 36 states of the federation. A brilliant tyrant could be trusted to a certain degree of depth and capacity to lead but a dimwitted tyrant is infinitely dangerous; as he cannot be trusted beyond his mental handicaps and the devious plots of his associates and kitchen cabinet.

    Sadly, in the corrupted currents of our world, such characters are making frantic gestures to perpetuate themselves in power beyond 2023. It’s 2020, and some governors have spent more time in Abuja than their domains; they are embroiled in desperate plots to beguile and forcibly seize power in 2023 even as they fail to fulfill the duties of their incumbent offices.

    Ongoing political liaisons enable a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by inducements, dubious segregation and manipulative politics.

    Many argue that the major problem afflicting Nigeria is the dearth of inspired leadership drawn from the nation’s youth. A converse view advances the presence of eminently capable youth, potential heroes who have learnt to keep quiet and tactfully ignore our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo. They know, that, as usual, we would always settle for an opportunistic contract between our exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    It is about time we actualized a culture of true ideals against petty passions and sordid objectives. Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship whose ideal of patriotism is held untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss and the temptations of power.

    Let us begin from the grassroots. Let us desensitize ourselves of toxic prejudices and conceit.

    Let us begin to court and patronise the usual objects of our apathy and disdain – like the “inconsequential” park urchin, “hooligan” and muscles for hire in the boondocks, university campuses, the media and law enforcement agencies.

    It is time to connect with the park urchin, neighbourhood thug and militia to channel the inestimable benefits accruable by identifying with them in psyche, electoral will and numbers.

    In 2019, candidates of the PACT collective thrashed blindly about the nation’s political swamp, inciting rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. Eventually, their language did not make sense.

    They could begin to make sense by speaking truths amenable to the miseries of the electorate outside the perimeters of the general elections. For the latter, better tomorrow has passed, today is stricken and yesterday has withered with her ridged fundaments at last.

    Now that fractured ‘Change’ in which they trusted, has drifted down shifting waters to the darkest deep, let the PACT “disrupters” strap torn will to broken resolve and furiously row before we sink.

     

  • Life and legislation in the time of coronavirus

    Life and legislation in the time of coronavirus

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    THE raunch and squalor of a plague breaks cultural and religious taboo. The coronavirus aka COVID-19, for instance, incites a fable of ugliness in the human experience.

    By reducing persons to bodies, the plague casts personality as a totem of renewal and disintegration. It prefigures our struggle with Ebola and its stern, maleficent ghost. COVID-19 could be deadlier, if not well managed.

    By its encounter with the virus, the world suffers a rehash of climactic trauma: more paranoid segments of the globe cringe in fear of a tragedy akin to the Black Death of 1348, a bubonic plague that killed up to 40 percent of Europe’s population.

    Though COVID-19 is supposedly milder in scale and maleficence, wherever it strikes, human tissues cower, viral cells bloom and open their capsules; they split apart and spit pips in the red tide of the victims’ blood. Death is a surety for patients, where health systems fail and treatment is inadequate.

    Epic similes compare COVID-19 to a divine judgement, a vampire, a raging storm, and thunderbolt. When it struck China, the Asian giant, for all its economic power and military strength, cowered before its viral might. The super power recolonizing wide swathes of the African continent could neither tame nor contain the pestilence’s raging storm.

    Authorities have confirmed more than 92,000 cases of the virus worldwide, of which more than 80,000 are in China. More than 3,000 people have died globally, the vast majority in China.

    The virus devastates the giant and minion alike; its surly seeds sprout as conduits of lusus naturae, obliterating history and mankind. Ask Wuhan; a visit to the despoiled Chinese district would convince you.

    How does Nigeria respond to the virus? How does she deal with the brute awakening posed by her Italian patient? First, society tried to dominate the disease psychologically, dismissing it as the proverbial plague that never calls close to home. But then the frightening news of an Italian patient counselled caution; COVID-19 won’t simply pass as urban legend.

    Each surge of rumour or news report about fresh quarantine of “suspected cases” booms as a relapse to reason or hypnotic startling to sentience.

    In the throes of a plague, there is always an awakening of self-preservation but more significantly, a deeper arousal of monstrosity within consciousness. The grotesque becomes random personae.

    Within the government and rich upper class, impulse may stir in sordid forms, premeditatedly, with éclat. Deep within the shanties, suburbs and dreary boondocks, less sophisticated forms of grotesqueness may stir. Pestilence haunts our sordid neighbourhoods, restoring horrid theatricality.

    Nigeria experiences a frenzy for nasal masks, gloves, antibiotics, hand sanitizers and ‘anointing-miracle oil,’ all barely available at prohibitive prices.

    At the backdrop of the drama, the House of Representatives, on Tuesday, resolved to suspend plenary sessions for two weeks in order to allow management of the National Assembly provide screening and detention facilities at the complex.

    Thus a nation of 190-million people or thereabouts, will be deserted for two weeks by her elected representatives simply because they fear the eruption of a plague past their gated paradise.

    The lawmakers will embark on their shameful vacation even as millions of school kids, mostly children of the underprivileged electorate, continue to attend school.

    They will retire to guilty pleasures, unperturbed, even as disturbed parents take their children to school, every morning, with a heaviness in their hearts and tremor in the souls, praying fervently that the pestilence spares their beloved wards.

    Nigeria’s 360 lawmakers would desert the country for two-weeks in perilous times. The 109-member Senate may follow suit and down tools to protect their privileged hides.

    The National Assembly would bat no eyelid even as the bumbling government, which they are part of, abandon the citizenry to a comatose health system and infrastructure. The situation at the nation’s hospitals is worrisome. The airports are a health risk as the arrival and departure terminals suffer the lack of adequate screening facilities. But these are of little significance in the estimation of the Nigerian lawmaker.

    More worrisome is the citizenry’s cynicism and indifference to the situation. Silence is never apt to government perfidy.

    Nigeria’s lawmakers are a comical group, always eager to appropriate outrageous perks to advantage while they neglect more pressing, constitutional duties, like staying in session, in time of a plague.

    Just recently, a coalition of civil society groups launched a lawsuit to stop the purchase of luxury cars, valued at N5.550 billion (about $15.3 million) for principal officers in the Senate, stressing, that, such spending was “unjust” and inimical to the welfare of the citizenry in a troubled economy.

    In a related development, another coalition filed a lawsuit asking the Federal High Court in Abuja to stop the leadership of the House of Representatives from spending an estimated N5.04 billion to buy 400 exotic Toyota Camry 2020 cars for principal officers and members, “until an impact assessment of the spending on access to public services and goods like education, security, health and clean water, is carried out.”

    Such is the quality of lawmakers, or “statesmen” if you like, parading Nigeria’s hallowed chambers.

    Perhaps they would set aside a day or two, of their ill-advised vacation, to mull over the challenges before them and the perils of botching the COVID-19 containment exercise.

    The disease has spread through China and to 31 other countries, including the United States. There are now at least 137 known cases across 13 states in the US. As a result, the U.S. government and public health partners are implementing aggressive measures to slow and contain transmission of the virus in the US, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC).

    About 1,336 CDC staff members have been involved in the COVID-19 response, including clinicians (i.e., physicians, nurses, and pharmacists), epidemiologists, veterinarians, communicators, data scientists and modellers, and coordination staff members.

    Of these, 497 (37%) have been deployed to 39 locations in the US and internationally, including CDC quarantine stations at U.S. ports of entry, state and local health departments, hospitals, and military bases that are housing quarantined persons.

    The health workers are working with state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments to assist with case identification, contact tracing, evaluation of persons under investigation for COVID-19, and medical management of cases; and with academic partners to understand the virulence, risk for transmission, and other characteristics of the virus.

    Also, the U.S. Department of State is working to safely evacuate Americans to the US from international locations where there is substantial, sustained transmission of COVID-19, and to house them and monitor their health during a 14-day quarantine period – even as Nigeria’s government ignores her stranded citizens in Wuhan, hub of COVID-19’s outbreak.

    Beyond the bromides on Lagos State’s very effective anti-Ebola campaign, few years ago, is Nigeria really equipped to contain COVID-19?

    Our reality spotlights the factors driving denial and the need for disease control to be contextualized in social realities and practicalities. An outbreak can worsen preexisting tensions; palliative measures would fail due to the current weakness and lack of accountability of health systems in an atmosphere of insecurity and politicised rumours.

    Shut downs, movement restrictions, quarantine and isolation can only be tolerable if provision for basic needs, treatment and livelihoods are made in conducive environment by the government and intervening parties.

    But these issues aren’t worth our lawmakers’ attention.

     

  • SARS killings: Time for IGP Adamu to clean house

    SARS killings: Time for IGP Adamu to clean house

    By Olatunji Ololade

    This minute, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) manifests as a pandemic, a colony of sentinels overrun by deathly tumours. It’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) afflicts it with cultic character and the decadent orientation of a malefactor.

    While police authorities justify SARS as the expedient answer to the scourge of armed robbers, kidnappers, among others, the supposedly elite squad mutates like a reptilian predator, preying on innocent citizenry in frenzied pursuit of internet fraudsters called “Yahoo Boys.” Oftentimes, their protracted hunt manifests as a deathly couvade.

    Yet the Nigeria Police must answer for the gruesome death, or murder perhaps, of Remo Stars defender and assistant captain, Kazeem Tiamiyu.

    Officers of the unit, operating in Sagamu, Ogun State, are culpable for their role in the death of the 26-year-old footballer, who was crushed by a hit-and-run driver on the Sagamu-Abeokuta highway soon after they arrested him.

    Although the police claimed, that, Tiamiyu a.k.a Kaka, jumped out of the vehicle in an attempt to escape and was crushed by an oncoming vehicle, Sanni Abubakar, a friend and team-mate of the deceased, stated that he and Tiamiyu were both arrested and were being taken to SARS office in Abeokuta when the officers stopped on the Sagamu-Abeokuta highway and pushed the deceased out of the vehicle. In the process, an oncoming vehicle ran over Tiamiyu.

    The latter’s death sparked protests in Sagamu resulting in another tragic episode, on Monday, that saw the police fire live bullets at protesters, killing one of them.

    In the wake of Tiamiyu’s killing, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Adamu, in frantic bid to defuse rising contempt for the police and appeal to the bereaved, and irate citizenry’s good nature, issued fresh directives disbanding the NPF’s Zonal Intervention Squad (ZIS) in Ogun.

    Read Also: EndSARS lauds Saraki for Police Trust Fund Law

    Represented by a Deputy Inspector-General of Police (DIG), Peter Ogunyonwo, the IGP disclosed this when he accompanied Gov. Dapo Abiodun on a visit to the parents of the deceased on Tuesday in Sagamu.

    He added that their offices have also been handed over to the State Police Command. The DIG said that the death of Tiamiyu would prompt the police to carry out more reforms, insisting that the officers involved, who have since been arrested, were on illegal duty and did not obtain clearance from the police formation in Sagamu before the operation.

    The malady has eaten deep into the core of the NPF, as different units mutate, even as you read, into various forms of grotesqueness. It would be recalled that the fatal  shooting to death of Kolade Johnson, by men of the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (F-SARS) unit, of the police sparked widespread criticism, with a renewed call on the Federal Government to scrap the controversial squad.

    Johnson, 36, was allegedly hit by a stray bullet at a public viewing centre during a Premier League fixture between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur in Lagos, last year. Johnson died at the hospital while waiting for treatment. The deceased, a father of one, was reportedly devoted to his family and had just returned from South Africa, where he had lived for five years to focus on his music career.

    Johnson’s killing provoked widespread anger among Nigerians, who said the police unit had gone rogue and should be disbanded immediately.

    So far, none of the reforms and gimmicks of propaganda have blunted the NPF’s murderous hordes; the latter demean the good work done by the negligible few striving to truly ennoble the police by sterling service and commitment to precepts

    Police boss, IGP Adamu, couldn’t have forgotten so soon, too, his stupefaction at seeing police officers on his watch, harass Enyimba Football Club player, Stephen Chukwude, simply because he was driving a Mercedez Benz, last year. The footballer was harassed by policemen and accused of being a “Yahoo Boy” because he was driving a Mercedez Benz and owned an iPhone.

    Even after presenting documents verifying his identity, one of the policemen insisted that any youth who owned a Mercedes Benz was a yahoo boy.

    There is no gainsaying corrupt police units, including SARS, a supposedly elite formation of the NPF, has over time, brought the police to disrepute via its complicity in cases of extra-judicial killings, torture, ill-treatment of detainees and extortion of suspects. SARS operatives, persistently neglect their constitutional duty of ridding the nation’s streets and highways of armed bandits and, instead, engage in wild pursuit of the country’s youths, many of whom they label “Yahoo Boys.”

    In several incidents, the public allege, that, where they justifiably apprehend internet fraudsters, they do so only to extort them; afterwards, they set them free. I have witnessed in recent past, an incident whereby SARS officers pulled their guns on an internet fraudster at a Lagos bar only to set him free, after they hauled him to a nearby ATM to extort money from him.

    In an ugly contradiction to the NPF motto: “Police is your friend,” several police units, – SARS in particular – have continually let loose corrupt, homicidal officers on mostly poor, struggling segments of the citizenry. You don’t see them patrolling Banana Island in search of “Yahoo Boys;” this doesn’t mean that such vicinities are unaffected by crime or various classes of criminals, SARS would rather lay siege to the suburbs and boondocks, to kill and waste children of the underprivileged.

    The NPF’s SARS currently manifests as an affliction to impoverished urban and suburban communities; equipped with military-grade weapons and empowered to arrest, harass and kill largely at will, the police unit has become the major affliction of the poor.

    Its officers make no pretensions to fulfilling their oath to protect and serve the citizenry, rather they carry on with impunity and gross disregard for justice.

    It is unsurprising that IGP Adamu acknowledged that the SARS officer erred; the

    NPF leadership and Nigerian government have on multiple occasions acknowledged the police’s shortcomings.

    In recent years, the government has launched several police reform initiatives yet the government has generally failed to hold accountable police officers who assault innocent citizenry and kill them.

    Public complaint mechanisms, internal police controls, and civilian oversight remain weak, underfunded, and largely ineffective according to the Human Rights Watch.

    Aggressive policing becomes yet another bulwark of underfunded, poorly trained and inadequately equipped NPF. Of course, Nigeria occasionally enjoys, flashes of brilliance by brave but very tiny fragments of the police force. Officers comprising such circuits represent a positive deviance from the murderous, wayward operatives constituting the NPF’s SARS; against all odds, they patrol the borders between our societal wastelands and impervious leadership.

    Its about time the police leadership and the Nigerian government addressed the dynamics that have given rise to and sustain endemic police corruption and its  related abuses, and ensure that those who perpetrate these crimes are held accountable.

    So far, none of the reforms and gimmicks of propaganda have blunted the NPF’s murderous hordes; the latter demean the good work done by the negligible few striving to truly ennoble the police by sterling service and commitment to precepts.

    The incumbent IGP must establish mechanisms to breathe life into and activate internal control structures of Public Complaints Unit at all police stations and restructure its largely discredited internal anti-corruption unit.

    The government should also launch an independent inquiry into cases of high-handedness and abuse perpetrated by SARS officers among other police units. They should investigate and prosecute without delay police officers implicated in extortion, willful murder and human rights abuses.

  • Goons of LASTMA (2)

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    ROAD travel, in Lagos, is an exhaustive blow-out; a romp of popping male muscles and bursting female globes. Chaos rules the metropolis and runs the dusty suburbs amok. Enter the Lagos State Traffic Monitoring Authority (LASTMA), presumably to sanitise the dystopic motif. Is LASTMA as effective as its cracked up to be?

    Kayode Opeifa, former Commissioner of Transport, in response to the first part of this article argued that, LASTMA, as an organisation, and its officers are not violent.

    He said, “They are a civil enforcement organisation, whose officers carry no weapon but deploy their skills and societal recognition. Should we have a case of one or few incidences that is unacceptable, it can best be described as isolated cases and regrettable in the context of the society they operate. Their training in traffic management is about the best in Nigeria and they are constantly being exposed to attitudinal and human relations training.”

    Speaking for the government, he went on to say, that, “LASTMA remains one of the master-strokes of public service policy in Nigeria in the last 20 years. It is being replicated in most states of the country today with help from the Lagos establishment. The government is always concerned, worried and apologetic when any of its workforce misbehaves. In your own case I personally feel your pain and I am very sure that the GM and the organisation as usual, will ensure all those involved are identified, disciplined and retrained as necessary in line with LASTMA and public service extant rules.”

    The former transport commissioner and ex-Team Leader of the Presidential Committee on Clearing of Apapa Port and Access Roads argued that the misdemeanour of a few bad eggs shouldn’t be used to tar the good works of the coastal city’s traffic law enforcement agency.

    His rebuttal comes in the wake of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s warning to the 1,017 newly-recruited LASTMA officers to shun corruption and uncivilised conduct. Sanwo-Olu gave the warning during the Passing Out Parade (POP) of the newly recruited officers last week, in Lagos.

    “Corruption is not limited to extortion or financial inducement. Indiscipline in office, harassment of citizens will also be frowned at.”

    Going forward, concrete steps must be taken to prevent a recurrence of high-handedness and violent physical attacks on Lagosians by corrupt LASTMA officers in episodes that Mr. Opeifa identified as “isolated cases and regrettable.”

    At times, its not the driver or private citizen that ends up as the casualty of chaos, Lagos has lost some LASTMA officers too to road rage.

    The agency authorities must institute more inventive strategies at apprehending traffic violators, including those that deploy violence against uniformed operatives. The state could install functional traffic cameras, street/highway lamps, CCTV and reinforce punitive measures against defaulters.

    Stringent punishment must equally be meted out to uncouth and violent LASTMA officers making up the fraction responsible for what LASTMA authorities consider negligible cases of mayhem.

    While counselling LASTMA operatives to desist from taking unnecessary action against the citizenry, Governor Sanwo-Olu said, “Let us be civil, let us be firm and be decisive. Do not leave any room for the public to doubt your integrity, your honesty and your commitment to traffic management. You have been given an opportunity to serve the people of Lagos State to the best of your ability, and this opportunity must be seen as a privilege.”

    His reference to “privilege,” “integrity” and “unnecessary action” is instructive. It connotes the gamut of LASTMA’s responsibilities to the public and the latter’s expectations of the traffic monitoring agency.

    Of course, many a government scribe and apologist would argue that Lagos drivers are lawless thus the need for extreme punitive measures to check their excesses, but like I said in the first part of this piece, LASTMA officers must be reorientated on the benefits of achieving balance and harmony between instruction received and implementation.

    They must be re-sensitized against yielding to anarchic consciousness; they must be taught to scorn signals from lust and rage, and instead, consult tact and brain.

    At the moment, the traffic situation of Lagos is a Darwinian spectacle of aggression of the eaters and the eaten. The rabid struggle for right of way and law enforcement debases service and order to the will-to-power. Public peace and ethics are corrupted and assailed by pagan instinct.

    Lagos deserves a proactive, humane and ethically sound LASTMA, whose officers truly consider their job as both a privilege and an opportunity to serve the people of Lagos to the best of their ability.

    And to whom much is accorded, much is expected; if Lagos wishes for commuters to be completely law-abiding, the state government must do its part to make transportation easier. Government application of traffic rules are more punitive than preventative, and this is justifiable perhaps in the context of the society where the laws are interpreted. But I would suggest that the government evolves a preventative cum punitive model of traffic management.

    For instance, the government could provide lay-bys, where motorists with faulty vehicles and those involved in accidents can pull up, and thus avoid causing unnecessary gridlock. LASTMA officials must subsequently be sensitised to the actual demands of their job, which is to ease Lagos’ traffic problem and not compound it.

    Lagos needs to repair the dangerous gulley at Obadeyi-Ajala where at least two large trucks somersault every week, endangering lives and causing serious gridlock. Then, there is the deadly issue of LASTMA absence at the Obadeyi-Ajala, Runsewe Estate and Ahmadiyya Bus Stop, where both private and commercial drivers speed against the run of traffic thus constituting serious hazard.

    Several times, LASTMA officers of the Pen Cinema division, turn a blind eye to commercial bus (danfo) drivers hurtling through the red light while they swoop on defaulting private vehicle owners at the Oke Koto junction in Agege.

    The officers have gained a notoriety for harassing defaulting private motorists even as they ignore commercial transporters guilty of the same offence, often to the chagrin of bystanders and commuters stuck in the traffic caused by their antics.

    The malady persists at the Oja Oba, Abule Egba, and Fagba junctions. You could be forgiven for thinking that some LASTMA officers are involved in a gentleman’s agreement with commercial transporters, to ignore the latter’s excesses.

    Of course, this writer is aware of the few exceptional cases in which mindless commercial transporters assault, and sometimes, kill diligent LASTMA officers for daring to do their work.

    Notwithstanding, it is dangerous to espouse the trite narrative of the eternal lawlessness of Lagos drivers; not every Lagos driver is delinquent, as we have sterling LASTMA officers, so do we have motorists who are law-abiding.

    Lest we forget that it is very impossible for any LASTMA officer to arrest or prosecute the ward, relative or associate of a bigwig. When the violent LASTMA officer arrested my brother, I bluntly told him that he must desist from giving the operative any bribe and instead follow him to the office to pay the stipulated fine.

    I doubt if that same officer would arrest and assault the ward of a serving Lagos governor or LASTMA’s DG, if either were caught violating traffic rules.

    Lagos must reinvest in progressive revitalization of LASTMA, given its significance to the stability and fortunes of the state.

     

  • Goons of LASTMA (1)

    By Olatunji Ololade

    The mental processes of the proverbial “Lagos driver” spurred the state government to recommend psychiatric evaluation as part rehabilitation of traffic offenders, among other measures. That initiative was meant to be implemented by sterling law enforcers.

    More drastic measures are, however, required in the recruitment and periodic evaluation of officers of the Lagos State Traffic Monitoring Authority (LASTMA). Profuse apologies to the tireless, diligent LASTMA officer by whose industry Lagos sustains endurable traffic, everyday.

    His random peer carries on as an ‘enforcer’ with the psychology of an outlaw. He is sensitive to nature’s harsh elements thus his mental processes are wildly tinged. Chicane is his lord and master; he is like the Delphic oracle maddened by vapours.

    He reverts to anarchic consciousness, receiving signals from lust and rage rather than tact and brain. Driven by official instructions to prevent violation of traffic law, he carries on mindlessly, forgetting or not knowing, that, there should be balance and harmony between instruction received and implementation.

    Whereas LASTMA was created to serve as a supportive machinery of state, currently, it operates as a mercenary of state – driven by inordinate hankering for cash, violence and bloodshed among other destructive tendencies.

    Several months ago, I escaped death in the hands of homicidal LASTMA officers. The murderous horde was attached to the agency’s Pen Cinema division in Agege, Lagos. About seven of them attacked me and an older relative, who is a police detective, with broken bottles, cudgels and amulet.

    We were on our way to the gym at Police College, Ikeja, when I made a stop over at the popular Mosalasi market. I parked off the road, into the gates of an uncompleted building. Ten minutes later, I returned to an empty spot. I was shaken.

    A market woman of the sidewalk told me that some LASTMA officers came to tow my vehicle.

    It flouted common sense. There were two commercial buses packed by the roadside. The LASTMA officers ignored them and moved their towing truck inwardly to tow my vehicle which constituted no traffic nuisance.

    “O neat gaan, eni ti o ni ma ya owo (It looks neat, the owner would make a fine mark)” they reportedly said. Following a tedious search, I sighted my vehicle, jacked-up, on LASTMA’s tow-truck opposite their holding lot beside the Isheri-Olowoora park in Agege. I felt relief.

    Instinctively, I brought out my camera and took shots of the vehicle but a wild looking officer leapt at me from behind the tow-truck, dragging my camera from me. I pulled back and he shoved me violently. I reeled backwards into fast-moving traffic but I was caught by my companion just in the nick of time.

    My assailant said I had no right to take pictures of my vehicle while attached to their tow-truck. He said it constituted an offence under Lagos traffic laws. With a chuckle, I marched into their command at Pen Cinema to complain but I was told to “go and settle” with the officers. “Oga give them something,” said a pinched operative with tobacco-stained teeth.

    All along, my car had been moved into their garage, its four tyres deflated; LASTMA works with mischievous speed and skill.

    In cancerous, ill-conceived phrases, the LASTMA officers admitted to breaking beer bottles and attempting to stab us. They owned up to assaulting us, unprovoked, knowing I am a journalist and my companion, a detective, and we flouted no law.

    Again, I brought out my camera and another goon in LASTMA uniform sprang at me, threatening to “disfigure” me. I persisted and he threw a mean hook. I ducked. His next punch would land on my chin but for my companion who shielded me from his wild assault.

    “Stop it! I am a journalist. This is my uncle. He is a detective. We’ve done nothing wrong. We don’t want trouble!” I said.

    “Eyin, e ti ri trouble! E fe ku loni!” (You! You have seen trouble! You will nearly die today!) screamed another goon, spurting marijuana fumes like a faulty locomotive engine. Downing his last swig of sepe (alcoholic beverage), the latter charged at me while his accomplice gunned for my camera. They were on auto-rage at 9 am, extremely high on sepe and ‘smoke.’

    Although I was set for the gym, I would burn calories ducking blows and hay-makers from drug-hardened LASTMA officers. In the melee, an officer smashed a beer bottle against a boulder and charged at me with its jagged edge. Another came for my detective uncle with a cudgel. In all, seven of them charged at us, eyes bloodshot, noses flared, muscles rippling. One of the officers brought out an amulet and threatened to “kill” us.

    A small crowd gathered but no one could get in because the LASTMA thugs had chained the gates, locking us inside. Being high has its shortcomings, due to their inebriated state, they lacked the stamina and the tact to contain us hence they sent for help from nearby Pen Cinema police station. At the arrival of the police officers, we departed for the station together.

    There, I insisted on seeing the DCO, a female officer, whose maturity and clinical depth saved the day. The Nation had to send a senior member of the editorial board to the station given the gravity of LASTMA misdemeanour.

    That morning, the DCO revealed that LASTMA officers had been lobbying to be allowed to wield guns. “With such a disposition, no one will allow you bear guns,” said the DCO with undisguised contempt. She reprimanded them for conducting themselves as hooligans in government uniform.

    In cancerous, ill-conceived phrases, the LASTMA officers admitted to breaking beer bottles and attempting to stab us. They owned up to assaulting us, unprovoked, knowing I am a journalist and my companion, a detective, and we flouted no law.

    In my case, I emphasised that the operatives stole my vehicle, having towed it without cause. I stated that what they did amounted to vandalisation and car-theft but the DCO counselled patience and forgiveness.

    Such is the temperament and quality of officers donning the LASTMA uniform. Several months after my chilling encounter with them, three days ago to be precise, my brother was apprehended by a LASTMA officer at the Oregun junction, in Ikeja. His offence: he stopped at the edge of a zebra crossing as the traffic light blinked red. But rather than counsel him to reverse since he wasn’t obstructing traffic, the LASTMA officer jumped in his vehicle. He called me and instantly, I told him to avoid giving a bribe of N5, 000 and instead follow him to the command.

    Given the LASTMA officer’s mischief and combativeness even while unprovoked, my brother tried to make a recording of his misdemeanour but the officer assaulted him, threatening extreme violence. His grouse was that my brother refused to give him bribe and instead offered to follow him to their Alausa office and pay a fine of N20, 000. Olanrewaju H, the female officer, who issued the ticket, at the LASTMA office was forced to caution her ireful and uncouth colleague although she brazenly supported him when I called to verify his misdemeanour. Given his penchant for atrocities, the LASTMA goon, known for extorting motorists, wore a cardigan to hide his name tag.

    While Olanrewaju extolled his devilry, Olufemi Filade, LASTMA’s image maker said “It is highly uncalled for,” for a LASTMA officer to assault a driver trying to record his antics.

     

  • This toxic underside

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    THE manic male cum female furor must be quelled for Nigeria to experience rebirth.

    The country must be rid of her androgynous plague; until then, she will careen at the borderline of republic and apocalypse. Ultimately, she will expire as a colony. It is the saddest thing to note amid the country’s curious afflictions that she is a colony of the world and our toxic underside.

    Colonies are made to be lost, wrote Henri de Montherlant, French novelist and playwright, but will Nigeria ever truly be free? Have we ever been free of domination by other countries and our innate demons?

    The United States’ recent ‘warning’ that the $321m Gen. Sani Abacha loot soon to be repatriated to Nigeria must be placed in an account and must not be stolen knells a scandalous note. Spokesperson for the US State Department, Morgan Ortagus, said in a statement, that this was one of the agreements between the US, Nigeria and the Island of Jersey, where the funds are being kept.

    The US said Nigeria would be made to replace the money if stolen, and trust the press to sensationalise this. For effect, the phrases ‘US warns’ and ‘US threatens’ gets hauled across the country’s mainstream and new media in mockery of President Muhammadu Buhari’s incumbent leadership.

    Such a ‘warning’ should generate outrage but instead, it excites applause. Among other things, it resonates a sad commentary on the curious kinks of the ruling class. Call it an advance reproach on their unarticulated sinful lusts; the lust to steal and pervert. The recent put-down manifests in the wake of the United States’ issuance of Visa constraints on Nigeria due to her terrorism baggage, religious, and security challenges.

    Nigeria constructs a complex psychology not yet fully understood. The pattern manifests as warring spiritual contraries through which political determination is pursued as reflected by her terrorism joust and frequent spats between religious groups.

    Through the chaos, an ugly narrative develops; the country’s major problem is highlighted as a conflict between Christians and Muslims, metaphors for Nigeria’s toxic underbelly.

    As Nigeria careens, a bloody combat evolves in carnage between the religious groups in obsessive rhythms of attack and withdrawal, pyrrhic victory and defeat. This is the narrative being pushed to the rest of the world.

    In truth, Nigeria suffers a class war. The real battle is between the rich and the poor, the haves and have-nots, but the West patronises our duplicitous narratives all the same in order to feather its nest.

    Serious class war, wrongly couched as religious war, has become an issue. It prefigures the theme of tyrannical power relations that has seen the poor masses perpetually at the receiving end of a dysfunctional system foisted upon them by a predatory ruling class in connivance with hieratic enablers.

    Across the country, poverty cripples youthful energy and religion presides as a villainous Herod, massacring the innocents while ravishing them with scythe and mind.

    Rising insecurity shoves the citizenry to seek escape within the temples and manacles of religion, the fabled opium of the people. Mounting desperation has equally created across the country, a pool of broken people willing to believe anything that would dull the pangs of working for low wages, and without the shield of effective without unions – as it is the sad fate of youths jostling to join ethnoreligious militia and state-sponsored Ponzi schemes.

    Consequently, society operates by vicious hierarchies in which elected representatives subject the citizenry to interminable hardship via anti-people policies; although many of them benefited from free education, they have failed to extend similar provision to the electorate whose interests they were elected to protect.

    The ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the Romans, the Mayans, and Hapsburgs all perished by their inability to tame and control the appetites of their ruling class. The latter exploited ecosystems and human beings until these civilizations self-destructed. The quest by a bankrupt elite in a civilization’s final days to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism.

    As there is less and less to exploit, writes Hedges, this quest leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, infrastructure collapse, and, finally, death.

    Class struggle defines most of human history and Marx, got this right. The dandle-board of Nigeria’s history has thrust the oligarchs upward; rendered insensate to citizenry travails, they render millions destitute, humiliated and bereft of hope. The only route left to us, as Aristotle averred, is either submission or revolt.

    Nigeria will be saved by flawed heroes. True, beneficial change can only be driven by ordinary people experiencing extraordinary problems; ordinary people with a track record of extraordinary achievements and exploits in the interest of the collective. But this is discussion for another day.

     

    Terror so politically-correct!

    A DAMNING portrait of the Nigerian malady was recently painted by Nathaniel Samuel, the suspected bomber, whose calamity fruit was neutered at the verge of its blooming.

    Samuel reportedly tried to blow up a church in the Sabon Tasha area of Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State by dumping a bag of explosives in the toilet. He was eventually apprehended by church members and handed over to the police.

    Even though he couldn’t detonate the explosives, Kaduna’s encounter with Nathaniel Samuel manifests as yet another tragic spell that commands twisted narratives.

    In the wake of his arrest, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Kaduna chapter, argued through its scribe, Reverend Joseph Hayab, that while being interrogated at the church, he gave his name as Mohammed Sani, but when he was handed over to the police, the latter told everyone that his name is Nathaniel Samuel.

    Predictably, the social media was agog calling out the police for being shady with the truth. Even the mainstream press and new media partook in the pageantry of shame; several prominent media, in flagrant violation of news writing ethics and template of the 5Ws and H, left out the name of the culprit till the final paragraphs in futile squabble with the truth.

    Samuel

    It was painful to read the tangles of partisan reports until the father of the culprit, Samuel Ezekiel, confirmed to a newspaper reporter, that his son is a Christian, and not a Muslim as being speculated on social media.

    The reporter, who visited the suspect’s house at Marabar Demishi village in Chikun, Kaduna State met his father, Samuel Ezekiel, a Jarawa by tribe from Bauchi state, alongside Kaduna CAN’s Reverend Hayab.

    Mr. Ezekiel confirmed that his son had never been a Muslim and he was born in 1991 and schooled in the state.

    Subsequently, it was heart-warming to see Reverend Hayab issue what could pass as a subtle recant while condemning the police for bungling the interrogation of the suspect. Hayab said, “I don’t care what his name is. All I know is that a criminal wanted to blow up a church and kill people. The police should find out who his sponsors are and not play politics with names…I know Muslims that bear Paul, I know Christians that bear Mohammed. Our CAN chairman in Borno State is Mohammed Laga. I have a cousin that bears Mohammed Paul. So, let us not focus on the name but on the act of terrorism.”

    Reverend Hayab’s final statement, despite his organisation’s initial gaffe, is instructive.

  • Amotekun…Beast of illusion (2)

    By Olatunji Ololade

    IN Amotekun we enter animal aura. There is magic there, both white and tame, black and wild. Enchantment corrupts psychic space and makes it temenos. In this ritual precinct, Amotekun manifests as a sacred creed of mind; a political logic of space, nature and expediences.

    This minute, it unfurls to dominance and defilement. But who domineers? Who gets defiled?

    The debate segues to ethics of power and self-preservation. Amotekun, according to apologists, is meant to protect lives and property of Yoruba land. The group is expected to work with the police and other security agencies to protect the region from killer herdsmen, robbers and kidnappers among other terrors of Yoruba land, claims the southwest governors.

    “Nobody knows Yorubaland better than the sons of Oduduwa. Whoever comes to Yorubaland to kill are known. Amotekun has 10,000-year-old technology that nobody knows. Amotekun must stand, it is a protective force for Yorubaland,” enthused an apologist.

    It’s easy to get smitten by the romanticism and rage of it all. The politicised arguments, juvenile spats, seasoned justifications, foxy upbraids and catlike ripostes attain harmony in the jarring snarl of the southwest’s feline sentinel.

    The drama intensifies but the effort has, so far, been productive. In the wake of Amotekun’s proclamation, the southwest governors have met with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to create a legal framework that would accommodate the regional security outfit into the Federal Government’s community policing plans.

    And even though the fear abides among certain pretenders to patriotism – mostly of northern extraction – that Amotekun was created in preparation for the southwest’s secession plan, Ondo governor and chairman of Southwest Governors’ Forum, Rotimi Akeredolu, has faulted such notions, maintaining that the security outfit was launched to complement the efforts of the security agencies to protect lives and property of the citizenry in the southwest geopolitical zone.

    Shared militia, driven by an autonomous but integrated command structure founded on superior, native intelligence seems a worthy and commendable response to the forays of murderous herdsmen, armed bandits and kidnappers tormenting the southwest’s outliers.

    Kudos to the governors. But beyond bromides and artifice, their falsehood disinters sinister truths. I don’t see Governors Rotimi Akeredolu (Ondo), Kayode Fayemi (Ekiti), Seyi Makinde (Oyo), and cohorts enlisting their children, wives and siblings as personnel for the security apparatus. And this stresses the ugliness of the southwest’s predicament.

    Of course, the governors’ apologists would call this a cheap shot, stressing that there is no basis for needling them with such prickly truth, yet the politics and drama of Amotekun was predetermined along the rigid straits of the southwest regions socio-economic and political realities, on their watch.

    It is very instructive to note that like previous initiatives of similar nature, Amotekun fulfills the Animal Farm stereotype. Apology to Orwell. While career courtiers, Twitter and Facebook warriors, don face powder and power the governors’ raucous orchestra, it need be said that we are at this sorry pass because the governors failed us.

    The southwest, like other regions of the country, needs an Amotekun because the governors manically dole savage love unto our sapless electorate. If they had over time, committed their states’ resources to actualise policy objectives, the southwest wouldn’t be at this sorry pass.

    If they had spent judiciously on education, health, economy, and infrastructure, the southwest would have appreciated in scholarship and medical services; and they would have generated employment by igniting industry, research and economic growth. The region would thereby enjoy improved quality of youth; an army of builders and progressives, undeserving of enlistment as members of Amotekun, or the rampaging hordes of the killer herdsmen, bandits and kidnappers.

    The spectre of social unrest pervading the southwest, like neighbouring regions, feeds off the greed and ambition of inefficient leaders.

    While the region’s vulnerability to attack manifests as a consequence of the unforeseen economic collapse, civil disobedience and widespread violence wracking neighbouring states, it’s noisy plummet down the steep slope of anarchy is smothered in the din provoked by the region’s inefficient leadership.

    They label critics of Amotekun, traitorous, although the real traitors are the governors who have made it difficult for the southwest and neighbouring regions to progress.

    While we applaud Amotekun as a worthy response to the southwest’s insecurity problem, let us nurture healthy inhibitions of what deviousness might result from its manipulation by the criminally-minded.

    History obliges us timeless lessons on the depths a power-drunk governor might descend if intoxicated by power. We have seen a former governor orchestrate the stoning of President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC’s Ogun governorship candidate during the 2019 elections campaign, over political differences. The same character 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) from his illicit arsenal to the police, at the end of his tenure. Picture a heavily weaponised state chapter of Amotekun in the control of such a governor. The consequences are better imagined.

    Amotekun would never resolve the southwest’s security problems. The rage frothing amid the ranks of Nigeria’s disenfranchised impoverished divide spills as venom from the blades and bullets of killer herdsmen, armed bandits, terrorists and kidnappers comprised by the nation’s unemployed youths. Their exploits resonate as chilling howls.

    Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise them into legitimate, mainstream economy, unless we tear down the walls of the highly politicised and exclusive socio-economic circuits, the southwest, like other regions is doomed. The region suffers a dislocation between the short-term interests of the ruling class and the longer-term interests of the electorate they dominate and exploit.

    The incumbent governors can’t resolve the southwest’s security and development challenges perhaps because they are rich. Wealth and privilege insulates them from the major afflictions of the poor electorate; these include bad roads, substandard healthcare and education, and comatose infrastructure. Affluence permits them to turn those around them into compliant and expendable workers, hangers-on, sycophants, and candidates for lifeboat palliatives, like Amotekun.

    Wealth, argues Fitzgerald, breeds a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities.

    Although the governors affect a protective mien, their actions resonate as chilling neglect of the miseries of the southwest’s impoverished outliers.

    Sadly, the citizenry’s inability to grasp the pathology of the governors as members of an oligarchic corporate elite makes it difficult to organise an effective resistance and change in their fate via the ballot box.

    Politics looms entwined with money and power across the region, two cuffs of its shackled-lyre.

    Armed with the cuffs, the governors turn the electorate into docile subjects of their godlike delectation; there is a vast disconnect between what they say and what they do. Sadly, the masses are blinded and enchanted by their illusions. No thanks to a fawning press and civil societies.

    Amotekun is a frantic mental caress that induces weeping but instead excites applause. The masterminds (governors) grope and stroke their beloved (electorate) with calloused palms, violating the latter’s psychic spaces even as you read. Until they match in virtual lock-step with their campaign promises, the governors will loom as marketers of illusion, skittish shamans channelling deceit to trade in confusion. They would be continually seen as crafty fabricators of mood and gesture, prowling the edges of duty cloaked in deceit. These are truths that can’t be ignored.

     

     

  • Amotekun…Beast of illusion (1)

    By Olatunji Ololade

    To the murderous herdsmen, trespass is euphoric, and subliminally erotic perhaps. Hence they rape farmers’ wives, daughters, sisters and even grandmothers, while plundering peasant farmlands.

    Supposedly miffed and driven to self-preservation, the Southwest Governors’ Forum established the Western Nigeria Security Network, code-named, Operation Amotekun (Operation Leopard) as a promising deterrent to terrorist herdsmen, armed bandits and kidnappers tormenting the rural outliers.

    The leopard is a dangerous animal and moral exemplar; an embodiment of poise, predatory instinct and fastidious eating habits hence its suitability as a metaphor for the southwest’s security initiative.

    In the wake of its establishment, however, Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has described Amotekun as “illegal,” drawing flak from several quarters.

    Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC) argued in a recent interview, that Amotekun doesn’t run foul of the law, stating that the governors have no duty whatsoever to consult Malami.

    He said: “I think the governors should just ignore him and carry on with what they are doing…That arrogant authority that he can dictate to states is very insulting.”

    Operation Amotekun, argues pundits, agrees with Section 14(2)(b) of Nigeria’s Constitution: “The security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government,” which, in a federation, includes the federal, state, and local governments.

    Subsequently pro-Amotekun rallies have held in Akure, Osogbo, Ado-Ekiti, Abeokuta, and Ibadan. In Lagos, the planned rally was, interestingly, foiled by the police.

    At the backdrop of the ensuing drama, some have argued that Operation Amotekun resonates the frantic skirmish between southwest governors and their northern peers, in a pageantry of wile and maneuver en route the 2023 elections.

    However, to totally condemn Amotekun is to amplify the rabid cries of biased critics of the initiative. To its apologists, if the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) and Hisbah, among others, are acceptable as worthy security measures, up-north, then Operation Amotekun must be acceptable to all as the southwest’s inalienable right to security and self-determination as backed by the constitution, and foremost legal luminaries.

    For instance, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN), advised the southwest governors to proceed with the implementation of Amotekun and leave the Federal Government to challenge the matter in court.

    As most south-westerners read of Boko Haram and armed bandits’ assault on the northeast, hovering at the edge of a forbidden locus of experience, so do misguided critics of Amotekun up-north perceive news of homicidal herdsmen tormenting the southwest.

    Nonetheless, Amotekun is a welcome initiative in an era when armed bandits, herdsmen, and kidnappers subject fringe communities of the southwest to a merciless ravage akin to the plundering of a nut grove thus rendering the fertile lands mutilated bowers.

    According to urban legend, on Amotekun’s watch, terrorist herdsmen, armed bandits and kidnappers will shy off the boundaries of the southwest. But the regional security initiative faces opposition from both external and internal forces, according to Ondo State Governor and Chairman, Southwest Governors’ Forum (SGF), Rotimi Akeredolu. Akeredolu berated internal enemies for sabotaging Amotekun, describing them as “collaborators whose parochial political pursuits have beclouded their sense of tomorrow.”

    But that is simply one way to look at it. On the flipside, Amotekun is a pseudo-gesture affected to excite sentimental feelings of safety and racial pride. It’s a wildly selfish ploy, plotted to make the citizenry confuse how they are made to feel about the governors’ inefficiencies and political maneuver, with the bitter reality of pervasive insecurity across the southwest.

    Governors who can muster no justifiable account of security votes allocated to them want us to believe that they care about our safety, the protection of our civil rights, and democracy. Ultimately, they seek to funnel billions of tax naira to fund Amotekun, and so doing, replenish their political war-chests, acquire choice property and stash public fund in their overseas accounts, illegitimately.

    There is no gainsaying auxiliary forces, like Amotekun, in Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq and other contemporary conflicts have played key roles in winning back territory from terrorists and brigands. Such forces are often convenient, short-term solutions for governments facing insurgencies that outmatch regular security forces.

    Amotekun is expected to operate as a cheap force multiplier; as its members presumably have local knowledge and language skills that makes them more effective fighters and intelligence gatherers. More importantly, the group offers southwest governors more plausible immunity and denial of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in the context of ‘keeping the peace’ and counter-insurgency campaigns.

    Through the hoopla and feral applause, very few people, perhaps, have paused to mull the likely ramifications of Amotekun. How long before the militia turns back to haunt the people whose interests it was created to protect? How long before it sinks its fangs and claws into their hide?

    Its a given that on Amotekun’s watch, human rights conditions would worsen across the southwest. Violence and torture, state-sanctioned murder, unjustifiable citizen arrests and disappearances would increase as each state governor nurtures infinitely ‘loyal’ units of the group.

    The group’s ultimate loyalty is to the governors, whose chief intent is to deploy Amotekun to bully political opposition, steal ballot boxes and rig the 2023 elections.

    Arrowheads of the Amotekun movement, despite their platitudinous chant, clandestinely seek to deploy the outfit in taming detractors and ‘political godfathers’ whose perceived influence may limit their chances and interests at the 2023 elections.

    The downside of this reality is that such ‘godfathers’ equally have the capacity to woo and purchase the loyalty of Amotekun’s hierarchies. In the long-run, Amotekun will implode, with members pitching tents and selling allegiance to the highest bidder.

    How would Amotekun’s membership be drawn? What are the yardsticks for vetting recruitment? If the police and other state law enforcement agencies, despite their access to structured academies and international training, continue to churn out mostly inefficient, trigger-happy cops, what’s the guarantee that they would help mould Amotekun into a sterling militia as the governors’ claim?

    Bus conductors, park urchins, transport unionists, political thugs, assassins, human parts dealers, the unemployed, ex-convicts, and warlords, among others, will comprise Amotekun alongside ageing hunters, vigilante and native-doctors.

    Crisis is bound to erupt; the group will implode by its inability to achieve a synergy between its young, violent membership and ageing conservative divide.

    The people may need to gird their loins for more outbreaks of ritual murders by auxiliary militia members seeking spiritual powers in bid to assert their individual might and repute, and thus enjoy patronage by governors seeking ‘muscles’ for “top-secret political missions.”

    Moreover, given their roles in fighting armed bandits, kidnappers and terrorist herdsmen, Amotekun members will often be seen as heroes by segments of the citizenry.

    This would raise the political costs of trying to bring their members to justice when they run foul of the law.