After 100 days, our governors’ narratives sprout from a honeyed tongue, not the baleful patois of the boondocks. It is an aesthetic of seduction but like the sweet melody of the Sirens, it spirals like poisonous fumes, afflicting our land with a vapour of hanging participles and colourful hyperbole. The governors’ panegyric excites the passing tribute of a sigh.
Of the numerous achievements spuriously cited as each governor’s selling points, the phantasm of road projects attains the pride of pitch. To mark their ‘first 100 days’ in office, several state governors boastfully published pictures and literature depicting their ‘widely appreciated and celebrated road rehabilitation’ projects.
Like I said in last week’s piece, it defies reason and tact for a state governor or federal minister to roll out the drums to celebrate his commencement of repairs on a bad road, a decrepit school or public health facility – particularly when his claims are exaggerated or untrue.
He is only doing the work for which he was elected and is being handsomely rewarded. Thus any governor that would commit the state’s resources to such fluff is in dire need of counselling and civic education.
At the back drop of the specious figures being hurled around, Nigerians die for lack of good roads.
On several highways, the random pothole becomes a vector of death. It attains urgent symbolism as a testament of neglect and element of Nigeria’s grotto of bad governance. Think of them as earth fissures detailing the 36 states’ mutation into varnished tombs.
Several families have lost loved ones to avoidable accidents on the country’s bad roads. Many a job seeker have missed crucial interviews and lost promising employment opportunities because they got stuck in vehicle traffic caused by road craters.
Lives are lost on the Bauchi-Alkaleri road as drivers and passengers die in accidents caused by potholes. Similar carnage occur on the Lagos-Abeokuta and Lagos-Ibadan highways; the latter, constructed in 1978 and said to be the busiest in Africa, has about 6,000 vehicles plying it daily according to the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). Due to government neglect, the road which connects Oyo, Ogun and Lagos States, leading to the northern, southern and eastern regions of the country, continually claims lives in ghastly auto accidents.
Lest we forget the Enugu-Onitsha highway, the Calabar-Itu road, Calabar-Ikom, Kano-Kaduna, and the Bayelsa State axis of the East-West Road, where commuters extinguish in potholes and road craters.
A tour across the states would avail our governors a more realistic experience of the inherent tragedy of plying bad roads, on which foul dust and mud spatter spring from the earth to discolour commuters’ vehicles, sully their clothes and corrupt their health.
Governance in the country is literally grotesque. Like the deathly pothole or road crater, it is borne of a grotto of shady public officers, who like their predecessors, nurture a special affinity for ornamenting one hideous gaffe with another.
They ignore crisis while it stews and hazard a knee-jerk reaction, when the crisis degenerates. Former Ogun governor, Ibikunle Amosun, and the Federal Ministry of Works, for instance, ignored the condition of the Lagos-Ibadan highway until a 20-feet container fell off a moving truck and crushed 12 students to death in a Toyota Hiace passenger bus, on a bad portion of the road.
One would expect that frequent travel abroad would furnish our governors, among other public officers, with the necessary exposure about rehabilitating for the long-term, the country’s dilapidated road network.
The value of good roads to a nation’s agricultural economy and financial regeneration cannot be overemphasised. The economies of the so-called ‘First World’ have been known to pirouette from a sound base of good roads and seamless transportation network. The evidences abound from Asia to Europe and America. In those climes, public officers walk their talk.
Many a Nigerian public officer, however, would rather dazzle with talk while presenting what’s supposed to be a routine, official duty as stagecraft. It is part of our pagan heritage and rites of governance, our inherited artifice.
The random imagery of a state governor donning a grim look while inspecting a bad road, predictably, excites applause among his lackeys and an illiterate populace. But it inspires in the observer, depending on his enlightenment, that stirring in the bowels identifiable as disgust or applause.
The state governors parade a cabinet and coterie of spin-doctors adept at flipping over disgust to applause, by reportage. Truth is in the telling. Knowing this, they recruit a pliant press to entertain and hoodwink the citizenry with exaggerated accounts of their ‘sterling exploits.’
The State House thus becomes our Versailles. Cradling doctored reports, the media evolves under its rule, into a class of courtiers; government publicists masquerading as journalists and pundits, cede their platforms to ‘friendly’ governors, for whom they spin, prevaricate and lie.
Consequently, we hear little about the stories of pain and desolation afflicting the victims of bad governance and policy failure.
In Lagos, however, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu supposedly means well; after all, he recently approved the commencement of repairs on bad roads across the state. And in fulfilment of his executive order on zero tolerance for potholes in the state, the Lagos State Public Works Corporation (LSPWC) has begun full scale routine repair and rehabilitation of roads across the state.
The General Manager of the LSPWC, Engr. Olufemi Daramola, during an inspection of the ongoing rehabilitation of Iju-Fagba road, recently, stated that
despite the incessant rainfall witnessed in the past few weeks, the state had been providing palliatives with the use of gravel and crushed stones on strategic roads across the state to ensure free flow of traffic.
This is, no doubt, a temporary palliative and is grossly inadequate as the patched spots eventually cave in, in less than two weeks.
Daramola cited rehabilitation works in 26 different locations across the state. It is, however, sad to note, that for the umpteenth time, the Lagos government has failed to treat the sad state of the Lagos-Abeokuta highway and bypasses with the urgency and care it deserves.
Like his predecessors, Babatunde Fashola and Akinwumi Ambode, Governor Sanwo-Olu’s palliative effort cuts off this neglected terrain of the coastal city.
The roads are very bad in Agbado-Kollington, Dalemo-Akera, and Ijaiye-Jankara axis. You need only travel the cratered paths and bypasses of Abule-Egba, Ahmadiyya, Meiran, and Alakuko to understand the extent of devastation and neglect afflicting the area.
Governor Sanwo-Olu has certainly got his work cut out for him. Its about time he understood that good roads and development must be evenly spread across Lagos; they should never be exclusive to the state’s supposedly posh, popular and gated communities.
Given the pride of place he occupies as governor of the state widely acknowledged as Nigeria’s commercial heartbeat, Sanwo-Olu must shun pedestrian praise and commit to his task with unparalleled gusto.
At the moment, he unfurls like a newbie at the State House’s pageant rites. Let him remember that his lackeys might be saboteurs and his critics may be friends; together, however, they constitute the periphery of governance. He is the man at the centre.
And he has less than four years to ennoble his office and dispel inherited stereotypes. This wisdom applies to his 35 fellow governors.
THIS minute, the “First 100 Days in Office” panegyric attains crescendo in the caverns of Nigeria’s State Houses and the Ninth National Assembly.
Government institutions, routinely, churn out statistics and claims celebrating public officers’ “excellent” exploits over the first three months widely considered a probationary period.
The media is seduced to preach the gospel even as the public unfurls and pliantly accepts the Kool-Aid of this engineered temperament. It doesn’t matter if the highlighted achievements are exaggerated or unreal, everybody buys into the farce. Those that couldn’t are too spiritless to protest.
Amid the pageantry, however, a spirit of gloom and depression haunts the 36 states of the federation; the spectre mocks the hyperbolic chants in praise of public officers, on the corridors of power, the pulpit and across multimedia platforms.
This haunting spirit is manifold: a post-recession and wartime gloom afflicts the citizenry; a rising tide of poverty and bigotries aggravate the situation increasing distrust among the citizenry, public office and political institutions.
Nigeria shrivels like a sick rose but the public officer inhales its sick molds, basking in its scent, cradling its diseased stamens as his bower of bliss.
The country’s death wriggle is mistaken for an act of concealment hence the public officer’s approach takes the form of a rape. To this end, he deploys political power as his shaft of conquest, his manic death agent. Nigeria may be a sick rose, but her shrivelled petals become his bed of crimson joy; little wonder he plunders state coffers amid a gloomy economy.
There is no gainsaying elected representatives fleece the country’s meagre reserves; the Ninth National Assembly, for instance, faces litigation for perceived excesses as you read.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), BudgIT, Enough is Enough (EiE) and 6,721 concerned Nigerians recently filed a lawsuit asking the Federal High Court to “restrain, prevent and stop the National Assembly Service Commission from paying or releasing the sum of N5.550 billion budgeted for purchase of luxury cars for principal members of the ninth Senate, and to restrain and stop the Senate from collecting the money until the downward review of the amount proposed by the Senate.”
In suit number FHC/L/CS/1511/2019 filed at the Federal High Court, Ikoyi Lagos, the plaintiffs argued: “Spending a huge sum of N5.550 billion to buy luxury cars for principal members of the ninth Senate is unjust and unfair. It negates the constitutional oath of office made by members to perform their functions in the interest of the well-being and prosperity of Nigeria and its citizens, as contained in the Seventh Schedule of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution (as amended).”
The plaintiffs also queried the proposed spending by the National Assembly via the following posers: What is the economic value and contribution of the vehicles sought to be purchased to the grand scheme of Nigeria’s economy? What are the parameters used to arrive at cost efficiency and value for money in the decision to purchase the vehicles? Where are the vehicles purchased by the eighth Senate?
That the National Assembly deems itself worthy of a N5.550 billion vehicle largesse (valued at N50 million per Toyota Land Cruiser SUV) at a time the government finds it difficult to pay the N30, 000 minimum wage further establishes the legislature as a sinister drain on the nation’s dwindling resources.
The proposed expenditure is amoral, despicable and redolent/reflective of all that’s wrong with the country’s ruling class.
It would be recalled that similar exotic cars including Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs and office equipment such as computers, photocopiers, and refrigerators. were reportedly pawned off to senators in previous assemblies.
Some of the lawmakers who are in the current Assembly allegedly profited from the misconduct. Some of the items were reportedly sold to members of the Eighth Senate and House of Representatives at scandalous prices; for instance, a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV acquired at N36 million each was reportedly sold to the departing lawmakers at a paltry N1 million.
All the items handed almost freely to the legislators would apparently be purchased afresh and supplied to members of the Ninth Assembly inaugurated on June 11, 2019; just as the new computers, scanners, photocopying machines, television sets, and refrigerators would be purchased at ridiculous prices, according to a media report.
In the wake of the outrage generated by the lawmakers’ excesses, prominent figures in the National Assembly have argued that no one can deny them their ‘inalienable’ right to the largesse.
Nigeria is no doubt superabundant with politicians who assert legitimacy for their belligerently exploitative actions and redundancies on the grounds that they are acceptable privileges of their high offices.
Still, there’s something unnerving about how brazen and savage this spiel has grown in a time of acute economic depression, social inequality and ideological vacuum. Any public officer or their lackey rationalising the controversial N5.550 billion vehicle largesse is nothing but a glorified political grifter.
Similar fraud subsists in state governments’ frenzied celebration of incumbent governors’ achievements in their first 100 days. Nothing justifies the curious appeal and endurance of the underlying grift here; government agents manipulate statistics and data to foster illusions of growth and prosperity where they are non-existent.
Sadly, the citizenry who should know better, trade invective across multimedia platforms, defending the excesses and redundancies of their favourite public officers goaded by bigotries. Call it political illiteracy.
The cost of their ignorance is not being paid by the government and its agents of illusion. It is being paid on our inner city streets, in barren manufacturing towns and dystopic host communities to multinationals.
The cost is borne by the desolate townships of Ewekoro, living and dying in a thick haze of effluents, cement dust and flying rock fragments billowing from multinational, LafargeWAPCO’s exhaust pipes and limestone quarry.
The cost is borne by the helpless people of Bodo, who are continually tormented and traumatised by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC)’s lethargic approach to ridding the community of its major oil spills.
Although SPDC agreed in 2015, to a clean-up the Niger Delta community, the clean up is expected to cost around $500 million and will take up to 10 years to complete. In a rare victory for such communities, Shell also agreed to pay £55 million ($84 million) in settlements to Bodo community for the devastating effects of the spill. That’s a way forward.
This isn’t the time for Nigeria’s National Assembly, the presidency and state governments to roll out the drums and splurge on ill-conceived jamborees; they haven’t done enough work to merit such.
It is foolhardy for a federal minister or state governor to celebrate giving the approval for rehabilitation of a road project, a derelict school or public health facility in his first 100 days. The performance of such roles, among others, was the reason he or she was elected into public office. He has done no one no favour.
It is about time public officers stopped misappropriating state fund and the historical language of ennoblement to ornament dew as crystal. Its about time we stopped humouring them.
Nigeria is at war on several fronts: from Boko Haram, herdsmen terrorism, kidnap for ransom, to xenophobic attacks against Nigerians in South Africa, our elected representatives have got their work clearly cut out for them.
The cult of digital citizenship has a supreme theme: that of the ‘digitally-woke,’ youth. Social media, expanded to fill the space life provides, substitutes Nigeria’s bleak moon for a digitized dawn.
Call it science’s dark revenge or technology’s defiant stand against conservative norms. In the mix, Nigeria incinerates by the speed of blistering terrabytes; two planes of reality collide a la traditional versus new media; conservative ethicist versus deviant liberal, erupting in primeval chaos, cyber-activated.
The intelligible persistently loses to the unintelligible and citizenship gets redefined as digitally-woke youth vengefully debase and defy society’s arrogant hierarchs.
The digitally-woke youth is technology’s heroic personae and his cult runs where dissent rebounds. He has a fearless disposition but is afflicted by dewy cowardice. In the cyberspace he inhabits, he personifies spirited narcissism, unfurling wildly to his articulated and unarticulated sinful lusts.
Yet the joke persists in contemporary circuits that the battle for Nigeria’s freedom would be fought and won in social space and by the cudgels and blades of ‘woke’ youth. This notion sprouts from ideological fields at home and abroad, where pasture, copse and tributary of thought, flourish from sickly seeds of violence and death.
Being ‘woke’ is next to being a deity in contemporary youth circuits. It confers on the ‘woke’ a colossal ego, an exaggerated sense of awareness and idolatry of fawning peer. To such youth, social media becomes theatre, a public agon. Every issue from policy failure, inefficient leadership, distressed economy, electoral fraud, insecurity, to failing public institutions offers him an opportunity to vent.
Unlike the conventional patriot for whom protest functions as a catalyst for positive change, the digitally-woke youth protests for ego and applause.
In his element, he courts the admiration of the strolling spectator; he forgets that he is neither king nor god but manipulable pawn. He is victim of ignorance’s tyranny over intellect thus his susceptibility to being used by shady, criminally-minded others.
He is arsonist, assassin and mugger at election time; and canon-fodder for disrupting the state, in time of peace. He is the random cyber-rat with multiple monikers, preaching bigotries and a gospel of hate across multiple social media platforms and news sites as you read.
Beneath his radical chants, however, subsists an immoderate hankering for money and safety. Some would call this cowardice and a predilection for slumber. But he is ‘woke’ and ‘woke’ youth musn’t snooze.
Money, fast cars, dubious acclaim are, however, a deal breaker hence the morbid race against time to acquire wealth by ‘woke’ young assassins, internet scammers (Yahoo Boys), and prostitutes. Lest we forget the gangs of ‘woke’ political thugs, human rights activists, ‘youth leaders,’ public officers, pen robbers, armed robbers and thieves comprising the nation’s youth.
Due to perceived trashiness and philosophical harlotry of the journalist, this band of youths would not leave the battle for their freedom from Nigeria’s predatory ruling class to the press.
Cowardice is what we should conquer. Cowardice enslaves all to mean and homicidal politicians. It cripples the rage of impoverished youth and binds all to the wiles of dubious political parties and public officers.
It takes courage to evolve a humane ideology and sustain it. As Nigerians, in our youth, we haven’t the courage and the will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change.
More worrisome are our violent attempt to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly, like a kind of rudderless activism. This was reflective in the attitude of certain youth segments during the last general elections.
Mistaking hooliganism for “higher political awareness” or “being woke,” they harassed their peers and the elderly who voted for President Muhammadu Buhari, among others.
They frantically sought for votes for their self-styled messiahs, whose unique selling point (USP) was an exaggerated sense of self-worth. Extravagant sections of the press called the latter, titans. But they were no titans. They were simply merchants of rot, who emerged to clothe dross as gold and filth in newer, fanciful packs.
Leading a motley pack of rabid followers, they condemned the incumbent ruling class to frantic applause. But soon after they spoke in brilliant, rousing cadences, their platitudes started to trail off in confusion.
Today, their language echoes like the battle-cries of four-year-olds playing war Generals against an army of hostile corn stalks. Having provoked the citizenry’s dormant passion with deceptive dialectics, as the election wore on, their passion was shown for what it was, the spunk of beetles kindling wet wood.
Most youth candidates failed to shine at the last general elections because their gospel of hope was untranslatable by realistic yardsticks. They spoke the same gibberish as the oligarchs they sought to unseat.
Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the table, save a slew of platitudes and tiresome rhetoric. For instance, some dizzy candidate promised to turn marijuana into a national revenue earner and establish a N100, 000 national minimum wage package for the country in a manner reminiscent of the prominent parties’ lifeboat solutions.
Another promised to rescue the Chibok girls, eradicate terrorism and entrench gender equality without a practical blueprint for achieving such.
Eventually, their desperate rants and promises established them as dangerous daydreamers, who could and would rip apart a nation already fragmented and ruined by bigotries, maladministration and plunder.
Such is the quality of the Nigerian youth – the ‘politically woke” and most vocal segment to be precise. They identify all that is wrong with Nigeria but they are never specific about what must be done to correct them.
It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, and in some instances, even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions.
All the picket lines in the world will not resolve maladies of fraudulent and impatient youth, greed, racism, disillusionment with learning and substandard education.
Yeah, bad news is in the air. We worry and gripe about it. Bloggers and columnists rant about it. We have even learnt to joke about it. But it’s time we do something about it.
It takes so much effort to be cynical and vengeful, let us channel such efforts into more profitable enterprise, like visionary politics, honest labour and reorientation.
It’s about time we projected more progressive views of our world. Let us begin to seek the upright amongst us. They are the negligible few we love to haze and deride for being too ‘conservative,’ ‘boring’ and ‘pretentious.’
They believe in justice, equality and the rule of law. They are pious without being self-righteous. They are responsible, tolerant, and in many ways, more evolved.
We need such breed of youth to drive a practicable and all-inclusive plan; a proposal of shared targets and intentions with broadbased support and the moral and political will to implement its mechanisms and ends with profound understanding of law, governance methods, economics and social organisation of humane statehood.
Without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of well-meaning but ineffective good intentions.
These are dark days for the Nigerian youth. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves.
A MULTITUDE of disgruntled youths may flirt with strife and call it ‘revolt’ just as a swarm of mosquitoes can make a noise like thunder – left to their own devices. But where their ignorance and rage enjoy the caress of a dubious demagogue, Nigeria should flinch.
The demagogue deploys distortion and deceit for dramatic effect. His hypnotic repetitions resound as a series of soothing gestures to distressed, ignorant youths but in truth, they are borne of greed, calumny, acrimony and deceit.
Thus when a self-styled demagogue issues a call for revolt, Nigerians should be wary. The youth, in particular, for such supposedly heartfelt ‘patriotic’ call is often issued by the demagogue or ‘revolutionary’ after he fails to clinch a lucrative role in the government that he condemns.
The legend persists, for instance, of the bitter ideologue, who radically morphed from President Muhammadu Buhari’s staunch apologist into one of his greatest detractors, simply because Mr. President refused to offer him a ministerial role. The embittered character has since, seized every opportunity to attack Buhari. Makes you marvel at his entitlement syndrome.
This is not to absolve Buhari of his shortcomings, however. Yes, Buhari could be more detribalised and presidential in several respects; yes, poverty, corruption, maladministration, official irresponsibility, and insecurity persist despite his claims otherwise.
But most of these problems are aggravated by the citizenry’s refusal to aspire to the finer aspects of citizenship, character, and tact.
Nigeria had a perfect opportunity to elect the right calibre of men and women into public offices during the last general elections but as usual, they opted to squander their votes, routing for convicted felons and money-bags, for a token.
Now, that the consequences of their misguided action bear down at them, they sing a song of revolt. The call for a revolution becomes even more worrisome, and dangerous perhaps, given the sources and audience of the damning call.
Omoyele Sowore’s #RevolutionNow, while seasonable, is fraught with errors. Sowore anchored his call solely on the cult of self. This cult thrives on a facile charm, ornateness and conceit; a need for constant adulation, a penchant for manipulation and wild drama, and the inability to take correction.
This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations and the predatory ruling class. It is the ethic of looters and unfettered capitalism and it advances the misguided belief that charisma and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as patriotism and democratic altruism.
Youths and civil societies under the auspices of the Global Coalition for Security and Democracy fell for the ruse thus serving as hapless tools. Somewhere amid the movement, however, lurks one or more Janus-faced comrades, who understand the rules of the ‘game’ and take their inspired rabble for suckers.
While the latter ignorantly lend their hide and shrill voices to the ‘struggle,’ the leaders of the pack strategically amble closer to the seats of power. If they don’t get courted by the incumbent government, they would be patronised by its enemies. Something’s gotta give.
A lot of their demands are unrealistic. Even so, the revolutionaries highlighted their demands to the Buhari leadership in three phases. Among other things, they seek a return of fuel prices and electricity tariffs to their levels in 1999; an end to estimated and inflated billing by the electricity distribution companies; no devaluation of the Naira; free education; immediate payment of the N30,000 minimum wage; the immediate release of all political prisoners, including Shi’ite leader Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and his wife and the immediate payment of all outstanding salaries of workers and pensions of retirees.
They demand that all public officials be banned from educating their children in private schools in Nigeria or abroad; the complete socialisation of all land in the country and declaration of access to land as a basic right; they demand a ban from politics, all who have stolen the people’s money and property since 1960 and the abolishment of the Senate thus establishing a uni-cameral legislature with only the House of Representatives.
Failure by Buhari to accept these terms would spell a great deal of trouble according to the group. It’ quite sad that they moot a socialist-styled revolution while scorning the philosophical bedrock of such revolt, a reorientation of vision and mind.
Its suspicious too that the arrowhead of the movement is Sowore. The jury is still out on the integrity of #RevolutionNow. Sowore’s revolutionary chant, however heartfelt, resonates as the rant of a sore loser, who would rather topple the apple cart than accept his lack of access to the fruit within. Buhari apologists argue that Sowore, having failed to earn the presidential powers via the ballot box, intends to snatch it by fomenting trouble.
There is yet promise in a man like Sowore. There are millions like him, of which many are better qualified to lead. What distinguishes Sowore though is the courage he summoned to speak until he began to sound like a human barrel-organ chanting a list of tunes with wild variations.
To champions of the ‘struggle,’ what are their revolution and post-revolution plans? What is their blueprint for the revolt? How would they ensure that it is not hijacked by criminals, bigots, genocidal warlords and demagogues? How would they protect the struggle from the antics of scorned ministerial hopefuls?
#RevolutionNow isn’t the first call to commingle overt duplicity, freedom to rail, the swagger of youth, righteous rage and a refusal to play by the rules. But distortion adds another layer; it drives trending discontent thus its dismal philosophical aberration, and the delinquency synonymous with #RevolutionNow.
The revolutionary call is a ruse; dubious, berserk, strongly ritualistic. Gradually, it becomes pop culture and the youth embrace it. This makes it even more dangerous, knowing the calibre of youth embracing the call. How mature are they to wield the burden of rage and such enormous task?
Revolutions can be championed by conmen and crushed by the state using tyrant forces. Then, there is the possibility of the faux revolution when, through subterranean, lethal influence, counter-revolutionary forces, emerge to seize the struggle and demand, not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites.
Things get messy when the movements within the revolutionary body emerge to compete for power, squabble over arcane bits of doctrine, dispute tactics, misread power, and engage in self-defeating power struggles.
When authentic, revolutions express a fundamental truth about societies in decay. They offer fresh vistas of hope, a new language and future, to victims of failed systems of governance. #RevolutionNow, however, manifests as a series of soothing gestures, like rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear. The call will gradually peter out, and diminish, like a spell materialising a dark power in a blaze of light, if borne of selfish intent.
Yes, Nigeria is in dire need of a revolution but what we need is a revolution without bloodshed.
#RevolutionNow is best propagated, practically and ideologically, in our lecture theatres, artworld, townhalls, worship houses, public parks by folk united to restrategise and chart our path to a better future via the ballot box.
The current call for a revolt is being made by characters with access to exit visas out of the country at the slightest eruption of violence. Yet they sing a song of chaos.
Let us all be wary of the dubious revolutionary badgering on to the stage for acclaim through the trapdoor.
BIG Brother Naija (BBN)’s Pepper Dem Gang perpetuates a fable, not of hope, but disintegration. The current edition of the reality show celebrates the pre-adolescent mind stuck in a grave of delusions. Participants on the show, like their predecessors, personify a deep cry for help, like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from example.
An inmate of the BBN house, Khafi Kareem, who is also a Metropolitan Police officer in the United Kingdom, is reportedly being investigated for appearing on the reality TV show despite being refused permission by her employers.
The 29-year-old, who joined the UK Police as a Constable in 2015, is being investigated after she was allegedly filmed having sex repeatedly, with 31-year-old inmate, Ekpata Gedoni, on the show.
The Metropolitan Police said it had not granted Kareem’s request to appear on the show and that an internal investigation would be carried out.
A spokesman said, “The Directorate of Professional Standards has been informed and will be carrying out an investigation into the circumstances. The Met does not support the officer’s appearance, nor does she represent the Met whilst appearing on the show.”
Well, if she doesn’t represent Metropolitan Police, at least, she represents her family. Even if Kareem’s employer eventually sacks her, she has the ‘love,’ ‘votes’ and backing of her family and fan base.
It is instructive to note that while the UK Metropolitan Police is embarrassed by the conduct of Constable Kareem, the 29-year-old has become something of a folk hero, a pop idol to millions of Nigerian youths rooting for her to win the show mainly because of her sexual exploits.
Sex possesses a far darker power than society has admitted. It is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Kareem, for instance, participates in the show “to do societal good” and in pursuit of the prize money, she has unfurled interestingly.
As I asserted in last week’s piece, a show like BBN posits reality and entertainment by dignifying decadence and seduction.
To remould society, the show’s producers target the youth, and successfully sever their audience’s mental connection with moral roots. The so-called leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backward, away from menarche into the womb of regression.
The inmates are enclosed in a zone of morbid ecstasy. They are untouchable, carriers of charisma kept under quarantine, till they emerge as bearers of dirt.
The BBN inmate, irrespective of gender, is a non-person, subject to mass cheering and shunning. The eventual winner, like other participants in the show, emerge blinded by celebrity and severely crippled to function as a normal constituent of a humane society.
As BBN inmate, his imagination is free, but his body is bound in ritual restriction. He is a daemonic tool, a sacrificial totem maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals.
The heated debate over sexual indulgences of the show’s participants is rife with sentiments as societal segments engage in a clash of obscenities in defence or condemnation of goings-on on the show.
The disconcertingly awkward sex between participants on the show has, reportedly, been untidy and shattering. Viewers’ morality has been seduced and conquered as DSTV/Multichoice keeps sensuality aglow in gothic gloom. Surely, the show’s producers legitimise carnal depravity. They broker pornography via BBN’s bedchamber of rank and malodorous sex.
Any critic of the show is, however, deemed ‘hypocrite,’ a disgruntled visionary who feels too deeply and sees too much and is tortured by his own vision.
Shall we seek import, still, in a social media post by a certain Shakeerah S. It goes thus:
In 2018, the total number of votes on the BBN show was 170 million. In a sharp contrast, the total number of votes cast at the 2019 general election was 27 million.
Then she writes: “A practical reality of who we are as a people and where our priority lies as citizens. The funny side in all of these; we still go to bed, have a good sleep and wake up with the hope to meet Nigeria we didn’t create.”
This brings us to the Nigeria of our dreams vs the Nigeria of our plots and intrigues. Do we deserve Nigeria as it is? Yes, we do.
Nonetheless, the country’s youth clamour for change. They want a revolution and a radical improvement on the status quo. But how can they exact change while they are perceptually enslaved?
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality.
If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he will suffer great pain. Blinded by the glare, he is unable to see anything and longs for the familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated.
He confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality. The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they be blinded as well.
Plato, argues Hedges, feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. Plato, he notes, said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”
We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news and BBN’s disconcerting reality.
In contemporary culture, writes Boorstin, the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.
Boorstin goes on to caution that an image is something we have a claim on. It must serve our purposes. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving towards it, we assume the matter is with us, and not with the ideal.
A greater problem manifests where the BBN reality becomes the Nigerian ideal.
Omoyele Sowore likens himself to a revolutionary. His followers call him truth-sayer, the voice of the youth. He is the situational hero sculpted of spunk and spittle. Certain youths idolise him.
In their fantasy, Sowore transfigures by patriotic ecstasy, defeats all odds hauled at him by the predatory ruling class. He causes Nigeria to implode and through the implosion, he emerges to rescue all from the stranglehold of the predatory ruling class.
He causes Nigeria to implode and through the implosion, he emerges to rescue all from the stranglehold of bad leadership.
Nonetheless, the ageing leadership holds tenaciously to power, never letting go. When they do let go, they reinsert themselves via stooges, their children and sworn associates.
Amid the malady, the youth romanticised the emergence of a ‘young’ presidential candidate like Sowore, among others. The fable persisted through the 48-year-old’s establishment of the African Action Congress (AAC), through which he vied for the presidency in 2019 and lost, coming a distant tenth and polling 33, 953 votes to Buhari/APC’s 15,191,847 winning votes even as PDP’s Atiku scored 11,264,977 votes to come second.
Sowore’s supporters feigned stupefaction over his defeat, mocking and ‘shaming’ fellow youths on social media for deserting their ‘own,’ but the founder of Sahara Reporters took it in good stride, as if he envisaged the shellacking.
This writer, and perhaps others, quietly hoped that Sowore, despite his defeat, would join brilliant minds and builders from the ill-fated Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) collective, and commit to a take-it-back styled movement, with greater purpose, maturity and unflagging spirit – under the rule of law.
Instead, he embraced militancy. Sowore made the news recently over his calls for nationwide protests against the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government. He accused the government of inefficiency and manipulation of the citizenry, claiming that they were the real enemies of the people.
Consequently, he called for a revolution and fixed a date. On the eve of his #RevolutionNow protest, the DSS invaded his home and picked him up.
Fisayo Soyombo, former Editor of Sowore’s Sahara Reporters writes: “On intent and method, I am on his side. However, on expediency and his utterances, I see gaping holes. If Sowore attempted to lead a political revolution pre-2019 election, the altruism of his intention wouldn’t be up for debate. But having offered himself as the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) and lost by a distance, this move would definitely be interpreted in some quarters as an attempt to seize power through a revolt having lost it through the ballot. That’s the expediency.
“On utterances, he was caught on tape saying the “DSS would no longer exist” after the revolution. That was probably a slip and still fails to justify the Gestapo-style invasion of Sowore’s home; otherwise, the northerners who issued a threat to southerners over RUGA should have been languishing in jail by now. There is no justification for arresting Sowore,” argued Soyombo.
The DSS accused Sowore of threatening the harmony of the nation by plotting to overthrow a democratically-elected government. While that, truly, is an ‘overkill,’ Sowore needs to re-examine his modus operandi and evolve more peaceful, mature, and decisive method of leading his ‘teeming’ supporters to take Nigeria back from perceived predators.
In truth, he hadn’t such support while he vied for the presidency. A great deal of his supporters, on the streets and social media, never truly believed in him or the candidacy of his peers in the PACT assembly.
Besides talking tough on social media, what do the youth seek in their preferred leader? What do they see now in Sowore that they didn’t see in him during the last elections?
The youth regret their inability to take over power from the same ruling class that recruited them as thugs to disrupt the elections, maim, kill and scuttle the ambition of promising young aspirants. Yet they make a living as social media hooligans (e-rats), whose job is to hoodwink, bully, spread falsehood and thwart the ambition of promising change-makers.
They will retire to rant, on their digital devices, and as paid protesters, about the their urgent desire and right to take over power. Their only argument is that, they are Nigerians, in their youth.
There is need to evolve a credible opposition platform particularly as the PDP fades out and resurges in the APC. This requires the active participation of the nation’s youth; it’s about time, however, that they grasped certain bitter truths about their incapacities.
Save a few stunning breed, contemporary performances of most youth in social and political theatres emphasise Nigeria’s descent from a moral cloud into a dissolute fenland. Freedom of persona is magical but often destabilising. If married to an excessive lust for money, it becomes very frightening and overwhelming. Ultimately it destroys.
Revolutions throw up hierarchies thus new castes are dramatized in the noisy climax of Sowore’s #RevolutionNow. The castes are scary. Rather than sound off on a fallacy, Sowore and cohorts will do well to sensitise the youth to a visionary, peaceful revolution, founded on altruistic ideals. This brings us to the quality of youth mooting #RevolutionNow.
Let us seek import in a social media post by one Shakeerah S. It goes thus: Topic 1: Big Brother: Tasha caught on camera having sex with Ebuka attracted 60, 700 comments; 100, 300 likes and it was shared 70, 800 times on the spur of the incident. Topic 2: Nigerian government signs power generation contract with Siemens to boost electricity, elicited 4 comments, 2 likes and the news was shared 6 times.
I would add that Soyombo’s defence of Sowore equally got paltry page views. At the last count, the post attracted five comments and zero shares.
In 2018, the total number of votes on the BBN show was 170 million. In sharp contrast, the total number of votes cast at the 2019 general election was 27 million. A practical reality of who we are as a people and where our priority lies as citizens. The funny side in all of these; we still go to bed, have a good sleep and wake up with the hope to meet Nigeria we didn’t create, lamented Shakeerah.
A show like Big Brother Naija (BBN) posits reality and entertainment by dignifying decadence and seduction. In the house, inmates lie and seduce in order to get laid. Poisonous words lead to poisonous sex. It’s a win-win situation. But in Sowore’s arena of revolt, the porn assumes a darker shade as passion runs where dissent rebounds.
To the youth, Sowore’s passion for power translated to gibberish en route the 2019 presidential elections; his words hovered in an interpretative cloud. Today, the same youth that scorned the AAC candidate tout him as Nigeria’s messiah.
Trust Sowore to exploit their energy until the fascination wears out. But let all be guided by the curious example of Nnamdi Kanu, the IPOB leader, who led hordes of Igbo youth to a deathly bed, in his ritual couvade mimicking Biafra’s rebirth.
The battle for Nigeria’s soul may be won and lost on the screen, and between the lines of the printed, spoken word.
Word denotes newspapers, magazines, the audiovisual but never the book. Screen alludes to TV, new media and illusions of our multiple ethnic, religious bigotries.
Living in a world of words and images, we have grown from people who spoke words and painted images to folk who speak images and paint words.
We have learnt to interact in varnished dialect; amid the racket of voiced imaging and painted words, a pagan illusion triumphs over the moral eye and mind. It is fitting, therefore, that heathen idolatory subsists in the absence of national heroes and heroines.
It is the latter that we should seek but Nigeria defies the tenor of lore and wisdom indigenous to us. Thus we ditch heroes to create gods by the dozen. In our lust for deities, we romance and spread to fickle idolatory.
We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. In Nigeria, our gods are celebrities thus religious belief and practice, business, economy, advocacy and politics, are modeled around the idolisation of personages.
In contrast, China prospers by native intelligence despite her love of celebrities. Likewise Japan. Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Korea. These countries’ socioeconomic and technological progress were built on a sturdy foundation of autochthonous intelligence and wisdom. Such wisdom should see Nigeria through her dark passes; left to our own devices we are retrograde.
There is no gainsaying modern Nigeria inherited the achievements and perversions of her ancestor generations. Then she lays waste to the latter’s achievements, even as she modifies their perversions and gives them new form.
Nigeria lusts for western-styled progress but the only modern parallels we have to the west occurs in politics, the arena where gladiators whip up artifice. Then we have cinema, our machine of the aggressive, amoral eye.
As amoral eye, cinema penetrates time and space. Enter Big Brother Naija (BBN) and its house of nasty realities. Big Brother’s culture of filth and voyeurism reflects the unacknowledged prurience of the Nigerian mind.
With money in contention, families ditch morals to embrace mammon. A so-called disciplinarian family, led by a cleric, learnt to turn a blind eye as their beloved and presumably well-groomed daughter gets ravaged in a public toilet; a lavatory frequented by 20 people in the Big Brother house during its last edition.
It didn’t matter that her body, a supposed ‘temple of God’ got plundered and sullied like a befouled orifice, by a fellow inmate fulfilling his role as a random buck.And the fable persists. Many a defeated, disciplinarian father, mother, sibling, granny, and other blood relative, impotently watch a loved one enthuse wild profanities on live TV, in frantic bid to emerge winner of the BBN sweepstake.
Such parents learn to ignore the rape of their elevated mores, values they hitherto inculcated in their child, painstakingly and pray for their ward to win.
As the travesty progresses, millions of youths and families participate actively from the sidelines, arguing mindlessly; their beclouded vision peering aggressively through labia of daemonic nature, cheekily eulogised as a DSTV/Multichoice’s social, experimental broadcast.
The show thus becomes a pornographic parable of Nigeria’s submission to amoral sex and power. It localises lust. Defiance, seduction and domination are precepts of the show’s blooming. Values hitherto idealised as Nigeria’s sunny, flowering fields are wilted in the searing of BBN’s bestial, infernal substratum.
Producers of the show strive to prove, that, success has too little to do with being a genius or smart workaholic, and everything to do with playing the game for the sweepstake.
The ongoing edition of the show incorporates wilder ingenuity by its producers as the inmates include supposedly made men and women; a banker, psychotherapist, human resource manager, Mr Universe Nigeria and a grandson of late sage, Yoruba and national icon, Obafemi Awolowo. Some alpha breed.
DSTV/Multichoice certainly mistakes its selection of Awolowo’s grandson as one of the 12 inmates of its morality jailhouse, for a work of pure genius; whatever outrage or applause results from its coup is expected to generate wider buzz about BBN and give it traction. But this is discussion best saved for another day.
By vetting the continuous broadcast and viewership of the show, the Nigerian government establishes itself as DSTV/Multichoice’s eternal wimp cum yard dog, and the nation, as the broadcaster’s doormat.
Yes, government and the broadcaster’s apologists will continue to rave that the BBN show is broadcast on paid digital service and that “It’s not a must that you watch!” and that “It’s a matter of choice.” Yet the government has no scruples outlawing what it terms “indecent dressing and behaviour.”
Government, for instance, disapproves of two public officers or citizens having sex in a car by the roadside, even if the vehicle’s windshields are tinted and the act takes place in front of their house or a remote street.
The culprits would be arrested for constituting ‘public nuisance’ although BBN apologists would argue that they committed the act in the private confines of their car.
The show’s producers argue that it creates stars, heroes and empowers youths. They would claim it propagates ‘values’ too. After all, former inmate, Teddy A’s values and moral compass led him to ‘appreciate’ fellow inmate, Bambam, by having sex with her in the toilet.
Picture the duo as candidates for Nigeria’s Presidency and Presidency. If the imagery scares you, wait till you read rationalisation of the BBN perversion by society’s supposed leading lights; so-called fiery critics of government and societal corruption mutate into DSTV/Multichoice’s lackeys or errand boys in real time. What do they still seek? A seat at the broadcaster’s annual gala or movies award night?
Kids are witnesses to BBN inmates’ perversions. They watch it on the internet and read frenzied reports of goings-on in the show by mainstream and new media.
Desperate rationalisation of the show, routinely, ignores its imminent repercussions on society; BBN apologists drone about how lucrative it is. To whom? It’s still the show’s producers and sponsors that pocket all the profit. Even its N60 million prize – increased from N45 million – remains devilishly exploitative of participants who ultimately become fame junkies and commercial sex workers by the end of the show.
They bend and break and distort into hideous forms in pursuit of the prize money. Such character is unworthy of young men and women persistently touted as Nigeria’s future leaders. To this end, let us hope Seyi Awolowo, a medical doctor, would remember his pedigree as grandson of the sage ancestor, who blessed generations of Nigerians with free, quality education cum civilisation and withdraw from a show, which perverts civilisation. But on the flip-side, his family and friends would argue that it is his choice and a free world.
At a time when Nigeria needs young men and women of unimpeachable character to wrest leadership from predatory leadership, the BBN show cloaks the minds of prospective patriots in wantonness, wild ego and muck.
This minute, their chants resound like the crusted corpse’s muffled groans in a garden of dirt.
IBRAHIM El-Zakzaky is a child of belief. From childhood through adolescence, he was raised on a stern diet of toil and reward; thus his life from infancy till he clocked 16 was characterised by two things: attending madrassah (Islamic school) and helping his father on the farm. On the farm, his father guided his wiry hands to till the soil, till it sprouted with fruits.
He learned, however, that the harvest is a bonus, and the process is of essence. At the madrassah, he was fed a spiced gruel of Islamic monotheism: “Without faith nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible,” he learned. Born May 5, 1953 in Zaria, Kaduna State, El Zakzaky experienced rebirth in the folds of religion. By the time he clocked 16, he had hazarded his brand of belief. Inured to its precepts, he wore it like a fine robe.
His journey into faith, however, accentuated in 1969 at his encounter with formal education while attending the provincial Arabic School in Zaria. Back then, the Native Authority (NA) trained Arabic teachers for its primary schools.
From the school, El Zakzaky proceeded to the School for Arabic Studies (SAS), Kano, from 1971 to 1975 and the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where he studied Economics from 1976 to 1979. El Zakzaky graduated from ABU with a First Class degree.
As an undergraduate, he was an active member of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) at both campus and national levels. In 1978, then Secretary-General of the MSSN (ABU), he was fingered as the brains behind the nationwide demonstrations in support of the inclusion of Shari’ah in the Nigerian constitution. He was elected Vice-President (International Affairs) of the MSS (National Body) in 1979. Through those years, he quit farming and committed to the pursuit of knowledge.
He led a very busy life studying, teaching and proselytising Islam (da’awa). It was during this period that he attracted the attention of the Nigerian authorities.
“Some might say they are the years of struggle. This struggle contains learning, teaching and of course, calling others,” he said in a past interview. He stated: “Perhaps, it is calling others that the authorities do not want. If I may confine myself simply to learning and teaching, maybe there would be no problems.”
But El Zakzaky would not be confined to learning and teaching, instead he embraced his passion to “call others.” Immersed in his pursuits, El Zakzaky meant to influence his world. Then he sought to change it. Among other things, he couldn’t bear what he considered the misconceptions and frequent attacks against Islam.
He couldn’t be silent in the face of random accusations against Islam as a tool of oppression, nor could he bear silently what he termed the oppression of Muslims, thus he “started to defend the religion” and at the same time, spread enlightenment about “what it truly stands for.”
To this end, he established the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), an off-shoot of his student idealism, in ABU, in the 1970s. The Iranian revolution, coming in 1979, inspired him. To him, Iran epitomised what Muslims in general could accomplish.
Thus motivated by the Iranian example, he took a sectarian path and over time, adopted religious markers of Shi‘ism. It’s noteworthy that the IMN credo fol- lows the kind of “Twelver Shi‘ism” dominant in Iran, rather than the Isma‘ili Shi‘ism that exists in East Africa or the Zaydi Shi‘ism prevalent in Yemen.
For instance, the IMN celebrates Shi‘ite holidays such as Ashura, which commemorates the death of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn, whom the Shi‘a consider one of their Imams. Shi‘ism is only one aspect of the move- ment, however: in some ways, El Zakzaky adopts the conventional Nigerian Muslim religious leader’s pragmatism; for instance, he discourages some Shi‘ite practices, such as praying for Imams to intercede with God on one’s behalf. While his home town, Zaria, remains his base, due to his repeated clashes with authorities, he has spent years in prison: 1981-1985, 1987-1989, and 1996-1998 and now, 2015 till date.
Across northern Nigeria, El Zakzaky’s followers are seen by authorities as troublemakers. For example, in 1991, one of his followers led a violent protest in the northern city of Katsina, targeting the newspaper, Daily Times, over alleged blasphemy. In 2007, the IMN clashed with authorities in Sokoto, far northwestern Nigeria, sparking a legal battle that lasted until 2015.
There is no gainsaying trouble sticks to his fine robes, like ivy to a laurel bush. Consequently, El Zakzaky has been jailed several times for his ideas by successive military regimes, from Obasanjo to the late Abacha regime. Charges against him varied from sedition to inciting disaffection to government. In the Abacha era, he was arrested for declaring that, “There is no government except that of Islam.”
His total prison experience is nine years in nine different prisons across the country – the most famous being Enugu (1981-1984), the Interrogation Centre of NSO, Lagos (1984-1985), KiriKiri Maximum Security (1985), Port Harcout (1987-1989 and 1996-1997) and Kaduna (1987 and 1997-1998). Nonetheless, from where El Zakzaky worked, the crusade was going just great.
It was “the will of God.” Now, if only everyone else would see it that way. A problem of perception? No president underestimates El Zakzaky. Doing so could imperil “everyone,” successive military regimes had believed thus his imprisonment over nine years; from Olusegun Obasanjo to the late Sani Abacha/Abdulsalami Abubakar military junta. And dreading what the 66-year-old could lead his Shi’ite group, the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) ,to become, the incumbent administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, took him into custody since his first term in 2015.
El Zakzaky was detained along with his wife, Malama Zainab, on December 12, 2015, following deadly clashes between Nigerian soldiers and his followers in the city of Zaria. At least, 60 people reportedly died in the violence, which the Nigerian Army claimed was a response to an assassination attempt by the sect’s members on the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai.
The clashes and El Zakzaky’s subsequent arrest sparked protests by his followers and further aggravated the tension between the Nigerian state and El Zakzaky’s IMN.
The seeds of the lingering conflict were sown at a July 2014 Shiite religious procession in Zaria, during the administration of former president, Goodluck Jonathan. At the pro-Palestinian rally, known as a Quds Day procession, 34 protesters, including three of El Zakzaky’s sons, were reportedly killed by security operatives, who alleged self-defence. More recently, Precious Owolabi, a corps member serving with Channels TV, died after suffering a gunshot to the stomach as members of El Zakzaky’s IMN clashed with the police, on Monday, in Abuja.
Deputy Commissioner of Police, Usman Umar, of the FCT Police Command, was also killed in the crisis. The IMN said 11 of its members were also killed during the agitation for the release of their spiritual leader, El-Zakzaky, who was taken into custody by Buhari’s administration four years ago.
The making of another insurgency Shiite Muslims are generally well-integrated in Nigeria and do not suffer direct discrimination or persecution. El Zakzaky’s followers, however, have a strained relationship with the Nigerian security apparatus. In the wake of a recent Shiite unrest, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, the current Sultan of Sokoto warned the authorities to “exercise restraint” in order to avoid creating another Boko Haram-style militant group.
He warned the authorities about the potential of radicalizing the group and its followers.
“The history of the circumstances that engendered the outbreak of militant insurgency in the past, with cataclysmic consequences that Nigeria is yet to recover from, should not be allowed to repeat itself,” said Abubakar.
And just recently, Femi Falana, a lawyer and human rights activist, warned the Buhari government on the implications of detaining El Zakzaky, along with his wife, despite court orders for his release. Falana said the nation risks another insurgency, should El Zakzaky die in detention, just like it happened with Boko Haram after its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed by policemen, while in detention in Maiduguri in 2009.
“El Zakzaky must not be allowed to die due to medical neglect as it may provoke a crisis of monumental proportions. Therefore, the federal government should implement the unanimous resolution of the House of Representatives for the release of El Zakzaky and his wife without any further delay”, Falana warned in a lengthy statement on Tuesday.
He warned the Federal Government of Nigeria against its violent approach to handling members of El Zakzaky’s IMN, who are protesting the detention of their leader, despite court orders for his release. On Tuesday 23, one day after the IMN clashed with the police, members of the House of Representatives were divided at a plenary session, over the call for the release of El Zakzaky.
While the House unanimously granted the prayer that the heads of security agencies be invited to address the lawmakers on the measures being taken to check the Islamic sect, they voted out the prayers calling on the Federal Government and the Kaduna State Government to obey court orders and release El Zakzaky.
At the backdrop of the proceedings, the mainstream and social media pulsate with arguments for and against the continued detention of the Shiite leader and his wife. While some declared that the group should not hold Nigeria to ransom and constitute public nuisance, other pundits alleged that the Federal Government should respect court order and release El Zakzaky and his wife. A suit challenging the illegal detention of El-Zakzaky and his wife was earlier decided in their favour by the Federal High Court on December 2, 2016.
The presiding judge, Kolawole J, at the period, reportedly directed the Federal Government to release the couple from unlawful custody, pay them N50 million reparation and provide them with a temporary house since their house got burnt when the army laid siege to it. The Federal Government hasn’t complied with the judgment to the chagrin of El Zakzaky, his wife and the IMN.
To the government, El Zakzaky and his IMN loom as a threat to the continued peace and stability of the country. Neighbours give conflicting accounts of their encounters with the sect. While some alleged nasty encounters being bullied off public roads by IMN processions, others recount palatable experiences sharing neighbourhood with the sect.
But Sheikh Ya-aqup Yahaya Katsina, who has been standing in for El Zakzaky since his detention in 2015, stated that IMN is not a terrorist group and it does not have problems with anyone. He said: “If we say something, it will appear like we are praising ourselves. But if you ask them, then you have the ability to arrive at an average opinion.
But quite okay, you may find someone saying he is not happy neighbouring our members, because not all people are the same. But if you can get a hundred responses, check the average, you will see 75 or 80 per cent are quite happy cohabiting with us. We don’t have a problem with anybody. If anybody experiences a problem, it would not be from us but from him. “In the case of Katsina State, we initially began to stay at Unguwar Yari Quarters.
When we left there to another location, from that very day, the residents counted their losses from thefts, because we provided security for the quarters while we were there. In this community where we relocated to, nobody had been in the position to leave his car or property outside, talk less leaving the lights on. But since we became part of this community, several neighbours from the beginning to the end leave open their doors and windows till daybreak.”
Through the crucible of his detention, the possibility of his release seems bleak and his ardent followers worry about his safety, warning that he musn’t die in prison. If that happens, the possibility of martyrdom looms for El Zakzaky; the IMN leader whose brand of Islam, rankles an ominous note to the state and cultivates a fiery model of belief.
His critics accuse him of extremism even as his apologists argue otherwise.
“What have we done that warrants us being branded terrorists? Why should we be called terrorists? But everybody knows Al-Qaeda are terrorists. Taliban are terrorists. Boko Haram are also terrorists. Why should El Zakzaky sect be regarded as terrorists? Are we doing the same operation? Calling us terrorists is clear cheating. We have the right to practise the religion of our own choice as enshrined in the Nigerian constitution. No one can stop us,” argued Sheikh Katsina.
Beneath the resonance of his words, a heartfelt plea steals into the atmosphere; the message is clear-cut; Katsina and his brothers in faith seek the unconditional release of El Zakzaky.
“He is not a terrorist,” they claim. True, El Zakzaky, until his arrest, didn’t live in a cave. He didn’t retire into the innards of some forest reserve to assign murder, or traffic in the image of an ascetic warrior-prophet.
El Zakzaky lived in a concrete house amid the flurry of neighbours and mundane concerns, where his sharp words elicited sharp blows of inquisition by defunct military and incumbent civilian administrations.
The frightful ending of Precious Owolabi’s life is a brazen incantation of bestiality over mankind. It exposes, among other things, the relationship between government and the governed as a barbaric ritual drama where the performers periodically swap masks.
Owolabi’s demise, however, occurs jarringly in the drama; his corpse manifests as a sick rose wrapped in menacing public thorns.
The corps member serving with Channels TV, suffered a gunshot to the stomach as members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), otherwise known as Shiites, clashed with the police, on Monday, in Abuja.
As Owolabi ebbed with his final hours, the Shiites and the police hacked at each other with sadomasochistic zeal – the Shiites energised by conviction and support for their incarcerated leader, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, and the police, sceptred by conviction of the state’s supremacy over outlaws.
At the backdrop of the mayhem, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Twitter reaction, that, he “most deeply commiserate with the families of Precious Owolabi” and another casualty of the crisis, “Deputy Commissioner of Police, Usman Umar, of the FCT Police Command” could be mistaken for artifice – a sterile rusing deception of a ruling class lamenting a pain it does not feel.
Does Buhari truly feel the pinch? How affected is he by the deaths? The IMN said 11 of its members were killed as they agitated for the release of their spiritual leader, El-Zakzaky, who was taken into custody by Buhari’s administration four years ago. Is Buhari regretful of Shiite deaths – whatever the true number of casualties?
Was his ‘twittered’ grief yet another maneuver mimicking compassion? What would Buhari say or do about the likes of Aisha Sani, the eight-year-old who was reportedly kidnapped two weeks ago from the Islamiyya School she attended with her siblings, in the Tudunwada quarters of Kano State by an unidentified lady?
Aisha’s kidnappers eventually demanded N200 million as ransom. Of course, the Sanis couldn’t afford it. Four days ago, Aisha’s corpse was found; she was hacked to death by her kidnappers. Her parents have since taken custody of her body for burial.
Cut to a recurrent panorama of mayhem and bloodshed from dusk through dawn across Borno, Zamfara, Benue, and the country’s major highways and transit towns, and you have a ghastly mosaic of the terror afflicting Nigeria.
The greatest terror, however, subsists in our complacent leadership, on whose watch, hundreds are hacked to death, monthly. In the wake of the carnage, public officers and politicians trade blames across party lines. While they play to the gallery, poor, helpless kidslike Aisha and youths like Owolabi, are murdered in cold blood.
President Buhari should flinch. He must understand that he is responsible for the safety of every Nigerian. He could, for instance, do with a more convincing response than silence to Aisha Sani’s murder and ‘twittered’ grief over Owolabi’s demise.
His expression of regret over Owolabi and Umar’s death is not enough. Regret is inadequate balm for eight-year-old Aisha Sani’s death and the carnage foisted on the country recurring conflict. The mayhem persists due to avoidable lapses in the security network and Nigeria’s culture of bigotries.
And, yes, the Shiite group overreaches itself by constituting a public nuisance but Buhari must learn to handle their grievances with tact, humility and wisdom characteristic of a mature leader. He must be decisive within the ambits of the law, and he must neither be condescending nor disdainful in his response to the debate triggered by the crisis.
Wild complacency, irrational brick bats, and mindless bloodshed have shaped our politics for too long. Many Nigerians, youth in particular, are probably living through the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city while many more live through such. Add these to an economy patched with foreign loans and dubious tales of growth; if Nigeria is prospering, it hasn’t manifested in the lives of the citizenry.
It took a perfect assemblage of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a character to lead usthrough and survive it. Is Buhari such a man?
He was supposed to be a dependable President: a patriot of uncommon grit and fibre, whose fabled Spartan discipline, humaneness and decisiveness would signal the end of Nigeria’s recurrent carnage and locust years. Is he?
As the country endures, the youth would do right to coalesce into a cohesive force, given their significance to the country’s impending doom or probable rebirth.
Come 2023, Nigeria should seek candidates capable of fostering policies that would revivify industries, generate employment, a functional health sector and quality educational system.
The search should start now for individuals endowed with the native intelligence, skilled manpower, astounding genius, streetsmarts and wisdom, that Nigeria sorely needs to power her rebirth. The prospective candidates must be convincingly detribalised and courageous enough to eliminate crime and power Nigeria’s comatose industry.
Industry matters. If the youth are gainfully employed, they won’t be vulnerable to criminal masterminds using them to foment mayhem, for selfish ends.
In the Shiites-Police mayhem, for instance, none of the casualties was identified as a scion of the ruling class or rich, privileged divide. Its instructive to note too, that, no former or serving governor, president or legislator has a descendant among the murderous herdsmen and Boko Haram.
Such homicidal groups are mobilised from the working class, the boondocks and other destitute divide. It’s about time we put a stop to this.
Today is spitting out monsters, tomorrow portends the emergence of a million more ogres, if the cycle is not reversed.
What Nigeria needs at the moment is leadership driven by moral courage to change the status quo. While I wouldn’t root for a clueless gerontocracy or corrupt oligarchy, if Nigeria must elect a youthful leadership, it must comprise fully evolved, courageous, young men and women, capable of fostering change beneficial to all.
Moral courage encompasses the nerve to do the right thing and speak the truth always. It involves defying the mob as a solitary individual; spurning toxic comradeship and disobedience to a corrupt potentate, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
Come 2023, Nigeria must root for a candidate identifiable as the window into the Nigerian psyche. The one who internalises the grief he has learnt from the streets. I speak of the candidate who shall manifest as the blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes can rally to project their dreams and needs; the passive yet active instrument by which Nigeria may prosper and attain rebirth.
Failure to do so would manifest as yet another sociopathic confusion; a sign of the internal political and social divisions that make it difficult for Nigeria to bloom by her youth in monolithic terms.
The youth is crucial to Nigeria’s rebirth; knowing this, the incumbent ruling class silences them by an irresistible material caress. Think political appointments, unearned benefits, tokenism, violent and intellectual thuggery for cash and so on.
The youth must understand their role in this cosmic mess and avoid future rehash of the present lest Nigeria becomes one big cautionary tale.
LASURA courts private investors, adopts N288 billion highrise building technology
Bintu Rahman dreads thunderstorms. The early drizzle pounds fear through her roof into her fragile frame. When it pours, the 86-year-old feels a rare chill to the bones; rivulets trickle through her housetop. It channels down the living room wall, leaving a brownish smear in its wake, the colour of rusted aluminium and dusty slates.
“The rain destroys everything. It leaks through the roof and the flood takes over our homes. Our houses are sinking and falling apart, but we have nowhere else to • Ganga paradise: Unidentified teenagers and young adults smoke Indian Hemp in the open to the Chagrin of Phase I residents. go. I have been trapped inside since four days ago. I couldn’t step into the flood,” she said, staring outside her second-floor apartment at Block 67, Adeniji Adele Phase III Housing Estate, Lagos.
Outside, the spatter of rain had subsided to a sprinkle, the note of each drop playing into the tenor of filth below. The buildings look derelict from afar. Closer, the peach-coloured flats bleed into the bleak, dark, expanse. The sinking houses, peeling paint lines, vanishing porches, roads and sidewalks bear insolent scars of decades-old flooding and sludge, a menacing fallout of administrative neglect and torrential rainsquall.
A journey through the flooded expanse is akin to a pilgrimage of sort. Venturing out of her apartment to receive the reporter, Rahman, 86, seemed like a wayfarer seeking to rediscover the forgotten footpath to the neighbourhood in its prime. However, she couldn’t advance beyond the rickety bridge made of a broken plank, which connects her house to the river of muck bordering her front yard.
At four feet, it’s too shallow to pass as a river, but it was deep enough to instill caution in the 86-year-old and her five-year-old neighbour, Mariam. The latter, cleverly, avoids the pool by taking a detour to her block.
“It’s quite sad,” said Rahman. “Every time I stare down my window, I am besieged by memories of this estate back when it was habitable. Then, we all felt privileged to live here. Little kids (like Mariam) do not have to suffer any ordeal while running an errand. But that was 25 years ago when my late husband, Rasheed, bought our apartment and we moved in thinking we had made a good buy. Today, I can’t bear to live here anymore. There is no pipe-borne water. We have to buy water from vendors.
Nonetheless, she raised her children there. “They used to live on the ground floor, but the persistent flooding sacked them from their apartment,” said Rahman.
Corroborating her, one of her sons, who pleaded anonymity, said that he had to flee his flat on the ground floor and relocate to his parents’ apartment on the second floor.
“It’s so sad. We live here like animals. They can’t keep neglecting us. This place has become very dangerous to live in,” he said.
The ‘Lizards of Lagos’
There is no gainsaying that flooding constitutes a major challenge to residents of Adeniji Adele Housing Estate Phases 1 to 4. The low-income housing estate, which comprises 120 residential blocks of two bedrooms and three bedroom apartments in four phases, was established in 1983. At the period, it was considered an attractive residential project thus making access to the housing units very competitive.
The proximity of the site to the Lagos lagoon, its low lying terrain, and external, physical development infractions have caused the estate to be decimated by floods over the years.
“I moved here as a bachelor in 1985. I also got married here. Those were the glory years. Today, this estate has gone to the dogs,” lamented Yinka Adekunle, 58. The widower and father of four stated that but for his undying attachment to the community, he would have relocated abroad to live with his son.
“I tried it once but I could not bear to live anywhere else. Soon after my wife passed away, my first son invited me over to London to live with his family but I couldn’t. Life over there was too boring and regimented. I missed my friends back home. I felt constantly harassed by the laws over there. I returned home four months later. And I never had any cause to regret until now,” he said.
Residents like Adekunle comprise what is known in coastal city parlance as Alangba Eko, meaning the Lizard of Lagos. The moniker connotes a subtle barb at residents of flooded parts of the Adeniji Adele estate, most of whom have refused to vacate their quarters for more habitable places on the mainland or outside Lagos.
“They do not mind the perils of living in a flooded slum,” said a shoemaker and resident of the estate’s Phase 2 commune.
A short history of neglect
Alhaji Rasaq Noibi, Chairman of Phase 2 residents association and also the Social Secretary of Adeniji Adele Phase I-IV Housing Estate and Oko Awo, stated that the flooding happened due to the neglect of the canal structure that ran through the four phases of the estate.
“By the time we came here, this estate was a great place to live, but in time, there was a sand-filling in front of the Federal Roads Safety Commission (FRSC) office across the road. That was when this problem started. It, however, worsened by the time of the filling of the Ilubirin building site; all the water began to flow back here. It worsens during the rainy season, then there is a blockage and flooding became the order of the day here,” he said.
The first flood happened in 1994 and continued ever since. Residents alleged that the major contribution to the persistent flooding is the “sand filling” of the Ilubirin area behind the estate. The sea level rose and water flowed backward. The canal structure is three-quarters-filled with sand, as it is not maintained.
According to Noibi, former Lagos governor, Babatunde Fashola, noticed the dilapidated state of the estate towards the end of his tenure. “He noticed that most of our houses were about collapsing when he came to inspect the canal and he instructed the Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency (LASURA) to intervene.
“The agency staff came, and during deliberations, we agreed on relocation. But before we can relocate, we stated that we would hand over our buildings to them for regeneration. After the regeneration, our flats would be given back to us, free. The project commenced in Phase 1 of the estate, where five blocks were demolished to pave way for the exercise.
“At the sitting with LASURA, it was decided that residents whose houses were billed for regeneration (renovation) would be relocated to the LASURA Transit Camps at Iba and Amuwo. Before the exercise commenced, they were given N25,000 each to finance their relocation to the transit camps. But there were some who insisted that they are lizards of Lagos (Alangba Eko); they said they were not living the vicinity of the estate,” said Noibi.
“So, we agreed that those ones should be given money to rent houses in the area and each family was given N1.2 million as rent for three years. Subsequently, the figure was reviewed to N550, 000 per year. But as we speak now, their rent is due and they are yet to receive the next instalment.
When Governor Akinwunmi Ambode assumed office, said Noibi, “he said he would not spend government money on the scheme and suggested that we involved a private investor. Then we (community heads) contacted the United Africa Company (UAC), who were more than willing to help out, but Ambode refused to put pen to paper. This is why we are here today,” he lamented.
It will be recalled that the Lagos State Government paid N6.6 million to the 12 families who were displaced due to the ongoing redevelopment project of Adeniji Adele Phase 1 as rent for the 2017/2018 period.
The 12 families who received the payment were reporteldy among the 30 families living in the estate before the demolition for redevelopment.
The government was said to have paid an initial N18 million as rent for the 12 families in 2014, while the N6.6m served as payment for the 2017/18 period with each family collecting N550,000 as against N500,00 previously collected due to increase in rent.
The families were given two options of resettlement: either they moved to LASURA’s Transit Camp within Iba Housing Estate or get paid to secure a convenient accommodation in a location of their choice, pending the completion of the project.
Eighteen families opted for resettlement at the transit camp while the remaining 12 families chose to receive money to rent an apartment of their choice in a preferred location.
Drug dens and marijuana divide
Those left behind, that is, current residents of the estate, however, have to contend with greater challenges. Besides the persistent flooding, decrepit infrastructure and lack of potable water supply, they have to deal with the invasion of the community by aliens and shady characters.
“A major fallout of our flooding challenge is the invasion of our community by criminal elements. Since many of the apartments here are deserted after flood sacked the occupants, criminals have moved into the empty buildings; they have turned most of them into drug dens where they sell and smoke hard drugs,” disclosed a member of the estate’s Community Development Association (CDA), who pleaded anonymity.
The Nation’s tour of the area revealed the depth of the estate’s brewing drug crisis. The reporter encountered gangs of youths brazenly smoking and selling Indian Hemp in the open, particularly near the clogged canal of the estate’s Phase 1 region.
Why govt, other stakeholders must intervene
Worried by the crisis posed by the estate’s environmental challenges, among other habitats, stakeholders came together recently to address the challenges at the climate and habitat conference on Flood Resilience and Housing in the City of Lagos. The event, which was convened by development guru, Lookman Oshodi’s Arctic Infrastructure (AI) and Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Nigeria, at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) building, Alausa, Ikeja, on Thursday, June 20, highlighted the climate change factors affecting the city.
Speaking at the event, Engr. Sunday Omoniyi of the Lagos State Public Works Corporation/Ministry of the Environment reviewed the flooding situation in Adeniji-Adele, Lagos Island and Divine Estate Idi-Ori, Ajegunle as ponderous case studies.
Reacting to flooding and housing challenges in Adeniji-Adele/Ilubirin, he said that the government improved on the state’s drainage Master Plan in 2015 to “de-flood” the entire state, including Adeniji Adele Housing Estate, but gross environmental mismanagement hindered the functionality of the basic drainage infrastructures within the area.
Omoniyi linked the causes of flooding in Lagos to global climate change and poor urban planning.
He stated that according to the drainage Master Plan 2015, there are three primary drainage channels and other secondary and tertiary drain networks within Adeniji Adele neighbourhood proposed to “de-flood” Lagos Island, and they are mostly concrete lined.
The primary channels are the Jankara/Adeniji-Adele channel which runs through the Ilubirin reclaimed land area with 10 meters bottom width, 15 meters top width and 1.5 meters depth; the McGregor channel, which runs within Osborne estate having a 10 meters bottom width, 15 meters top width and 1.5 meters depth; the Mandilas/Ebute Elefun channel, which runs along with Sura Market and Osborne extension.
Omoniyi recommended total urban regeneration of the estate due to the structural state of most of the buildings and its poor planning at the time of conception.
Funding the master plan may, however, pose a problem going by the claim of Abiodun Oyeshola of the state’s Ministry of Finance that the budgetary provision for drainage—both construction and maintenance—is declining. The major cause of setback in fighting flood in the state, argued Oyeshola, is government policy and lack of political will.
Further expert analysis of the flooding at the Adeniji Adele Housing Estate revealed that the community was built below sea level. Arctic Infrastructure recommended that the estate should be raised at least 3.5 meters above sea level as opposed to its current 0.6 meters, due to its closeness to the Lagos lagoon.
In an earlier attempt to improve living conditions in the estate, Lagos authorities mooted a major urban renewal project billed to see the transformation of the estate into high-rise buildings. As part of the efforts of the state government to get rid of slums in the state, it projected a reduction at five per cent per annum basis of its slums in the Lagos State Development Plan 2012–2025, similar to the first and second phases of the Lagos Island redevelopment that involved Isalegangan and Ojo-Giwa areas.
At present, the estate houses 15,000 people with 720 housing units, but in the swift urban renewal project, the state targeted 2,500 housing units in a high rising building format.
In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the General Manager of LASURA, Sholebo, disclosed that the redevelopment of Adeniji Adele Housing Estate Phase I-IV will commence soon.
He cited UACN Property Development Company (UPDC) Plc and ATO/Integra Architects Consortium as prospective developers, who have indicated interest and submitted designs for the projects.
He said that the state targets the construction of 2,500 housing units with all infrastructural facilities including alternative power supply and recreational facilities. According to him, “The redevelopment of Adeniji Adele Phase I-IV Housing Estate will be using a combination of various house types at various heights to achieve the required density for the redevelopment. The project consists of commercial and community development as well as provisions for elevated parking spaces would make it one of the iconic estates in the state.”
He said the project, when completed, will further meet the housing needs of residents in fulfilment of the government’s promise to provide shelter across all divisions of Lagos.
Although the United Nations (UN) pegged the city’s population at 14 million, Lagos government estimates it nearer 21 million, as rural Nigerians are drawn by the hope of a better life to its congested mainland and coastlines, daily.
To contain the surge in population, the new administration of Babajide Sanwoolu would be banking on the Lagos Drainage Master Plan 2015, drafted to address necessary factors such as area topography, tidal variations and climate change, among other variables, to ensure that the city of Lagos and Adeniji Adele Housing Estate Phase I-IV in particular, is flood-resilient.
Amid the misery of flooding and failed drainages, Bintu Rahman, 86, is a woman older and wiser. Her mind gradually adapts, like a channel of coarse memories and forms, through which beauty once raged.
Her five-year-old neighbour, Mariam, on the other hand, presents a perfect opposite to the widow and grandmother. Innocence enshrouds her as she meanders, running errands through rivers of muck, daily, like a light-walker on pond scum.
In the estate, the five-year-old cuts the perfect mould of what may pass as the beauty of things after a rainstorm. Yet it cannot be said that the storm has eluded or besmirched her. For she is of the storm.
