It is with unstinted pleasure that I write this piece to rejoice with my friend and colleague, Ambassador Dapo Fafowora as he celebrated last week his 80th birthday presumably quietly as the coronavirus protocol would permit. Ambassador Fafowora is a product of a union of a Lagos lady and one of the scions of Ijesha aristocracy. There has always been reasonable amount of wealth in the Fafowora clan thus the name signifying the power of Ifa in attracting wealth. Like most Ijesha, Ekiti and Ondo people, the Fafowora before the advent of Christianity were devotees of the Yoruba divination god of Ifa. Most of them embraced Christianity with the same fervor when the white man and their African Christian colleagues brought the religion on the wake of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade and subsequent Christian evangelization of the people of Africa. Quite a few of the returnees from Freetown, Sierra Leone to Lagos in the 1820s and 1830s were Ijesha people and some of the Christian educated elite in Lagos traced their roots to Ijesha land.
Western education came relatively early to Ijesha land after the Egbaland and the Ijebu areas. Fafowora’s father and his brothers were educated and Dapo Fafowora’s father was a middle level public servant. It was therefore understandable that Dapo went to school very early and by his teenage years, he was already in the oldest grammar school in Nigeria, the CMS Grammar school founded by Babington Macaulay, the son-in-law of Bishop Ajayi Crowther and father of Herbert Macaulay, the doyen of Nigerian nationalism.
After secondary school, Dapo Fafowora went to the University of Ibadan graduating with a second class honors degree in History at the age of 23 which was a very young age at that time when it was usual for people in their late 40s to sit in the same class with young people like Dapo Fafowora to whom reading and writing were not forced but came with effortless ease. Graduating in 1964, just four years after independence came with boundless opportunities for a young man. He could join either the Western Region or federal civil service after competitive examinations. He chose the federal civil service and the foreign service which at that time was reserved for the best in intellect and carriage.
Fafowora, tall and slim, self-confident and articulate was made for the foreign service. As a foreign service officer, he exploited the opportunities of the service to improve himself by earning a Master’s in History at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1966 and Doctorate in Philosophy (D.Phil.) in Trinity College, Oxford University is 1972. He had a stellar career as a diplomat, serving in Entebbe, Uganda and Istanbul, Turkey and finally as ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative (DPR) of Nigeria to the United Nations under Professor Ishaya Audu, former vice chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University and a physician by training. He was at his post in New York when Shehu Shagari was overthrown by a group of army officers whose headship later emerged as Major General Muhammadu Buhari.
As a civil servant and career diplomat, he did not think he had any reason to worry about his future as a foreign service officer but to his horror, he was retired at the age of 43 for reasons that he could not fathom. But in modern Nigeria, one could be marked down for whatever those in power or those who had access to men in power found unacceptable. It could range from one’s religion, ethnicity, lifestyle, looks, yes one could be cut down for being too handsome, too tall or short or for overconfidence or too much knowledge – what Hausas call “dogon turanci”.
There were very few people who had a doctorate from Oxford in the foreign service or the entire civil service. Dapo Fafowora was therefore a victim of envy and jealousy by those who had opportunity to do him in and took the opportunity by hiding under spurious intelligence report concocted by a junior executive officer who had served under him when he was in London. Dapo Fafowora suffers no fool gladly and he was not averse to telling off subordinates under him who performed poorly by the standards expected of a foreign service officer. In his career, he also served briefly in the Cabinet Office that scouted him out as an exemplary officer during the turbulent years of Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo years. He was exposed to enemies‘daggers because of his high profile as a young officer in the civil service and he paid for his brilliance, integrity, bluntness characteristic of his upbringing by an Ijesha father to whom what mattered in life was honesty and speaking the truth no matter whose ox is gored.
Life did not end for Dapo Fafowora after his retirement from the foreign service and the next 37 years afterworlds have been remarkable. He served as Director General of the Manufacturing Association of Nigeria (MAN) for some years during which time he spent time analyzing the impact of the annual budgets on the manufacturing economy of Nigeria. In this role, he became a self-taught economist whose views were as highly sought after as those of graduates of economics in Nigerian industries and higher educational institutions. He was drafted to his home government of Osun State in 1979 as Special Adviser to Governor Bisi Akande, a state that was rich in manpower but poor in natural resources. He was once a commissioner and acted as secretary to the government before bowing out having been chastened by the cut-throat competition and back biting characteristic of state government officials who had little to do and were themselves victims of frustration. From 1991 to 2020, Ambassador Fafowora has featured regularly as a columnist in one major national daily newspaper or the other and had also sat on the editorial boards of at least two national newspapers. He has shared with the younger generation, his views on our national problems of economic underdevelopment and national integration. He is quite in high demand in the lecture circuit in Nigeria particularly in the universities where he has been called upon to give convocation lectures probono. If he were an American retired ambassador giving all these lectures, he would be by now a rich man.
He published what is regarded a classic on the foreign service of Nigeria. His memoir “Lest I forget: Memoirs of a career diplomat” gave an account of the problems of the foreign service and the need to protect the service from being flooded by non-career ambassadors. This problem has now overwhelmed the foreign service under President Buhari who has polluted the service with politicians of doubtful character.
Dapo Fafowora had earlier published a book on “Sir Fredrick Lugard and Indirect Rule in Nigeria “which is a product of either his Masters or D.Phil. dissertations. Ambassador Fafowora is a devout Christian who plays the organ and worships at the Cathedral Church of Christ, Marina Lagos.
He wrote “A venture of faith: An Official History of the Cathedral Church of Christ, Marina Lagos 1867- 2007”. He had also published “A History of the CMS Grammar School 1859 -2009”. For his literary efforts and exertion, the Nigerian Academy of Letters in 2014 elected him an honorary fellow, one of a few Nigerians who have been found worthy to be so honoured. He has been very active in forming an association of retired career ambassadors to articulate collectively the direction Nigerian foreign relations should follow and to help protect the integrity of the diplomatic profession.
One thing that stands out about Ambassador Fafowora is his truthfulness, integrity and honesty of opinion. You may not agree with him but you cannot impugn his integrity and patriotism. There are not many people like him left in Nigeria who will offer his opinion whether whoever asks him likes it or not. What some find as cynicism on his part I find liberating. Ambassador Dapo Fafowora has no secret and he hates gossip and woe betide anyone who goes to him gossiping because he will expose the gossiper when he least expects it. He is fortunate to have married his beautiful wife who has given him wonderful children, male and female who have done very well in the professions at home and abroad. He is a patriotic Ijesha man. If not because of the general insecurity in the country, he would probably have gone to Ilesha for some Christian worship to mark his birthday but alas gone are those days in Nigeria when one could freely and safely travel. Ambassador Dapo Fafowora is a Yoruba patriot and a Nigerian nationalist and he sees no contradiction in being both.
Happy birthday to you dear friend; you have made your mark and your life will remain a template for good upbringing, good education and excellent service to man and to God. Felicitations.
You do not need a strong nose to perceive the aroma of coffee. Why? The beverage itself has a strong aroma that wafts in the air, travelling miles on end, causing people to look over their shoulders and wondering who is taking coffee around them? You smell the coffee before it gets to you. Just as Nigerians are smelling trouble before it happens across the country these days. It is one day, one trouble, leaving the country in ruins.
The smell of trouble is so strong. You do not need to be an intelligence operative to know that our country ails. It ails from self-afflicted crises because our leaders have left undone what should be done. Critics have shouted themselves hoarse over the state of things. They have called on the government to check the country’s drift into the Hobessian state of nature where life is short, nasty and brutish. It seems the government has no answer to this humongous challenge that is threatening to divide the country.
Despite all the telltale signs staring us in the face that if something urgent is not done, we may rise up one day and behold a balkanised country, President Muhammadu Buhari prefers to engage in platitudes. This not the time to talk, it is the time to act before what we all dread most happens. As a people, we are not united on the oneness of our country. There has been no other time in history than now that Nigerians, among them the lettered who ordinarily would have opted for one Nigeria, are singing discordant tunes on the country’s unity. They have come out to call for their own ethnic nations.
Is that the problem with Nigeria? Is division the solution? Are we not better and stronger as one? Why all these sudden agitations by ethnic nationalities for their own nations? Has Nigeria failed them? Is Nigeria a failed nation? Is the President helping matters with his handling of the situation? Is the President aware of the seriousness of the mess we are in as a nation? Has he shown leadership in the true sense of the word? Leadership has a lot to do when a nation is in dire straits as we are in Nigeria now. The nation needs leadership of purpose; a leadership that will unify the country and not divide it through acts of omission and commission; a leadership for everybody without beholden to anybody.
This was what the people thought they got with the coming of the President in 2015 when he uttered those classic lines: “I am for everybody and I belong to nobody”. He has not lived up to his word which is expected to be his bond as not only a soldier, but a general to boot. The country is giving way at the seams. It is on the precipice and just a little tip, it will tumble over. The root of all the problems we are facing can be located within Buhari’s leadership style. The President has to wake up to realise that he has an enormous challenge at hand. He has to act now or forever lose the country that he fought to keep as one. If that happens, history will not be fair to him. If the educated, the not so literate and stark illiterates are coming together in the crusade for self determination then something is wrong somewhere.
If the lettered who should restrain the others are joining them, it shows that all is not well within the system. It is no longer a case of us against them; it is more than that – the ethnic nationalities are up in arms against the government. It is not a south versus north thing anymore, though that is there somewhere below the surface. The immediate challenge is the shortcoming of the government, which cannot hold the country together. The people expected more than this from Buhari, but what they are getting beggars belief. Is this the same Buhari, who sought office on three occasions before getting it on the fourth try? What blueprint did he prepare for running the government? Does it mean that all the years he was contesting election, he had no idea of what to do if he had won?
It is not often that you see all sections of the country rising against the government. This is one of those rare occasions that people forget tribe, tongue and religion to take their government to task. In unison, they are saying: Mr President, the country is burning; rise up and do something. There was nothing the President did not say he would do if he got into office. Security and the economy were top of his agenda. Today, security is in tatters. Bandits, terrorists, kidnappers, insurgents, robbers, rapists and other criminal elements have taken over the land. They rule not only the underworld, but also the open world, making life terrible for the people. With a general as President, things were not expected to be like this.
These things can only happen in a country where there is no leader. We have a leader, but we are not feeling his impact. He takes donkey years to react to developments. We saw it at the outset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and we are seeing it now in the breakdown of law and order across the country. Thirty nine students of the College of Forestry Mechanisation in Kaduna were abducted over four weeks ago and up till today, they are still in captivity. What do you say of Leah Sharibu, who has been in captivity for three years under the watch of a president who promised to finish off Boko Haram on coming to power? Instead, Boko Haram has become stronger under him. The Northern Elders Forum (NEF), which played a major role in Buhari’s ascendancy, captured the nation’s mood aptly in a television interview by its spokesman, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed.
Describing Buhari’s governance style as too slow, he said “Nigerians must rise to take strong initiatives as citizens…since the country can no longer rely on the President or the governors. Not even members of the National Assembly can address the challenges of Nigeria. The truth is that there is enough reason to question the efficacy and legitimacy of the Nigerian state, in terms of its commitment to protecting the people…” If opportune to meet the President, what will he tell him?
Stating unequivocally, Baba-Ahmed said: “I will say sir, please wake up and smell the coffee, this country is falling apart. It is in serious danger; it is going down under your watch. You swore in 2015 and again in 2019 that you will protect the citizens, the territorial integrity of Nigeria. Sorry sir, you are not doing that, doing it well or you are not doing it at all”. Nobody can fault this submission, no matter how much that person loves the President. Buhari leaves things to go bad before he acts. For instance, it took the invasion of the Imo State Police Command and Owerri Correctional Centre on Easter Monday by hoodlums for him to fire Inspector-General Muhammed Adamu whose tenure he extended by three months in February.
He also footdragged before removing the immediate past Service chiefs only to compensate them with ambassadorial jobs. What happened in Imo on Monday is a wake up call to the President to use his remaining two years in office to redeem himself and his Presidency, otherwise history will not be kind to him. The signs are already manifesting.
Zamfara, “a state of three million population, 23 hospitals with 23 doctors, 300 public primary schools manned by a single teacher each while many others in remote rural have no teachers” (Hon Murtala Adamu Jangebe,) has always been in the news often for the wrong reasons since the birth of the fourth republic in 1999.
The Zamfara governing elite remain the scourge of an impoverished people serially betrayed and repeatedly raped by self-serving leaders that rode to power on their back. The intervention of Abuja at the behest of the local hegemonic class has only prolonged the people’s nightmare.
Last week, Ibrahim Dosara, the state’s Commissioner of Information reminded Nigerians of the origin of this nightmare. The “genesis of rural banditry in Zamfara,” he said, “started with a conflict between the Fulani and Hausa communities in the state”. The result: 2,619 deaths, 1,190 abducted and 14,378 livestock rustled with 100,000 people displaced from their ancestral homes between 2011 and 2019. He also told us the obvious: “Zamfara lacks enough security forces from the federal government to secure the lives and properties of the people in the state”.
Having located the conflict within the Hausa majority and the Fulani hegemonic ruling minority, for many, the most cost-effective approach would have been community policing with recruits drawn from the warring Fulani and indigenous Hausa people to enable them jointly confront their demons.
And from the above, it was clear the source of social dislocations in Zamfara as elsewhere in the north is distributive justice–the proper allocation of rewards, as Aristotle put it. But sadly, the Zamfara minority was committed to distributive injustice and as expected chose force to enforce it. For them, allowing the oppressed and marginalized to participate in policing themselves was a risk they were not ready to take.
This perhaps explains why Minister of Defence, Brig-Gen. Mansur Dan Ali (rtd.) persuaded the president that a full battalion of special forces be stationed in Zamfara State This was followed by “Operation Maximum Safety” with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles”. This was further consolidated with a “Joint Intervention Team of about 1000 police personnel comprised of seven mobile police force units headed by an Assistant Commissioner of Police, counter terrorism unit (CTU), federal special anti-robbery squad (FSARS), anti-bomb (EOD) squad, and conventional policemen”.
Their mandate: “rout-out, arrest and prosecute armed bandits, vicious kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustling gangs operating in some parts of the state.”
The Nigerian Air Force also launched its own Operation ‘Diran Mikiya’, with a coordinated air strikes and a force package of two attack helicopters after intensive Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Then not too long ago, “Operation Puff Adder,” by Mohammed Adamu, the just removed IG aimed “at taking the battle to the doorsteps of the criminals” especially in Zamfara.
The result has been more killings, more rustling of cattle and more kidnapping for ransom. Whereas, the amount of money frittered away by a central government that spends funds it does not generate would have sustained community policing and provided job for would-be criminals. But for Zamfara’s suicidal elite and their Abuja promoters committed to institutionalization of injustice, neither logic nor socio-economic considerations count for much.
Zamfara’s successive elected governors have been no less disloyal to the people of the state. In 1999, instead of working for a more egalitarian society by addressing inequality and economic strangulation of the majority that could only access their own land for subsistence farming after payment of tax, Ahmed Sani Yerima chose to exploit the religion and ethnic differences of the people for temporary political gain. On October 27, 1999, he introduced Sharia law in breach of the constitution. Some 20 years later, the introduction of Sharia law according to one observer had only “forced people to withdraw into the womb of their religions since people’s religion and ethnicity today determine access to power, resources and privileges”.
Yari who many believed governed mostly from Abuja while his state burned did little to change the status quo. In November 2016, when gunmen overran a mining camp in the Maru district of Zamfara State and killed 36 people, Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar, who from his hideout described the incident as “an act of terrorism” prevailed on Abuja to deploy more military units to fight the armed gangs.
Besides self, Yari served neither the people nor his party. He frittered away the victory of his party in a failed attempt to hand pick his successor. The court nullified all those elected including the governor on the platform of his party because of lack of valid primaries before the election.
He was dragged to court by Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) where he lost N700m on January 24, when the court held that “he could not prove how he got the funds while or before serving as governor of Zamfara State between May 29, 2011, and May 29, 2019.”
In the midst of the people’s misery, the absentee governor also assented to a law that would have allowed him to draw N10m pension after his tenure. Bello Matawalle, his successor while signing the repeal of the law accused Yari of paying himself N360m from the state pensions fund two days to the end of his term.
In Matawalle, the suffering people of Zamfara are not likely going to get any relief. He claimed his three predecessors spent the sum of N970 million on payment of ransom to some of “the 30,000 identified bandits, operating in more than 100 camps” leading to a rescue of over 2,000 kidnapped victims with the help of repentant bandits. Matawalle’s own creative response to those in control of Zamfara so far has been to swear by the Quran that he has no connection with bandits terrorising the state and challenging residents of the state, irrespective of their status, to do the same.
Bickering between Matawalle and Yari over mismanagement of Zamfara resources will not in any way change the relationship of the Zamfara impoverished people and their ruling oppressors.
In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Oxford University in its Human Development Initiative rated Zamfara as the poorest state in the north. It is also estimated that about 80 per cent of the population is in extreme poverty. In 2019, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) listed Zamfara along such states as Bauchi, Niger, Katsina, Kano, Sokoto, Kebbi, Gombe, Adamawa and Taraba as having eight million out-of-school children.
A REUTERS report of April 21, 2016, claimed “gold remains a major obstacle to peace with the state political elite and retired Generals engaged in deadly war, using the proceeds as the source of income to arm actors, from the Northwest, who kill and sexually abuse civilians with impunity”.
As if to support the claim, Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) alerted Nigeria of an increasing number of childhood deaths and illness in mining villages in the two Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Bukkuyum and Anka. There was also the United States Centre for Disease Control (US-CDC) that confirmed severe lead poisoning in more than 100 children in the villages of Dareta and Yargalma
Yet both the federal and state government were parties to the “illegal mining”. As late as October 2020, the Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Olamilekan Adegbite, spoke of N2.5billion loan with the Bank of Industry for artisanal miners whose interest is now N3.2billion, making it difficult for miners to access the money. Governor Matawalle was also recently quoted as saying: “For a start, we have purchased 31 kilogramme of gold, wholly mined and refined by our artisanal miners.”
Sadly, the besieged poor people of Zamfara can neither swear by the name of their state elected office holders nor by that of the federal government, the impartial arbiter.
There is a righteous delirium implicit in Kwara public schools’ anti-hijab sentiments. Ten schools’ administrators, waving the Christian flag, engage the government and Muslim students in a virulent struggle for the soul of their schools.
They seek to ban the hijab claiming the Muslim apparel is an affront to their Christian roots. Public commentators, Christian groups and the press subsequently denounce the state government’s outlawing of the schools’ agitation; all eager accessories to a righteous hoax.
The most righteous hoax, however, must submit to the Rule of Law. It is noteworthy that the Court of Appeal had ruled in compliance with Section 38 of the Constitution, which allows the Muslim girl’s right to freedom of religion and her freedom to manifest same by donning the hijab in Kwara’s public schools.
The Appeal Court ruled that the Christian names of the public schools – that had been operated as co-educational, multi-ethnic and co-religious institutions for over 40 years – do not suggest ownership but fond memories in humour of their founders. Thus they are public schools, disallowed from having discriminatory rules.
Their teachers are recruited, promoted, disciplined, and paid pensions and gratuities by the government. Yet these schools imposed rules that are inconsistent with the law, notes the court, in flagrant violation of students’ religious rights as provided by Section 42(1) and Section 38(2) of the constitution.
Even without the rebuke of the court rulings, the school have no justification for victimising Muslim students on their watch.
As minors growing up in an Islamophobic world, the affected students have to deal with misconceptions about their religion, their faith and identity; persistent hostility from their schools’ authorities, render them acutely confused about how they should navigate the world as Muslims.
They find out that their bodies and identities – in spite of the voguish gender rights dubiously touted for their sake – are restrained in the liminal world of religious intolerance and righteous ambiguity. It’s disconcerting that feminist and girls’ rights activists are conveniently quiet in the face of such premeditated acts of violence committed against innocent school girls.
The latter are expected to yield to persistent bullying, and stifle their individuality and faith to humour a highly toxic, politicized social space.
While they look up to their teachers and schools’ administrators for quality tuition, character and moral guidance, the latter see them as dreadful ogres that must be subdued and defeated.
Their fear of the hijab, however, reveals their spiritual and mental insecurities. Even as adults, they are so insecure in their own faith, that they twist their pants into knots over innocent school girls, young enough to be their daughters’ religious choices. Those who fall within such human bracket may seek urgent therapy – constructive psychotherapy to be precise.
In their crusader circuits, victory is the end game. But victory over who? Over underage school girls? If the scriptures preach love, tolerance, how come they recast it as a code book for eternal mayhem and intolerance? Even Jesus was so open-minded in his pursuit of knowledge that he schooled with the agnostic Essene sect in company of his friend, Barnabas.
The Jesus that the Muslim school girls accept as their Holy Prophet Isa, would never approve of their maltreatment. After all, when he said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven,” the children referenced weren’t Christians.
What are the anti-hijab crusaders’ fears? I would say, that most antagonists of the hijab are victims of chronic bias – something bordering on paranoia and misplaced aggression.
Religious war and intolerance is a disease of the poor. The political class looting our coffers do not engage in religious wars in their circuits of expediences. Rather they hobnob and marry off their children in oft arranged inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages.
About 800 choice assets bought in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), by looted funds, have been traced to some ex-governors, ministers, senators, and military officers in Nigeria.
Such loot would serve better purpose if committed to youth empowerment and infrastructure development. Yet most of the looters are self-confessed Christians and Muslims, and they co-exist as landlords and neighbours in Dubai, a Sharia province, without incident.
Indeed, religious intolerance is the plague of Nigerian segments rendered bitter and disillusioned by poverty and bad governance. It’s an avenue for them to let loose their frustrations and reenact against each other, the oppression they suffer at the hands of the ruling class.
When presumed intellectuals jump in the furore, they often do so as a necessary performance of prejudice. They are never found at the crossroads, where ‘righteous souls’ clash and maim their reckless spirits. Theirs is to incite the world into a needless war in fulfillment of their treasonous pieties and questionable allegiances.
There is a paranoiac neuron characteristic of the Christian and Muslim bigot; it is resident in the terrorists that abducted Leah Sharibu and subjected her to sexual captivity and premature motherhood. It is resident in every Nigerian, who sees something horrid in a harmless school girl donning the hijab.
The migration to Abyssinia, also known as the First Hijah, offers timeless lessons in tolerance among early Christians and Muslims.
At the height of the Muslims’ persecution by the Quraysh of Makkah, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) advised Uthman bin Maz’oon, one of his trusted companions, to lead a group of Muslims (83 men and 18 women) to seek refuge in Abyssinia, which was ruled by the Negus, a Christian King, who had a reputation for justice.
When their Quraysh persecutors realised that the Muslim exiles could safely practice their religion in Abyssinia, they sent emissaries to the Negus with fine gifts of leather, to demand their repatriation.
Although the Abyssinian king granted them audience, he refused to eject the Muslims without a fair hearing. He summoned the Muslims in the presence of his bishops, and Ja‘far ibn Abi Talib, who acted as the refugees’ spokesman, narrated to the king how they lived before Islam, Prophet Muhammad (SAW)’s prophetic mission, and the persecution they had suffered from the Quraysh.
The king requested divine evidence of their faith and Ja‘far recited a passage from Surah Maryam (Chapter of Mary). When the king heard it, he reportedly wept and exclaimed: “Verily, this and what Jesus brought (Gospel) has come from the same source of light (miškat).” Then he vowed never to give up the Muslims.
Exasperated, one of the Quraysh envoys, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, maliciously suggested to the Negus that the Muslims are spreading dreadful notions about Jesus. The king summoned the Muslims again, and Ja’far held Jesus to be “God’s servant, His prophet, His spirit, and His word which He cast upon the virgin Mary.”
Upon hearing these words, the Negus declared that Jesus was indeed no more than what he had said. He turned to the Muslims and told them: “Go, for you are safe in my country.”
He then returned the gifts of the Quraysh envoys and dismissed them.
There is a lot to learn by the Christian king’s compassion for the Muslim exiles.
The Kwara schools are wrong to deny the Muslim students use of their hijab.
If I see something better, I will quit police work
October 21, 2020; Jola Edewor wore his uniform with a frantic earnestness unlike the passion that drove him to enlist with the police. Few minutes before he gets to work, he would rip it off and renounce his calling. But he did not know that. The previous day, Edewor retired in bed with a heavy heart, having discovered that his salary had been short of N50, 000 for two years (about N1.2m). The following day, the 41-year-old set out for the force headquarters, eager to get to the root of his hardship.
• Sgt. Maina urging Babatunde to get off the street in order to feed him
But that fateful morning, he wouldn’t get to work. About 15 minutes after he left the barracks for his rendezvous with colleagues at Meiran, he beat a hasty retreat.
It was the 12th day of the #EndSARS protest and the streets pulsed with mayhem as irate youth ran it amok baying for blood of uniformed men. Few paces from his rendezvous, a riotous mob chased after a policeman until he tripped over a boulder and they pounced on him. They ripped his shirt off and rained punches on him, chanting “#EndSARS! #EndSARS!” said Edewor.
“From the distance, they didn’t look like protesters. They looked like hired killers out for blood. One of them railed that they would kill any police officer that they see and set him ablaze” he said.
Instantly, he retreated behind an empty food kiosk. From his hiding, he watched the mob batter his colleague till he was drenched in blood.
Fearfully, he tore his shirt off his body, ripping the buttons as he did, and he slipped out of his trouser. He would be naked, but for his improvised undies comprising a t-shirt and cycling short. He balled his left hand into a fist and rolled the uniform around it. Then he tucked it in a refuse bin behind the kiosk and walked away, coolly, in brisk, urgent strides.
Several metres ahead, he turned to look at the scene. He could not make out his colleague in the distance but he felt contrite leaving him to the mob. He was equally ashamed for discarding his uniform.
“I knew I could purchase another uniform. They sell everything to us anyway. But that officer (his lynched colleague). Till date, I don’t know what became of him. I never bothered to ask,” he said, arguing that even if he did, there was nothing he could do.
Still, he rued his helplessness leaving his uniform in the bin and watching his colleague fall to a lawless horde.
The melee resulted from the demonstrations triggered on Thursday, October 8, 2020 by videos circulated on social media, showing the highhandedness and extrajudicial killing by officers of the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery (SARS) Squad.
For the next two weeks, protests were held in various states across the country and by Nigerians in the diaspora calling for police reforms and an end to brutality. But before long, groups of hoodlums seized the opportunity to unleash staggering violence on members of the police force.
Still smarting from his close shave with death, Edewor set back hurriedly for his barracks in Agege, chanting “#EndSARS! #EndSARS!”in solidarity with hoodlums prowling the streets in search of policemen.
Eventually, he ran into a group of teenagers wielding battle axes, machetes and clubs at the Oja Oba and Abule Egba junction.
While some of them kept watch for policemen and smashed empty beer and soda bottles on the street, others huddled in clusters around mobile phones, chatting animatedly about a trending video.
Intrigued, Edewor asked one of the horde what they were excited about. “He told me to switch on my Bluetooth device and shared the video with me,” Edewor said.
The video showed a police officer being clobbered by a mob in front of a burning police station at Orile, Lagos. The officer reportedly jumped the fence in order to escape being caught in flames as the mob set fire to the station, in protest against the alleged high handedness of the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) heading the station.
Unfortunately for him, he leapt into the hands of the mob. They pounced on him and beat him to a pulp. Amid the mayhem, a thickset youth stabbed him in the eye. The officer careened with the dagger stuck in his eye, bleeding profusely. As he reeled blindly, his assailants took turns hacking into his already bloodied frame with machetes. Eventually, he keeled over and the mob descended on him maniacally, finishing him off.
Edewor swallowed hard. He cringed, watching the mob hack the policeman to death. At that moment he wished to abdicate his position as a Police Inspector. An axe-wielding boy in his early teens railed that he was looking for a policeman to hack to death.
“How could I serve and protect members of a public that wants me dead?” thought Edewor. Suddenly, he felt vulnerable, exposed. “I feared one of the hoodlums might recognise me,” he said.
Thus he retreated cautiously, in anxious steps. Soon, he was dashing down the bypass behind Oja Oba market, en route Agege; an inexplicable yearning to live urging on his desperate feet.
“I was in survival mode,” he said, stressing that he thought nothing of his oath to protect and serve in that moment.
“I have no passion for this police work again. I just wish to make ends meet and care for my family. What kind of work is this, that your employer would steal N50, 000 from your salary for over two years and the public you serve seek to kill you,” he said, adding that were it not for a colleague who alerted him, he would continue living from hands to mouth.
Edewor was supposed to earn N130, 000 monthly but instead, he received N80, 000 for two years. Having spent over two decades on the job, he felt cheated.
He wondered how much had been stolen from my salary in the course of his 20-year-career as a police officer. He said, “When I approached people in the cash office, they told me point-blank that I must pay a bribe of N50, 000 to them, if I was serious about receiving my full salary.”
Faced with no choice, Edewor paid the bribe of N50, 000 and instantly, his salary was regularised. On next pay day, his account was credited with N130, 000.
His stolen salary and the events of Wednesday, October 21, 2020 shook him to the bones. They were ingenuously haunting episodes that rendered his heart a soiled, grey carapace for police work.
Recalling his travails with the police accounts department and the #EndSARS mob, his face darkened and crimped with furrows. His eyes eddied from white-black to a muddy capitulation, his lips parted and closed, forming an incongruous angle with his words. Softly, slightly distended, as if he would break into tears or start bawling.
“If I see something better, I will quit police work,” he said with submissive sternness.
Yet Edewor was lucky to escape with no physical hurt, unlike Sergeant Ajibola Adegoke and Corporal Rotimi Oladele. They were among the police officers killed in the wake of the #EndSARS protests that rocked Ibadan, Oyo State.
The duo, who were attached to the ‘B’ Operations office at the headquarters of the state police command at Eleyele, Ibadan were attacked and set ablaze while going on special duty to a fish depot at New Gbagi area with a superior, Inspector Osho Ojo, on Thursday, October 22, 2021.
To guarantee their safety, they reportedly wore mufti and rode in an unmarked vehicle; but for a minor accident with a motorcyclist, the team would have gone about its duty without incident.
A heated argument ensued with the motorcyclist, attracting hoodlums to the scene. Immediately they discovered that they were police officers, the hoodlums reportedly pounced on them.
Although they fled for safety, Adegoke and Oladele were eventually apprehended and the thugs descended on them with various weapons.
A viral video posted by one of the hoodlums showed the gory scene as the policemen were beaten to death and set ablaze on a heap of used tyres.
Not done, the hoodlums allegedly cut chunks from the burnt corpses and devoured them with chilled drinks.
Fortunately for Inspector Ojo, he was rescued by operatives of Operation Burst, while they recovered the pistols of his burnt colleagues.
Unnerved by the fate of the murdered officers, the Oyo State police authorities launched a manhunt for their assailants. The police subsequently arrested two men identified as Aliu Mubarak, 24, and Adewale Abiodun, 17, in connection with the killing, dismemberment and selling of decapitated heads of the policemen for N1,000.
The suspects were arrested after one Oladipupo Ifakorede, 45, confessed to buying the policemen’s heads from the duo for money-making ritual.
Recounting how he got the heads from Mubarak and Abiodun, Ifakorede said;
“I want to use them to prepare ritual to make money. It is for myself. They (other suspects) did not let me know where they saw the two heads. I did not ask them where they saw them.”
Five persons were arrested in connection with the crime. The police had earlier arrested Kemi Adeyemo and Saheed Oyedepo and they were both transferred to Abuja for further investigation.
Abiodun equally confessed that he and Mubarak sold the two heads to Ifakorede, stressing that they saw the two heads “while coming from Egbeda area of Ibadan.”
In Rivers State, three policemen also lost their lives to angry mobs. Police authorities in the state, however, accused members of the pro-Biafra group, Indigenous People of Biafra, (IPOB), of hiding under the #EndSARS protests to kill the three police officers.
The State Commissioner of Police (CP) Joseph Mukan, while briefing the press in Port Harcourt, gave the identity of the slain officers as: Sunday Dubon, an Inspector attached to the anti-kidnapping unit, whose corpse was said to have been burnt; Swawale Ornan, a Sergeant attached to the 19 Police Mobile Force on Special Duty at Oyigbo, whose corpse was also burnt; and Umunna Uchechukwu, a sergeant with Afam police station, whose legs and hands were cut off before he was burnt to ashes.
Uchechukwu was butchered, his legs and hands cut off, and his body was eventually burnt to ashes. Emotionally stricken by the presence of the grieving wives and children of the murdered policemen, the Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, decided to pay a N20 million compensation to each of the families of those killed by hoodlums in Oyigbo.
The Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Adamu, speaking through the Police Spokesman, Frank Mba, stated that, “available reports show that twenty-two (22) police personnel were extra-judicially killed by some rampaging protesters and scores injured during the protests. Many of the injured personnel are in life threatening conditions at the hospitals.”
He added that “two hundred and five (205) police stations and formations, including other critical private and public infrastructure, were also damaged by a section of the protesters.
“Despite these unprovoked attacks, our police officers never resorted to use of unlawful force or shooting at the protesters,” Mba said, even as civil society chide the police for excessive display of aggression and use of force on the #EndSARS protesters.
Human rights organizations blame the police for escalating the protests soon after it was hijacked by armed thugs, leading to the deaths of at least 51 civilians.
Our morale is low – Police
There is no gainsaying the #EndSARS protest and the mayhem triggered in its wake has strained relations between the police and the public. Speaking with The Nation, several officers – who pleaded anonymity – admitted that they have become less passionate about their work.
“Our morale is very low. Extremely low. Nobody bothered to ask of our own side to the story. Yes, there are bad eggs in the police but don’t we have bad eggs in every profession? We have bad doctors, teachers, engineers, accountants, civil servants, journalists and even our religious men…Every day, we deal with dangerous criminals among the public. But na police be everybody’s problem. Now, that they have killed policemen. Let them begin to protect themselves,” he said.
‘Now the police know how we feel’
While offering condolences to bereaved families of police officers, Kunle Atanda, a retired civil servant stated that, “Now, they feel our agony. Their wives and children know how we feel when their husbands torture and kill innocent members of the public. They understand the severity of the losses suffered by members of the public who have lost their loved ones to extrajudicial killing by policemen. An eye for an eye is never a welcome option but our social and security system is truly deserving of a corrective purge and I think the tragedies of the #EndSARS killings should guide us towards urgent solutions.”
Policing in squalor
Nationwide, policemen live in squalor within and outside the barracks. They patrol in rickety vehicles, often extorting commercial transporters and motorists for fuel money.
A combination of poor training, poor remuneration – recruits earn N9, 000 and less than N120, 000 annually – and a culture of corruption and impunity has allowed torture and other ill-treatment to become routine in criminal investigations by the police.
Suspects are tortured to extract confessions as the police are under pressure to solve serious crimes without adequate resources and specialised skills. With little investment in fingerprint databases, ballistics and other forensic expertise, investigations often rely on confessional statements not brilliant police work to solve cases.
Several policemen also complained of deplorable housing; some residents of the Agege and Pedro police barracks, for instance, lamented their squalid living conditions.
“The barracks are overcrowded. I live in a single room with my family of seven. There is too much heat, the septic tank is filled up and it really stinks. Cockroaches crawl all over our apartment, even our beds, and the whole place is rat-infested,” said a Police Sergeant, who lives at the barracks in Agege, Lagos.
Patricia Udom, 36, also complained of overcrowding, unsanitary toilets and surroundings. “The whole place smells like a toilet. It smells of human sweat, over-filled septic tanks,” said the Lance Corporal.
The Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership (CACOL) recently took the National Assembly and the executive arm of government in charge of the Police Trust Fund (PTF) to task on the present state of police barracks across the country, lamenting that police barracks could pass for rat holes and slums.
The Executive Chairman of the Centre, Debo Adeniran, stated that, for this reason, the Nigerian police was rated among the top five worst police organizations in the world in 2016 by the World Internal Security and Police Index.
Police barracks in Lagos are an eyesore. Most of the structures are collapsing, yet the barracks and accommodation department of the force has done nothing to rectify the situation.
“All they do is deduct N7, 000 or more from your salary as lodging allowance. The rooms are very bad, and you only get one room and parlour, no matter the size of your family and you are forced to share toilets and bath,” said a Sergeant at the Agege barracks. He lamented that police families struggle to construct and maintain septic tanks and drainage.
Plans have, however, been concluded to demolish all dilapidated and rebuild them for policemen and their families. This was disclosed recently by the Chairman, Nigeria Police Trust Fund (NPTF), Suleiman Abba, during his visit to the Ijeh Barracks, Obalende Barracks, MOPOL 20 Barracks and the Police College, Ikeja.
Abba, a former IGP, who was accompanied by the Lagos State Commissioner of Police (CP) Hakeem Odumosu, and other senior officers said, “We are going to demolish dilapidated barracks and renovate those that are still good to human habitable status, with the provision of modern toilets, flowing water, safe roofs where water will no longer leak into rooms as well as safe electricity. That is what policemen deserve.”
Travails of a failing force
With a staff strength of almost 400,000, the police is the primary law enforcer and security agency in the country consisting of 36 state commands grouped into 12 zones and seven administrative organs including special units such as the disbanded SARS and newly constituted SWAT.
Yet salaries of Nigerian policemen are abysmally poor with a recruit earning as low as N9, 000 monthly and N110, 000 annually. Jocelyn Nwiti, a Corporal said she earns N42, 200 per month, Niyi Orunkoyi, an Inspector, said his take-home salary is N78, 478 per month.
A 2008 Presidential Committee on Police Reform headed by Muhammed Yusuf recommended an estimated N2.8 trillion – or N560 billion annually – to effectively reform the police in five years.
The Parry Osayande Committee, constituted in 2012 by former President Goodluck Jonathan regime, made similar recommendation, and called for a special fund to transform the NPF which he described as the worst paid in the West African sub-region.
In November 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari approved an enhanced salary structure for the NPF but more than three years after the approval, police officers say they are yet to receive a pay rise.
Hostility begets hostility
The deplorable working conditions have been blamed for police officers’ poor attitude to the job. “Hostile work conditions breed hostile personnel. The slogan, ‘Police is your friend’ is very wrong. How can we be your friend when we are underpaid and our children play and sleep in filth? Many of our children have fewer choices to succeed; they either turn criminals or do police work. Many choose the former and become Yahoo Boys. It’s easier to be a Yahoo Boy (internet fraudster) these days. Many police officers even support their children to do internet fraud. Yes, its as bad as that,” said Nonso Michael, a Lance Corporal.
According to him, the many policemen resume their shift everyday, very angry, hungry and agitated. “That is why some get trigger happy when provoked. It’s not that they mean to kill but they are not in the right state of mind…And things have worsened since the #EndSARS. Many of us watched our colleagues get slaughtered for no just cause. We are not happy about it,” he said.
To watch the viral videos of police killings in the wake of the #EndSARS protests was to suddenly explore a dark facet of Nigerian life. Pundits argued that the development was a fallout of the persistent highhandedness and extrajudicial killings of innocent members of the public by the now defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the police.
Police officers, however, admit disillusionment at the backdrop of fears that the incident could make them apathetic on the job and undermine their work ethics.
Memories of the #EndSARS killings and police impunity dating farther, continually trigger hostility and despair among affected parties.
For many citizens, particularly bereaved families of slain policemen and victims of extrajudicial killings carried out by the police, the memories are too grisly for comfort, even as some victims receive compensation for their losses.
The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu recently compensated the families of six police officers lynched in Lagos State, in the wake of the violence that trailed the #EndSARS protests, with N10 million each, totaling N60 million. Sanwo-Olu also announced scholarship awards to the children of the deceased officers up to the university level.
The slain officers include Yaro Edward, an Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Inspector Ayodeji Erinfolami, Inspector Aderibigbe Adegbenro, Inspector Samsom Ehibor, Sergeant Bejide Abiodun and Inspector Igoche Cornelius. Sanwo-Olu described the slain officers as “heroes,” saying the deceased sacrificed their lives to secure lives and properties in the State.
The Lagos State judicial panel hearing cases of police brutality and SARS-related abuses also awarded N10 million each to two victims of police misconduct. Adebayo Abayomi — who received the compensation on behalf of Kudirat, his late mother, who was hit on April 4, 2017, as SARS officers raided the Onipanu area of Lagos.
Hannah Olugbodi was equally awarded N10 million for being hit by a stray bullet from a SARS officer’s rifle while police unit raided an Ijesha hotel shooting sporadically in the air; the bullet shattered Olugbodi’s left leg and left her in crutches. The duo received their cheques from Doris Okuwobi, chairperson of the panel, who presented the cheques to them on behalf of the Lagos State government.
Marc Chidiebere Nwadi was also awarded N7.5 million by the panel for his brutalisation by the Nigerian police in 1999. Nwadi first appeared before the panel on Saturday, November 28, 2020, where he testified, without legal counsel, that he was arrested by the police in 1999. He had just arrived in Lagos and he could not find his relative.
The 39-year-old told the judicial panel how he was detained and tortured, and later remanded at Kirikiri prison for six years, awaiting trial. This put paid to his dream of becoming a journalist, he said.
Memories of the #EndSARS killings and police impunity dating farther, continually trigger hostility and despair among affected parties.
Inspector Edewor brusquely recalled the chain of incidents as a monumental tragedy, stressing that the impact will live with us for a long while.
The police Inspector is still traumatised by the incident. These days, he drinks “to forget” because the remembrance unnerves him. Edewor may have escaped with no physical hurt but he is undoubtedly one of the several victims of the #EndSARS protest, argued Bisi Ade-Iluyomade, a social psychologist.
She said, “Most people are battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) inflicted by their gruesome experiences in the hands of lawless police officers. On the flipside, we have a very traumatised police force whose orientation to the job has suffered a terrible mutation to an ‘us versus them,’ and ‘we against the world’ mentality. This is very bad for future relations between the police and the public that they were employed to serve.”
Notwithstanding the hideous work conditions, Sergeant Bulus Maina would never ‘betray’ his uniform and his oath to protect and serve the Nigerian public.
Just recently, The Nation encountered Maina working against the tide of bad blood and apprehensions about the police. On a Saturday afternoon in Ahmadiyya, Ijaiye, Lagos, Maina moved to save a destitute man sprawled in the middle of the road, in a puddle of spittle and pee.
From dawn through noon, flies hovered around him, darting back and forth his soiled pants and begrimed face. His soft breath chirred against the hard tarmac, like a dirge of dying locusts.
But while pedestrians and commuter traffic took great care to avoid him, Maina ventured closer. Good news: he wasn’t dead. But he had neither the strength nor the will to state his own name. He looked starved and spent as if life could depart him any minute.
Seeing his piteous state, Maina who was attached to the unit manning a roadblock along the bypass hurried to get him a rice meal. But the homeless man was too weak to feed.
He lifted his hand from its perch in the puddle of urine and proceeded to dip it in the food but Sergeant Maina prevented him from doing so, and instantly crouched to feed him.
With his belly full, a semblance of spunk spread through his hitherto lifeless body and he identified himself as Johnson Babatunde. Maina went on to get him off the street to the consternation of his colleagues who felt he was exposing himself, recklessly, to possible infection by COVID-19.
To some, Babatunde was a ticking time-bomb, a deadly pathogen in human form. Others saw him as a “junkie” and “drunk.” Ultimately, he was the creature that must be avoided by the sidewalk, the irritant laying supine, hugging the tarmac as his bed, his urine as bedsheet, and pedestrian scorn as blanket.
To Maina, however, Babatunde was simply a Nigerian in need, a “deserted husband, a forlorn father, and bankrupt carpenter.” He was a destitute Nigerian in need of help, and Maina endeavoured to feed him, wash him, and get him off the street.
Now, that is an image of the police we hardly see.
Some names have been changed to protect interviewees.
In the dead of night sometime early in October 2016, hundreds of security operatives stormed the homes of some judges in Abuja, Port Harcourt, Gombe, Kano, Enugu and Sokoto. It was something that had never happened before in the nation’s history. Raid a judge’s home? It was unheard of, and incredibly not only a home, but homes were raided. The operation came with much ado, with the security people going about it in their usual gragra manner.
The raid, it later emerged, was informed by the need to expose the judges, who are believed to be corrupt. Among them were two Justices of the Supreme Court (JSC), Sylvester Ngwuta, who died last month, with just three weeks left then to his retirement, and John Okoro. As a nation that loves such drama, the public lapped up the story. Immediately, people started calling for their lordships’ heads. How can such corrupt people sit in judgement over us? Many wondered. In short, the judges were convicted before they were tried.
Two other homes raided in Abuja that night belonged to Justices Adeniyi Ademola, as he then was, and Nnamdi Dimgba of the Federal High Court. The homes of Justices Kabiru Auta, Muazu Pindiga and Samia as well as Chief Judge A.G.Umezulike, as he then was, were raided in Kano, Gombe, Sokoto and Enugu. In Port Harcourt, the operatives could not access the home of Justice Mohammed Liman because Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike came to his aide. Whether the raids achieved anything we can never say. What the people heard was that some incriminating pieces of evidence were recovered from the judges. These were to form the basis of their trial from which nothing has so far come out.
Unbeknownst was that the raid was the forerunner of the treatment to be given to former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Walter Onnoghen. With the 2019 elections around the corner then, the rumour mill was abuzz with his meeting with the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, in Dubai. Atiku faced President Muhammadu Buhari in that election. The implication of such meeting, if true, was not lost on the people. They wondered why the CJ would meet with a candidate in an election that may end up in the Supreme Court. Surely, if it is true, he does not deserve to remain in his exalted office a minute longer. Even, the media swallowed the story hook, line and sinker.
In discussions in newsrooms, it was a hot topic, but there was no proof. It seems there is still no proof of the allegation, as Onnoghen has come out, at last, to deny ever meeting with Atiku in Dubai or anywhere else one-on-one. Where then did the tale emanate from? Although, the government never said anything about Dubai when it suspended Onnoghen from office in January 2019, the name of that tiny, but rich country in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was never far from the surface whenever the issue was discussed. What the people were told was that Onnoghen did not declare his assets in line with the Code of Conduct for public officers before he assumed office.
The issue was raised in 2019, two years after he became CJ in 2017. Should issues like this not be raised before public officers take office? Should they be sworn in when they have not declared their assets? Who should be blamed for that lapse? Is it possible that Onnoghen became CJ without being screened? If he was given security clearance before assuming office, does that not amount to a clean bill? Questions, questions and questions. The answers should not be hard to come by, if the government is ready to take up the Onnoghen challenge. By coming out in public to speak on the rumour which many believed led to his exit from office, Onnoghen is drawing the government out to tell the world its own side of the story.
Onnoghen has given his own account, which many, who have become tired with the Buhari Presidency, may tend to believe. They cannot be blamed if they toe that line. Onnoghen laid his cards face up on the table, holding nothing back as he spoke, at a book launch in Abuja, on what could have amounted to his darkest hour in office. He spoke as a pained man and that is understandable. Who will be treated in that manner and not feel aggrieved? “Prior to my suspension, I was confronted with no allegation. There were rumours that I met with Atiku in Dubai. As I am talking here today (March 19), I have never met Atiku one-on-one in my life…”, Onnoghen said.
Hinting that his exit was politically motivated, he said: “Let me make it clear that the office of the CJN was not for Onnoghen but for all Nigerians who have sworn to guide and protect the Constitution of the Federal Republic…judicial officers must be courageous. I want to beg all judicial officers not to be discouraged by what happened to me in the hands of the executive arm of government. Emerging brand of Nigerian judges should not go the direction of injustice because without courageous judges, Nigeria is doomed. Democracy will be dead”.
Onnoghen was tried and convicted by the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) in 2019, but the case was full of intrigues, raising doubts about its fairness. He gave vent to this at the book launch. He said he was not surprised when all of a sudden his trial at the CCT was arranged even when he had not been invited to defend the allegation (of non-declaration of asset) or any wrongdoing. If this can happen to the CJN, who then can be sure of justice? Onnoghen has taken his case to the court of public opinion. Will the executive which he has pointedly accused of doing him in, despite “not committing any offence” take up the gauntlet?
It is even surprising that the executive, which is quick to react to anything under the sun, has not deemed it fit to respond to Onnoghen’s weighty allegation, which he made 13 days ago. He did not stop there. He left the nation with a message: “if the judiciary is not freed from political manipulation, the dispensation of justice in accordance with the rule of law would be a mirage”. This, unfortunately, has been unfolding in our eyes and in an administration that prides itself on integrity for that matter.
One tragic example of the fall-out of cultural imperialism is the fanatical and uncompromising faith of Nigerians in Islamic and Christian religion. The zealotry of our Muslim brothers would make people of Mecca, the birthplace of Prophet Mohammed green with envy. In the case of their Christian counterparts, they are more Catholic than the Pope. And of course, that is when they are humble enough to concede the Pope is a Christian. The Jews, adherents of Judaism that along with Islam and Christianity makes up the Abrahamic religion, recently celebrated her dominance of the world through science with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting of a technological break-through that allows Israel to practice agriculture in the skies. The Israelis think the rest of us are sick.
And while the Pope in the belief that adherents of Abramaic religion worship the same one God, has been visiting Muslim countries across the world including Abu Dhabi, UAE which is already hosting “Mary the mother of Jesus mosque,” preaching peace and reconciliation, our Muslims zealots here are issuing fatwa to Bishop Kukah of Sokoto for criticizing government as if President Buhari and his administration are owned by Muslim fundamentalists. As for their equally intolerant Christian counterparts without the spirit of Christ, touching or reading the Holy Quran, inspired according to Prophet Mohammed by angel Gabriel, the Christian Annunciation angel, is sacrilegious.
And more tragic for the nation is that since the beginning of the fourth republic, many poor, ill-educated and unemployed miracle seekers have become tools in the hands of equally ill-prepared new breed politicians who, when confronted with social problems, often resort to exploitation of religious sentiments by appealing to innermost fears of Nigerians.
The truth is that unlike our first and second republic politicians who went through some form of political socialization process, our current set of military-baked “new breed’ politicians are ill-prepared for challenges of governance. The late Ahmadu Bello who welded the multi-ethnic and multi-religious north together started his long years of political socialization at the Local Council level. Obafemi Awolowo, his counterpart in the West, started as a Local Council chairman.
But Kwara’s AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, the son of the first northern lawyer in Nigeria was said to be a successful businessman and a philanthropist until his adventure into politics when he went straight in 2011 to contest for governorship on the platform of Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), then for Kwara Central Senatorial District on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and, by 2019, he was an elected governor on the platform of APC.
His political opponents insisted “the commitment extracted from him to singlehandedly bankroll the election in Kwara without the support of the Presidency and national leadership of the party” was what qualified him for the position.
They alleged that unable to meet the promise “to liberate Kwara state, the state of harmony pauperized by the political rulership of Sarakis dynasty” and also “ensure all secondary and primary schools in the state, are fully equipped with standard facilities and the needed manpower… to make products of schools in Kwara State tower above their contemporaries in other states of the federation, he dabbled into religion to cover up his inadequacies.
If he was not up to some mischief, they ask, why did he need to set up a kangaroo committee to look into an issue before the Supreme Court.? The committee’s report upholds the “the right of Muslim students to wear their head covering” and the governor went ahead to reopen the 10 closed school saying “All the schools are government-controlled and fully funded; they are not Christian schools”. And that became the battle cry of aggrieved Muslim parents.
There was no evidence the governor tried to find out if the decision of the Muslim parents to make admittance of their wards to Hijab unfriendly Christian schools was on account of the high standard of such schools. That would have been an opportunity to upgrade the Hijab-friendly Muslim schools to prove his campaign manifesto on education was not just an empty promise.
But he chose to settle for the usual Nigerian strategy of ‘if you cannot meet the standard of some groups in the country, truncate their progress and lower the standard for everyone” as done through federal take-over of universities, recruitment into the bureaucracy and admission into universities through JAMB.
The response of Muslim parents who vandalised and made attempt at torching Christian schools that rejected their Hijab-wearing children only confirms the fears of Christian schools’ stakeholders. Here Solomon’s Biblical historic judgment between two women fighting over a child readily comes to mind. Muslim parents who tried to torch Christian schools are probably driven by envy.
Unfortunately, I have searched without finding any difference between the warring Muslim and Christian parents. I think the Christian parents are Christians without the spirit of Christ. It is most unlikely that with their battle cry of “We shall not allow Hijab in our schools., we will defend our faith and defend our inheritance” which led to a clash that resulted in 20 injured, they ever sought the opinion of their children. They would have been pleasantly surprised that their children have no misgivings about their hijab-wearing colleagues. For the innocent minds, the cloak does not make the monk.
I attended St Joseph’s Secondary School, Ondo where those of us in the Novitiate mixed freely with regular students and Muslim students who despite having opportunity to go for their Friday prayers outside the school participated in our morning masses. Some of my closest friends some 50 years after were my Muslim classmates whose main attraction back them was in their beautiful Muslim strange names such as Rafiu, Majeed, Tofeek etc which were different from our own John, James and Peter etc.
It is true that mission schools were set up to promote Christian values and set moral standards for students. But I cannot see how wearing of Hijab undermines those objectives.
Members of the St. Barnabas Cathedral, who, decided to hold a worship service at the entrance of the school despite the bitterness in their hearts and those who decided that a truckload of sand must be heaped at the entrance of St. Anthony’s school to prevent Hijab wearing children of their neighbours from entering probably never bothered to read about their patron saint.
St. Barnabas, was a peacemaker and patron of Cyprus and Antioch who sold his property, and gave the proceeds to the community (Acts 4:36–37). While others were suspicious, he agreed to sponsor St. Paul’s after his incredible conversion. Barnabas, together with Paul, struggled against those who required that Gentiles first be circumcised in order to become Christian (Acts 15, 1¯2).
And those preventing children from entering St Anthony School must be reminded that St. Anthony, born into a wealthy family, was a patron of the poor. His major aim of joining the Franciscan order in 1220 was to have an opportunity to preach to the Saracenes (Muslims) in Morocco and be martyred. He was known for his undying love and devotion to the poor.
There is a purpose for religion in all societies. Religion is therefore not the problem of Nigeria but the use into which political actors without vision, prosperity prophets, Muslim fundamentalists and Christians without the spirit of Christ put it.
A fool would soon part with his money especially if the fool has no advisers, says an African adage. It came to most of us in the reading public as a rude shock to learn that once again our government is going on a wild goose chase over the rehabilitations of our money-guzzling refineries. This time around the annual $100 million is not enough, it is now going to be $1.5 billion. From the international media we learn this money is going to be sourced from the international capital market.
We don’t know what the collateral is going to be. I ask whether this is a trick or something else. But a trick that is so easily decipherable is no longer a trick but a sick joke. The project would not be completed until the Buhari regime expires. This means the succeeding regime would have to carry the debt albatross. For God’s sake how much debt will Buhari pile up for the succeeding generations to come?
We are back to debt peonage from which Obasanjo got us out of and Jonathan and particularly Buhari have gotten us enmeshed in debt slavery where we thought we and our children have escaped from. Did this new debt undergo parliamentary scrutiny? What is the purpose of having a well-paid, in fact the highest paid parliament in the world if it cannot perform parliamentary oversight duties? What we get in return is free flowing heavily embroidered gowns and shining Japanese Jeeps to show for it. No one knows how much this government based on other people’s money has accumulated in the last six years and we have two more years of generalized insecurity, uncertainty and additional foreign loans to go.
This particular loan is taking Nigeria and Nigerians for a ride. Any informed Nigerian knows that for almost two decades rehabilitations of the four moribund refineries have become coded words for looting and grand larceny. Realizing this, on the eve of Obasanjo’s departure, he sold these useless refineries to some Nigerians willing to take a leap in the dark. But when Umaru Yar’Adua came, his “socialist crowd” from Ahmadu Bello University prevailed on him to abrogate the sale whose negotiations were apparently inchoate. Since then, we went back to the annual ritual of awarding the rehabilitations of these refineries to what Americans will call “favorite sons” or companies fronting for them. This whole scenario began when Abacha, the byword for national looting gave the rehabilitations of the Kaduna refineries to a so-called French company for $100 million. Of course nothing seemed to have been done and the Kaduna Refineries continue to run a deficit of hundreds of billions of Naira without producing any refined petroleum while its staff are routinely promoted after attending annual jamborees and refresher courses abroad.
The current minister in a moment of candor said he could not understand how a company not refining oil annually runs a deficit and promotes its staff without being closed down or sold to whoever may want to buy the dead dodo off the hands of a clueless and confused state. One of the last things the late Professor Tam David West, a knowledgeable person in these things said is that the refineries should all be sold to private entrepreneurs. David West was an avid supporter of the incumbent president and a man who served Nigeria well and for most of his life was a lone voice in the wilderness crying for Nigeria’s Risorgimento.
Many of us in the academia had consistently supported Buhari, I believe since 2003 because of what we perceived was his sense of purpose, discipline and integrity. Some of us felt that having been an oil minister without dirtying his hands in what is now a curse on our country, he will be able to block the leaking basket of the national treasury. It is either we did not think thoroughly or we were deceived or that because of Buhari‘s advanced age, people are doing things in his name of which he is unconscious of. If a huge loan was needed, should it not be for infrastructural development and electricity? Even in the case of infrastructural development, there is need for monitoring and scrutiny of what is going on so that nobody is deceived.
The much-ballyhooed Lagos -Ibadan railway that has been officially opened is still work in progress. Out of curiosity I went to see the station at Moniya in Ibadan and I was shocked by what I found. The station is still under construction and the roads to the station are virtually impassable. It took me more hours to drive from the station to downtown Ibadan than it took me from Lagos to Ibadan. Yet Rotimi Amaechi is signing railway loans all over the place. A government that does not believe in cabinet reshuffle is by global parliamentary standards an inactive or carefree government or a government of free for all or a government in a free fall. This is what the Buhari government of sit-tight ministers is.
If a huge loan was needed to upgrade the universities or some of them into centres of learning and ground-breaking research in a sustainable fashion, one would understand. If people are short of ideas, shouldn’t the coronavirus pandemic bring our national shame before us that we who used to produce vaccines in places like Vom are now waiting for handouts from WHO in Geneva before we can save our country from going under the coronavirus scourge. South Africa is manufacturing the Johnson and Johnson one shot vaccines on license from the company’s owners in the United States. Yet we are told we are the biggest economy in Africa. We have the humiliation of two million vaccines being sent to us by the WHO to vaccinate a population of 200 million if we can trust our census. Why can’t we on our own take $5 billion from our foreign reserves and begin to set up a vaccine infrastructure in Nigeria to manufacture under license vaccines against coronavirus and not only supply all our needs and sell vaccines to other parts of the world including Africa but also prepare for future pandemics. Rather than this imaginative way, we go around borrowing money to put into the sink-hole of refineries’ rehabilitations when even before we begin, we know the project will not end well.
If money is to be borrowed why sink it into petrol refineries when we know in a few years to come, perhaps 20 years when petroleum would no longer be energy of choice because of the environment, we would not have recovered our investment. If there is a need for investment in this sector, a government driven by national interest would invest such money in the high yielding NNLG which has been returning huge dividends to the national purse.
While still on petroleum refinery, why not wait for the Dangote Refinery that would produce refined petroleum products for home consumption and for export to come on board rather than waking up moribund national refineries that should just be scrapped and save us the heart burn of annual budgetary allocation into corrupt pockets of armchair petroleum engineers hopping around in the corridors of power for their share of national cake? If there is any hurdle in the way of the Dangote refineries, government should assist the company to overcome them. If the Dangote refineries do not come on stream this year, it may be too difficult for the company to recover the almost $20 billion invested in the huge multi-purpose industrial complex because the world is moving away from hydrocarbons dependency.
Parliament should enquire about the loan being sourced for the rehabilitations of the Port Harcourt refineries and any other refineries for that matter. Without parliamentary budgetary approval, the process of awarding contracts and or funding the rehabilitations should be stopped and if the rehabilitations contract has been awarded without parliamentary approval, then the whole process should be regarded as dead and buried. There should be no funding for any such projects from the annual budget. There are more pressing issues of infrastructure and security that should take government’s one hundred percent attention. Security should even take precedence over infrastructure because it has come to a point when travelling between two cities in Nigeria has become a perilous journey undertaken only by those who have military or police escorts or by intrepid travellers secured by the Holy Ghost or by African juju.
Indeed, there was a country! How much my heart pants for a return to a Nigeria of yore when we slept with our two eyes closed.
Religion is the highland to viral nature, the fabled staircase to the Christian Paradise and the Muslim’s Al Jannah Firdaus. Its sacred rungs, however, descend to the filth of faith amid conflicting creeds’ earthly bowels – oftentimes. To ascend mystic nirvana, Nigerians will maul earth into a grisly hell.
In Nigeria, religion is glyptic; faith is carved with incised edge astride mystic culture and human nature. The steely autograph of the Nigerian faithful is seen in his inclination to do right or wrong, in God’s name.
Consider the Kwara debacle, for instance. For the second time in seven days, Muslims and Christians in the state hopped in the trenches to battle over the rights of Muslim girls to wear hijab in secondary schools. In bid to forestall total anarchy, the state government shut down 10 schools that were at the centre of the controversy after anti-and pro-hijab groups attacked each other with stones and steel chairs among other weapons.
The incident which occurred at the Sabo-Oke parish of the Cherubim and Seraphim School was contained by the combined efforts of the Kwara State Police command, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and the Nigeria Army.
Children, mostly minors, are the major casualties of this pious recklessness. The Kwara debacle confirms Nigeria’s penchant for religious hypocrisy and mayhem: from Boko Haram’s terrorism in the northeast, Kaduna’s religious wars to Plateau’s sacred scuffles, children get orphaned, displaced and sexually molested.
Yet the Nigerian faithful celebrates treasonous pieties while afflicting our families, workplaces, and schools, among other social institutions with bigots. Little wonder we sire children into unregenerate nature.
If there is any lesson to be learnt from Kwara’s hijab fiasco, it is that we have forgotten our duty as teachers and parents. The Nigerian adult, be he a teacher, clergyman, mullah or parent has forgotten his mission to children; that is, to teach them humaneness and help them understand that the essence of education and religion is to make them more tolerant, more compassionate, more forgiving and humane.
Ignoring these facts, the controversial Kwara schools are saying that: “There are no warm womb-spaces within our walls for Muslim students.” By offering no safe space for compassionate nurturing and religious freedom, they maul scholarship into chaos and faith into shafts of infernal devilment.
The schools claim that they are “mission schools” and that government merely offers them support in grants. They claim absolute right to ban the hijab and run their schools as they deem fit.
On the flipside, government quotes a 2006 education law that allows Muslim students to exercise religious freedom in public schools including the use of hijab. All the affected schools are public schools and there are several justifications for categorising them so – these will be dealt with subsequently.
This minute, Kwara dissembles into a war zone as its adult citizens engage in battle frenzy; like medieval crusaders in visceral herds, they mentalise war and seek to actualise it.
Predictably, media platforms offer fosterage of dubious sophistry in patronage of the warring herds.
Most commentators are not saying anything new, however. Like spectres of battle sound, they amplify prejudice and slaughter jazz. Ultimately, they refasten the religious war harness and enable Pyrrhic claims to victory of their favoured divides. Shame.
As clergymen, journalists, teachers, school administrators dissociate faith from compassion and pure thought, the brilliant sheen of bias in Nigeria’s popular religions makes the eye “glide” along its shiny surface. The hardness repels vision, like medieval savagery cast unto humane civilisation.
Beyond the arguments and counter-arguments, ‘gospel’ truths and relative truths, sophistry and arrant bigotry, a bitter truth subsists about Kwara’s hijab debacle: that several faithful practice faith without compassion, salvation without spirit.
Does using a hijab prevent other children from effective assimilation in class? No. Does it distract the teacher and school authority from serving the interest of the children to whom they owe the duty of unsullied tutelage and care? No.
While the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), journalists” and public commentators weaponise gall and casuistry, to justify the victimization of the hijab-loving high school girl, in more cultured, tolerant clime, the hijab is allowed in humane and mutually beneficial circumstances.
At the Cheetham Church of England Academy in the United Kingdom, for instance, Muslim students are allowed to don the hijab without incident.
And even though Australia, like several nations in Europe and America, flaunts her share of Islamophobia, a Baptist college in the country recently did the ‘unthinkable’ for its first hijabi Singaporean student, Sumaiyah Rahmad. Syahrom, her father, enthused that the principal of the college painstakingly prepared a praying area for Sumaiyah. And after discussing with the girl’s mother, the principal proposed to the school’s board that hijab and clothing that cover aurat (private parts) be included as part of the school uniform.
Recognising that Islam considers hijab as an obligatory clothing and spiritual code, not a mere religious symbol. The board members agreed on the proposal and starting 2020, modest clothing like black leggings, white long sleeve tops, and white or black hijab were included as part of the school’s uniform.
Ironically, a Nigerian Baptist school is in the trenches fighting dirty against the use of the hijab by its female students. The womb-like walls of the high school are too tender for such acrid drama. Schools are meant to foster in the student, a sterling character, appreciable sophistication and individuality but at Kwara’s controversial high schools, the notion is unseemly.
Several chapters in the Muslim Holy Quran prescribe the hijab of the eyes for the Muslim male, and the use of the hijab, khimur and jilibab for the Muslim female. This connotes Islam’s culture of modesty, purity, pride and tact in clothing and deportment.
How can anyone rebel against such, especially in an era when secondary school girls are ditching their panties and brasserie on the way to school, screaming “Marlians don’t wear undies!” in homage to a local musician’s salacious lyricism.
Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the faith has long been used in the wrong hands—such as Boko Haram and their sponsors hiding under the guise of Islam to perpetrate mayhem.
In Kwara, religion is currently being used to foment trouble. The situation worsens as warring Christians stew in an Armageddon complex and their Muslim rivals declare the situation a Jihad.
Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the controversial schools will have “absolute control of their schools and place a total ban on the hijab perhaps. But what happens after that?
Do they run Muslim students out of the educational system or completely stamp out their right to identity and religious freedom?
This is not about the warring adult faithful hugging marketable rage with entitlement syndrome. It is about the Muslim girl-child’s right to individuality, justice and religious freedom.
What is faith to the administrators of Kwara’s controversial public ‘mission’ schools? What is faith to the victimised hijabi and her Christian mate? What is faith to the Nigerian bigot?
Unlike in the developed democracies where politics serves the interest of interest groups, Nigerian politicians serve none but themselves. The ongoing shedding of crocodile tears by politicians over last week’s attempted assassination of Governor Ortom of Benue State by suspected herdsmen has once again confirmed Nigerian politicians respond to inputs from their environment only when their interest is threatened. To the politicians who take delight in playing the ostrich, the attack came as “a shock and a reawakening”. But to ordinary Nigerian folks, it did not come as a shock. Our politicians sowed the wind. It naturally follows they reap the whirlwind.
But let us set the record straight by going through memory. It was the politicians who at the onset of the fourth republic in 1999 introduced what Obasanjo back then described as “political Sharia”, embraced by the 13 contiguous northern states and hailed by leading northern politicians including General Muhammadu Buhari. The politicians sent some innocent northern youths to Osama Bin Laden, then hiding in Sudan where he was grooming terrorist and planning his attack on World Trade Towers in New York, for radicalization. They set up a terror group that later graduated to Boko Haram, as a balance of terror to settle scores with political opponents. The politicians provided arms and intellectual support for the Niger Delta militant youths, with the aim of replacing their foreign exploiters who deploy Niger Delta resources to build bridges over land in Abuja. It is widely believed Ex-President Obasanjo took sides with a faction of the Niger Delta militant group to serve his own political ends. In the Southeast where election is war, the politicians armed the youths to checkmate political opponents. Thugs were also weapons of election in the southwest with a sitting president deploying state funds to secure the support of banned Odua militant group in 2014.
With the legitimacy of elected politicians being fiercely challenged by the demons they foisted on Nigeria, the chicken has only come home to roost. But rather than address our crisis of nation building, our politicians have continued to play the ostrich. Last week, Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesman told us that his principal who for five years failed to tame rampaging immigrant herdsmen as was done in Ghana due to lack of political will, “has directed the police to undertake a thorough investigation into the attack involving the governor and into all such incidents affecting individuals and communities in the state.”
Once again, the president chose to address the symptoms. Ortom has on more than one occasion publicly claimed he had written more than five different letters to the president and the nation’s security apparatus, calling attention to the fate of Benue people condemned to IDP camps by those who confiscated their farm lands. The president also paid a condolence visits to Benue following the 2018 Agatu massacre and mass burial of about 72 people.
But trying to outdo the presidency in a game of living in denial are our governors. The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), perhaps the only group that saw the attack as “shocking and a rude awakening”, now says “it will continue to encourage its members to stand firm in the service of their people regardless of the evil machinations of those who don’t wish Nigeria well”. Still trying to read the body language of a president who has directed AK-47 wielding criminals threatening Nigerians to be shot on sight, the groveling governors are still unable to talk about criminal herdsmen. Sadly this was long after some members of the forum, including Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna, Aminu Masari of Katsina and Bala Mohammed of Bauchi have publicly denounced the criminal activities of foreign Fulani herdsmen that continue to visit violence on Nigerians even after receiving restitution for their alleged killed cows.
The PDP has also expressed its outrage and “demanded the federal government lives up to its responsibility on the protection of life and property in the state.” The party wants President Buhari to “put machinery in motion by ordering an immediate manhunt, arrest and prosecution of the assailants and beef up security around the governor.”
Other outraged PDP members include Rivers’ Nyesom Wike, a favourite of the militants who according to Itse Sagay, rode to power on the blood of the people. Blowing hot and cold, he told the president: “If you kill Ortom, then be prepared to bury Nigeria.” There was also incensed David Mark who says: “If our government and security operatives can no longer guarantee people’s safety in their homes, farms or places of business, I am worried that the situation may compel citizens to resort to self-help”.
David Mark, a PDP leading light was in the senate for about 16 years serving as senate president for eight years. In 2004, unidentified gunmen attacked the convoy of George Akume, then governor of Benue State. Over a dozen politicians were killed in the first five years of the fourth republic with perpetrators seldom found.
The long list includes the vice chairman of the People’s Democratic Party, Aminasoari Dikibo, who was shot dead in his car while traveling to a party conference in Delta State. There was also Bola Ige, who as Obasanjo’s minister of justice and attorney general was killed in his bedroom. His assailants are yet to be found.
Under his watch in March 2014, Governor Gabriel Suswam of Benue State, escaped death by the whiskers when his convoy was ambushed by suspected Fulani mercenaries at Tee-Akanyi village in Guma Local Government Area of Benue State. This was just after the rampaging invaders had sacked about 64 villages on the Daudu-Gbajimba axis of the council, killing no fewer than 37 persons.
Also playing the ostrich is Plateau State’s Simon Lalong and his Northern Governors Forum. The forum wants the incident investigated thoroughly. But Plateau had its own fair share of killing. We can easily recall the attack on Razat, Ruku, Nyarr, Kura and Gana-Ropp villages of Gashish District in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State which claimed no fewer than 100 lives. The killing was said to be in retaliation to the killing of over 300 cows according to Danladi Ciroma, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders’ Association, MACBAN chairman, North Central zone. The report of the investigation into the incident which many claimed indicted the then IG was suppressed.
Indignant Atiku Abubakar, Obasanjo’s vice president for eight years was also out to be counted. He wants “a rejig of the nation’s security architecture and a constitutional framework that empowers the states to control their internal security.” But, Paul Unongo as the then chairman of the Northern Elders Forum,, had alleged that besides having more cattle than anybody, he was the chief financier and most influential member of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, a charge Atiku has since denied
Unongo, a Fulani and a Tiv who should know better also told Nigerians that Miyyetti Allah is “an establishment of the big people, a very rich group of Nigerians and they pack small boys to take their cattle all over the place and then buy all these arms to give herdsmen to go and kill people, and the government is doing nothing!”
Unfortunately, with little or no governance going on under President Buhari’s APC government, it is Unongo’s words against Atiku’s.
