The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Goons of LASTMA (2)

    Olatunji Ololade

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Elite conspiracy against youths

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

    After one year of anxiety and suspense, relief finally came for 1,050 of the 60,000 Nigerian youths that participated in the 2019 NNPC recruitment exercise.

    Releasing the list of the prospective trainees last week,   Mele Kolo Kyari, the Group Managing Director of NNPC, assured Nigerians that ‘the outcome of the exercise reflected national spread and complied with all statutory suspense requirements”.

    To help the public decode Kyari,’s statement, the exercise was not strictly based on merit but on quota system, a euphemism for nepotism which has been institutionalised as part of our laws.

    As for other participating youths who graduated four to eight years earlier, with Masters Degrees and probably equipped with all the professional qualifications in their areas of specialization in Nigeria, Britain Canada etc., they will still have to wait a little more to know their fate.

    ‘The experience Hire (HR) component of the exercise would be addressed in due course”, Kyari added with cold relief.

    That our frustrated youths had to wait for a year for the result of an exercise they knew was not going to be based on merit but nepotism, explains  why Nigerian youths are moving out in droves  to earn a living  as second class citizens in those societies where merit and justice are  important determinants in achieving one’s potentials.

    But it has not always been like this. We used to have a just and organized society where youths dream dreams.

    The turning point started with the recruitment into the Nigerian Army by the new inheritors of power.  For short term ethnic advantage, they chose nepotism over meritocracy.

    As a result of rivalry with Igbo controlled NCNC, the first republic junior coalition partners, Ahmadu Bello and other northern leaders who back then did not  even have enough qualified northerners to run  their regional bureaucracy,  insisted Pitman typing qualification be accepted as equivalent to GCE as entry qualification to the Nigerian Army.

    Merit had taken full flight from the military institution by around 1963 when the outgoing British head of the army scored Aguiyi Ironsi third in the order of preference for his successor.

    That did not stop Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ozumba Mbadiwe and Mathew Mbu from lobbying Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa who had to secure a plane to convey the pressure group to Ahmadu Bello the NPC leader and strongman in Kaduna.

    Ironically, of all the politicians that sacrificed merit in the military for short term ethnic gain, the Sardauna was the only one killed in the January 1966 coup that ended Espirit de corps in the military and built the foundation for a future “Nigerian Army of anything is possible”.

    The soldiers then banished merit and moved themselves up the social ladder by paying themselves higher salaries than vice chancellors, the second highest paid public servants before the military intervention.

    Then ill-tempered soldiers started retiring bureaucrats, professors and appointing vice chancellors on ethnic or religious and even gender basis.

    The Sultan of Sokoto and Christian Association Chairman (CAN) soon became major actors in the appointment of university vice chancellors.

    Soldiers that were not trained on how to manage society then decreed quota system of admission into the universities, military schools and other federally funded institutions.

    This was followed with introduction of quota system of recruitment into the bureaucracy and federal parastatals to ensure those who secured admission with lower scores and came out with lower grades didn’t have to compete for jobs in NNPC, FRCN, PPPRA, Immigration Customs etc.  as those with first class and second class would have been shut out.

    Instead of building capacity as El-Rufai of Kaduna is now doing by devoting 40% of his budget to education, ill-trained soldiers chose to truncate the progress of others by compromising standards.

    Since a nation is as good as its bureaucracy, decay set in with the advent of ‘quota system’ bureaucrats, doctors, judges, attorney generals, IGs and social engineers etc. while the best brains that constitute the middle class  without which a nation decays,  migrated to other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas.

    Just last Monday, Muhammadu Sanusi II, the Emir of Kano while speaking during the Kaduna governor’s 60th birthday ceremony captured this betrayal of Nigerian youths and how the concept of quota system destroyed the north, its major beneficiary.

    Read Also: INEC announces fresh recruitment

     

    He warned his people saying: “The rest of the country cannot be investing in educating its children, producing graduates  and then they watch , they cannot get jobs  because they come from the wrong states, when we have not invested in the future of our children”.

    And concluding he said ominously, “If we don’t listen, there would be a day when there would be a constitutional amendment that addresses these issues of quota system and federal character”.

    But why have our political elite either as PDP or APC, its junior brother lived in denial for so long? Unfortunately unlike those who institutionalised nepotism to protect group privileges, the current suicidal political elite, exploit it for personal gains.

    NNPC’s last week’s outing, compared with standards elsewhere in the civilized world, was a disaster.  But that was the first time such was happening since 2012.

    As was under PDP, available slots in the military schools, Customs, EFCC, DSS, are still being filled mostly by children of military officers, members of the national assembly, governors and other political office holders under APC, the party of change.

    What we occasionally had as public recruitment exercise between 1999 and 2015 was a charade. For instance in 2012, after those in power had shared the available slots in the Immigration among themselves, about 200,000 hungry youths were invited for physical exercise as a cover up. Forty-three of them collapsed with 17 ending up in the morgue.

    In 2013, Abba Moro, a quota system minister from Benue State approved the sale of 520,000 applications for available 4,556 positions, raking in millions in application fees and cost of tee shirts.

    The applicants were already at some of the centres as early as 6.am while the ministry officials sauntered in at after 9.am without provisions for tables and chairs and writing materials.

    The Abuja National Stadium tragedy where eight of the 70,000 applicants including pregnant women who had been on the queue for over three hours were asked to use one entrance with no crowd control personnel, died in a stampede, was replicated across the nation.

    The bungled recruitment drive by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) altogether left 19 desperate job seekers dead and scores of others in critical condition in hospitals all over the country.

    Nigerian elites have not only failed Nigerian youths, they have failed the nation. A quota system military institution as we have seen can enforce neither internal cohesion nor guarantee protection of territorial integrity of a deeply divided society.

    Rather than ‘give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, by teaching our youths how to think, quota system vice chancellors in a nation with biggest churches and largest catholic seminary in the world, try to outdo prosperity prophets and Imams in proselytization.

    In the private sector, nepotism has killed motivation and increased frustration as reflected by the number of youths escaping from the banking sector to Canada and other western nations despite their relatively better salary structure.

  • The boxer-king

    Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    THERE are certain things a king cannot do in public. These include quarrelling or fighting.

    But when a king breaks any of these rules, he brings shame to himself and the throne.

    The Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Akanbi, did the unthinkable when he descended on the Agbowu of Ogbaagba, Oba Dhikrulai Akinropo, with blows at a peace meeting in the office of Assistant Inspector-General of Police (AIG) Bashir Makama in Osogbo, the Osun State capital, last Friday.

    The Oluwo is known for his theatrics, but there was nothing theatrical in his boxing show that fateful day. He was annoyed; yes, he is entitled to such temperament, but he should not have punched the Agbowu. A royal father should always act regally no matter the provocation.

  • Supreme Court, heal thyself

    Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    AS the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court owes it a duty to give decisions which will stand the test of time because of its power of finality.

    Its verdicts must be verdicts that people will hear and be able to say ‘’that was a verdict’’. Even where they are faulted, it must be from the prism they are being looked at by the critic.

    No litigant wishes to lose in court and when they do, they impute motives. That is when you hear stories of how corrupt the judge is as well as his relationship with the winning party.

    The Supreme Court is not just any court. It is the final court where aggrieved appellants believe that, no matter what, they will get justice.

    Their belief is fuelled by the fact that the apex court is the bastion of justice where all tears are wiped away. They are delighted by the apex court’s power to correct the perceived wrongs done them at the high and appeal courts.

    The statement ‘’we will meet at the Supreme Court’’ confidently made by many lawyers after losing at the lower courts stems from the fact that it is the portal of justice which can do no wrong.

    Has this been the case? These lawyers, their clients and Nigerians who have been affected one way or the other by the court’s decisions are likely to answer in the negative.

    A time there was when the Supreme Court was indeed supreme. Those were the days of the Udoma Udo Udomas, Anthony Aniagolus, Ayo Irikefes, Andrews Otutu-Obasekis, Chukwudifu Oputas, Kayode Esos and Augustine Nnamanis.

    These justices were bold and erudite and activism ran in their veins. Their verdicts went beyond the law to touch on social and political issues. They never left you in doubt on where they stood.

    For instance, in Ojukwu versus the Lagos State Government, the Supreme Court in 1985 blasted the government for flouting the appeal court’s order not to forcibly evict the Biafran warlord from his 29, Queens Drive, Ikoyi home.

    The court described the government’s action as ‘’executive rascality’’. This happened during the military era when the courts, according to the Court of Appeal, were to ‘’blow muted trumpets’’.

    But, the Supreme Court blew trumpets that were heard across the nation, leaving its marks in the sands of time. Our present day Supreme Court, a school of thought believes, is not taking a cue from its worthy precursor.

    This school of thought points to some of the court’s decisions in some election cases to buttress its stand. It accuses the court of giving conflicting verdicts in cases that are similar, leaving lawyers wondering what happened to what is called legal precedent.

    The age-long principle of legal precedent is that the court’s order in one case is binding on a similar case in future.

    The court, it appears, has dumped this principle, preferring to give conflicting verdicts in similar election cases, leaving lawyers dazed and confused as to which to cite as authority when they appear before the court.

    The court has drawn the flak, especially for its decision in the Bayelsa State governorship election wherein, without consideration for the people’s will, it voided the election of David Lyon of the All Progressives Congress (APC) because the deputy governor-elect, Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo, used multiple names.

    Read Also: Civil societies seek review of Imo Supreme Court judgment

     

    The apex court visited Degi-Eremienyo’s sin on Lyon and APC, and directed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare the next candidate with the highest number of votes cast and the constitutional spread as the winner of the election.

    Analysts are not comfortable with the court’s decision because it seems to conflict with its earlier decisions in the cases of Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello and former Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi.

    Even if it is assumed that the court can stand in place of the electorate to choose their leaders, can it be pardoned for giving conflicting verdicts in cases which appear similar?

    It voided Lyon’s election because he contested on a joint ticket with Degi-Eremienyo, but it saw nothing wrong in the election of Bello, who inherited the votes of the late Abubakar Audu, and contested the Kogi governorship rerun election without a running mate.

    James Faleke, who ran with the late Audu, withdrew from the race when APC did not adopt him as its candidate for the rerun after the former candidate’s death.

    Yet, Section 187 (1) of the Constitution says: …a candidate for the office of governor of a state shall not be deemed to have been validly nominated for such office unless he nominates another candidate as his associate for his running for the office of governor, who is to occupy the office of deputy governor.

    Their lordships did not avert their minds to this provision in the Bello case, but did so in Lyon’s. Where then is the justice in both cases? Which one will lawyers cite as authority in future similar matters? In the Amaechi case, the court held that the electorate vote for parties and not their candidates.

    On the basis of that, it voided the election of Celestine Omeiha as Rivers governor because he was not the rightful candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2007 election and suo moto (on its own) awarded the election to Amaechi, who it held was the party’s lawful candidate.

    The Supreme Court cannot continue to approbate and reprobate on sensitive election cases, otherwise it will throw the nation into anarchy. Its decisions must be clear, concise and considered.

    It has done enough harm already, but there is still room to make amends.

    The apex court should remember the words of Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme Court that ’’it (Supreme Court)  is not final because it is infallible, but it is infallible only because it is final’’. A vibrant Supreme Court shall yet rise from the ashes of these present times.

  • Turnaround in the Sudan

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the 76-year old, long-serving president of the Sudan was overthrown last year after he had been in power from 1989 to 2019 a period of thirty years.

    During this period he wielded untrammelled power restrained only by the army and a sham of a political party called the National Congress. Before him was the interim prime minister-ship of Sadiq al Mahdi, the grandson of Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah al Mahdi (1881-1898).

    Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad founded a Mahdist state in the Sudan in 1885 after murdering the British General Charles George Gordon.

    The British fought back, finally killing him in 1898 and then the Sudan came under an Anglo-Egyptian condominium from 1898 to 1956.

    Omar Al Bashir shunted aside Sadiq al Mahdi in 1989. Before him was another long-serving military ruler Jafar Muhammad el Numeiry who ruled from 1969 to 1985 as part of so called “free officers movement”.

    Numeiry survived more than 20 attempted coups and was once restored to power by troops of Muamar Gadhafi. The point to make is that since the Sudanese independence in 1956, the military has remained a permanent feature  in the government of the country with occasional civilian rule provided by rival Sudanese politicians of either the Umma party of the Mahdist movement and other Muslims opposed to them.

    Out of the 64 years of sovereign nationhood, the military has been in power for more than 50 years. During this period, the country has been wracked by racial/religious wars between the Muslim north and the largely Christian / animist South in which more than two million people were killed and five million displaced as well as fissiparous political tendencies between the northern Arabized Muslims and the black Muslims in Darfur.

    Southern Sudan became independent on July 11, 2011 thus ending the longest civil war in Africa. In the meantime, the Khartoum regime launched a paramilitary force, many on horsebacks, the so-called Janjaweed against their compatriots in Darfur murdering more than 400,000 people mostly of Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes and raping hundreds of thousands of women and female children and seizing their lands.

    The USA in 2004 declared the massacres in Darfur genocide and crime against humanity. This Sudanese campaign was in retaliation against a secessionist liberation force which wanted people of Darfur to be recognized as a distinct people.

    The rebellion in Darfur remains active with no end in sight. Sudan is a basket case whose economy has been further damaged by the secession of the oil rich Southern Sudan since 2011.

    The Sudanese regimes, whether civilian or military, have oscillated between ideological socialists and Islamic fundamentalists depending on whichever could guarantee them hold on power.

    Omar al Bashir has however held power until 2019 when there was a general rebellion of workers, students, professionals, particularly doctors and civil servants.

    On the orders of General Omar al Bashir, the army unleashed murderous force on the civilian population, especially college students killing thousands of them. When it became clear that the young people could not be cowed, the higher command of the military moved against Omar al Bashir.

    A transitional Military Council (TMC) took over power. In August 2019, the TMC and “Forces of Freedom and Change alliance” (FFC) signed a political agreement and a constitutional declaration legally defining a 39-month phase of transitional state institutions and procedures to return Sudan to civilian democracy.

    In September the TMC formally transferred executive power to a mixed civilian-military collective head of state the so-called “Sovereignty Council of Sudan”, and to a civilian Prime Minister Abbdalla Hamdok and a mostly civilian cabinet and a female jurist, Nemat Abdulla Khair became Sudan’s first female Chief Justice.

    There has been tremendous pressure on the Sudan by the West particularly the USA and by Saudi Arabia, its main financier in the past which has withheld financial assistance to the country until it met western demands.

    The economy of the country relies mainly on agriculture particularly the production of cotton from the vast irrigated plains of Gezira plains, the largest irrigated agricultural scheme in the world, lying between the white and Blue Nile river .

    The country also produces 80% of the world’s gum Arabic. It is trying to invest in the mining sector especially the mining of gold  and it still has some oil but not enough to make serious economic impact.

    The entire country is in the Sahara desert with consequent harsh climatic conditions making the country one of the poorest countries in the world.

    Read Also: Sudan agrees to send ex-president al-Bashir to face ICC

     

    It has also been subjected to economic sanctions from the 1970s because of harbouring  Al Qaeda terrorists including Osama bin Laden and others who attacked  in 2000, the American ship, USS Cole in the Port of Aden  in Yemen killing 17 American servicemen.

    The Clinton administration was forced to bomb the country using long range Exocet missiles from ships on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Sudan was declared a terrorist state with all the negative implications deriving from it.

    The new regime in the Sudan after negotiations with the Trump administration has now decided to compensate for the damage to American property and loss of lives of his servicemen to the tune of $30 million. This is a huge amount for an impoverished country to cough out.

    It is also now ready to surrender Omar Al Bashir, its long term former president, for trial in The Hague for genocide and crime against humanity committed, in Darfur and other places on his order.

    A United Nations Commission in 2005 had reported that crimes were committed in Darfur by the Sudanese forces and had referred the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

    It now seems that chicken has come home to roost and that Omar al Bashir and his henchmen are going to answer for their crimes.

    We do not know what the USA has promised the current government in Khartoum in exchange for their bending over backward to accommodate the American demands including ties with Israel.

    Sudan is on the list of countries whose citizens are banned from coming to the United States. It may be this ban will be lifted as well as the designation of the country as a terrorist state.

    There may also be promise of American investment and encouragement for the Gulf Arab states and Saudi Arabia to increase their aid to the country. The apparent rapprochement between the USA and the Sudan has wide-ranging ramifications.

    It is a call to dictators particularly in Africa that oppressing their citizens and killing opposition members is not the internal affairs of their countries.

    Brutal dictators will, no matter how long, be held accountable for their misdeeds. It began in the successor states of the old Yugoslavia, in Serbia and Croatia; then the Serb leaders in the ramshackle Bosnia and Herzegovina, then in Liberia, Chad, Cambodia and The Ivory Coast.

    There is of course disquiet that only countries in the poorer parts of the world are subjected to criminal prosecution while in office or after leaving office.

    While on the other hand powerful leaders of major powers are getting away with murder.

    This is of course the kernel of international politics which is largely based on power relations. History is written from the perspectives of the victorious!

  • Cost of dearth of strong political parties

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    Reminded recently of a sense of betrayal by many Nigerians who in 2015 voted Buhari because of his party’s promise to restructure Nigeria and people’s disenchantment over his current stonewalling on the implementation Nasir El-Rufai committee report on restructuring, Governor Kayode Fayemi told us it would be “unfair for Nigerians to blame All Progressives Congress (APC) or Presidency for not implementing restructuring agenda as promised in its manifesto. He wants Nigerians to take their frustration to the doorsteps of the National Assembly who “should be tasked to work on the reports of the Nasir El-Rufai committee on restructuring formally submitted to the legislature by all the APC governors”.

    Governor Fayemi has learnt very fast. He has grown from being a social activist and public intellectual to a politician, a man of many words, who has learnt through timeless world of politics, the brinkmanship of how to cope with party intrigues and balance the ambition of party and non-party members. But the consolation is that Nigerians know where the buck stops. They know those to be held responsible now or in future for their current nightmare.  Nigerians know the party that controls 65 seats in the 109 seat Senate, 190 of the 360 Lower house seats and  about 21 of the 36 state governors but lacks the political will to address nation’s crisis of nationality.

    Those who genuinely care for our country know the answer to our crisis of nation building is restructuring or “how best  we can move towards a more perfect union through better management of our diversity” as Governor Fayemi puts, it to allay the fears of those who are afraid of the word restructuring. It is the most cost effective and less painful approach towards addressing the menace of cross border herdsmen; mindless killings of subsistence farmers in the middle belt region and in other federating states across the nation; importation of labour of other societies by unpatriotic Nigerians who import or smuggle substandard goods to kill our budding industries; end killing of Nigerians through importation of fake drugs and stop the  export of  social problems of some states in form of unemployable angry youths  who grew up without knowing parental  love or equipped for challenges of modern society through education,  to some more prosperous southern states. And since we operate at different levels of cultural development, it is the only way for elite consensus between National Assembly members who want to advertise their four wives and 27 children as evidence of power and affluence and those whose forebears engaged in such past-time in the late 19th century purely for economic reasons as children and women back then provided much needed farm labour. And finally, a consensus on how to manage our diversity will end the current ‘feudal system’ in the country whereby resources of states are cornered by a dysfunctional centre  and shared or looted by a few privileged members of the political elite as various judicial and house probes have shown since the end of the civil war.

    From the experiences of other multi-cultural societies such as India, Canada, Australia and Germany, elite consensus on common values is best negotiated through political parties, the 18th century ingenious creation of students of society. Here at home, our independence constitution which guaranteed an ordered society until a military that was never equipped to manage society destroyed it in 1966, was negotiated by NCNC, NPC and Action Group.

    But confronted with social problems they were ill-trained to manage, rather than allow normal evolution of political parties through free association of those who shared identical interest and values, the military decreed two political parties, NRC and SDP headed by Tom Ikimi and Tony Anenih. It got more bizarre with an intellectually- challenged General Abacha setting up his own five parties – UNCP, CNC, NCPN, DPN and GDM, with all of them adopting him their  presidential candidate. The PDP, ANPP and AD that emerged during General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s 11-month transition program were infiltrated and hijacked by retired military Generals and their contractors.

    It was therefore not a surprise that PDP described byJohn Campbell, former US envoy as ‘an elite cartel at the centre of power in Nigeria that came together  for sharing of oil rents and political spoils’, and its military-baked ‘newbreed’ politicians  did what soldiers of fortune do best – sharing the loot of conquered territories.

    For eight years, Obasanjo’s roadmap promised to provide stable electricity, attain agricultural revolution, end massive importation of foreign goods as well as fight corruption. President Yar’Adua had a seven-point agenda and President Jonathan added his own ‘transformation agenda’, but PDP only served the interest of PDP.

    In August 2013, the All Progressives Congress unfolded its own eight-point cardinal programme- devolution of power, accelerated economic growth and affordable health care, electricity generation, war against corruption, food security,   integrated transport network and free education”; all of which Chief Olisa Metuh, the PDP National Publicity Secretary, dismissed as s “a very poor imitation and a bland parody of PDP manifesto.”

    What is not in dispute however is that PDP and APC members are all military-baked ‘new breed’ politicians and share identical mind-set. Nuhu Ribadu, a man who should know better as former EFCC boss and as a politician who has operated within the inner circle of the two parties told us that looking for saints among current Nigerian politicians will be an arduous task.

    Unlike the first and second republics, when there were strong parties and party supremacy, APC and PDP governors are answerable only to themselves.  Again, this was perhaps why Nuhu Ribadu, had during a two-day summit of Northern Development Focus Initiative (NDFI) in Kano in January 2013 said “the 19 northern state governors and the 414 local governments have nothing to show for the N8.3 trillion that accrued to them between 1999 and 2010 whereas Ahmadu Bello’s NPC with an annual budget of N44m maintained law and order and ensured effective security of life and property among other achievements.

    There has been similarly nothing remarkable about the outing of southwest governors whether PDP or APC. Intra-city and inter-state roads are in states of disrepair, rural health programmes that thrived in the first republic have collapsed. Neither Bodija housing estate for workers nor Ikeja GRA built in the first republic has been replicated elsewhere since 1999. About four ranches were located in various parts of Western State by the Action Group government of Awolowo and his colleagues within eight years but 20 years into the fourth republic, southwest continues to depend on the north for about 10,000 cows consumed in the geopolitical zone daily.

    Unlike political parties, both PDP and APC that don’t dream dreams cannot perform miracles. It is also obvious from their baleful record since 1999 that they have both failed the nation over routine responsibilities of government that do not require the intervention of angels or men with special talents.

    If anything, Fayemi’s response to the betrayal of Nigerians by his party has confirmed there is little or no difference between PDP and APC neither of which seems to have any philosophical foundation or an ideological orientation.

  • Goons of LASTMA (1)

    By Olatunji Ololade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • American presidential election 2020

    By Jide Osuntokun

    I have been a keen watcher of American politics since I was in secondary school in Christ School Ado Ekiti, 60 years ago, when Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon from California and Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Massachusetts were running for the White House.  I grew up in an intensely political family, so I was naturally drawn to politics of Nigeria and other countries.

    America had been a global power from 1918 onwards following the armistice signed by imperial Germany’s High Command with the Allies at the end of the First World War. The United States by the end of the Second World War in 1945 became a super power and the only nuclear power until 1949 when Soviet Russia was able to split the atom and became a nuclear power also, thus beginning the super power rivalry until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994. So, any intelligent person concerned with survival and security of mankind had to show interest in what was going on in the USA and the USSR. World peace and human survival was maintained on the thread thin balance of power between the two super powers and on the fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or what was later described as “balance of mutual terror”.

    The excitement of American politics is however no longer there for many observers. This is not because world peace is guaranteed, and it is not, particularly with the proliferation of nuclear weapons among several nuclear weapons states like the USA, the Russian federation, China, France, Great Britain, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel in what a writer described as “peace of the graveyard”.  In spite of an international protocol against nuclear proliferation, quite a few countries like Iran and possibly Germany, Japan, South Korea if compelled by security considerations and threats by their neighbors have the capacity within a short time to make the bomb.  Interest in American politics has waned because of the advent of the tempestuous and unguarded Donald J. Trump who can say anything without caring of its diplomatic consequences any time any day. In spite of the enormous punch the country still packs, America is just merely tolerated and endured like a bully but hardly respected any more.  Trump has no respect for any leader of any country except those dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Victor Orban of Hungary, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and the new man at the helm of affairs in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. He insults on regular basis Angela Merkel of Germany, Trudeau of Canada and Emmanuel Macron, President of France and the previous prime minister of Britain, Theresa May, the very people who made NATO a truly Atlantic alliance.

    It is the hope that nothing lasts forever and that the Trump nightmare would also end possibly by January 2021 that makes us pay unusual attention to the process of who the Democratic Party flagbearer will be in the election against Trump in November this year . The signs are not good. The Iowa debacle in which it took almost a whole week to determine who won the vote of the Iowa caucus of just over 200,000 shows how unprepared the Democrats are in an election year. The man who was eventually announced as winner is Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg, an American combat veteran and a mayor of a small town in the state of Indiana and a graduate of Harvard College who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford university. He is 38 years old. Coming second is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who is technically an independent who however sits with the Democrats in the Senate of the United States. He is Jewish, a socialist and he is 79 years old. The next two are Senator Elizabeth Warren, a law professor from Massachusetts who has been a senator since 2013.  She is 70 years old. Former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden jr. is from Delaware. He served as Obama’s vice president for eight years and was in the US Senate from 1973 to 2009 making him a veteran politician who should go into retirement if he was a wise man. He is 77 years old. A dark horse who has just thrown his hat into the ring is the former mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, who comes in with a huge war chest from his $55 billion wealth. He is 77 years old. This is the group from which the Democratic Party has to choose a candidate unless some popular governor or senator were to come in from the blues.

    The question then is which of this lot would emerge the Democratic nominee? And will he be able to beat Trump. Four years ago, no one believed that Trump would be president and when he decided to run, many people dismissed him as loudmouth inexperienced television showman with a history of failed businesses and philandering. He did not only win the Republican nomination, a party that he was not even a member and also defeated the much fancied cerebral and celebrated Hilary Clinton, wife of a former president, senator from the great state of New York and Secretary of State. Although Hilary Clinton beat him by almost five million of popular votes but in the Electoral College where it mattered, Trump triumphed over Clinton. The import of this is that anything can happen in American presidential elections. Who could have believed that a skinny young black man from Chicago, born in Hawaii to a white young woman driven by more enthusiasm than wisdom, and a philandering married man from Kenya, would become the president of the United States? Anything is possible (Alles ist moglich”) as the Germans would say.

    From the Democratic wannabes none stands above the others. The oldest of them Bernie Sanders is a Jew and a socialist, who has had a previous heart attack seems to attract a large following among college students and educated young people. This may be due to his policy of universal health insurance coverage and free college education and writing off of all college debts. He also wants to scale down the influence of the military industrial complex in American politics and reduce military spending while increasing spending on social security and welfare. The question is whether Old Bernie Sanders is electable. I have my doubts. The shrill professor from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, is also perhaps too extreme for America which is by and large still afflicted by misogyny and may not yet be ready for a female president. Joe Biden on account of his son’s shenanigan in Ukraine and China, earning  millions  of dollars for doing nothing, has probably irredeemably damaged the candidacy of his father. Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish billionaire may be resented for his money and his religion in the heartland of America where Jews are still not favorably looked at. Peter Buttigieg who now sees himself as the “gay Obama” is regarded by some as a patsy of the Wall Street crowd and who may be acceptable to liberal America of New York and California, but is not likely to be acceptable to rural America, the blacks and the Bible Belt where homophobia is rife.

    So where is the candidate to beat Trump in a campaign which will be bitterly fought in which Trump will not take prisoners? The world in my own estimation, is doomed to endure Donald J Trump’s second term as president of the United States. Trump during his second term, when he has nothing to lose, may be tempted to fight Iran and possibly North Korea and that is the danger the world would face because of the Democratic party’s failure to come up with a credible and electable candidate in November 2020. The election is nine months away; this is a long time in politics. My prediction is a long shot but any intelligent reader of politics can predict the end from the beginning.

  • In his element

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    Whether in the battle against Boko Haram, standing up for his beloved people or recognising a woman diligent in her duty, Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum has shown that he is nonpareil. He has within a few months in office written his name in gold. He acts naturally and his ways continue to amaze this reporter. This is not about him but it is also about him. Why? This article cannot be written without reference to him. It is all about his encounter with a school teacher and his reaction to Sunday night’s Boko Haram’s umpteenth attack in his state.

    I first came across the story of his meeting with 54-year-old teacher Obiageli Mazi on WhatsApp some days ago. It was a moving story of a teacher meeting another teacher. Zulum was teaching at the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID) from where his predecessor Senator Kashim Shettima picked him as a commissioner. Zulum, a professor, was an uncommon teacher who rode bicycle to school. He does not believe in material things and that is what makes him different from many of his peers.

    Some theorists argue that there is no man who does not like money. They may be right because it is in the nature of man to seek what can give him comfort. Money ensures comfort because, according to the Good Book, it is a defence. But man’s vaunting love for money has turned the world upside down. It has turned many into kidnappers, armed robbers and ritual killers.

    It takes the grace of God for many in top positions such as Zulum to stick to their principle despite the perquisites of office. His meeting with Mazi was not happenstance as I argued with a colleague in the office on Tuesday. It was not a chance meeting at all. Something tells me that the governor must have heard about the woman and went to her school to see things for himself. What is the story he must have heard about the teacher? It is that at Shehu Sanda Kyarimi Primary & Secondary School, Maiduguri, there is a woman that resumes at 6.30 am everyday without fail.

    Can that be true? In this present day Nigeria, do we still have such conscientious teachers? These and other related questions would have crossed the governor’s mind when he heard about this teacher who has been serving for 31 years in that her little corner in a part of our country ravaged by Boko Haram in the past 10 years. Not even the fear of falling into Boko Haram’s hands has stopped Mazi from leaving her home early daily in order to get to school promptly. To Mazi, her job comes first and come rain, come shine, she must be at work before any other person everyday.

    That is the path she has chosen and she has stayed true to the course all of 31 years. On January 7, the Lord who rewards all good smiled on her as her time finally came. It was the day Zulum paid a surprise visit to the school to verify all he has heard about this woman who is from Abia State, but has spent the greater part of her life in Borno. She settled in the state when it was a peaceful town and has remained there up till now even when things are so tense. For her, January 7 was payback time and it came in a big way.

    She got to school at 6.28 am that day and had hardly settled down when she saw a convoy of vehicles driving into the compound. In her story published by this paper yesterday, she said: ‘’As I was about to write my name in the time book, I saw them enter the school compound at 6.30 am; one of them walked towards me and I stood up and greeted him. Then he asked me ‘who I am, that whether I am the headmistress’. I said no, I am a class teacher for Primary One pupils. He said ‘ok. And you came early like this’. I said yes this is how I use to come… He told me that they came with the governor. He said he will report my case to the governor and he left.

    “Later, I saw the governor beckoning on me two times and I grabbed my purse and started running towards him but the governor said no, no, no just come gently. I then slowed down but moved very fast and greeted him and his entourage”. At that very moment, her life changed. For starters, the governor gave her money and promised that she would be rewarded. From class teacher, she has been made Assistant Headmistress. Certainly, we have not heard the last about this woman.

    As the Good Book says: ‘’Seest thou a man (woman) diligent in his (her) work, he (she) shall stand before kings; he (she) shall not stand before mean men’’. May Mazi live long to enjoy the fruits of her labour.

    Not one to keep quiet when he sees his people suffering, Zulum has consistently harped on the need for the army to buckle up in the anti-insurgency war. On Monday, he found himself speaking the truth again to the military over the Boko Haram attack in Auno near Maiduguri in which 30 were feared killed, houses and vehicles torched. ‘’We have to be brutal in telling the truth. I am pushed to the wall to say the truth. Since I was inaugurated as governor of Borno State, Boko Haram has attacked Auno six times. Another thing is that the military has withdrawn from Auno town.

    “I am not undermining the capacity of the military but we have made repeated appeals for the military to establish their unit in Auno. They are here but as soon as it is 5 pm, they close the gate and lock the people and go back to Maiduguri. This is not right’’. Seeing that Auno is vulnerable, why has the military not considered the governor’s appeal to set up a unit there? It cannot cover the place from Maiduguri and it cannot continue to shut out overnight people coming into the capital from there, leaving them at the risk of being mauled by Boko Haram. There should be a middle way out and that is what should be explored in this case.

    Angelic spirit

    Erelu Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

    Mothers are gold. They are gems of a being. I cherish my mother and why won’t I considering her role in my life. I still remember how she backed me a grown secondary school boy (Form 2, 1974) who was rushed home from the boarding house because I could not walk after a nail pierced my right foot.

    She carried me on her back to and from the hospital for days until I could walk again. Ekiti State First Lady Erelu Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi rekindled my love for my mother in her moving piece: The forgotten princess – Rachael Jolaade Osho (1910 – 2020) in the Daily Sun of Friday, February 7.

    It was an article in celebration of womanhood, more particularly women like the late Mama Osho whose children died before them. Did she die without children when she had a daughter like Erelu Fayemi to celebrate her? In life and in death, the Erelu stood by the centenarian. She ensured that Mama Osho lived a worthy life and got a befitting burial.

    What more could Mama Osho’s own biological children had done if they had survived her? Truly, whether a woman is survived by children or not, she will be buried by a child. Erelu, may God reward you amply.

  • This toxic underside

    Olatunji Ololade

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Terror so politically-correct!

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

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

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

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

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

    Samuel

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

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

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

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

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