The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • ‘The BLASTS that changed OUR LIVES’

    Olatunji Ololade, Associate Editor

    The fragrance of rain whiffs through the tent Muhammadu Idrissu shares with his family. As the cold draft seizes the shelter, the nine-year-old’s face breaks into a wince.

    “He feels ache in his legs whenever it rains. The cold breeze causes him great pains,” says his mother, Fatouma.

    Rubbing her hand on the stump where her son’s left knee used to be, the 33-yearold recounts how Muhammadu lost his leg to a blast from a landmine while fetching firewood with his older brother, Musa, in Biu.

    It happened in the twilight of 2015 thus casting the family in unexpected gloom. On the day he lost his leg, Muhammadu had wandered far from home with Musa and friends in their neighbourhood, because they intended to hunt for game (bush meat), at the end of their task.

    The boys worked at feverish pace so that they could have enough time to hunt for grass-cutters and squirrels.

    They would skin, roast and eat their kill before heading back home for a late supper. It was part of the thrill of running errands in a group.

    Although their mothers warned them against wandering too far from home, most parents knew of the kids’ escapades in the bush. It’s all part of the thrill of growing up.

    While they gathered firewood, Idris, then five at the period, saw his brother poke at something that looked like a steel plate. Instantly, there was a blast and that was the last thing the child remembered. When he came to, Idris had lost his left leg and his brother. The latter was violently torn apart by the bomb.

    The incident claimed Musa and two of their friends and rendered two others crippled including Muhammadu.

    In a voice laden with grief, Fatouma said: “Musa was a wonderful child. Always in high spirits. He wanted to become a doctor. Although he is gone, I am lucky I still have Muhammadu.” Fatouma has every reason to be thankful. Unlike Sekinatu Jayya, tragedy sauntered into Jayya’s life in common hours.

    News of doom intruded her home in Baga, while she made millet soup for supper and awaited her children’s return from a play date. Nuru, five, and Ayisatu, seven, had been gone since noon. But Jayya was assured of their safety. She knew they were secure playing with their friends in the neighbourhood. Then a loud noise intruded through her windows at a quarter past 4 pm. The shutters rattled at the hinges and Jayya’s heart sank with her spirit.

    The 28-year-old was suddenly assailed by a foreboding of evil. But she shook off the feeling and set out to look for her children.

    “People stared at me as I hurried towards their play zone, near a dry well two streets away. But I thought it was because of my appearance. I had rushed out of the house without my hijab and with one slipper on my left foot,” she said.

    Then she got to her destination. And her heart sunk lower as she sighted a large crowd. Jayya rifled through the mob, haphazardly, like bullets from a Dane gun, stopping for breath at the edge of an opening where puddles of flesh and bone fragments seethed in the sun.

    Some mothers bathed in the carnage. Others rolled and wailed in the bloodsoaked sand, amid the spatter of decapitated minors. In their grief, they fought off the firm grasps of their husbands and sympathetic neighbours.

    The loud blast that caused Jayya’s shutters to rattle had claimed the lives of her children and seven others.

    The minors had discovered an unexploded canister under a pile of dried bush. The bomb went off while they fiddled with its metal ring. Amid the heap of decapitated minors, Nuru’s head jutted dolefully with what’s left of his torso. Few metres away, Ayisatu’s innards spilled from her belly, even as her forelock streamed with blood. Such was the imagery at her children’s playground, and venue of their dismemberment. It’s all part of her grisly memory now but Jayya lives in dread of remembering.

    “Everytime I remember what my children looked like, torn apart, I shed tears uncontrollably. Most nights, I cry myself to sleep. My husband has been very strong and supportive. He consoles me. But he cries too. I have heard him cry during Salat (prayer). He cries in his sleep too. Together, we try not to remember. That is why we relocated from Baga to Maiduguri,” said Jayya. ‘They came to change our lives with bombs’ “BOKO Haram came and changed everything. They made this place unsafe.

    They came to change our lives with bombs. Our kids can’t go out to play in the sand. They can’t hunt for sport. We, their fathers have to be careful too, except we intend to die before our time and watch another man father our child, be a husband to our wives. There is bomb everywhere. The bomb ruins everything,” said, Ibrahim Koni, a crippled trader. Before his disability, Koni used to be a farmer. He worked through wet and dry spells to cater for his family and rebuild his ancestral home. But on a hot afternoon, the 41-year-old suffered a decapitation of both legs when he hit on an unexploded ordnance on his farm, with his hoe.

    It was like a scene from a horror movie. Koni admitted that he had heard of farmers dying from bomb blasts as they tilled their farms but he never imagined that he could be on the receiving end of such gruesomeness. “The blast flung me backwards belly down. I had no clothes on save a worn knicker and my face was buried in the sands. Two of my neighbours who farmed beside me could not come immediately to my rescue.

    They fled for safety as soon as they heard the explosion, thinking our village was been attacked by Boko Haram. It took them two good hours to get to me. I could have died. But Alhamdulillah, Allah spared my life. “When there is life, there is hope. Though I cannot farm anymore, I am trying to gather some money to start a small trade. Something I can manage on my own…Since my accident, I have been on my own.

    My wife fled with our only son. She couldn’t stand the fact that I had become useless to her and my son,” said Koni. The grim picture HUNDREDS of people have been killed or maimed by landmines in north-east Nigeria, according to research findings. Mines laid by Boko Haram terrorist group over the course of its deadly insurgency in the Lake Chad region, killed 162 people in two years and wounded 277 more, according to the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a landmine clearance charity.

    Casualties rose from 12 per month in 2016 to 19 per month between 2017 and 2018, making Nigeria’s casualty rate from mines the eighth highest in the world. After a decade of the insurgency, locally produced landmines, unexploded bombs and improvised explosive devices are scattered across the north-east. MAG’s Avishek Banskota, who is based in Maiduguri, said: “Everyone I have met in Borno State has been affected in one way or the other, whether losing a family member, a friend or a house. People can’t move around freely in most of the region and much of the land can’t be used to farm or collect firewood, so the impact on communities is huge.” According to the police, insurgents use pipes, pots and other items to make their own munitions and harvest explosives from undetonated ordnance.

    ICRC to the rescue

    Most victims of Boko Haram assaults make it to a health facility. Many die in the heat of the attack. Some die few weeks after due to inappropriate medical care. Others live with disabilities for life. They are forced to move on with their lives without the necessary facilities, like physiotherapy and prosthetic limbs, that could make their lives easier. Some very few amputees, however, enjoy the rare boon of support, courtesy a healthcare programme devised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in partnership with the Borno’s State Specialist Hospital.

    The ICRC runs a medical, rehabilitation programme courtesy a Mobile Surgical Team (MST) at the State Specialist Hospital in Maiduguri. Over the duration of the protracted insurgency in the northeast, the surgical team has treated hundreds of people wounded in bomb blasts in Borno. For instance, in 2016, the team together with surgeons from Michika Hospital, treated 76 victims of the blast in Madagali market, while another ICRC surgical team treated 15 people injured in Maiduguri. Recently, the health organisation introduced of a rehabilitation programme, whereby it facilitates the acquisition of prosthetic limbs to victims of bomb blasts with amputated limbs. The primary focus of the project is to cater for amputees from the conflict, women and children, according to Claudia Soares, Head Nurse of the ICRC’s Mobile Surgical Team (MST). Soares shuttles through wards and the operation theatre, daily, at the State Specialist Hospital in Maiduguri.

    “The majority of our patients are weapon-wounded patients and internally displaced people (IDPs) fleeing the conflict. We receive patients from across Borno State. Some of them are referred to us by other humanitarian organisations and some of them come to us by their own volition.

    They are all treated for free. We treat them all free of charge,” she said. The Boko Haram conflict has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people in the highly impoverished region, where many live on less than $2 a day thus making prosthetic limbs – which cost on average nearly $700 – prohibitively expensive to them.

    Amputees are first assessed in Maiduguri, where the ICRC runs a medical clinic that caters specifically for victims of Boko Haram attacks. The clinic complements services provided by a handful of state-run hospitals in the city which have been overstretched by the sharp rise in emergency cases from occasional violence. Once potential beneficiaries of artificial limbs are screened, they are then sent for a fitting in Kano, nearly 600 kilometres away. Medical personnel work on an average of five amputees per week, which is just a fraction of the number of those seeking his services. One of the many beneficiaries of the initiative is Musa, a soccer-lover, who lost his left limb in a bomb attack.

    The incident happened when a boy walked into his school with a bag despite the fact that bags were banned in his school, Government Science Secondary School, Potiskum, with a bag. “We kept asking him why he was carrying a bag,” Musa recalled. “Then we heard a beeping sound, but we thought it was his phone.” Unknown to Musa, his teachers and mates at the school assembly, the intruder concealed a bomb in his bag. The ensuing blast was huge, killing two dozen students and injuring more than 40.

    When Alhaji Musa, Musa’s father, who lived in the staff quarters near the school, heard the bomb go off, he ran into the school. “ I saw dead bodies everywhere and everyone running around confused. I started looking for my son,” he said, recalling the November 2014 attack. “I eventually found Musa in the emergency ward of Potiskum General Hospital.” Musa’s left leg had been blown off by the blast.

    The football-loving teen faced a gruelling recovery. However, three days after the blast, Musa’s family learned about ICRC’s programme to fit victims of violence with a prosthesis free of charge. Musa was fitted with a prosthetic limb three months afterwards at the National Orthopedic Hospital, Dala-Kano in Kano. The youngest person in the programme at the time, Musa was trained by the orthopaedic staff on how to use his new limb. Like Musa, Njidda Maidugu, a fuel station attendant, never thought he would walk again on two legs after he lost his right limb in a Boko Haram suicide bomb attack at a checkpoint in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria, in 2016. Maidugu has been fitted with a free artificial limb in the project run by the ICRC. Modu Yaganami, a native of Dikwa, Borno State, is another beneficiary of the initiative. He said: “I used to be a trader going to several markets. I was very strong and energetic, until this happened to me.

    I was brought to the hospital and my limbs were fixed and treated for free by ICRC. “I was also given an artificial limb. Now, I can move around and do my normal business…I have peace of mind. I thought I was never going to walk again. It was after I was fitted with artificial limb that I felt normal.” Ali Suleiman, 35, said he had been on admission for a month as a patient at the mobile surgical ward of the health facility. “I am a victim of a bomb attack in Bama. Thank God, out of 13 of us that got injured, only three of us survived. I am recuperating gradually and receiving the best care from this people,” he said.

    Tending the maimed is, however, no walk in the park. It requires a great degree of commitment and cooperative efforts Nikolai Dmitriev, an ICRC Surgeon with the MST, stated that he has to frequently operate weapon-wounded people from the very old to the young. “Our patients are really broken. And it is not enough to heal their bodies, there is also need to heal their minds,” said Dmitriev. Daniel Madembo, Chief Physiotherapist with the MST, stated that it is the job of his unit to help amputees get accustomed to the use of the new artificial limbs provided for them by the ICRC.

    “We help them learn to fit the limbs and walk properly on it. We help them reintegrate into their new lives and their communities,” said Madembo. Living under the bomb ABOUT 565 people might have been killed by the explosive remnants of the militant group Boko Haram in Nigeria’s restive northeast region in 2018, according to a recent report by the United Nations anti-mine agency. Lionel Pechera, a programme coordinator of the United Nations Mines Action Service (UNMAS), disclosed this at a campaign to mark the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram. Pechera said the presence of explosive hazards was a barrier to accessing the majority of land for agricultural activities, which in turn increased food insecurity in the northeast area.

    A November 2015 assessment in Adamawa and Borno states by international de-mining organisation Danish De-mining Group (DDG) had noted local community reports of a number of local government areas in Borno state they thought needed clearance, including Bama, Dikwa, Gwoza, Kala-Balge, Kukawa, Marte, and Ngala. In 2015, the Nigerian army warned civilians of the threat of improvised devices using adapted submunitions. Caches of French-made air-delivered BLG-66 “Beluga” cluster munitions were reportedly found in Adamawa state. Also identified were anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines resembling Chinese No. 4 anti-personnel mines and Type 72 anti-vehicle mines; a variety of body-borne, vehicle-borne, and remotely controlled devices; as well as cluster munition remnants, mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, and Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS).

    Going forward…

    Boko Haram’s insurgency has killed more than 20,000 people since 2009 and left over 2.6 million people homeless. Contamination from mines and other explosive devices has had a serious humanitarian impact, impeding the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and exacerbating the crisis in the region. In October 2016, the governor of Adamawa State confirmed that many IDPs were unable to return to their farms due to a fear of landmines. Roads were closed to civilian traffic by the military due to the presence of mines or other explosive devices and there were numerous reports of civilian casualties and farmers who feared returning to work their fields, contributing to sharply worsening food shortages. At the moment, there is no structured mine action programme in Nigeria.

    Both Nigeria’s armed forces and its police carry out explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) activities and explosive remnants of war (ERW) clearance. The army’s ERW clearances are primarily focused on facilitating military operations and clearing roads and areas to facilitate access for troops to carry out attacks on Boko Haram and keep military supply routes open.

    The 2016 Buhari Plan for Rebuilding the North East from the Presidential Committee on the North East Initiative (PCNI) includes a plan for de-mining as part of clean-up operations in reclaimed communities before resettlement of IDPs. It assigns responsibility for clearance to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), the Nigerian military and paramilitary agencies. In early 2018, it was reported that some de-mining was taking place to facilitate the safe return of internally displaced persons (IDPs). In September 2018, it was announced that the federal government was planning to spend $6.7 billion to deliver the PCNI. Yet, hidden explosives constitute a major challenge to IDPs to Boko Haram survivors. According to MAG, mine action should be prioritised as a core protection activity within the humanitarian response in the northeast.

    It also emphasises attention on coordinated strategies for safe, voluntary and informed returns to areas where there is risk posed by landmines and other explosives. Bounded by the Ottawa convention also known as the Mines Ban Treaty, Nigeria is obligated to destroy stockpiles, clear mined areas and assist affected communities. Majority of landmine victims are civilians who step on a mine after armed conflicts has ceased in their areas. In most instances, over one-third of all casualties due to landmines are women and children.

    There is no disputing the perils of landmines as indiscriminate weapons that lie dormant until triggered, be it by a soldier, or a civilian, a friend or a foe, an adult or a child. Jonathan Gambo is one such child. In a widely advocacy and award-winning report, Temitope Kalejaiye, a Commonwealth staff, narrated Gambo’s ordeal. At age 12, Gambo lost his arms, while fetching firewood in his village, Uba, where his parents worked as farmers.

    While gathering firewood, his elder brother, who had been curious to unearth a chunk of metal, unwittingly passed him the object, a bomb, before instructing him to throw it away. The device blasted off Jonathan’s hand and right arm up to the elbow. Like Gambo, Muhammadu lost a limb, his left leg, while fetching firewood with his brother in Biu. Then there is the sad case of Jayya, who lost her two children, Nuru, five and Ayisatu, seven to an unexploded canister.

  • Buratai’s call for spiritual warfare

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    I sympathise with Lt. Gen Tukur Buratai, our Chief of Army Staff, who has come under severe criticism for advocating spiritual warfare to counter the evil doctrines of Boko Haram insurgents as a prelude to resolving our crisis of nation-building at a recent seminar titled “Counter insurgency and violent extremism in Nigeria through spiritual warfare”. It is perhaps lost on Buratai’s attackers that  we are a praying nation of miracle seekers led at different periods by  elders statesmen like  General Yakubu Gowon of “Nigeria Pray” fame, General Obasanjo who publicly declared his policy thrust and its implementation would be determined not by voice of expert advisers but that of God,  and in recent times by Goodluck Jonathan who hopped from church to mosque in Nigeria and synagogues in Jerusalem with thieving government officials in need of redemption  and, currently, by the duo of President Buhari who tries to remain faithful to  his five times daily prayers as prescribed by the Holy Quran and his deputy, Osinbajo who hardly misses any of his important weekly programmes such as “Power must change hand and Holy Ghost night” holding at his Lagos-Ibadan express road Redeemed Church headquarters. He not too long ago publicly attributed his miraculous escape from a helicopter crash in Kogi State to the prayers of his spiritual father, Pastor Adeboye. They also seem to have ignored the fact that we are a nation of prayers warriors and miracle seekers with the biggest Roman Catholic Seminary in the world located in Imo State and the largest Pentecostal church in the world located in Canaan land in Ota Ogun state.

    Of course, Buratai’s call for prayers cannot be regarded as a sign of weakness. He has in the last five years fought an heroic war driving out Boko Haram insurgents from about two dozen LGAs they carved out of Nigerian territory as their caliphate, stopped their incursions to Abuja, Kogi and other parts of the Northeast before declaring Boko Haram insurgents  ‘technically defeated’ and their ability to visit terror on Nigerians ‘greatly degraded’.

    When  Nnamdi Kanu left his London comfort home to hold governors and youths of Southeast hostage, Buratai was on hand to launch  ‘Operation Python dance’ that drove him out of town and out of Nigeria. He was also on hand when the Nigerian Police insisted the invading herdsmen who killed, maimed and seized conquered middle-Belt farmlands after chasing their surviving victims to IDP camps were ghosts. And when in recent times, Yoruba and Igbo criminal elements in the name of Fulani herdsmen without cows embarked on mindless killings and kidnapping in the mangrove forests of the Southwest, it was Buratai we turned to.

    Buratai has no doubt given his best to the nation. But for President Buhari who doesn’t seem to understand that government is a science, he along with his tired and drained colleagues with very little left to contribute after attaining retirement age should be having their well-deserved rest.

    If Buratai who had first-hand experience of the forces behind our crisis of nation building at a period the police claimed albeit falsely that those killing Nigerian were ghosts, a fraudulent claim Nigerians were almost believing until some powerful emirs and the Minister of Defence held brief for the killers, mooted the idea of spiritual warfare, the  events of the last three weeks must have vindicated his stand that  a nation that has chosen to live in denial needs other approaches beyond deployment of Ak-47 rifles and fighters jets .

    Let us start with the tragedy of Zamfara State.  It will be recalled that the killing of 203 people and kidnapping of 685 persons in the first quarter of 2016 in Zamfara led to the launching of Operation Sharan Daji (Sweep the Forest), Operation Harbin Kunama (Scorpion Sting) and Operation Diran Mikiya (Eagle Fighting), and the stationing of a full battalion of Special Forces in Zamfara State by Defence Minister Brig-Gen. Mansur Dan Ali (rtd) who is an indigene of the state. This was followed by the launching of ”Operation Maximum Safety” with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles”. Added to this was  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.

    In 2018, a DIG was deployed there with three surveillance patrol helicopters and crew members to coordinate the operation to completely rout-out all armed bandits from Zamfara and other contiguous states”. That was not all; there was also the employment of 1,700 charmers to join the civilian joint task force to tackle bandits, kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustlers. Finally, after all the show of power, a deal was signed with Zamfara bandits.

    Even without any evidence all these formations have ceased to operate in Zamfara, the unexpected and the in-explicable happened in Zamfara last week.  Three local government areas including Mayanchi and Maru were sacked by 300 AK- 47 wielding bandits riding 150 motorcycles after an encounter that led to the death of seven soldiers.”  They, according to Yusuf, The Nation’s insightful reporter, operated from Thursday night to Friday morning, before moving to Mayanchi petrol station where they re-fuelled their 150 motorcycles, stole N300, 000 sales proceeds from the fuel attendants and impounded a truck with which cattle seized from herdsmen were ferried together with looted foodstuffs and 300 cows into their Birnin Gwari base. Unarguably, Zamfara’s ongoing struggle is beyond banditry.

    The second event is the attempt by some powerful Fulani  politicians led by Bala Mohammed, governor of Bauchi State to confer citizenship on stateless Fulani immigrants first through RUGA and now through National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) which Malam Garba Shehu, President Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant (SSA) on Media said are the same, minus Vice President Osinbajo’s semantics. Governor Bala Mohammed speaking on a Channel Television programme last week did not see any reason why immigrant herdsmen accused of mindless killings of Nigerians by Nigeria-based herdsmen that had lived for decades with their fellow Nigerians should not be allowed to benefit from NLTP programme funded by Nigeria’s taxpayers. According to him “The Fulani man is a global African person.  He moves from Gambia to Senegal and his nationality is Fulani; and so we cannot just close our border and say the Fulani man is not a Nigerian”.  This perhaps explains why Southern and Middle Belt Forum (SMBLF) out rightly rejected the policy dismissing it as ‘divisive and smack of domination and conquest of sections of the country by a section.

    Last week’s Zamfara tragedy that went on for about 13 hours without interruption from the police and other security formations in Zamfara took the same pattern with mindless killings and seizure of territories in the Middle Belt without anyone, including those found in seized territories, questioned or arrested; abduction and ferrying of over 200 Nigerian Chibok school girls with buses for over three hours inside Nigerian territory to insurgents hideout in Sambisa forest and Buni Yadi’ selective killings of students of a technical school that went on for a whole night without help from the police and the army.

    The cheapest route to resolution of our crisis of nation building is restructuring, devolution of powers, resource control and community policing. Unfortunately we have continued to live in denial deluding ourselves that what is needed to resolve our crisis of nationality is spiritual intervention.

  • Independence from the eyes of a provincial lad

    Nigeria got its independence 59 years ago and I was in my final year in the fifth form in Christ’s School Ado Ekiti. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, to put it in local Nigerian lingo.

    I was a fragile but athletic teenager who played soccer, basketball and represented my house in short sprints, long and steeple jumps as well as rounders. If there was a school team in rounders, I would have been on it. Rounders was almost unique to Christ School because hardly any other school played it. On the eve of independence, I remember our class being asked to write about Nigeria‘s independence. I wrote that we would soon be free from “rancorous negrophobism” of white colonialists.

    I think I must have seen this phrase in the Daily Times, the most widely read newspaper of the time. It sounded very nice but our English teacher, Allan Reed angrily cancelled it. I felt bad many years later when I realized how insensitive I must have been. Here was a young Englishman and his wife doing yeoman job in the backwoods of the British Empire being lumped with other white people from his country as haters of blacks. Of course I was not totally off the mark. There were Britons who hated us while making a living in our country. After all Rudyard Kipling in his book “The White Man’s Burden” had described us as “half children half devils”. Our white teachers in Christ’s School, were however really devoted to their jobs and they apparently loved us as Christians were supposed to love one another. This was particularly the case with our principal Donald Leslie Mason. We students also loved him in return. Mason celebrated brilliant students but paid little attention to sports, the result of which was the annual humiliation of our school by Government College Ibadan’s soccer team. To make up for this, we usually displayed our school certificate results for the visiting soccer team to see and to know there was life after soccer victory.

    Even though we were not aware of nationalist rumblings among our Nigerian teachers, we suspected something was wrong when our beloved principal Canon L.D Mason went on an extended leave for six months. The chemistry teacher Papa Adeyemi, a much loved man and an old hand in the school, acted in the absence of Mason. What we noticed was the improvement in our food. It certainly tasted better. We started having bread and tea for breakfast.

    Crayfishes found their ways into our previously tasteless stews. We later learned that by currying the favour of the students, the school’s finances were run down. Baba Adeyemi took keen interest in our preparation for our final University of Cambridge West African School Certificate examination. That was the name of the final examination then. It was the first serious examination many of us had ever taken. And for most of us it was a “do or die affair”. In Christ School of those days,  nobody cared whether you came from a rich or poor home, all that mattered was one’s  performance in examinations and the crowning glory was your coming out with flying colours in the final  school certificate examination. When I was a junior boy, one of our senior boys was known to keep his legs in a bucket full of cold water all night so that he would not fall asleep while swotting. Unfortunately this particular boy was the butt of students’ jokes because he flunked his examination. Boys in my set read all round the clock weeks before the commencement of the examination. We ate kolanuts and drank strong coffee to stay awake. There were all kinds of tablets that were hawked around to keep students awake. Thank God our “do or die” efforts did not result into any deaths. On the eve of the examination, the acting principal, Papa Adeyemi called all of us to his office and gave us what he said were tablets to prevent us from having head ache. But we noticed that as soon as we took the tablets we became sleepy a few minutes later and we had to rush to our dormitories before falling asleep on our legs. This routine of cleverly sedating us was followed daily until we finished our examination. I remember our distinguished biology teacher, R. A Ogunlade emphasising deliberately what he knew would not be asked the students in the practical biology paper. What an honest man!

    That was the Nigeria in which I grew up and the Nigeria of our independence dreams .We worked very hard not because of independence but because that was the tradition of our school.

    One thing I remember vividly was that at the eve of Independence Day, we had a party in our big dining hall to which girls from our sister Anglican Girls Secondary School in Ado -Ekiti were invited. This was before the two schools were merged. Many of us were not too comfortable dancing with people of the opposite sex. We just did not do such things as Christ School boys. We actually thought any boy who had a girlfriend was doomed to a life of failure. Indeed many of such wayward boys did not make it in life! Many of us danced alone and the girls did the same. The rave then in the world of music was Victor Olaiya’s “Omo pupa”. The song was about marrying a fair skinned woman and leaving her at home while the spouse went in search of the “golden fleece” in London. While in London the man sends money home so that his wife could join him and so that they could live happily thereafter. That captured a trend in those days when men sort of funded their education through “work study” without parental or government support. Many of our people took this route to success. Most of my classmates were far removed from this trajectory. All we wanted to do was pass our examinations and go to the University of Ibadan and become graduate teachers like our teachers. We had no professional guidance in school. The few of my classmates who became medical doctors did so by mere chance of emulating older students from our school who were studying medicine at the University of Ibadan. We knew nothing about engineering, law, accountancy, journalism, insurance, banking, finance etc. No one thought about police or armed forces yet our contemporaries in the East and the North were being encouraged to join these critical organs that, for better or for worse, played decisive roles in the history of our country. My class did not enjoy the privilege of being the most senior class in the school because the sixth form in science started in our last year. This created unnecessary conflict between us and the sixth formers who were very few but were veritable irritants for us who felt robbed of the ultimate prize of being the senior boys and ultimate bullies in the school old tradition!

    A year earlier in December 1959, the elections into the federal House of Representatives had held. This was a bitterly fought election. In our part of Nigeria, we had thought the Action Group (A.G) led by the indomitable Obafemi Awolowo would win. We saw the party flying helicopters here and there and engaging in aerobatic displays and writing of party slogans and symbols in the sky. The two other major parties of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) led by Ahmadu Bello, the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio northern aristocracy and the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Citizens) led by the flamboyant wordsmith, Nnamdi Azikiwe, we were told, stood no chance against the A.G. The NPC did not bother to campaign in the South while the NCNC gave the A.G in the Southwest a fight for its money. This was because the NCNC was previously led by Herbert Macaulay a Lagosian Yoruba descendant of the first African bishop, Ajayi Crowther.

    For daring to challenge the NPC in the North, it was predictable that it would form an alliance with the NCNC. This was what happened. The government formed by the two parties led Nigeria to independence. We had an uneasy political peace in the country and certainly in the west with the NCNC threatening to use its presence in the federal government to challenge the AG government in the west. As school boys we grew up seeing other Nigerians as inferior to Yoruba people.

    We did not have much contact with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. There were neither Igbo nor Hausa in Christ School. We had a few people from Edo speaking part of the West. The Urhobo we knew lived in the bush tapping palm wine and making palm oil from the palm trees on our farms. We dismissed Ijaws (Izon) and the Ibos as “ Kobokobo” which was the way their languages sounded in our ears. We even called them worse names! We called the Hausas “gambari” apparently thinking all northerners belonged to the small Kamberi ethnic group. Our people sold kolanuts to them but we still did not feel they were our equals.  We had derogatory names for other Nigerians and of course they had derogatory names for us too. We were supposed to be the future of the country, yet we held each other in mutual contempt. It should not have surprised anybody that our country was building on shaky foundation because of ignorance. As students we sometimes went to non-Yoruba areas of the west and also to the Igbo speaking areas of the Eastern region either to play soccer or on geographical excursions.  This did not remove our negative notions about them; rather we looked for things that validated our preconceived ideas about other people. We never went to the North not even to the Yoruba areas of Offa, Ilorin and Kabba. This isolated us from the youths of other parts of Nigeria. We of course were not sensitive to these negative trends in our lives. We did not study Nigerian history; rather we studied the history of the British Empire and even got distinctions in the subject. In retrospect, we were not well prepared for the future. We passed our examinations quite alright. We were very well behaved. We obeyed the school regulations. We knew it was wrong to be dishonest or to steal. In short we grew up to be decent Christian boys and there was nothing wrong with that. But we were not going to live in a Christian country or perfect society where everybody was of the same ethnic group. In fact we were going to live in a complex mixed up society where not much attention would be paid to academic excellence, morality or integrity. This is why in my view my school did not produce a single rich Nigerian. Do I regret this? The answer is blowing in the wind.

     

  • Independence from the eyes of a provincial lad

    By Jide Osuntokun

    Nigeria got its independence 59 years ago and I was in my final year in the fifth form in Christ’s School Ado Ekiti. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, to put it in local Nigerian lingo. I was a fragile but athletic teenager who played soccer, basketball and represented my house in short sprints, long and steeple jumps as well as rounders. If there was a school team in rounders, I would have been on it. Rounders was almost unique to Christ School because hardly any other school played it. On the eve of independence, I remember our class being asked to write about Nigeria‘s independence. I wrote that we would soon be free from “rancorous negrophobism” of white colonialists. I think I must have seen this phrase in the Daily Times, the most widely read newspaper of the time. It sounded very nice but our English teacher, Allan Reed angrily cancelled it. I felt bad many years later when I realized how insensitive I must have been. Here was a young Englishman and his wife doing yeoman job in the backwoods of the British Empire being lumped with other white people from his country as haters of blacks. Of course I was not totally off the mark. There were Britons who hated us while making a living in our country. After all Rudyard Kipling in his book “The White Man’s Burden” had described us as “half children half devils”. Our white teachers in Christ’s School, were however really devoted to their jobs and they apparently loved us as Christians were supposed to love one another. This was particularly the case with our principal Donald Leslie Mason. We students also loved him in return. Mason celebrated brilliant students but paid little attention to sports, the result of which was the annual humiliation of our school by Government College Ibadan’s soccer team. To make up for this, we usually displayed our school certificate results for the visiting soccer team to see and to know there was life after soccer victory.

    Even though we were not aware of nationalist rumblings among our Nigerian teachers, we suspected something was wrong when our beloved principal Canon L.D Mason went on an extended leave for six months. The chemistry teacher Papa Adeyemi, a much loved man and an old hand in the school, acted in the absence of Mason. What we noticed was the improvement in our food. It certainly tasted better. We started having bread and tea for breakfast. Crayfishes found their ways into our previously tasteless stews. We later learned that by currying the favour of the students, the school’s finances were run down. Baba Adeyemi took keen interest in our preparation for our final University of Cambridge West African School Certificate examination. That was the name of the final examination then. It was the first serious examination many of us had ever taken. And for most of us it was a “do or die affair”. In Christ School of those days,  nobody cared whether you came from a rich or poor home, all that mattered was one’s  performance in examinations and the crowning glory was your coming out with flying colours in the final  school certificate examination. When I was a junior boy, one of our senior boys was known to keep his legs in a bucket full of cold water all night so that he would not fall asleep while swotting. Unfortunately this particular boy was the butt of students’ jokes because he flunked his examination. Boys in my set read all round the clock weeks before the commencement of the examination. We ate kolanuts and drank strong coffee to stay awake. There were all kinds of tablets that were hawked around to keep students awake. Thank God our “do or die” efforts did not result into any deaths. On the eve of the examination, the acting principal, Papa Adeyemi called all of us to his office and gave us what he said were tablets to prevent us from having head ache. But we noticed that as soon as we took the tablets we became sleepy a few minutes later and we had to rush to our dormitories before falling asleep on our legs. This routine of cleverly sedating us was followed daily until we finished our examination. I remember our distinguished biology teacher, R. A Ogunlade emphasising deliberately what he knew would not be asked the students in the practical biology paper. What an honest man!

    That was the Nigeria in which I grew up and the Nigeria of our independence dreams .We worked very hard not because of independence but because that was the tradition of our school.

    One thing I remember vividly was that at the eve of Independence Day, we had a party in our big dining hall to which girls from our sister Anglican Girls Secondary School in Ado -Ekiti were invited. This was before the two schools were merged. Many of us were not too comfortable dancing with people of the opposite sex. We just did not do such things as Christ School boys. We actually thought any boy who had a girlfriend was doomed to a life of failure. Indeed many of such wayward boys did not make it in life! Many of us danced alone and the girls did the same. The rave then in the world of music was Victor Olaiya’s “Omo pupa”. The song was about marrying a fair skinned woman and leaving her at home while the spouse went in search of the “golden fleece” in London. While in London the man sends money home so that his wife could join him and so that they could live happily thereafter. That captured a trend in those days when men sort of funded their education through “work study” without parental or government support. Many of our people took this route to success. Most of my classmates were far removed from this trajectory. All we wanted to do was pass our examinations and go to the University of Ibadan and become graduate teachers like our teachers. We had no professional guidance in school. The few of my classmates who became medical doctors did so by mere chance of emulating older students from our school who were studying medicine at the University of Ibadan. We knew nothing about engineering, law, accountancy, journalism, insurance, banking, finance etc. No one thought about police or armed forces yet our contemporaries in the East and the North were being encouraged to join these critical organs that, for better or for worse, played decisive roles in the history of our country. My class did not enjoy the privilege of being the most senior class in the school because the sixth form in science started in our last year. This created unnecessary conflict between us and the sixth formers who were very few but were veritable irritants for us who felt robbed of the ultimate prize of being the senior boys and ultimate bullies in the school old tradition!

    A year earlier in December 1959, the elections into the federal House of Representatives had held. This was a bitterly fought election. In our part of Nigeria, we had thought the Action Group (A.G) led by the indomitable Obafemi Awolowo would win. We saw the party flying helicopters here and there and engaging in aerobatic displays and writing of party slogans and symbols in the sky. The two other major parties of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) led by Ahmadu Bello, the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio northern aristocracy and the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Citizens) led by the flamboyant wordsmith, Nnamdi Azikiwe, we were told, stood no chance against the A.G. The NPC did not bother to campaign in the South while the NCNC gave the A.G in the Southwest a fight for its money. This was because the NCNC was previously led by Herbert Macaulay a Lagosian Yoruba descendant of the first African bishop, Ajayi Crowther.

    For daring to challenge the NPC in the North, it was predictable that it would form an alliance with the NCNC. This was what happened. The government formed by the two parties led Nigeria to independence. We had an uneasy political peace in the country and certainly in the west with the NCNC threatening to use its presence in the federal government to challenge the AG government in the west. As school boys we grew up seeing other Nigerians as inferior to Yoruba people.

  • Cold room

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    Cold room is not a strange word. It is a word freely used in conversations. Women in particular cherish the cold room, but not in the sense that the word was used by a University of Lagos (UNILAG) lecturer, Dr Boniface Igbeneghu, in his bid to seduce a would-be student. To the ‘randy’ teacher and his ilk, they used what he called  the UNILAG ‘cold room’ as a slaughter slab. The room was not created for that.

    The Functions Room, which they turned into a cold room, was created for a different purpose. Just as they have them in world-class hotels, Functions Rooms serve as meeting places, conference halls and seminar venue. To satisfy their libidinal appetite,  Igbeneghu of the Department of European Languages and Integrated Studies and his bedfellows turned it to a slaughter room, where they slept with brainwashed girls.

    As the name implies, a cold room serves for preserving meat, chicken, fish and drink, among other items, at regulated temperature. You now know why women love cold rooms. Perhaps, these teachers saw these girls as objects that must be preserved at regulated temperature before being devoured. Our dons have a creative way of seducing female students, as we saw in the popular British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Africa Eye video, which gave Igbeneghu away. They do not go straight for their would-be victims; they go about it in a roundabout manner, but leave them without doubt about what they want.

    Igbeneghu’s case is interesting. He is not only a teacher but also a minister in the temple of God. A pastor with the Foursquare Gospel Church who should show people the way is leading them astray. Who knows the number of girls he has led into temptation, all in his bid to have his way with them? In a society, which values paper qualification more than a person’s ability, many girls would have fallen prey to him in their desperation to get a degree. The craze for a degree has made many female students to do what they should not do.

    Someone is likely to say that the girls fell into the teachers’  trap because they too were interested in such affairs. There are certain things which are beyond our ken and until we find ourselves in such unpleasant situation we may not know what those people went through. A teacher and a pastor to boot should be above board. He should be a mentor and a father figure to his students. But when he starts to plan how to sleep with his students, he has lost every moral and spiritual right to his teaching and priestly offices.

    What kind of teacher and priest is that, that would plan to take a girl of 17 to bed? If that girl were his daughter, would he have shown such amorous interest in her? If someone else does that to his own daughter, how would he feel? Being a teacher is not a licence to sexually harass a student. Unfortunately, it has become the practice among some teachers to lure students to have sex with them in return for good grades.

    No matter how brilliant a student is, if she does not give in to her lecturer’s request, she may not pass his course. To avoid being failed, many girls sheepishly accept their teachers’ advances and unknowingly become the butt of crude jokes  among those lecturers. When the game is up, the teachers become a shadow of themselves. The tough talking teacher threatening to fail a student if she refuses him, suddenly loses his power to talk. When questioned, he will look at you like a goat tied to a stake. His sin has found him out and with no means of escape, he becomes as lonely as his victims when he confronted them with the stinker: your body or you fail?

    Igbeneghu, according to some of  his former students, is notorious for such acts. For years, he molested students and got away with it. Is UNILAG saying it never got wind of his escapades? That will be hard to believe. Thank God for the BBC Africa Eye that blew everything open, otherwise the university will still be believing in denial. What becomes of Igbeneghu in the aftermath of this scandal? Will he be tried? For now he has been suspended pending investigation of the BBC story.

    I only hope that at the end of the day, a verdict that no student  came forward to buttress the BBC story will not be passed.

    The Taraba Five

    REMEMBER, the three policemen and two civilians that were killed in Ibi, Taraba State, on August 6? At last, the panel set up by the Defence Headquarters has recommended that those behind the dastardly act be disciplined. Of course, they should be disciplined and the first step towards that should be their dismissal from the services of the army and the police.

    I still cannot fathom why a policeman will kill a fellow policeman. Why? Come to think of it, the slain policemen had come from Abuja and lodged a report of their mission at the Ibi Police Division in Traraba State. It was from that same police station that some of their colleagues, who are on the payroll of the kidnap suspect Hamisu Bala aka Wadume, they came to arrest, hatched the plot to kill them after blowing their cover.

    Now, they have to pay for their sin. The panel indicted Captain Tijani Balarabe, Sergeant Ibrahim Mohammed, a soldier, as well as Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Aondoona Iorbee, Inspector Aliyu Dadje and Corporal Bartholomew Obanye of the Ibi Police Division. The panel recommended that ‘’necessary disciplinary measures’’ be taken against them. Their murder trial should start in earnest.

  • MISSING IN CONFLICT

    IF eyes are windows to the soul, little Ibrahim’s eyes are giant panes. At age 11, the scales of innocence fell from his eyes, as the moth’s wings melt in the fire.

    Ibrahim suffered a rude jolt in January 2015 when the rampaging hordes of the Boko Haram (BH) terrorist sect invaded his home in Baga, on the shore of the Lake Chad, in Maiduguri, Borno State.

    The insurgents sacked his home and like thousands of kids, Ibrahim got separated from his family. In a frantic bid to stay alive, the 11-year-old boarded a boat sailing to Chad whereas his family members fled by road.

    His parents were eventually hacked to death by BH insurgents, thus rendering him yet another orphan of the lingering terrorism and humanitarian crisis wracking Nigeria’s northeast.

    Through his ordeal, Ibrahim keels through each day, bemused, like a child forced by tragedy to become a man. For the minor, innocence chokes amid the fumes of his ruined childhood.

    Ibrahim feels his loss like a burn, deep to the bones: the loss of his father’s approving smile at his completion of a task; the loss of his mother’s embrace and the warmth of her fuss through torrential rainfall and sandstorms impales his peace like the shank-end of a sharp spear.

    All he is left with are memories of their love. But memories are not enough to assuage the pain of their demise and absence in his life.

    Months after he fled Baga to live with 4, 999 fellow refugees at the Dar es Salaam refugee camp in Chad, Ibrahim has returned to Maiduguri.

    Having being declared missing by his only surviving relative, his aged grandmother, Ibrahim returned to endure a tearful reunion with the septuagenarian. As the aircraft bearing him touched down in Maiduguri, Ibrahim stumbled out with eight other kids into Borno’s heat and searing realities of their destabilised worlds.

    Families have been split. Dear ones may have been lost but they enjoyed the reprieve of reunion with loved ones. As Ibrahim reunited with his older relative, words failed them. Grandma and grandson broke into tears, their bodies and eyelids convulsing with echoes of their buried narratives.

    Few paces away, four- year-old Bintu struggled to make sense of the piercing wail and the floodgate of tears let loose on her fragile frame by her half-sister, Aisha. She was just too young to properly remember her half-sister Aisha; and even though neither of them know where their mother is, Aisha is simply grateful to be reunited with her missing sibling.

    For the reunited families, being together again is a huge relief. The uncertainty imposed by their disordered lives, however, implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

    The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) together with the Nigerian Red Cross reunited Ibrahim, Bintu and seven others, who had been displaced by the armed conflict in northeast Nigeria to Chad, explained Serena Tarabbia, Restoring Family Links Delegate of the ICRC .

    She said: “We have reunited them with their families, their parents, their siblings, their grandparents, here in Nigeria.”

    And so for Ibrahim and peers, family life could begin again. But thousands more remain separated by conflict, alone in refugee camps and other places.

    In about a decade of chaos, almost 22,000 people have been registered missing with the ICRC. Many of them are children and for their affected families, the work of identification, tracing, and reunification must go on.

    ‘They said they were taking us to a better place’

    THE process is, however, no ordinary walk in the park as desperate mothers and fathers hope for good news about their loved ones. Falmata Amodu, resident of the Gubio Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp, is one such parent. Having lost her 10-year-old son, Alkali, nine years ago, when her village was attacked by Boko Haram, she pines for his return.

    “I couldn’t sleep. I could hardly eat any food. I found it difficult to mingle with people, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Every night when we go to sleep, I think about him. My eyes stay open until daybreak. My only hope is for my son to be found, that’s all I want,” she said.

    The ICRC is working hard to try to find the missing, and, where possible, unite separated families. But, ICRC President Peter Maurer warns, that the 22,000 cases the already known may only be the beginning.

    “Huge populations have been displaced, and therefore huge populations are missing. Their relatives, their fathers, mothers, sons, families at large; 22,000 cases opened at the ICRC are just the tip of the iceberg, most likely, of what we are going to see in the future still here in Nigeria as the conflict unfolds,” he said.

    Armed conflict in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region has displaced an estimated two million people. Many of the displaced are children, who have been declared missing and are completely alone.

    The fate of these minors currently constitutes great worry to their relatives, government and humanitarian agencies, at the backdrop of a burgeoning human trafficking trade that has gradually found its way into Nigeria’s conflict regions, of the northeast.

    A global and local syndicate make determined forays into the northeast via avoidable cracks in the country’s security network. Displaced minors bear the brunt of this human error.

    Radia Abdullah, for instance, fled her home in Baga after watching BH insurgents hack her parents and grandparents to death in their living room. She made it “through the bush” in the company of neighbours to Maiduguri, where she sought refuge at the Dalori IDP camp.

    She was 13 years old at the period.

    Two months into her arrival on the camp, however, Abdullah was approached by camp officials, who promised her prospects of a better life outside the camp.

    Already weary and worn by the hardship of life on the camp, the 13- year-old bought into their colourful yarn of instant luxury and economic security in faraway Calabar, Rivers State.

    “They said they were taking us to a better place,” she said.

    Unknown to her, she was being set up for prostitution. Contrary to the promises by the camp officials, the 13-year-old was sold to a local madame who forced her to “remove her hijab” and “sleep with customers” for money in a makeshift room at the back of her car wash and run-down bar in Calabar.

    The teenager was eventually rescued by a “customer” who “fell in love with her” and paid her thoroughfare back to Maiduguri.

    Now 15, Abdullah earns her livelihood by doing menial tasks in a canteen, around Post Office, in the Borno capital. She saves a fraction of her meagre earnings to purchase and sell sweets to neighbourhood kids and on IDP camps.

    Unlike Abdullah, Hafiza, couldn’t escape through the “bush” while Boko Haram ransacked her family compound in Baga. Consequently, she was abducted by the insurgents, who made her watch the execution of her father and grandfather, before whisking her away.

    Two years into her abduction, Hafiza escaped from her captors in the wake of a Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) onslaught against the terrorist sect.

    She made it to the Muna IDP camp. However, she was forced to leave due to shortage of water and essential provisions.

    “I had to beg for food. Life was very hard. Everywhere I went people tried to sleep with me. Eventually, I had to date a camp official in order to get some food rations. When his wife discovered, she attacked me in the camp. I had to run for my life,” said the teenager.

    Subsequently, she made it back to Maiduguri. There, she slept in motor parks and unofficial camps. Three weeks after she relocated to Borno, Hafiza was approached by a middle-aged woman, called Khadija, who was reportedly visiting her cousin and coordinator at the Dalori IDP camp.

    “She asked if I wanted to go to Dubai and I didn’t hesitate before saying ‘Yes.’ She promised to get me a job as a shop attendant with a jeweller. I saw her cousin, who assured me that I would be in safe hands if I went with her. Before we left Maiduguri, she gave me N5, 000 pocket money and bought me beautiful bangles and abayas. She said there was more from where that came from,” said Hafiza.

    Excitedly, the teenager departed with the lady to Nassarawa for an onward journey to Dubai. Unknown to her, she had sold herself into slavery for a paltry N5, 000, two abayas and counterfeit jewellery.

    On arrival in Nassarawa, Hafiza’s supposed benefactor became hostile to her. “Her demeanour changed totally. She collected the N5, 000 from me as we alighted from the vehicle at the park. She said she wanted to keep it safe for me. When we got to our destination, I realised that it was a brothel. I had sold myself into prostitution,” she said.

    For 15 months, the teenager served the wild tastes of different classes of men, from taxi drivers, students, menial workers to park urchins, until she summoned the courage to flee from her captor.

    “I fled with the help of an older colleague at the brothel. She is from the east. Her name is Nancy. She advised me not to dress nice or take anything with me on that day in order not to arouse suspicion. I fled on a Sunday evening while my madam attended to her boyfriend in her sitting room. Nancy had arranged with one of her boyfriends, a cab driver, to smuggle me out of the brothel to Bauchi.

    “I had the choice to relocate to Lagos or Abuja but I came back to Maiduguri because I wish to find my mother and sister,” said the teenager.

    Conflict and the trafficking market

    A clandestine trade in under-age girls thrives across Borno’s IDP camps and the street corners, where displaced kids, mostly girls, are abducted or lured into sexual slavery. “People come there in the evening for recruiting, I can say, taking young girls, going away with them. I see it as they are going there for sexual exploitation,” said Mitika Ali, the zonal commander for the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).

    According to Ali, many female residents of the camps are at risk of being sold into slavery by human traffickers prowling the camps. Further investigations revealed that child trafficking is a flourishing business across IDP camps in the northeast. The racket flourishes in divisions of smaller subunits which may specialise in a particular task or sequence of the operation comprising recruitment, provision of shelter, false documents, transportation of victims to and from their workplace, roster exploitation, or rotation of victims to different destinations.

    Then there is a management unit which maintains a vertical structure of supervision and control over the subunits. While the complexity and number of specific tasks differ from one trafficking organisation to the next, trafficking enterprises have been characterised by a number of specific roles that individuals take on within the organisation to provide specific services. These roles include but are not limited to the investors, who put forward funding for the operation, and oversee the entire operation.

    These people are unlikely to be known by the everyday employees of the operation, as they are sheltered by an organisational pyramid structure that protects their anonymity; they may be separate from the organisation. There are the first level recruiters cum human traffickers, who seek out potential victims across IDP camps. They often target unregistered IDPs and unattended minors. A lower level of recruiters, however, comprises displaced persons who act as middlemen between the buyer and the seller. The displaced person cum middleman identifies likely targets among children orphaned by the crisis and those who have been separated from their parents. He or she negotiates the terms of transaction with the first level recruiter and trafficker.

    The middleman may be members of the culture and the community from which the trafficked children are drawn. They liaise with the first level recruiters, who come from distant places like Lagos, Rivers, Abuja, Nassarawa, Akwa Ibom, Imo, Anambra and Kaduna, to scout for victims. The Nation findings revealed that the price for a four or five-year-old child often ranges between N20, 000 and N150, 000. The price could be set higher or lower depending on the desperation and bargaining skills of the negotiators. After negotiations, the middleman approaches the camp official in charge, who collects the money and approves the release of the kids.

    The child trafficker subsequently deals out the child as a domestic servant to an interested family or bonded slave to a brothel madame. From Maiduguri to Niger Republic AISHA and Halima present a sad case that perfectly illustrates the fate of displaced kids in the theatre of war. The 15-year-olds were lured to bonded slavery in Italy by a group of women, who approached them one morning while they fetched firewood near their IDP camp in Madinatu.

    The teenagers had just escaped captivity by Boko Haram and they could not resist the lure of the luxurious life bewitchingly marketed to them by the traffickers. The traffickers promised to get them lucrative jobs as hairdressers in Italy, revealed Philip Obaji Jnr, a human rights educator, and the founder of Up Against Trafficking, a non-governmental organisation. But rather than fulfill their promise to the teenagers, Aisha and Halima were taken to the central Nigerien city of Agadez, to a “connection house,” where they were instructed to wait until the smugglers were ready to continue their journey through north Africa for the Mediterranean crossing.

    Their arrival had coincided with a government crackdown on smugglers, and they found themselves moved from one house to another to escape arrest. When finally they were driven from the city towards the southern Libyan town of Sebha, their trafficker spotted a police convoy patrolling the route through the desert. Worried he would be apprehended, he ordered the girls to get out of the car and drove away, said Obaji.

    While sub-Saharan migrants are particularly vulnerable to trafficking by armed groups, displaced persons and minors fleeing Boko Haram’s terrorism have been rescued by government and international groups, as they attempted passage in return for debt bondage, forced labour in construction or on farms, and prostitution. Traffickers also prey on IDPs selling them into servitude across state boundaries, thus facilitating the blooming of a local trade in trafficked persons.

    Evidence for the nexus is strongest along these routes, since migration routes are controlled by militant groups who operate in the largely anarchic regions of the Sahel. Boko Haram insurgents have employed their captives as suicide bombers, sex slaves and domestic servants. Terrorists benefit from victims of human trafficking in different ways. Direct sale of victims appears to be the most lucrative.

    For instance, Boko Haram has been involved in the abduction, trafficking and enslavement of children and women. Hundreds of women and children have been abducted since the group’s insurgency started. But Boko Haram’s most wellknown abduction occurred in April 2014, when 276 female students were taken away from their dormitory at the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State.

    The abduction triggered a global campaign #BringBackOurGirls. A few months after the Chibok girls were abducted, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said he would sell them. “I am the one who captured all those girls and I will sell all of them,” he said in an online video in which he justified human slavery.

    “Slavery is allowed in my religion and I shall capture people and make them slaves,” he said to the chagrin of Muslims within and outside Nigeria, who refute his claims, arguing that they have no basis in Islamic tenets and practice. Idris Abdulhakeem, a Muslim cleric and scholar, argued that, “Shekau is grossly misled and engaged in acts contrary to Islam’s peaceful and humane traditions of worship and citizenship of humanity.”

    Going forward… In response to continued reports of sexual exploitation of IDPs in the Northeast, NAPTIP partnered with an international organisation to create and implement a screening and sensitisation campaign to identify sex trafficking victims. They visited at least 14 camps in Maiduguri area in the process. Every day, people go missing in conflict in the northeast. Given the magnitude of the phenomenon and the intergenerational impact that unsolved cases have on families and communities, the ICRC highlighted the gravity of the situation disclosing recently, that, about 22, 000 persons have been registered as missing by its personnel during a decade of conflict in the northeast.

    The Geneva-based humanitarian institution said the figure is the highest number of missing persons registered with the ICRC in any country. “The figures could be higher given the absence of a dependable missing person’s register and security network across IDP camps in the northeast,” stated a camp official at a displaced persons camp in Maiduguri. “Every parent’s worst nightmare is not knowing where their child is. This is the tragic reality for thousands of Nigerian parents, leaving them with the anguish of a constant search.

    People have the right to know the fate of their loved ones, and more needs to be done to prevent families from being separated in the first place,” said ICRC President, Maurer, at the end of his five-day visit to Nigeria. There is no gainsaying that families are the greatest casualty of the protracted conflict in the northeast. Mustapha Garba, for instance, over his separation from his 14-year-old daughter.

    It is four years since she went missing but the 53-year-old is hopeful of reunion with her, following reports that she was seen alive in neighbouring Chad four months ago. Like Garba, Falmata Amodu nurses hope of reunion with her missing son, Alkali. “What troubles me is that I haven’t heard whether he is dead or alive. I just don’t know.

    Whenever I cook food for his siblings, I think about him,” she said, stressing that her husband died pining for their missing son’s return. She said: “For the three years that we stayed in Maiduguri, my husband was very distressed and would repeatedly have nightmares. He would call the name of our abducted son, ‘Alkali, Alkali, Alkali’ all the time. Eventually he died from the trauma.” Words cannot capture the anguish of parents like Garba and Amodu. For them, every new day begins with visions of reunion with their lost wards.

    To reunite the separated families, the ICRC works with the Nigeria Red Cross and other NGOs in the northeast to trace the missing persons across large swathes of the region. They will distribute photographs and bellow their names, while going door-todoor across camps and communities. At the backdrop of these efforts, concerned parents would utter a silent prayer, hoping desperately that their wards survived the grisly cocktail of gunshots, sexual slavery and bomb blasts.

  • Dear Narcissi

    Capitalism is neither wicked nor cruel when the commodity is the ‘whore’ – blue-collar or brothel ‘whore.’ Nigeria is neither ‘doomed’ nor ‘forsaken’ when the national cake is shared among the loudest activists, shady politicians and public officers.

    Profit is neither vicious nor impure when victims of multinationals’ exploitation are voiceless, impoverished host communities, and the bleeding heart rights activist, ‘social influencer’ or crusader-journalist eventually earns courtship and seasonal inducements by the transnational culprits.

    Government is neither tribal nor unjust when the Igbo, Hausa, Ibibio, Tiv, Jukun, Yoruba, Fulani groups, to mention a few, have their lands and treasures forcibly splayed for kindred “activists” and “saviours” to plunder.

    Values are neither degenerate nor effete when its the ‘emancipated’ youth having sex in a public toilet or unisex hostel on Big Brother Naija (BBN); sexual slavery becomes hip when ‘future leaders’ are presented as meat and body parts on the ill-conceived reality show.

    When reality is different, let’s cut to the chase and blame government for everything. While we do so, let us remember to blame Muhammadu Buhari and his “under-performing” cabinet and cliques for our elevation of fatuity as enchanted condition.

    We should blame government for our fancy pornography, the drab one too, while we conveniently forget that our erotica of the left-wing is the graveyard where our “woke” clans slither to die in eternal wokeness.

    Dworkin was wrong to imagine that the Left cannot have its politics and whores. We are Leftists, or progressives if you like, and in our clan, politics and whoredom are in perfect sync.

    Nigeria’s whoredom proliferates by her youth. The latter, having learnt to manipulate protest into performance, emerge as a rising political bloc. Dirty artifice, hitherto an exclusive preserve of questionable politicians, becomes the tool by which they renegotiate their claims to social spoils.

    Yea, Buhari, no matter the frequency of his bursts of political savvy and implied strength, will never curry the favour of his most virulent critics. This, unfortunately, shall be his lot until push gets to shove a la 2023 general elections.

    Nonetheless, Nigeria has got you and I to save her from the ravage of familiar predators, plundering her treasure trove for sport. Who knew pillage could be so elevated as recreation, and that coffer rapists could attain the honour of national heroes?

    The malady persists by our psychology of youth participation in politics, which highlights a lust for instant gratification and unearned greatness. This explains why some youths, goaded by sycophancy and a false sense of self-worth made frantic gestures to become Nigeria’s president at the last general elections.

    Their ambition had little to do with being visionary and competent for the job. It was arrant narcissism.

    A curious form of what clinical psychologists would call maladaptive self-love seem to have crept up on the Nigerian youth. Little wonder hordes of youths, unquestioningly, submit as tools and canon fodder for violence and destruction, for a fee, at election time.

    It also explains, perhaps, why otherwise promising youth would scorn morals and intellect, and submit as lab rats in the ongoing Big Brother Naija (BBN) experimental porn.

    There is no gainsaying youth participation in politics thrives on the pursuit of material gain and status by circumventing the cycle of honest endeavour. Most youths are wildly exploitative, they lack empathy, and possess unrealistic fantasies concerning political and socioeconomic success.

    A recent study carried out to examine personality traits and narcissism as predictors of pathological selfie among undergraduates of a federal university establishes narcissism as a major driver of neurotic lust for selfies among the university students.

    A similar lust sprouts by the notion that young presidential candidates at the 2019 elections were simply bidding for face-time. “They know they cannot win, they only wish to register their presence en route the 2023 elections,” argued their apologists.

    The argument also persists that many contested in order to land plum compensations or jobs in the cabinet of the eventual winner from the big parties.

    Several young candidates at the 2019 general elections, no doubt, emerged to take political selfies; and this portends the most dangerous case of self-love, given that thousands of voters hinged their destinies at the mercy of their aberrant lust.

    Another study reveals narcissistic facets in narratives of Nigeria’s advance fee fraud letters. The paper analyses a sample of 100 advanced fee fraud letters or Nigerian scams by fraudsters otherwise known as Yahoo Boys. Analysis of the scams highlight a Machiavellian/narcissistic approach of human behaviour and morality.

    It presents scams as narratives that give us various perceptions about the youth in the present era. It draws a set of moral principles and values that are explicitly declared by fraudsters similar to the young candidate’s platitudinous chant.

    A similar approach is adopted by many a Nigerian revolutionary and woke youth. To them, political participation and protest are simply facets and scenes in their performance theatre. Their strategy involves starting a ruckus until government drags them by force or persuasion to the negotiation board.

    As soon as favourable terms are reached, they withdraw to enjoy their loot and ‘elevated’ status in silence. When confronted on their sudden silence, they will brazenly say: “When you are eating, you don’t talk.” It’s called table manners.

    Activism, to them, is hardly about ideals. It’s an artificial construction, a performance to seduce karma’s fearsome power. To withstand providence’s scourge, they reinvent themselves as rights activists, advocacy-journalists, ‘social influencers, sociopreneurs, mediapreneurs’ – apology to such ‘practitioners’ plying honest endeavour.

    Eventually, the shady among them, would get storm-tossed and drown in nature’s barbarous deep.

    The duplicity within is what we should fear. It is the root of our predicament. And it thrives on narcissism.

    Vicelich writes, that, narcissists “behave like four-year-olds: it’s all about them.” They don’t recognise personal boundaries, they hog conversations, crave constant validation and take criticism extremely badly.

    “They want your attention, they need things right now – it’s all about instant gratification – and they really have an undeveloped sense of self,” she says, thus diagnosing the tantrums of many 2019 Nigerian aspirants.

    They can be charming, flirtatious company too, notes Hinsliff, but they see others largely as extensions of themselves and can be controlling, cruel or critical of anyone they feel reflects badly on them.

    Honest criticism wounds their fragile egos and they may become violent, broken or commit to drugs. Some simply commit suicide. This is, however, not an attempt to make light of the disconcerting suicide culture or its triggers and dangerous manifestations.

    Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter supply them with oodles of their ‘fix’ as measurable likes and shares.

    In his Metamorphosis, Ovid narrates the story of Narcissus making it clear that he will live a long life “if he does not discover himself.”

    Narcissus, it’s worth remembering, eventually died of loneliness and sorrow sprung from his distorted perception of self. He got destroyed by extreme self-love and maladjusted behaviour.

    It’s about time millions of Nigerian Narcissi understood that the most underrated act of patriotism, even if built on self-love, is the ability, just occasionally, to get over yourself.

  • Logjam

    THAT morning, time appeared frozen for a while. Everything stood still and there was chaos everywhere. Both sides of the road were blocked. Those going to Lagos who were taking the right lane and those heading the same way but following the wrong way were stuck in traffic.

    The situation was beyond the security agencies; they just looked on as motorists sweated it out in traffic that early morning. It was just 6.07a.m., and everywhere was locked down. Ascending the Long Bridge at Wawa was impossible as traffic stretched backward from there to MFM.

    It was also impossible descending the bridge at the same point as those trying to ascend it the wrong way blocked oncoming vehicles. Policemen from the nearby Wawa Police Division shouted themselves hoarse as they tried to restore sanity. But the motorists did not budge. They were determined to have their way despite being in the wrong.

    What happened around that corridor of the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway on Monday was sheer madness. All hell was let loose as motorists attempted to get out of the traffic congestion at the same time at all costs,  but the more they did so, the more they compounded the gridlock. It was not something that should have caught the security agencies offguard because it all started on Sunday. They should have prepared for the Monday madness going by what happened the previous day.

    Anybody who followed that road on Sunday would have foreseen what happened on Monday. I was prepared for it, thinking that by leaving home around 6a.m., I would not be caught in the logjam. I was wrong. By the time I hit the express around 6.06a.m., I knew there was trouble. I was not prepared for what I saw. My calculation was that I would have ascended the bridge before running into traffic. But I ran into traffic virtually in front of my home.

    As I took my turn in the Lagos-bound traffic from Arepo busstop, I surveyed my surrounding; I had ample time to do that since we were not moving anyway. The drama on the other side of the road kept us busy as motorists blocking oncoming vehicles stood their ground.  There would not have been any need for that if the security agencies had got their act right ahead of time going by what we were told before Julius Berger began work at the Kara/Berger axis last month.

    They should have envisaged what happened on Monday and taken precautionary steps. Men and materials should have been stationed at both ends of the Long Bridge at Wawa long before dawn to stop any motorist from driving against traffic. As usual, they left everything to chance. You do not take chances in matters like this knowing full well the way many motorists behave at the slightest sign of traffic jam.

    The presence of the police and road safety personnel would have deterred motorists from driving against traffic. There is no other time than now for them to make their presence felt more on that  road,  at least until Julius Berger finishes its work there. Traffic on that road is something that motorists have come to live with, but their pains can be eased, especially during this difficult period of its rehabilitation by Julius Berger. This can be done with the police and road safety personnel maintaining a 24-hour vigilance on the road.

    The police and road safety personnel should not just appear on the scene when things have gone awry and think that they can perform magic. We have talked and talked about alternative routes to ease motorists’ pain without anything being done about the issue.

    Rather than improve on the untarred route from Wawa that bursts out at the OPIC intersection, Julius Berger has dug a ditch across the road, making it unusable. If the place had been available on Monday, things would not have been that bad. Why did Julius Berger do that? We may never know as the citizenry and their wellbeing matter little to the government and its contractors in matters like this. So, I will not be surprised if that Monday episode repeats itself. It was the last day of September and it turned out to be the most memorable day of the month. A September to remember! You can say that again.

    Cry of distress

    THE cry came from the depths of her heart. “Why do they like to kidnap me?” Madam Beauty Uguoere Siasia asked no one in particular. She was thinking out loud. She answered the poser thus: “They said my son is a millionaire”. Is it an offence for someone’s child to be well to do?

    I fear for Mama Siasia who kidnappers have now turned into ATM. They know that if they kidnap her, her son Samson will cough out any amount to get her back. For how long will she and her family live in fear of kidnappers? The first time they came for her in  2015, they held her for 12 days.

    They returned for her on July 19 and kept her till Sunday before releasing her after collecting an undisclosed amount of ransom. At 80, she does not deserve this kind of treatment. What she deserves now is round the clock protection by the police. Will that be asking for too much? I do not think so.

  • Killing Lagos through infrastructural deficits

    The place of Lagos in the economy of Nigeria needs no debate. Whatever affects Lagos negatively would have ramifications on the economic health of the country. Lagos is the economic and commercial centre of the country. It follows that any neglect of Lagos for whatever reasons would be like cutting off our nose to spite the Nigerian face. Sixty percent of the VAT collected in Nigeria and distributed to all states of the federation is collected in Lagos. The same is true of income taxes collected In Lagos. In other words, killing Lagos with dilapidated infrastructure is a self-inflicted wound on Nigeria.

    One has watched with sadness the absolute neglect and deterioration of the ports of Lagos and the roads leading to them in the last four years of the Buhari administration with little or nothing done to ameliorate the situation. It cannot be that we are short of ideas on how to fix ordinary roads leading to the sea and airports of the most important economic entrepôt of this country.

    Some four years ago, it was announced with fanfare that Dangote and Honeywell and some other companies were going to fix the roads leading to Apapa to accelerate ingress and egress of vehicles to the place. After four years, the status quo is still what is being maintained. The effect of the paralysis of the ports of Lagos on the economy of Lagos and Nigeria can only be imagined. Perishable goods being exported are rotting in the vehicles conveying them to the ports while imports cannot be easily evacuated. Trucks and their drivers are marooned at the ports for weeks and a journey that should last a day is turned into a journey of no return. Brazil a country like our own producing three million barrels of oil per day does not depend on hydrocarbons production like we do, to fuel its economy but rather depends on its agricultural exports totalling $53 billion a year. Imagine if they have totally impassable ports like our own; their economy will be in the same parlours situation as ours.

    Nigerian government pays billions of Naira demurrage charges to shipping companies because of our inability to facilitate discharge of imported goods. The situation in Tin -Can island port is a mimic of the Apapa situation. In the meantime, the environment of the entire Apapa area of the city of Lagos is degraded. Properties worth billions of Naira have become useless and worthless. Yet, Apapa in the not too distant past compared favourably as Government Reserved Area as Ikoyi. I am sure if the ports complex were given to a competent foreign company to reconstruct and charge fees over some years, Nigeria would be better for it because a smooth ports operation would redound on the national economy. The entire Apapa would come alive and the Lagos State government would be able to collect land use charges for the benefit of the local economy and with increase in IGR, the state will be able to create jobs for the teeming population of people in Lagos.

    A long term planned ports development in Nigeria should factor in the development of the eastern ports of Calabar, Oron, Eket, Port Harcourt, and the western ports of  Onne,  Forcados Warri  and Olokoda. The private sector led development of Lekki deep port should help in reducing the pressure on Apapa and Tin-Can sland ports. I know of course that both Calabar and Port Harcourt cannot take large ships because they are not deep enough and they require constant dredging but this should not be a permanent obstacle to naval engineering. If we are a serious country, we should not be depending on just one city for our shipping and ocean trade. But in the meantime, we must decongest the Lagos ports and ensure that roads leading to them are constructed with permanent building materials that would not be easily washed away by floods and rains.

    It seems not only to rain but pour when considering the inadequacy of infrastructure in Lagos. The Lagos – Ibadan so-called express road has been under reconstruction since the Obasanjo years. Yar’Adua and Jonathan did nothing in eight years and Buhari is in his fifth year on the road. In the meantime, going to Lagos from Ibadan or Benin lasts longer than flying to London. Many of us have suspended trips to Lagos until a 600 metres section of the road under reconstruction and lasting three months is finished. Yes 600 metres lasting three months to reconstruct! This must be the slowest pace in road reconstruction anywhere in the world. We were asked to enter Lagos through Sagamu – Ikorodu road. Yet whoever said that knows that the Sagamu – Ikorodu road has been impassable for almost a decade.

    Thank God I heard recently that Lagos and Ogun states have decided to jointly take over that road and Lagos – Abeokuta road since the federal government is unwilling and unable to maintain interstate roads. I hope Ondo and Ekiti states will take over Akure- Ado Ekiti and Oyo and Osun states will take over Ibadan – Osogbo roads to the benefit of the suffering masses who live there and who are in Yoruba parlance cows without tails afflicted by a swarm of flies.

    States with similar cultural and physical contiguity in other parts of Nigeria can embrace the same paradigm thus imperceptibly restructuring this lumbering federation of Nigeria.

    The clincher in the killing of Lagos is the Lagos Murtala Muhammad Airport. Akinwumi Ambode, the former Lagos governor took it upon his state the construction of a befitting set of roads to the airport. He did not finish the task before he ran out of luck with his party which refused to nominate him for a second term in office. It seems the road construction to the airport has been abandoned. When travellers arrive from overseas trip they are confronted by a ramshackle airport and total confusion about where to go until one is taken behind a high fence obscuring the airport and where one is likely to be robbed by touts. Most of the time there are no lights and planes sometimes hover around waiting for sleeping airport staff to crank up their generators when the national grid fails to supply electricity to the airport. The internal configuration of the airport leaves much to be desired. The immigration and security desks could be better located. The luggage hall is mad house. Trolleys are hoarded and money changers are likely to dupe tired and bedraggled travellers. The toilets don’t flush and the air conditioning in the airport has apparently packed up.

    One wonders what the authorities do with the landing fees collected from foreign and domestic air lines. Whoever are the people running this airport must have travelled abroad or to Accra Ghana to see how airports are run. We say we are looking for foreign investors and we leave the point of entry into our country in this filthy dilapidated way. We should put our best face forward. Even if we say we have moved our capital to Abuja and we can no longer be bothered by Lagos, Port Harcourt and other places, we should ask how much revenue to the national exchequer is derived from Abuja. No matter how much power resides in Abuja, we cannot transfer the Atlantic coastline to Abuja by decree or executive fiat. A situation in which there is a collapse of the infrastructure of the most economically important town in the country, a town which services the economy of the whole country shows lack of seriousness and planning by those who are at the helm of the country’s affairs.

    From what has happened to the airport in Ikeja and the seaports in Apapa, one would have thought we would have learnt our lesson. Now the Dangote petrochemical industry is nearing completion in Lekki. The exclusive economic zone development in the same area being privately developed and industrial layout for export industries and development of a new port in the area are at an advanced stage. A new airport is envisaged for the area. Yet there is yet no comprehensive plan of evacuation of goods in the area. Trains that are planned for the area are yet to be constructed and perhaps a fourth bridge for the area has been discussed and the plans abandoned. History will probably repeat itself because of our lack of planning and our penchant for haphazard development and muddling through where serious planning would have put us among developed countries of the world. No one enjoys pointing out these inadequacies in our national life. But we write hoping that somebody who is failing in his or her duty about these things will be prevailed upon to wake up from his or her slumber. Things that are taken for granted elsewhere is treated in our country as if these were new discoveries. Our citizens do not demand their rights and our government needs not take them for a ride as they seem to do anywhere you turn.

  • Trump and disintegration of American political ethos

    Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) in his “Democracy in America” made two generalisations about the American political system. First, what constitutes democracy in America, according to him  is a kind of instinctive adherence to equality and second, that moral- the totality of customs, values, principles, habits, public opinion and beliefs had a greater influence upon American democracy than its laws and its physical environment. America has since gone ahead to build a political ethos that celebrates the virtues of equality and morality and the values of American system –stability and majoritarian rule. This long established political ethos is what has shaped the actions of political actors and American citizens in the last two centuries. Unfortunately it this political ethos that has now come under serious threat in the last three years of Donald Trump presidency. His declaration, last Monday following American congress institution of impeachment process against him, that America will go into civil war if he is impeached  is a confirmation of how badly damaged the American political ethos is.

    Trump who was endorsed before the 2016 election by various white nationalist and white supremacist movements and leaders  including David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon won by assaulting the otherwise  enduring  American political ethos. First, he threatened the very foundation of the American electoral system by insisting he would only accept the outcome of the 2016 election if he won. He then went on  with a strident appeal of ‘let us take our country back’ to white, blue-collar, working class and those without college degrees  to defeat his opponents  in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with only 77,000 votes despite losing the popular votes to Hilary Clinton by over three million.

    He has demonstrated after the election that he has little respect for the truth or rule of engagements. He has so far refused to file his tax returns as required by law. He has no apologies for identifying with white supremacist neither has he shown any remorse for demonising immigrants especially Mexicans as “criminals, drug dealers and rapists’. And, just as he promised his base during the 2016 election, he has gone ahead to ban Muslims from some Muslims countries from entering America.

    Trump has operated in the last three years with total disregard for political ethos which is what allow groups to reach a consensus on common goal. The result is a nation divided and endless disagreements among arms of government especially the executive and the Congress where compromise relationship is the only safeguard against instability. Trump must win all wars including intra-party feuds by means fair or foul. With his triumph over his party, the GOP is today cast in Trump’s image. For American neighbours – Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and Haiti, the fear of Donald Trump is the beginning of wisdom. Europe, American traditional allies was not spared. Trump has no apology for attempting to undermine the unity of Europe with his open support for right wing politicians and UK’s Boris Johnson who is bent on taking Britain out of Europe, deal or no deal. Trump is at war with nearly all American trading partners-China, Japan, Germany, Canada and Brazil.

    President Trump is currently engaged in a war of attrition with the American Congress after declaring “we cannot ignore our oath of office to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Last week, the Congress set up an impeachment process against him.  Speaker, Nancy Pelosi accused President Trump of appealing to a foreign country to rake up dirt against Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 election.

    But, Trump who has nothing but disdain for political ethos is not giving up without a fight. Although the whistleblower is part of part of American political culture, President Trump on Sunday evening called for the outing of a whistleblower and railed against other individuals including Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who he wants “questioned at the highest level for fraud and treason.

    Trump’s political base and the emasculated GOP, now cast in his image continue to support him. For instance, the party has refused to comment on a joint US Intelligence Community review of January 2017 that confirmed that “Russian President Vladimir V. Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election with the goals to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

    The party has ignored the outcome of Mueller’s inquiry and his testimony before the Congress to the effect that “the investigation found that the Russian government interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion”;  that “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed” and that Trump’s attempt to have Mueller’s investigation fired constitute possible obstruction of justice”. And even with 30 defendants charged for committing federal crime and with seven convicted, the GOP has kept its peace while Trump insisted the Mueller inquiry was a witch-hunt.

    The New York Times and People magazine’s coverage of claims by multiple women that came forward with new stories of “sexual misconduct, including unwanted kissing and groping” have no impact on GOP and many of its Pentecostal Christians. There was similarly GOP’s complete silence on the March 2016  open letter from 120 conservative foreign-policy and national-security leaders, including  Eliot A. Cohen, Max Boot, and Daniel W. Drezner, which condemned Trump as “fundamentally dishonest”.

    With the disintegration of political ethics and president Trump making no distinction between truth and falsehood while acknowledging that he encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, his potential 2020 opponent;  with a whistleblower’s complaint accusing White House officials of trying to hide the account of the conversation in a server intended for national security secrets, and with the GOP regarding politics as an end in itself, the fear is that Trump who out of government threatened to reject the result of 2016 election except he won, may not accept the outcome of 20120 election if he loses.

    From Trump’s activities in the last three years, the only discernible difference between Trump and harassed leaders of developing democracies such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Zelensky’s Ukraine and Nicholás Maduro’s Venezuela is that while the political ethics of the latter support perpetuation of leaders in office after losing elections, America’s political culture that has endured this past 200 years forecloses such practice. But with the destruction of American political ethos, there will be no restraint on Trump if he decides to adopt the strategy of Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Russia’s dictators whose companies he seems to enjoy. This possibility is not far- fetched taking into consideration the observation of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer at the end of his congressional testimony in February this year. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen had said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

    Add this to the current unfolding Trump/ Zelensky scandal; it is not difficult to identify the footprint of a potential dictator. As Steven Levitsky, of Harvard University and the co-author of ”How Democracies Die” puts it: “Autocrats don’t lose election because they take steps to rig it well in advance, by blackmailing electoral authorities, jailing opponents, and silencing unfriendly media outlets.”