The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Killers at large

    THESE are trying times. What with the killings and kidnapping across the country, things cannot be worse than this. Every day the people wake up, they are greeted with the grim news of one murder or the other and one kidnapping or the other. Everywhere they turn to, it is trouble. The roads are not safe; our homes are not safe; our offices are not better. Not even the hallowed precinct of the National Assembly can be said to be secure. The other day, members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) popularly known as Shi’ites nearly overran the place while protesting the continued detention of their leader, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky.

    The way people are killed on the road, on their farms and in their homes is frightening. It shows that security has broken down. These are not the usual Boko Haram attacks perpetrated by those indoctrinated to believe that they are killing and dying for a cause. They are the handiwork of those who are out to destabilise the country. These hoodlums are cashing in on the herders – farmers clashes in some parts of the country to perpetrate atrocities nationwide. They know that the attacks will be blamed on herders, some of who have turned some states in North central to killing fields.

    They invade farms with their cattle, leaving death and destruction in their trail. Some of them even came down south, hitting the farm of former Alliance for Democracy (AD) presidential candidate in the 1999 election Chief Olu Falae. They went away with him and only let him off after the Ondo State Government allegedly paid a ransom. If they were real herdsmen would they have collected ransom? This calls to question the real identity of those killing, maiming and kidnapping all over the place. Where are they from? Are they an offshoot of the Boko Haram insurgents? These are some of the posers that need urgent answers before things explode.

    The killing of Afenifere leader Pa Reuben Fasoranti’s daughter Mrs Funke Olakunri on Friday has made it extremely urgent for the nation to address the issue of insecurity frontally. The government has wasted too much matter in tackling these marauders and this might have given them the impression that they are above the law. No government worth its name will keep quiet when its citizens are being mauled by hoodlums. We have laws and these laws must be applied against those who commit crime.

    Killings and kidnapping are crimes under the law. What is the police doing about bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to book? Why is it so difficult to arrest them? This is the crux of the matter. Is it that some people are shielding these criminals? It was like this when herdsmen and their cattle were destroying farms. Nobody was arrested. This is why victims and their families are pointing fingers at herdsmen as perpetrators of these dastardly acts in the Southwest.

    Mrs Olakunri is dead. Nobody can bring her back, but her death will not be in vain if her killers are brought to book. The police must work like never before to get her killers because if they do not, the consequences will be too grave for us as a nation. It seems it was a premeditated attack as her vehicle was reportedly continuously shot at as her chauffeur drove furiously with reverse to get away from the scene. Despite his efforts, they still got her. The law will get them too. This is the wish of Nigerians so that our country is not thrown into another bitter enterprise.

     

    The loaded governor

    OYO State Governor Seyi Makinde has done what many in his position cannot do. He has made public details of his asset declaration. He is worth over N48 billion.

    I commend him for setting the pace in a society where many public officers believe it is a taboo to release such information. If all public officers can only be like him, the society will be better for it.

    But no, they will hide under the constitutional provision that asset declaration is not for public consumption!

    Adieu Sir Odafe

    IN the Daily Times Newsroom of yore, Sir Odafe Othihiwa, who died on Tuesday, stood out. He was 77. Ever before people like me, who are very junior to him, joined the Daily Times, Sir Odafe was already a reporting legend. Wherever there was news break, there you will find him. He crisscrossed beats in search of stories. As expected, his forays into their’ beats did not go down well with the reporters, who saw it as ‘invasion’. Many complained to no end about his activities, but Sir Odafe was not moved. He kept on doing what he loved to do. Sir Odafe  loved journalism and he gave his all to the job. No assignment was too small for him to cover. To him, both big and small assignments were the same and you must give them your best shot in order to turn out a good report. Sir Odafe was a reporter’s reporter. He was versed in the art of reporting. You could not but respect him when you met him on the beat. Journalism ran in his veins; that was why he always wanted to be where things were happening.

    I remember when Immanuel Odumosu aka Jesu Oyingbo died in 1990. Sir Odafe was there at Jesu Oyingbo’s Maryland enclave to cover the enigma’s passage. I was with The Punch then. I was intrigued that at his age, he could join us junior reporters to cover that event. He went about the place like us snooping for details about the man’s death as his followers were not forthcoming with information. Sir Odafe gave me a ride in his Peugeot 504 car to Olowu Street junction off Obafemi Awolowo Way, Ikeja, as we headed back to our offices. As I alighted from the car, he gave me money, saying: Gba kofi wo moto.

    The late Sir Odafe

    When I joined the Daily Times, our relationship blossomed. He wanted me to remain in Abuja when I went on relief duty there in 1993, but I played a fast one on him and returned to Lagos before he could take the matter up officially. Sir Odafe lived and breathed journalism. Nothing made him happier than to go after good stories. Even when he became an administrator, the reporter in him never left him. This was why after he retired from Daily Times, shortly before its eclipse in 2004, he found his way to Africa Independent Television (AIT) to work as General Manager, Current Affairs. If there was a born reporter, Sir Odafe was one. May he find rest in the Lord’s bosom.

  • Osoba’s reward for his forbears’ unfinished war

    Leadership in Yoruba nation is earned. Among a people that read meanings to ordinary greetings, leadership cannot be bought through distribution of patronage to siblings of your political opponents  to undermine their credibility, terrorizing people with political thugs to prove you are in power or by whimsically declaring yourself a ‘constituted authority’. Leadership requires selfless service. And it is not just to the Yoruba people but to the larger society.

    The Yoruba who  are  in the modern times led by a socio-cultural council of elders with Afenifere acronym – wanting the best they want for themselves for others, fully understand that the wellbeing of others is the only guarantee for their own continued wellbeing and security. By 1947, their leader, Awo had come up what he called ‘Path to Nigeria’s Freedom’, where he recommended a federation of major ethnic groups as the building block for Nigerian federation.  At the London 1957 Constitutional Conference, Awo, regarded by the British press as  the only one among the nationalist leaders who spoke like a statesman, insisted not only on freedom for ethnic nationalities but independence for individuals as citizens of the new nation.

    Awo and his Action Group party from then on led a crusade for the creation of states for minorities in the North notably Benue and Plateau and, Ijaw, Ibibio, Efiks and Anang, in the Eastern Region. Barely two years after independence, he was framed up and jailed by those who wanted to run the country according to their own distorted vision of society.

    Following his release from prison in 1967 by Gowon, he embarked on his crusade for a return to the ‘Path to Nigeria Freedom’ never taken while those who plunged the nation into civil war regrouped as NPN and NPP. In the Second Republic, the new inheritors of power in the West took up the crusade by establishing free primary schools and state-owned universities in Midwest, Ondo, Ogun and Lagos which were opened to everyone from other parts of the country.

    Olusegun Osoba, Bola Tinubu and others took up the battle from their illustrious fathers during the short-lived Third Republic and in the Fourth Republic, when they rejected Obasanjo and his ‘mainstreaming’ agenda.  Speaking of Pa Abraham Adesanya during his burial ceremony, Obasanjo confessed: “Pa Abraham told me if I join, things will change but I refused to join them. I went back the second time but they refused to work for my emergence…I went there again the third time but Afenifere maintained their stand, they refused to vote for me but I secured my votes outside Yoruba land”. Of course Obasanjo lost even in his polling booth in Abeokuta even though Pa Adesanya never publicly asked anyone not to vote for Obasanjo. The same scenario played out in the First Republic when in 1965, the Yoruba roundly rejected Samuel Akintola, imposed on the West by the Balewa’s federal government. In recent governorship election in Ogun State, the people rightly identified Osoba as their true leader in spite of the antics of Amosun. In Yoruba nation, the people know their leaders and leaders speak for their people.

    Read Also: Osoba at 80

    In 2003, when Obasanjo who has always claimed to be a Nigerian leader pretended to identify with aspirations of Yoruba people, they demanded no special favour for the Yoruba nation. According to Chief Segun Osoba, “The conditions presented to Obasanjo, among others were: the restructuring of the Nigerian federation, devolution of power, including moving some items from the exclusive to the concurrent list and ensuring fiscal federalism. Obasanjo was made to agree to organise a credible and transparent national census”. Obasanjo according to him assured them that he was satisfied with all the conditions tabled before him but as documented in his book, “It was later that we realised that we had been fooled. Obasanjo merely played along with us and ended up deceiving us by telling our leaders what he knew they wanted to hear, but which didn’t come from his heart.”

    Obasanjo was responsible for the division in Afenifere. But while speaking to Fasoranti, leader of the pro-PDP Afenifere faction shortly before the 2019 election, he had said. “You have been talking about the interest of Yoruba, while I have been talking about the interest of Nigeria. Our paths crossed.  Our priority is now one. If we did not repair this country, it will be disastrous.” Obasanjo says the solution is in rescuing the country from the hands of the All Progressives Congress and President Buhari.

    But Osoba, who prides himself as having undergone  a tutelage under Awo and “did his PhD in public life by being mentored” by him understands Buhari is just a symptom of our crisis of nationality  and that the way forward is retracing our way back to the ‘Path to Nigeria Freedom’ never taken through restructuring of the country. He has therefore suggested the 9th National Assembly be allowed to carry out that function. And with the encomiums pouring in from his political associates, his professional peers and from powerful people from across the nation, during the launching of his autobiography The Battle lines: My Adventures in Journalism and Politics, all extolling his virtue as a patriotic Nigerian, who built bridges across ethno-religious divides, the question as to who between the two Egba chiefs speaks for the Yoruba is settled.

    Everyone attested to Osoba’s selfless service to his people and to the nation. President Buhari affirmed that “the real impact of his wealth of experience, selfless spirit and many sacrifices in leadership will continue to resonate in the many lives he had touched”.

    Babajide Sanwoolu, Lagos State governor praised him for the “documentation of his journey as an elder statesman, as a politician, a true Nigerian, a true democrat, an Afenifere to the core, a NADECO stalwart”. Bola Tinubu, his soul mate in the struggle for implementation of ‘Nigeria’s Path to Freedom’ spoke of his “honesty and openness adding that even when Osoba was sick, his main concern was the struggle for Nigeria”. Abdulsalami Abubakar, said he and Osoba possessed deep interest in the affairs of the nation and that they both “want Nigeria to remain a blessing for Africa, want Nigeria to move higher worldwide and want Nigerians to believe in their nation”. Gen. Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (rtd) in his “Tribute to a great mind and uncommon Nigerian” described him as “detribalized and a patriotic Nigerian who speaks truth to power.”

    Everyone also admitted Osoba has massive contacts across the country. But like his illustrious forbears there is no evidence Osoba ever exploited these contacts for personal gain. He could have bargained for oil block, private bank or private university licence for himself. The only time he sought the goodwill of Abdulsalami Abubakar, his friend of many years was when he wanted Yoruba-backed AD registered as a political party. And he did this, not for himself or even for the Yoruba, but according to him, for the stability of the Fourth Republic.

    Osoba’s recognition as ‘a detribalized and patriotic Nigerian leader” despite waging his forebears’ uncompleted battle for ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom” for years has shown there is no contradiction in being a good representative of your people and being a patriotic Nigerian. Indeed as Awo, Osoba’s mentor observed, ‘You cannot be a good Nigerian without first being a good representative of your people’.

  • El Rufai…armed to the teeth

    Misery, peculiar to the individual, is the genre of private experience. But when co-opted as tribal angst and wielded by a governor in his mathematic of social space, it becomes a weapon.

    Having weaponised misery, Nasir El Rufai is armed to the teeth. The Kaduna governor’s penchant for political drama assumes structure amid the spring fertility of his wiles.

    Speaking at a summit on the challenges of northern Nigeria, El Rufai said: “Nigeria consists of two countries; there is a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria.

    He cited the north as the most impoverished region of the world and as a centre of drug abuse, gender violence, high divorce rates, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.

    El Rufai’s rhetoric commands an exercise of the eye, not of the mind. At best, he should be accorded the passing tribute of a sigh.

    But what’s Nigeria to do? What’s the north to do? Friends, associates and aides must humour and deal with the curious workings of his lilliputian mind.

    While they commend and stroke his infinite delusions, secretly, each man and woman on his team and political radar, suppresses the mind’s wars with treacherous nature.

    Were he discerning enough, El Rufai would be guided by the parable about a tall man’s genuflection to a short man with mammoth ego; to earn his favour or good graces, the tall man may prostrate, albeit lie in the dust to toady up. He knows, however, that, moments after genuflecting, he may rise to tower above his liege.

    Thus is the unwritten rule of political survival. Many of his aides, associates and presumed loyalists are simply “doing the needful” to earn a living, hence their silence is understandable in the face of the governor’s misguided missiles.

    Controversy excites the Kaduna governor, no doubt. From his recent vituperation on godfatherism in Lagos to his shameful recant soon after he incurred widespread reproach, El Rufai suffers the ravage of random impressions.

    Given his ecstasy at every glance society casts at him, this article too, may serve as yet another victory to the diminutive governor.

    His lust for triggering any form of debate about him is visceral and spasmodic. His theatrics, while hackneyed, are hardly about issues. They are chiefly about him: subtle, brazen gambits at generating a buzz and media mention.

    In the spotlight, El Rufai feasts like the mythical Narcissus; chewing on vile drama, he reduces outrage and criticism of his plots to soupy and primeval desert.

    A man like El Rufai should be ignored, even when he hauls venom and wiles to plow the political landscape with riot and rage.

    Contrary to his belief, El Rufai does not speak truth to power rather he spits toxin to power.

    His Nigeria as a two-nation rant, for instance, elevates chicanery to inconceivable heights. Having said that Nigeria is made up of a “developing South,” the Kaduna governor whined, that, the north is in contrast, backward and impoverished thus reinforcing a trending argument and subterranean plot championed by his ilk.

    We relive El Rufai’s rant with a stunned combination of amazement and disgust.

    Call it a daemonic aria, a flight of effete imagination. If contemporary politics thrives on musical artifice, the Kaduna governor’s recent falsetto is his cipher, the fault in his organ valve that renders his melody, frantic fustian dross.

    El Rufai, undoubtedly, particularizes his execution of inflammatory speeches with frightening and uncanny detail thus inciting our outrage. But what he actually deserves is our pity. Empathy for his cumbrous afflictions.

    In his hands, power has become a conveyance of discord, and a vehicle to his nemesis. El Rufai tangled with power is like Olohun Iyo disappearing to the lure of fatal chorus.

    His tirade’s emotional power comes from the brutal contrast between his smirking vanity and the sudden melting of his features beyond recognition. Call it his holocaust and apocalypse.

    Standing at ground zero. El Rufai incinerates by innate inclinations; self-intoxicated in the electric moment before lightning strikes and he is reduced to rubble at core.

    If El Rufai fails to beat a retreat from the strange path he tows, he would eventually reduce by the sedition of his own ego, like previous travellers on his chosen path.

    Pride torn in sparagmos, they lie scorched by ecstasy and annihilation by the seductive Maenads of power.

    According to El Rufai, he speaks “the naked truth,” and he added, that, the north still has a lot to be proud of in the person of Aliko Dangote, allegedly the richest man in Nigeria.

    Going further, he said: “So, we still have a lot to be proud of. We should be proud of our culture and tradition, as well as unity. You hardly can find someone from northern Nigeria convicted of 419 or being a Yahoo boy. That is something we should be proud of…In addition, our demographic superiority gives us a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics.”

    His final call to the northern youth, characteristically, connotes the chicanery of the Nigerian ruling class. “I, therefore, call on you the youth; you account for 80 per cent of the northern population and the future of this region lies in your hands, not in the hands of Dinosaurs like me. I’m 59 and among the oldest five per cent of the northern population. I shouldn’t even be governor; I should have been governor 10 years ago. But ‘na condition make crayfish bend,’ so we are here,” he said.

    Of course, El Rufai was right by stating that men like him, should be retired from politics already. He should have been eclipsed with the administration of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Let us also hope, that, his target audience are aware that his speech at the summit was tailored to mute their dissent over his resounding flaws as an elder and objectionable stature amid “the oldest five per cent of the northern population,” as he rightly acknowledged.

    His rant was yet another brassy attempt to beguile the north’s youthful electorate via reverse psychology and self-deprecation.

    The only conversation the northern youth should be having right now, should be with co-oppressed youths across the country’s geopolitical zones.

    El Rufai’s platitudinous chant seeks to divert attention of the northern youth from the crucial issues that requires relentless exercise of the mind.

    Failing industries, substandard healthcare, moribund national cashcows, deficient schools, executive profligacy, and deathly politics foisted on all by the selfish ruling class are some of the issues that the northern youth, like their southern peers, must worry about.

    On the flipside, men like El Rufai should attempt humility for a change. He could start by picturing himself as a roadside mechanic, a roving cobbler or displaced fisherman of Doron Baga; would he still affect the venom he displays? Would he be afflicted by power and its infernal seductions?

    There is no pure Fulani blood, Hausa blood, Yoruba blood, Igbo blood and so on. The purity of a bloodline consists in its capacity for humaneness, justice and truth. No magnitude of kinship, racial or ancestral pride, could surpass the beaming brightness of good deserving of all.

    The northern youth must understand that the only pursuit that could count in the national arithmetic is that which situates the individual, for the interest of all.

     

  • Our rescue plans for Adeniji Adele estates — LASURA GM Lateef Sholebo

    The General Manager of Lagos State Urban Renewal Agency (LASURA) spoke with OLATUNJI OLOLADE on government’s plan to adopt public-private partnership to save Adeniji Adele estates from further deterioration.

    What has LASURA done to mitigate the persistent flooding of the Adeniji Adele estates?

    We are trying to use the PPP approach for that project. We are trying to create an incentive for private people to invest with the government to develop that site (Adeniji Adele) and not only that site. That’s our strategy for developing most of our slum areas. Investments of that magnitude takes time and resources. We are talking about $800 million (about N288 billion).

    What is the quality of response from private investors?

    The response of the private business sector has been encouraging. They are trying to get their financial analysis together and submit to us. The company is ATO/ Integral. We as government will put in the stimulus money and provide an enabling environment for the PPP to succeed. Government cannot do all.

    We are also trying to introduce government’s ability to participate fully in such efforts via the Tax Increment Financing (TIF). It has not been adopted yet, but we are in the process of getting it adopted by the Lagos State government.

    What is the gestation period of the project?

    Once the financial analysis is done and submitted to the PPP office and it has been analysed and accepted, we will negotiate with the developer in terms of what they want and what the government wants. Once this is sorted, that is when the process of development starts. And then we probably have to do it in phases based on what we agreed on. The development is a very, very big project and it is probably one of the most important government projects. You know, our development pattern is irregular and we have many substandard development projects in our communities; so it’s going to take a lot of social re-engineering and reorientation of the minds of the people to identify with our new initiative.

    How does LASURA intend to resolve the challenges posed by space constraints?

    By going vertical. Because we have a very small amount of land area and due to the rapid growth in the population of Lagos, we need to start going vertical, which is another theme of LASURA. We need to start building highrises. In order to do that, we need to adopt smart technology also. To this end, Lagos is trying to adopt the concept of the Smart City to make things more efficient and functional. Challenges of highrise technology such as fire outbreaks will be curtailed as we are building capacity to meet them.

    How would you ensure quality control in the construction of the proposed highrise buildings?

    One of the things LASURA is trying to do is some kind of a material control guideline. It’s been done all over. In Dubai for instance. We also intend to provide every crucial facility in the highrises, including an internal mall, health centre, gym, car park, and so on. We have also proposed the idea of bringing work closer to Lagosians’ homes and vice versa. The intent is to reduce the travel between residents’ home and work places.

    How long must residents of Adeniji Adele wait for the plans to be realised?

    One thing I would always tell people is that development planning is not something you do overnight and achieve full implementation immediately, it takes time. It is a very long process. I have worked in the US for over 30 years and over there, development projects continue over 15 – 20 year period. Planning is not something you just rush to do. In an environment like ours, you have to think of relocation assistance for all the people that would be displaced and you have to find a way to ensure that things go on properly.

  • Ruga advocate, Customs man and our sanity

    DO you know Abdul-Azeez Suleiman?

    No? I didn’t either – until last Wednesday when he appeared on national television to issue a 30-day ultimatum to the authorities to implement the controversial cattle settlement project, which is popularly known by a more disputative name, Ruga, or face the wrath of his Coalition of Northern Groups.

    Said Suleiman: “While we warn all state governments that stand against the implementation of the Ruga initiative to desist and give peace a chance, we place President Buhari and the Federal Government on notice that they must completely stop this raging madness within 30 days beginning from today, Wednesday.”

    It was not immediately clear what the group will do if its ultimatum was ignored, but what seemed clear was that Suleiman was neither arrested nor questioned, either by security agents or elders who may have seen his vituperations as obscene and inimical to national security and unity. It is to be noted, however, that some eminent citizens, including senior lawyers, have dismissed it all as mere bragging. No group, they say, has the power to threaten the government with an ultimatum. Besides, the Presidency has sneered at the ultimatum and its issuers.

    Many believe that members of Suleiman’s group may have been exercising their right to free speech. But this has reignited the unending debate on free speech, hate speech and national security. Was Suleiman just exercising his right to speak without let or hindrance?  Was he merely joking? Who are the people beating the drum to which the man was dancing? Who are those behind the groups for which he claimed to have been speaking so authoritatively? Was the television right to have allowed him to whip up so much anger all for free speech?

    There are others who claim that something must have been wrong somewhere. To this school of thought belongs the thinking that our desperate search for sanity in a disunited country such as ours should not be jeopardized by seemingly insane display of insensitivity. Enough of anarchists, they say.

    Yet, others see it all as a sign of what they describe as the mental degradation suffered by many of our compatriots, who are obviously overwhelmed by the biting vicissitudes of these times. Many have truly lost their heads; some their necks and others their souls. Otherwise, we won’t have been having the oddities that confront us every day. Children killing parents for money ritual; fathers raping their own daughters and people faking their own kidnap. And more.

    The government suspended the National Livestock Transformation Programme (NLTP) because some unnamed officials of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and others, also unnamed, hijacked it and twisted it to achieve a different aim, according to sources. The Ruga project, it was learnt, was not integrated with the NLTP agreed upon by the 36 governors at the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo-chaired National Economic Council (NEC). Besides, contracts were heavily inflated, with solar panels estimated to cost tens of millions of naira. Boreholes suddenly became oil wells to be dug with big rigs. One was to cost at least N20million.

    The Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council reacted rather angrily to Suleiman’s threat, describing it as “drumbeats of war”. It is capable of causing unrest across the land, it said, adding that it is, in fact, targeted at the Igbo.

    It will rather facilitate dialogue with the Northern coalition and other groups to bring about peace. Good.

    The government says the project, which is its magic pill against incessant farmers-herders bloody clashes, will return as planned. No state will be forced to surrender land for it. Only those requesting for the programme will have it.

    Now, some other organisations are following in the footsteps of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. They are also seeking respect and recognition for their trade.

    They are asking for the kind of freedom of movement cattle breeders crave. Enter the hitherto unknown National Association of Yoruba Pig Farmers (NAYPF). It has written an “open letter” to the Presidency, pleading for land to set up what it calls pig colonies all over Nigeria. Its request, said the strange association on many social media platforms, is informed by the need to encourage its expanding trade, diversify the economy and enhance protein consumption in Nigeria.

    Besides, such colonies will end the often unwarranted embarrasment they face as some people scorn their trade as dirty, they said.

    Said the group: “This request is very important as our project will engage many youths who will be employed as doctors, nurses, teachers, drivers, engineers, guards, drivers and machine operators in these colonies. They will also intermarry and strengthen our dream for national unity and a strong economy.

    “Funds for the project have been sourced from members and well meaning Nigerians. Our foreign partners are ready for this life changing livestock experience.” We trust the Federal Government to grab this golden opportunity.

    The association requests to meet with the President to shed more light on its project. A Presidency source has just told me that the association’s letter has not been received. But, another, also usually credible, confided in me that there are fears that a flood of such requests are on the way, coming from Grass cutters Breeders Association, Rabbit Breeders Association, Bee Keepers Association and others, not forgetting the Association of Snake Charmers whose members claim that, if encouraged, their trade could become a huge foreign exchange earner that will put oil, with all its stress and distress, in its place – for life.

    If the youths’ threat was seen as a case of some mental indiscretion, how do we classify that of the Customs officer who decked himself in the rank of  a Deputy Comptroller (DC) and marched to the office of the Comptroller  General (CG), asking him to surrender his seat to him?

    Officer Nura Dalhatu, an Assistant Superintendent of Customs (ASC), has landed in hospital where doctors are trying to find out what may have gone wrong with him. There are eight ranks between ASC and DCG. “From questions and answers that followed, it was obvious that he was not in the right frame of mind. So, a doctor was immediately invited,” Customs spokesman Gabriel Attah said.

    Why did Dalhatu, well dressed and well fed, with no sign of mental instability – judging by his looks – do it? Oficer Dalhatu is a metaphor for the stifling situation in which many Nigerians have found themselves.  Pensioners, weak and frail, are being pushed around in some never ending verification. Some states are owing workers many months salaries. Farmers are afraid of going to their farms for fear of herders and their cattle. Bandits are on the rampage in some states. Kidnapping has become a huge enterprise, which has displaced armed robbery in its bestiality. Boko Haram won’t surrender.

    How, then can we keep our sanity?

    Sniper and the NYSC girl’s death

    THE news of the death of a Youth Corps member in Osun State has been as shocking as it is terrifying. Ayomikun Juliana Ademorayo is said to have died after applying the insecticide Sniper on her hair to rid it of lice.

    She was said to have died last Sunday after visiting her hairdresser ahead of her birthday on July 18. The hairdresser reportedly applied the insecticide and that triggered a negative reaction as blood began to come out of Ayomide’s mouth, nose and ears. She was rushed to the hospital, but it was late.

    Ayomide was an orphan who had two siblings to look after. Her death is, indeed, a family tragedy and a reflection of the level of knowledge we care to have on many of the products that we buy and use.

    There have been some suicidal deaths from Sniper, a common insecticide. Death after its application to kill lice remains uncommon. Strange.

    Ayomikun’s death should be investigated. Can Sniper’s ingestion in any form trigger the kind of reaction the young woman experienced and never recovered from? Who is the hairdresser? Who witnessed the horror?

    Why is Sniper so easy to pick off the shelf, if it is such a dangerous product for human consumption?

    Unfortunately, we may never know how exactly this young woman died. No lesson will be learnt. We will merely mourn her, bury her remains and go home in tears to await the next tragedy. So sad.

  • The one who fell

    IT IS easy to condemn; very easy because it is in human nature to delight in the mistakes of others. Yes, it is good to tongue lash people when they misbehave, but we should not forget the log in our own eyes when we are removing the speck in the eyes of others. In a society like others where we pretend a lot, those in positions of trust, especially men of God, must be beyond reproach. As ministers in the temple of God, they cannot be calling on people to follow the straight and narrow path, while they prefer the wide and crooked route.

    It is only meet and proper for those who claim to be called to live up to their calling. The Lord puts it succinctly: “any man who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is unworthy of God’s kingdom”.

    Come to think of it, what kind of pastors are we breeding these days? Many are end-time pastors, who believe that their reward is here on earth and not in heaven. This is why they engage in all sorts of atrocities – in the name of God.

    Virtually, the whole world now knows about the Busola Dakolo story. Busola was an impressionable young girl of 16 when she claimed she was raped by her pastor, Biodun Fatoyinbo, of the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA) in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, about 20 years ago. It all happened one early morning when the pastor came calling when nobody was at home and had his way with her. After the show, Pastor Fatoyinbo allegedly gave her a bottle of Krest bitter lemon, that famous drink of which we have heard a lot of tales. Such tales include that it is good as contraceptive for men and women!

    The second part of the show allegedly followed few weeks later on the hood of the pastor’s car. Rape whether by a man of God or by anybody else is a crime. It is also a sin before God. I am not here to judge Pastor Fatoyinbo; his conscience and the law will do that, but to use this development to assess the human character, particularly of those of us now playing the judge. Like many of us, Fatoyinbo needs spiritual help.

    We have virtually seen his nakedness now because of Mrs Dakolo’s allegations against him. What has happened to him should be a big lesson to all, especially those of us who are pastors. As a pastor, what kind of relationship do you have with the female members of your church? Is it the kind of relationship that can compromise your standing with God? Then, it is better for you to flee from every appearance of evil if you do not want to fall. He who thinks he stands, says the Bible, should take heed, lest he falls. Pastors must be conscious of this admonition in order not to dig their own graves.

    There is no amount of anointing that can save a man of God who sees evil (in form of female flesh) and stands by instead of running for his life. If you are easily attracted by the female flesh and you know that to be your weakness, the best thing to do is to run. If you think that your anointing will cover that, you will know better by the time you are consumed by that same flesh. It is of God’s mercy that we are not consumed, it is not by our might or power. It is because many pastors forget this fact that they fall easily. I pity Fatoyinbo. We are roasting him today because he was exposed. There are many like him out there having a fling with their church members and when the bubble bursts, they will say “it is the devil”.

    Which devil? There is nothing hidden before God. Your sin will find you out, says the Bible. God will not cover your sin because you are a pastor. Rather, He will expose such pastor to show that He is not a partial God. A pastor can only find favour with God if he lives up to His expectations and call on his flock to also do so. But what do we have? Shepherds who use the name of God to deceive their sheep and tell them after they have satisfied their urge: “you should be happy a man of God did this to you’’. What is so special about a man of God that he should deflower a 16-year-old girl, who is a minor under the law?

    Pastors are no special breed; they are human like every one of us and therefore fallible. You are not a pastor because you are infallible; you are infallible as a pastor only to the extent that you minister to the needs of your flock. But this does not include taking undue advantage of them. The earlier pastors realise this, the better for them and the society at large. I feel for Mrs Omodele Fatoyinbo, who has stood by her husband. That is how it should be.

    But in whatever she does or says, she should refrain from making it look like a case of a loose girl that pushed her husband into sin. From all indication, that was not what happened. How much does Mrs Fatoyinbo know about this her ‘faithful’ husband? Do not harden your heart to the truth, madam. Come to terms with it and let it set you free.

     

    Mayhem

    MEMBERS of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) aka Shi’ite went on the rampage, again, in Abuja on Tuesday. They stormed the National Assembly to protest the continued detention of their leader Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky. They attacked the police for stopping them from entering the assembly complex. The protesters blocked all roads leading to the place as they took the law into their hands. They vandalised vehicles, including those belonging to individuals.

    They did not stop at that. One of them was seen on national television as he clambered the rooftop of a car, which wriggled its way out of their road block, and smashed the windshield with an iron, as the motorist drove furiously to get out of danger. The motorist threw him off when he suddenly marched the brakes. For how long will we continue to witness this Shi’ite mayhem in Abuja and Kaduna, especially. Those sympathetic to the sect’s cause should call these people to order now. Violence is not the way to go. It will not help their cause; it will only portray them as an unruly bunch of fundamentalists and give Islam, which is a religion of peace, a bad name.

  • Reinvigorating Nigeria’s foreign policy in PMB’s 2nd term

    Domestic and foreign policies are intertwined to the extent that it will be appropriate to say that one is an extension of the other. A country with a sound and thriving economy with strong defence forces and a contented people will definitely have a strong foreign policy. Its voice will be heard when it matters. Other countries for the purpose of trade and mutual support, would like to befriend that country. Such a country needs not be totally self-sufficient, in fact no country is; but a beggarly country totally dependent on external support will only be useful when its vote is sought in the voting that takes place in many fora of foreign policy operation. Such a country will have little leverage abroad and amongst its neighbours. This has ramifying effect on international relations and the way its citizens are treated abroad and in the case of foreign missions operations in the country with its nationals fleeced when they apply for visas after going through humiliating experiences.

    It will be interesting comparing the way nationals of five countries namely India, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Nigeria are treated in the issuance of visas by members of the OECD countries. Singaporeans generally do not need visas to go to any of the western countries. So also are Malaysians exempted from the rigors of visa application? Chinese these days are courted and pampered at the entry borders when large numbers of students are arriving to study in foreign countries. India even though a putative power and Nigeria would be lumped together for special and humiliating treatment as countries whose people don’t return home after visiting the advanced western countries.

    Although the condescending treatment of Nigerians is rooted in racism, but in actual fact it is a case of our country not having power which translates into influence abroad. For now the same scenario can be painted in the case of India which is a rising power based on its 1.3 billion people and its technological know-how and its being a nuclear weapons state. As a young man, I saw the way Japanese got accepted in white countries. Now Chinese are not only accepted but  are feared and  I can  foresee Indians by their dint of hard work, at least by that critical  mass of Indian scientists becoming accepted  in the future into the world of respected races. But what about Africans? It is my hope that we will work our ways out of the humiliating situation the world has cast us, a humiliation rooted in slavery and colonialism.

    Nigeria as the most populous Black Country must lead the way. But does Nigeria see this as its manifest destiny? This is why the Buhari government must rise above its ethnic and regional tendencies and assume a crusading mission to put Africa on the map of global power. This is why it is very critical that Nigeria solve its internal problems of ethnic favouritism and preferences, insecurity, underdevelopment arising largely from corruption, putting the wrong people in critical offices of the nation, obscurantist religious politics in a modern age, indolence and over-bureaucratization, duplication of offices and agencies and miniaturization and atomization of units of state and political administration. As it is now, our country cannot fight a successful war if attacked because of the potential fifth columnists among us who are disgruntled because of their feeling of not belonging and abandonment of government responsibility to them as citizens. All these are what make it impossible for Nigeria to punch at its proper weight in the comity of nations.

    So what is to be done?

    The question to ask is what were we doing right when we had leverage in the continent of Africa and the world at large and we are no longer doing now? From 1960 to 1994 when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa under a majoritarian non racial democratic government, Nigeria was the uncrowned leader of Africa. Indeed the great man Mandela publicly stated this by saying Nigeria was the obvious choice to take Africa’s position on a restructured United Nations Security Council (UNSC). This was because of our role in the liberation of Southern Africa from Angola to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa itself. We committed substantial national resources and even made our workers to participate financially in the funding of liberation of Southern Africa. Our leaders particularly Generals Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida demonstrated leadership in foreign affairs. By the 1970s, our country was contributing troops to United Nations peace keeping and peace enforcement operations not only in Africa but even in the Middle East and the Balkans in South East Europe. Even though by the 1980s and 1990s the euphoria of having too much petrol dollars had died a natural death, this did not lead to our withdrawal to our shell. Of course the situation has admittedly changed. What has huddled and humbled us is the security collapse internally.

    The foundation of virile and strong nation with a strong voice internationally must be laid at home and the contentment of our people is the most important bedrock of this foundation. I say this for emphasis. President Muhammadu Buhari must therefore find solutions to the fissiparous tendencies aching the nation.

    Some are calling for restructuring and devolution of power. This should be a win-win situation because nobody is benefiting from the present situation of state paralysis and a situation in which constituent states of the federation cannot pay the minimum wage of N30,000 a month to workers. States cannot construct and maintain roads; neither can they dominate their environment. This was what led to total collapse of Zamfara. There are too many ungoverned spaces which terrorists simply moved in to occupy. I personally believe there are too many states in the country. What was the purpose of severing from Sokoto and Kebbi the state of Zamfara in the first instance? All the billions of naira given to the state that did not have the capacity to administer it were simply stolen by its absentee executives living it up in Kaduna, Abuja and Dubai. What I am suggesting therefore is that Buhari in the interest of the survival of our country must support genuine efforts at restructuring and devolution of power and resources from the centre to the periphery. Our country through this measure will kill two birds with one stone. It will put resources in the hands of the state to secure their environment and secondly it will ensure states have resources to carry out physical development.

    Abuja is too far from the states and bureaucrats in Abuja do not understand the unique problems of each state. Once the support of the citizens have been secured, the federal government can then focus on winning the war against insurgents in the northeast and in the rest of the country. The personnel of the armed forces and the police would have to be considerably expanded and help from friendly countries must be sought to train and equip them for the work at hand and for the guerrilla warfare rather than the conventional warfare our military were trained to engage in.

    Since a sound economy is the bedrock of stable politics at home and politics among nations, the Buhari government must continue its policy of diversification away from oil and gas into agriculture and industrialization. In this regard, emphasis must be placed on adding value to our agricultural produce before export. All our moribund textile mills must be rehabilitated and put back to work. All the refineries and petrochemical industries must be sold of, if necessary, at give-away prices to the companies that built them to avoid repeating what happened in the electricity sector where power generating and distribution companies were sold to party hacks who do not have the foggiest knowledge about power. A policy of food sufficiency must be our policy so that we eat only what we produce. In fact this policy will reduce our health problems arising from junk food and artificially modified food products.

    Once we secure the home base then we can go on an activist foreign policy in the interest first of ourselves and secondly in the interest of our sub region and Africa as a whole. Nigeria must be the centre of our foreign policy from now on.

  • On El-Rufai’s demographic superiority

    At the Northern Youth Summit organized by Northern Hibiscus Initiative in Kaduna last week, Governor Nasir El-Rufai spoke about the following naked truths northerners needed to tell themselves: ‘the north is backward, less educated and unhealthy in comparison to a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria’; ‘Nigeria has the largest number of poor people in the world, mostly of northern extraction’; ‘Nigeria  has the largest number of out of school children, all virtually from the north’; ‘Northern Nigeria has become the centre of drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism’, and that the northerners ‘have also been associated with high divorce rate and breakdown of families’. But what gladdens his heart and the northern rulers in spite of these dark statistics: is that the ‘North’s demographic superiority gives them a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics’.

    El Rufai was not the first representative of those who have held  the north hostage to spread these form of false narratives in order to give an impression they care for the northern poor on whose blood they feed. We  all remember the former CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi, current emir of Kano who often jarred our earlobes with tales about how proud he is of his illustrious grandfather who supervised the ‘famed Kano Groundnut pyramids’ while remaining silent on the fate of the children of the real groundnut farmers who were condemned to life of servitude even as children of cocoa farmers, their counterparts in the southwest were aided to cross the poverty line as lawyers, doctors and professors by a visionary leadership that understood it was in their own enlightened self-interest to create a more egalitarian society for the underprivileged.

    But those who held the north hostage saw such advantage including the West’s head start in education which led to Richard Sclar’s assertion that the north was 70 years behind the south as an affront. The Kaduna Mafia, the new inheritors of power by the end of the civil war, came up with a new policy thrust deliberately designed not to liberate their subjects but to slow down the progress of the south. It created uniformity by lowering standard through JAMB and quota system of recruitment even into military schools with typing qualifications as equivalent to GCE qualification, all of which produced “Nigerian Army of anything is possible” of the eighties and the military-baked ‘new-breed politicians’ that destroyed not only the strong institutions and public enterprises they inherited, but also like an army of occupation shared the national patrimony kept in their custody.

    Nigeria’s hostage-takers clearly understand no part of a whole can be holier than the whole. Sick North and ailing South are the result of their social engineering design. Outside prosperous Lagos, poverty strikes you on the face wherever you go in Nigeria. An army of seasonal unemployed youths in the north has been replicated by an army of unemployable graduates, secondary school drops out, area boys and political thugs, frustrated angry okada riders and urban social malaise in the name of urban street hawkers with many unable to read and write. Just as 80% of pregnant women have their babies delivered at home without the help of trained maternity attendants in places like Jos South Local Government of Plateau State, the Southwest that have only the relics of a thriving  primary health care system before hostage takers took control over their lives, is not different. Just as banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery and other violent crimes have come to characterise the neglected north, no one is also safe in the forest region of the south from Lagos through Benin to Enugu and Port Harcourt where it was once a delight to drive in the night. A professor kidnap-survivor recently confirmed his Fulani immigrant criminals worked hand in glove with Yoruba ritual killers and food vendors in the thick mangrove forest of western Nigeria.

    El Rufai was however right in his claim that “north’s demographic superiority is a powerful tool northern political elite have successfully deployed to negotiate in politics.  In 1951, Hausa-Fulani constituted only 54% of the population of the north out of which the hostage takers was less than 8%. With politics of figures, they demanded and secured 50% of the membership of the legislature as a pre-condition for allowing our compatriots taken hostage from the north to remain part of us. In 1959, we were all held hostage in spite 4,586,941 combined popular votes of the two southern based parties, NCNC and AG (153 seats) as against NPC’s popular votes of 1,922,179 (134 seats). For us, the 1962/63 census head count crisis eventually settled through judicial pronouncement finally invalidated the law of demography which claims those in the mangrove swamp procreate at faster rate than those in the semi-arid desert region. Subsequent disputed returns of census exercises beginning with 1972 which Awo tore into pieces only consolidated this absurdity. The hostage takers have continued to ensure election results, revenue sharing, infrastructural distributions are made to reflect El Rufai’s north demographic superiority. But for a good measure, Nigeria is regarded by the international community as a nation that plans without statistics.

    No one knows how many we are. Nigerian is as defined by the hostage-takers. Survivors of herdsmen’s mindless killings claim their assailants spoke neither English nor any of our local dialects; Miyyeti Allah and their patrons insist they are Nigerians. In an age when Botswana, a small country of about 2.3m with a cow population of about 2.6m has become one of the world biggest exporters of beef,  Miyyetti Allah insist open grazing  is an important part of Fulani culture.

    Then, their patrons in the 7th assembly sponsored a bill to create a cattle route across the nation. They warned their colleagues of the dire consequences if the bill was not passed. Nigeria became a killing field all through the eighth assembly. It was in the midst of harvests of deaths with thousands driven from their land to IDP camps that an insensitive minister for agriculture came up with cattle colony proposal which was roundly rejected by angry Nigerians.

    While credible voices but mischief-makers like Obasanjo, Danjuma and surviving victims of herdsmen trespassers in search of justice were blaming the President for what they term Islamisation and Fulanisation agenda of his government, a surreptitious attempt was made to foist Ruga, described as forceful acquisition of land for Fulani settlement across the 36 states of the federation. An embarrassed President Buhari was forced by public opinion to suspend the exercise last week.

    But many questions remained unanswered. When was Ruga discussed?  Who authorized the lawless enforcers? And if it was not the hostage takers surreptitious design to replicate the Zango Kataf experiment, why was Ruga not restricted to either Borno or Niger State with landed areas twice the size of both southwest and southeast instead of further impoverishing people where as many as 30 extended family members survive on less than half an acre as subsistence farmers?

    With Wole Soyinka’ last Sunday call on ‘Nigerian nationals across state demarcations to defend the sanctity of their ancestral lands, most Nigerians know the greatest threat to nationhood are hostage takers and hawkers of “demographic superiority”.

  • The gift-bringer who would be beggar

    The Nigerian, in his youth, becomes dangerous when politically dormant. He looms as dystopia to an infernal present. Sterile, he is the seed bearer who cannot engender; the gift-bringer who would be beggar. All fertile doors are closed to him.

    Where he is active, he lives captive in a zone of mortal dread, if untouched by patriotic zeal. But he hardly knows this.

    Either literate or illiterate, he serves as a tool for achieving the ends of deified others – if he doesn’t become deity. Hence his random manifestations as a political goon, arsonist, assassin, lobbyist, paid-agitator or activist-for-rent if you like.

    His words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of all shades of political correctness. Often times, they resonate as a double entendre; amidst the din, he soars into the trance of acclaim or descends its steep cliff even as society salts the ground he walks upon.

    Today, he may rewrite history via selfless, epic acts of grandeur. Tomorrow, he may corrupt it, slapping ‘sense’ and morbid fear into a defenceless nursing mother in a sex-toy shop. Think Elisha Cliff Abbo, 41. Abbo represents Adamawa North Constituency At his election, his kith and kin celebrated him; his victory at the polls resounded as a worthy reward for months of noise-making, grandstanding and sloganeering a la #nottooyoungtorun.

    Finally, a supposedly young candidate, Abbo, had been voted into office as the youngest Senator in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. That was undoubtedly some consolation prize of sort.

    The celebration was, however, short-lived in the wake of a viral video showing the youthful lawmaker slapping a nursing mother in a sex toy shop in the heart of Abuja.

    The recording was reportedly done on Saturday, May 11, 2019. On that day, Abbo, then a Senator-Elect, breezed majestically into the sex toy shop, in the company of three young ladies.

    As he sampled the sex gadgets with his company, one of the girls threw up thus messing up the shop. The female shop owner reacted angrily, stressing that Abbo’s friend should have vomitted outside her shop.

    An agitated Abbo accused the shop owner of poisoning the store’s air conditioner and the latter objected. Livid, Abbo made phone calls to the police and swiftly, the shop owner phoned her presumably influential father as the duo spoiled for a power duel.

    As the situation degenerated, one of the shop owner’s staff, a nursing mother, intervened pleading that the lawmaker should spare her boss; this infuriated Abbo and he dealt her ‘hot’ slaps repeatedly.

    Abbo would not be pacified even as his victim cringed from his wild assault. In the show of shame, a police officer in uniform, stared unperturbed at the lawmaker’s victim. He conveniently forgot the police credo: “To protect and serve.”

    Such is the temperament of a Nigerian youth. It would be unfair, however, to commit hasty generalisation by tarring millions of industrious, humane, patriotic youth with the misdemeanour of a 41-year-old elected lawmaker.

    Abbo, despite his teary and seemingly contrived plea for forgiveness, may forever grapple with uncomplimentary impressions of him as intoned by his May 11, 2019 misdeed.

    For the Senator, the political plane has become scorched earth; a temenos where his fragile repute may never bloom again.

    At the backdrop of Abbo’s misdemeanour, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka’s clarion call to the youth, to start organising themselves for leadership positions before the 2023 elections, instills fear into discerning hearts, perhaps. He said: “Sometimes I refer to this generation of youths in which one places so much hope, as a ‘Gaseous’ generation because they are so full of gas. But when it comes to action, you are astonished because they keep calling out names like where is Wole Soyinka? Where is Joe Okei-Odumakin? Where is Femi Falana?”

    The situation undoubtedly persists due to the dearth of heroic men and women in the political space. En route the 2019 general elections, Nigeria grappled with the swell of young aspirants. In the latter, desire sprouted with seductive dissonance of savagery and surrender.

    Passion in the young aspirant was armoured by greed, hypocrisy and a fever of entitlement. Like the ruling class they sought to replace, they loomed unwise, driven by errant lust.

    And this played out in their utterances, conduct and disposition. It manifests as you read, in the calibre and temperament of characters occupying Nigeria’s public offices.

    The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly. And this predominant malaise often manifests in their corruptibility and disinclination to foster a more humane leadership and society.

    Today, we suffer declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at due time. We suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.

    We perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. Together, we perpetuate a story of unbridled sectarian, ethnic and corporate power that has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal and entrepreneurial values. To redress the status quo, Nigeria needs a heroic league of ordinary men and women to shoulder the crusade on the voter and aspirant divides.

    According to Soyinka, “one hopes that in advance, 2023, the youths should begin to organise themselves, they must not wait till the last minute. “They should begin right now in manifesting their expectations and the possibility of the realisation of their expectations of taking up leadership positions,” he said.

    The youth are certainly in need of a platform, more selfless than the defunct, ill-fated PACT movement and more concrete than Facebook, Twitter and other social media. They need to create a rallying point where they could sit and determine a bloodless path to a promising future.

    Yes, the current leadership won’t relinquish power easily hence the need to be swift and methodical in action. There is no almighty formula to untying Nigeria’s leadership knot.

    Having created a dependable platform, the youth should identify that particular breed whose idealism and pragmatism articulates the citizenry’s painful silences and heartfelt dreams in order to actualise them. Further relations with the incumbent ruling class would be inimical to the nation’s progressive march. On their watch, Nigeria’s resources are being depleted; soon they will be exhausted. And then our hollowed-out edifice shall collapse. Impoverished and severely robbed of optimism, Nigeria’s hopeless masses, mostly youth, will rise against the ruling class in a premeditated and very savage strike – of which the citizenry would suffer the worst consequence. Like in all such uprisings, Nigeria will plunge into a canyon of blood and maniacal murders, in the name of the “revolution.” The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way.

    The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress: “..extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations ossify and collapse. Today, we tow a similar path.

     

  • The COZA pastor and his cross

    It seems a bit calm now. With the last of the protesters receding from the street to join their colleagues on the social media, and echoes of their rambunctious outing reverberating across the land, it is now fit and proper to examine dispassionately the rape allegation against Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA) Senior Pastor Abiodun Fatoyinbo.

    Perhaps it would have been ignored, like many of such grave allegations hurled around all the time, but  this was not just another mudslinging from a nonentity. It was coming from a somewhat credible source – Bisola, wife of songster Timi Dakolo. The story is well known; no need to recount here some of its raw, salacious details, this being a family newspaper, so as not to offend the sensibility of our dear readers.

    A young girl attends church faithfully. She gets noticed by the pastor who is also close to her family. One cold morning when nature is still trying to rouse everybody from sleep, the pastor shows up at the door, pushes the young girl, who is in her night wear, onto a chair, shuts her mouth and rapes her. She is all tears after the bloody action. The “man of God” rushes outside to his car to fetch a bottle of the soft drink Krest (Bitter Lemon) and offers the krestfallen –sorry; an error there – crestfallen girl the drink. She gulps it down her dry throat.

    “You should be happy that I did this to you,” Mrs Dakolo quotes “the man of God” as saying. A few days after, he did it again – on the bonnet of his car. Twice in one week. Fast forward many years after and hundreds of kilometers away from Ilorin, the scene of the action, to Abuja. Mrs Dakolo and her husband are strong members of COZA.

    Then, Mrs Dakolo, suddenly realises that there is a void in her heart. She has been fighting a long- time battle in her troubled mind – the psychological and traumatic effect of being raped some 17 years ago, allegedly by the very man who has been her spiritual guide. She decides to tell her story.

    Enter the activists. Anger. Curses. Abuses. Rage. An anti-Fatoyinbo coalition sprouts in Lagos and burgeons in Abuja, demanding that the pastor steps aside.

    Fatoyinbo quits, even as he denies it all. He is threatening to launch a legal battle to reaffirm his badly shaken integrity. His wife is standing solidly by him, insisting that even as an unbeliever her man would not rape a woman. Truly, Fatoyinbo is good looking; tall like a basketball star, a cherubic face and a fine sartorial taste – in a world in which good looks is everything and character counts for little.

    It all seems like some Hollywood stuff, full of action and drama, romance, spiced with moving scenes of love, sex, betrayal of trust by a spiritual guardian, a shepherd who failed the test of fidelity in matters of concupiscence, his escapades becoming the stuff of campus cultism legend.

    Rape is a despicable crime for which a convict deserves no pity. It is fine that the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has shown interest in the matter. If Fatoyinbo did it, he should carry the can by admitting his erotic error, apologising first to the victim and her family, then to his flock and his own family and surrendering himself for prosecution before embarking on a purgatory to free his soul of such devious conducts. That is the least the society expects from a man our youngsters follow with so much passion.

    But, wait a minute; just a note of caution – these are mere allegations, which require a cast-iron evidence to prove. There have been stories of what his critics swear is Fatoyinbo’s horrid past, including, they insist, his sexual peccadilloes. Again, some of the details are, considering their vulgarity, not fit to be published here.

    Should a pastor, who is deemed to have been successful in his calling – I have no skill to judge if he was, in fact and indeed, called – be mobbed because of his sordid past, which he may have renounced? Consider II Cor. 5:17: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”

    In other words, is Fatoyinbo being judged by his past or present libidinous peregrinations? If he refuses to confess, what next? Will the Dakolos sue? Rape is often tough to prove. Many abandon their cases after being cross examined by lawyers who ask all manner of embarrassing questions. A weak accuser often breaks down under cross-examination by lawyers.

    “What is your proof? Was there a witness? Were you protesting all through? Were you screaming or moaning or murmuring or crying or swearing?  How did you feel during the act and after? Tearful? Can I put it to you that those were tears of joy? Did you report to the police? Where is the medical report?

    How many boyfriends do you have? Do you agree that my client is a handsome man with whom any woman would not mind lying in bed? I put it to you that he got your consent to do it; you are merely a gold digger who is envious of his being a ladies’ man.” Easy to handle? Not at all.

    Those who see the Fatoyinbo scandal as a metaphor for what they think are church leaders’ calamitous conducts are damn wrong. We have a large army of good Christian leaders; the bad eggs are few. We also have them in other faiths. No need to gloat. This is part of our human foibles.

    When rape is proved, the convict hardly recovers; the victim feels good that justice has been done. Perhaps “Iron” Mike Tyson, the ex-boxing champion, would not have lost it all if he had not been jailed for raping beauty queen Desiree Washington. Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn got into trouble for allegedly having a coerced sexual relationship with an employee. He got off the hook with a payoff. His wife dismissed it all as “a one- night stand, which is now behind us”.

    A varsity teacher got his glittering academic career shattered after demanding sex to pass a student.  Richard Iyiola Akindele, a professor at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), is serving a six-year jail term. He joins a long list of men who found trouble on the hot laps of women, even if they did not rape them. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.  Samson and Delilah. David and Uriah’s wife. Fidelis Oyakhilome, the anti-drug czar, and Jennifer Madike. Sani Abacha and the yet unknown Indian women. Paul Wolfowitz, the ex-World Bank chief and an employee. And many others.

    Poor Mrs Dakolo. Considering the world we live in nowadays, she may well find a huge redeeming window in all this. She may soon hit the lecture circuit, telling her story, encouraging abused women to speak out and, of course, making money, even as she solidifies her marital felicity. Talk of some fortune in a misfortune. Didn’t the bard say “sweet are the uses of adversity”?

    A group of young lawyers have found an opportunity for their trade in Mrs Dakolo’s story. A friend sent me yesterday a copy of a legal agreement they have drafted for men who will demand that women should sign before having any intimate relationship (apology to Mr Clinton, aforementioned) with them.  The title is “Agreement Before Action”. “I, Mrs/Miss…, of the following address (hereinafter referred to as the …) …certify that I am above 18, that I am not being forced to do this; that I am not under the influence of alcohol or any narcotic; that I am neither asleep nor drunk; that I will never make a case against Mr…now or in the future… Signed on this…day of …(month) …(year) at …(a.m/p.m).” Every randy man is encouraged to always have a copy in his pocket.

    Will this promote peace?

    …And unruly Senator Abbo

    THE police have invited Senator Elisha Abbo of whom neither the biblical Elisha nor the good people of Adamawa North will be proud, considering his assault of a nursing mother in an Abuja adult toys shop. The distinguished senator says the video in which he is shown slapping the woman repeatedly and ordering her arrest was doctored.

    That was before he, apparently realising that the game was up, apologised late yesterday.

    The Senate ordered an investigation. Needless. This is a simple police matter. Let the senator make a statement and, if a “prima facie” case is established, he should be charged to court.

    We have always found a way to cope with the pandemonium that sometimes occurs on the floor of the Senate and what some people believe is our lawmakers’ predilection for wild libidinous attitudes (underage marriage, obscene language and all that); now we have to stop them from fighting in an adult toy’s shop–a euphemism for the home of sex toys.

    Abbo claims that the woman he assaulted said he was drunk. Was slapping her and behaving as if on drug the right way to show that he had not hit the bottle too hard?

    How about the policeman who aided and abetted this action?

    Some people have argued that Abbo is immature, adding that he has betrayed “Not-too-young-to-run” campaigners. They say he is abusing the privilege thrust on him by fate, that unseen hand in human affairs.

    He is in Abuja visiting adult toy shops while his mates are selling live chickens and mobile phone recharge cards on the streets of Yola.

    No doubt, this Elisha is no prophet. Neither was he called. He has regretted his action. If the assaulted woman would not press charges, he should be let off the hook.

    All’s well that ends well.