The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Mazi Kanu: Still on the heart of the matter

    Mazi Kanu: Still on the heart of the matter

    Igbo people of Nigeria whether at home or as urban immigrants have always been led by leaders who see them only as instruments of political bargaining. From the great Zik of Africa who came with his own brand of American journalism to ‘elezikify’’ Nigerian press , the smooth-talking Oxford-trained Odumegwu Ojukwu and now the rude, crude and probably disturbed Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, they have in one way or the other betrayed those who look up to them for direction. And associated with them are such tales of clash of interest in African Continental Bank (ACB), Ijora land deal the proceeds of which went into building of ‘the palace of the people’ amidst his people’s squalor to those with of high taste of fast cars and multi-million golden braziers acquired after a season in NNPC often described as a cesspool of corruption.

    Igbo urban immigrants in Lagos who had for a long time looked for a spokesman earnestly welcomed Zik of Africa’s return to Nigeria from Ghana. They trusted and loved him. Zik’s every word was law to his admirers including Lagos intelligentsia of the period except cynical jounalists like Ernest Ikoli, a pioneering journalist and first editor of the Daily Times.

    Not long after Zik returned with his fellow NCNC members from London where they had gone to campaign for constitutional change, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti and few other members of the group had accused Zik of mismanaging funds contributed by their party members for the trip. Zik said he was being so shabbily treated because he was an Igbo man. That was all his supporters and Yoruba in Lagos needed to buy off all the cutlasses in Lagos market in preparation for war.

    Awolowo in 1949 and a few Yoruba Lagos intelligentsias founded the Egbe Omo Odudowa to unite the Yoruba that had just come out of 16 years civil war. Of course by this time, Igbo National State Union with Zik as president had existed for about three years. It was under that platform Zik had given his most controversial speech as Igbo State Union president where he declared god of Africa had ordained the Igbo nation as leader of Africa. But the same Zik now passed a ‘fatwa’ on Egbe Omo Oduduwa as anti-Nigeria. To destroy the Egbe, he deployed his West African Pilot, while the Zikists carried out physical attack on members of the Egbe in Lagos and their properties.

    Zik and NCNC did not win the 1957 Western Region election. Those elected as independent candidate led by Adisa Akinloye had appealed to Zik to nominate a Yoruba member of NCNC, (a Yoruba party with only one Igbo man at inauguration) as premier-designate as a condition for joining forces with NCNC. Zik, supported by Mbadiwe, insisted he must become premier of West even with an easterner heading the Eastern Region government and a northerner heading the Northern Region government. Akinloye and his  group joined Awo’s AG.  For deciding to hold their destiny in their own hands, Zik named Yoruba as tribalists. That was the narative told Igbo youths since 1957. Chinua Achebe even  wrote his “There Was a Country” where he falsely claimed he saw NCNC members crossing over to AG side in the Western Region House.

    Ojukwu was another Igbo leader worshipped by his Igbo people. Although he admitted starting his war with Nigeria with 16 rifles after all the shout about “No power in Africa can defat Biafra”. He was to blame Awo who had said Yoruba would pull out of the federation if East was pushed out by acts of commission r omission”. He was silent on the fact that Awo visited Enugu to plead against secession following Gowon’s creation of 12 states structure with a landlocked Biafra surrounded by hostile minority neighbours that Igbo had oppressed for years. But he failed to listen to Awo.

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    Kanu also emerged as Igbo leader, riding on the crest of freedom fighter in 2012.  He has never told his supporters of how the Igbo, occupying a space in the north bigger than Igbo’s five states in the east, according to Nasir El Rufai former Kaduna State governor will fit into his new Biafra. He has also not told his Igbo compatriots who have taken over trading centres in Yoruba urban centres and villages, including Lagos where they now want to be governor following their success in the 2023 presidential election, how they will relocate their business and mansions to his new Biara.

    Except Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, the senator representing Abia North, who was courageous enough to admit that activities of Nnamdi Kanu, led to the death of over 30,000 people.

    “But people are just talking about soldiers killed and not the rest of them” he lamented. He also spoke of the destruction of businesses across the Southeast including that of his mother’s friend whose shop was ransacked and went bankrupt unable to pay the N4.2million she owed his mother. He also spoke of efforts he made to get him released on bail in April 2017 to face trial for ordering people to kill others.

    But ill-informed youths with only one side of the civil war story  and some political officeholders are ready to swear by the name of Kanu, the  self-appointed Igbo leader who in the words of Justice Omotosho  “remained arrogant, cocky, and full of himself without realising the magnitude of his crime and the effect of what he has done against his people in the southeast”.

    It will appear IPOB and its violence against Igbo people is acceptable to Igbo elite. For instance, on the eve of the judgment, some 44 members of the House of Representatives, acting under the aegis of Concerned Federal Lawmakers, asked the federal government to discontinue the case in favour of a political solution.

    Justice Omotosho had hardly finished pronouncing his verdict when

    Senator Adolphus Wabara, a former senate president was lamenting that “jailing Kanu was like jailing the whole Igbo race”.

     From Obi Cubana, came a warning to President Tinubu: “as long as MNK remains in jail, you cannot and will never get up to 10,000 votes in southeast come 2027”. As for Peter Obi who dared not disobey Kanu’s sit-at-home order during his 2023 campaign season,

    “Kanu ought not to have been arrested in the first place”. This was after Chukwuma Soludo who now governs Anambra which Obi once presided over has told the world that 99.9% of those arrested and prosecuted for violence “were Igbos killing Igbos”.

     The Southeast caucus of the House of Representatives is also of the view that the continued detention of Mazi Kanu has contributed significantly to tension and agitation in the Southeast. The caucus therefore believes that the release of Mazi Kanu, through pardon, would open space for broader engagement between the federal government, elected leaders, and community stakeholders to chart a sustainable and peaceful path forward”.

    But Igbo political leaders and unitarists that have consistently frustrated efforts to return to federal arrangement, a social system known to guarantee unity in diversity.by forming an alliance with those with whom they share a common worldview of how to run Nigeria, should know it is time to return to the road never taken.

    Unfortunately, current Igbo leaders are making the same mistake Zik made in 1957 during the London Constitutional Conference. Lagos was the target of current Igbo leaders promoting citizenship as answer to the national question.  But no one has forgotten the lamentation of TOS Benson, a First Republic information minister about how he begged a southeast governor for a plot of land to erect a house where he intended to bury his wife who was of Igbo extraction but his request as turned down.

    Flooding  the streets of Nigerian urban centres with hawkers of substandard goods is also not an option as it only serves the interest of political elite that used them for political bargaining during election (If in doubt, check all those areas where Obi secured huge support during the 2023 election) or cannon fodder during political or religious violence.

    If some Middle East nations can turn their desert countries to paradise, Igbo can turn their land to Taiwan of Nigeria.

  • A week like eternity

    A week like eternity

    •General lays down life

    HIS GRUESOME KILLING shook the nation. Brigadier-General Musa Uba died in line of duty. An officer and a gentleman, he was leading his men and some members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) on a mission to hunt down the terrorists, bandits and insurgents troubling the nation when they were ambushed along the Damboa-Biu Road in Borno State.

    The attack, which was carried out by the Islamic State – West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists happened on November 14. It was a black Friday, which presaged a week in which these elements went on the rampage in some states. They hit Borno, Kebbi, Kwara and Niger states, killing, kidnapping and looting in their characterisric style. Infants were not spared, as they abducted hundreds of nursery school kids in Niger, among others.

    The General’s bludgeoning stinks. It rankles because of how it happened. He had managed to escape the ISWAP ambush in which some of his men were killed. He was in the forest trying to find his way back to base. He relayed his position to his colleagues through WhatsApp. Somehow, his message leaked and started trending in social media. The military did all it could to salvage the situation, to no avail.

    The harm had been done. The terror group cashed in on that momentary lapse caused by the leaked message to comb the forest for Uba. They found and killed him, and in their typical way celebrated their bestial act in a video. Uba died a hero, as President Bola Tinubu said in a tribute. There is no gainsaying the fact that laying down one’s life for one’s country is the primary duty of a soldier, but the circumstances of Uba’s death are quite disturbing. Who did he send his message for help to?

    What did the receiver do with it? Was it treated with the utmost secrecy and urgency it deserved in order to evacuate him out of danger? How did the message get to the social media many of whose practitioners are not professional journalists? Uba did not deserve to die the way he did? If those he messaged had done their jobs well, he might have been saved with the terrorists suffering a heavy loss.

    What has happened to the area where he was gruesomely killed? Has it been levelled to send a message to ISWAP and others that no beast in human skin kills a soldier, a General for that matter, and lives to celebrate it?  Uba’s death should not be in vain. One of the ways to memorialise him will be the routing of ISWAP, Boko Haram, ISIS, Lakurawa, Ansaru and other terror groups by whatever name called, to restore law and order in the north, where the past week was hell. Their renewed offensive on schools and a church was shattering and it affected the national psyche.

    It came on the heels of the global efforts to change the narratives about our national image being pushed by American President Donald Trump. Trump had described the insecurity in Nigeria as ‘Christian genocide’, and vowed to come ‘guns-a-blazing’ to save ‘our beloved Christians’. It is thus difficult to dismiss the claim of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Senator George Akume, that this ‘targeted killings’ statement might have emboldened the terrorists to unleash these fresh attacks.

    Truly, such attacks had gone down until Trump spoke some weeks ago. The renewed attacks began 10 days ago, after they apparently took a cue from that remark. Their first target on November 17  was a girls school in Maga, Kebbi State, where they abducted 24 pupils after shooting dead the vice principal and injuring the principal. The 24 girls were freed on Tuesday.

    Barely 24 hours later, they hit the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), in Eruku, Kwara State, taking away 38 worshippers, among them an elderly woman. The abductees regained their freedom on Sunday. Their story is intriguing. The worshippers were in church to thank God for the release of tbeir brethren who were earlier abducted when they too fell victims of the abductors. In the midst of these incidents, the government is waging war on the global front to change the Trump narrative about Nigeria.

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    The United States (U.S.) Congress which he is armtwisting to impose sanctions on Nigeria and back his plan to send troops to take out the terrorists beamed a searchlight on our country on Thursday. Nigeria was on trial of sorts before the world as the proceedings of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Africa were aired globally. Some members of the Congress led by two women, Sara Jacobs and Pamela Jayapal, argued against the classification of Nigeria as a ‘country of particular concern’, while their counterparts, Riley Moore and Bill Huizenga, led those who insisted that there were ‘targeted killings’ in Nigeria.

    Huizenga, who became emotional as he recalled going to ‘school with kids from Nigeria’ pointedly accused the Tinubu administration of doing nothing to stop the killings. In its defence, Nigeria admitted that it has security challenges, explaining that all it required was collaboration with the U.S. to address the issue. Although, it is painful that Nigeria has not overcome the problem, which reared its ugly head in 2009, with the killing of Boko Haram leader Muhammed Yusuf in police custody, it is wrong to say that the country has not done anything about it.

    Past administrations fought it. The Tinubu administration intensified the campaign after assuming office over two years ago. Its efforts might have resulted in scorching the snake and not in killing it, though. Therefore, it will be insincere to accuse the government of folding its hands and doing nothing. More needs to be done, no doubt. So, the government must reawaken to the reality of the situation and do everything possible to kill this snake now, or continue to be the butt of cynical remarks by Trump, Moore, Huizenga and their local ilk.

    It is in this frame that the Niger school abductions which followed the congressional hearing beggar belief. After the Kebbi and Eruku attacks, the security agencies should have been more alive to their responsibilities to nip in the bud any other fresh incidents. That the Catholic (Private) Nursery, Primary and Secondary Schools, Papiri, Niger State, was hit just four days after the Kebbi attack, and in the wake of the congressional hearing, speaks volume about how prepared and serious we are to fight this scourge.

    The government has given its die-hard critics the ammunition to fight it and say ‘see those who say they are fighting terrorism’. Papiri should not have happened at all, at least not at a time like this, or at any other time for that matter. The attack should be a challenge to the government to go all out and tame this scourge. There is no better time than now to break this yoke. It has festered for too long. Those nursery kids (just imagine their ages) are waiting (only God knows where they are being held) to be reunited with their parents and guardians. I can hear their cries in my ears as I type this.

  • On language of instruction at early years of schooling

    On language of instruction at early years of schooling

    There is no argument about which language of instruction should be used in early education in any serious country other than the mother tongue. The recent announcement by the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa that as from now English will be the medium of instruction for education reminded me about his predecessor in the same ministry, Tahir Mamman who suddenly decreed that only children 17 or older will be permitted to write the JAMB admission examination for entrance to Nigerian universities  as if there were unchallengeable reasons to bar younger people of admission into university especially in a global environment where Nigerians and others were graduating in British  and American universities abroad at ages lower than 17.

    It seems the ministers were getting out of step with their positions. They seem to arrogate know-all powers to themselves until they are brought down to the reality of being removed from office.

    I wonder whether the  current minister was properly advised to take this decision because the research council in the ministry could not have done this  because the council’s position and those of most departments of education in our universities are clear on this: they have said and written that one of the reasons  for the low quality of our graduates in all departments of learning is that whatever we studied in other peoples’  language cannot be properly absorbed and  internalized  and if the foundation is  not solid, whatever floors constructed on a weak base will be ab initio unreliable.

    This fact may be stretching the argument too far but there is no doubt that if the foundation is not strong, the superstructure cannot be reliable. Besides researches by the late Babs Fafunso  a professor of education and others suggest that we should study English as a subject in our local languages just as we use English to study many subjects now .This is what great countries like China, India and Japan as well as most of the Arab countries have done and it has not stopped them from making advances in science and technology.

    The biggest argument one may have for the minister’s policy of teaching in English to infants is that this is what essentially but unofficially exists in practice among the educated middle class in Nigeria and among most Nigerians in urban centres where people speak a multiplicity of languages. But this does not make it rational to the point of becoming the law. We can also argue about how difficult it would be to translate all existing books in the sciences, medicine, technology and all subjects into our native languages.

    Which of our about 300 languages would we choose without alienating the other speakers of languages not selected? This is apparently why the choice of Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba as official languages is not strictly enforced in official communication but English which is neutral has remained the lingua franca. The current policy is that early education should be in our local languages presumably in English, Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba which have remained the official languages of the country. But what has become the constitutional provision of primary education remaining in the province of states? Then what happens to over 200 plus languages spoken by millions of other Nigerians?

    If we can learn from our colonial experience in the North where Hausa was taught to all school children even though  people in Northern Nigeria spoke other languages like Kanuri, Shuwa, Bura,  Jukun, Chamba, Tiv, Angas, Birom, Fulfude, Nupe, Yoruba, Maguzawa, Igala, Idoma , Ebira  and others if taken together may have outnumbered the Hausa native speakers. This policy has successfully knitted together perhaps more than 50% of Nigerians who now speak Hausa. There was no such language policy in the South though over the years Creole or Pidgin English is spoken all over Nigeria by people with a few years of exposure to the English language. This Creole/Pidgin of course cannot be seen as a native language. Some years ago, the late Professor Armstrong of the University of Ibadan in the 1960s suggested Igala as a strong candidate if Nigeria wanted a language to adopt as a national language because according to him, Igala has elements of Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. This was based on his academic study of Nigerian linguistics but I am not sure how far his suggestion got in the corridors of power in Nigeria where it was simply laughed out of court.

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    This new policy cannot be rejected on the basis that English was imposed on us by an outside authority. It has the support of presumably most people in Nigeria who may have taken up arms against government if a local language or group of languages were imposed on the country. The government probably learnt from the experience of the government of India which met stiff opposition while trying to impose Hindi on the vast country and population which had accepted English a neutral language. It also put us within the global medium of English with its abundant development of instructional material at all levels of the educational ladder.  The argument of supporters of English is that if we don’t belong to the wide medium of the English language world, we would have to learn English to understand the language of computing and AI. 

    If we will gain something from early learning of English, and that the better we started early and this does not mean we will naturally not speak our mother tongue at home and in the market, worship places and perhaps as secret language when negotiating with foreigners or when sending what will amount to ‘coded language’ in the wider global world. This is my personal experience in diplomacy when we want to arrive at a quick decision without our opposite party knowing our position, this will depend on if some of our people speak the same language. This experience made decisions maker to insist that any young recruit into our foreign service must have passed at ordinary level a Nigerian language.

    One cannot overemphasize the importance of the ability to speak a mother tongue. Inability to do so undermines one’s indigenous personality and character in a world where confidence in one’s skin is an imperative for one to be able to assert one’s personality in a world of competition of cultural sensitivity. In conclusion, studies in mother tongues, many of which we have in Nigeria will continue to be an advantage for those who study for use in politics, business and the market place economics.

  • Hostage season (2)

    Hostage season (2)

    Long before bandits preyed on schoolchildren, long before ransom notes began to read like market lists including palm oil, dried fish, onions, and yam tubers, Nigeria itself had been taken hostage.

    Thus, what we now call an epidemic of abductions is merely the physical manifestation of captive Nigerianness: with our consciences bound, institutions gagged, and the citizenry caught between fraying morals and failing structures.

    Truth is, the hostage crisis did not begin at gunpoint. It began in the dumbing down of Nigerian character; in the fragmentation of our family systems; in the erosion of public trust, and in the corruption that has become as ambient as the air we breathe.

    Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom enterprise has matured into a grotesque industry, sprawling from forest corridors to the fringes of urban life. Between July 2023 and June 2024 alone, SBM Intelligence reports that 1,130 kidnapping incidents were recorded, involving no fewer than 7,568 victims.

    In that period, abductors demanded N10.99 billion, but received only N1.048 billion, a mere 9.5 per cent of their outrageous demands. This gap reveals a frightening evolution: rather than targeting only business magnates, politicians, or oil barons, kidnappers have shifted their sights to the masses: to farmers, market women, students, commuters, villagers, minors, and the elderly.

    Yet the absurdity has assumed darker shades. In one widely reported case in the South-West, kidnappers demanded N3.5 million plus a carton of Schnapps, 30 litres of palm oil, 10 tubers of yam, and a keg of vegetable oil before releasing three captives. Elsewhere, abductors have asked for cooking oil, dried fish, garri, power banks, phone chargers, items required to restock a household inventory rather than a ransom ledger.

    This is what happens when criminality fuses with hunger; the consequence is a madness that confounds profit logic. It feeds, ultimately, an ever-widening maw of need.

    Yet, beyond the abductions that dominate news cycles, Nigeria suffers from a deeper, subtler captivity. Every Nigerian, in some form, is a hostage: hostage to creed, weaponising faith to justify bigotry; hostage to ethnic and religious loyalties; hostage to greed, that turns public office into a private empire.

    Many are hostage to hypocrisy, condemning loudly in public what they cuddle in private; hostage to poverty, which renders dignity an unaffordable luxury; hostage to materialism, chasing wealth with the desperation of a drowning man gasping for air.

    Some are hostage to sexual lust, weaponising desire to destroy marriages, careers, and destinies; hostage to rage, exploding at the slightest provocation because Nigeria heats everyone, like a pressure cooker; hostage to daily needs, locked in a battle that yokes survival to the next meal.

    Many more are hostage to imperialist agendas, gorging on colonist doctrines at the expense of indigenous wisdom. And perhaps most tragically, we are hostage to sentimentality, defending leaders who impoverish us, praising institutions that betray us, and romanticising the very dysfunctions that hold us captive.

    Amid this moral malaise, corruption manifests as a social ill and a vehicle of national dysfunction. Recent 2023 data reveal that 32.3% of Nigerians reported personal experience with bribery while dealing with public officials. In total, an estimated 87 million bribes were exchanged that year—approximately 0.8 bribes per adult. Among those who admitted paying bribes, the average number paid within 12 months was 5.1.

    The import is alarming: about US $1.26 billion in cash bribes changed hands in 2023; that is roughly 0.35% of Nigeria’s GDP.

    The citizen pays bribes to secure what is already his by right. The official extracts bribes to perform what he is already paid to do. And the system, greased by these transactions, chugs out detritus of misgovernance.

    To mend all that we have broken, we must rejig our cultural foundations. No society reforms itself without reshaping its stories; the narratives it consumes often become the beliefs it normalises, and the beliefs it normalises form the culture it lives by.

    Essentially, patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The politics we espouse and our lore of nationhood manifest the kernel of our sovereignty. A similar dynamic undergirds our politico-literary traditions. Politics thrives on artistic vistas and vice versa.

    What shouldn’t we do for an evergreen story? What shouldn’t we give? The evergreen story, if progressively spun, yields fresh insights through the imagination of the writer or filmmaker, who milks history and recalibrates reality to espouse a positive national lyric.

    What is the Nigerian lyric? What is our reality? What do our artists project about us to our internal and external publics? Filmmakers, for instance, possess a critical tool: storytelling. But too often, this instrument is pointed inward to glamorise crime, trivialise trauma, and distort our image in the pursuit of box office glory. A recent film, for instance, irresponsibly romanticised kidnap-for-ransom while maligning Islam, thus reinforcing stereotypes that worsen social fissures. This is artistic sabotage masquerading as creativity.

    It’s about time the government partnered with filmmakers to produce hard-hitting political thrillers, social dramas, and moral epics that diagnose Nigeria’s ailments and offer a path to healing.

    Hollywood perfected this strategy decades ago. Between 1911 and 2017, over 800 feature films received support from the U.S. Department of Defence. More than 1,100 television titles enjoyed Pentagon backing. These ranged from Iron Man and Transformers to Homeland, 24, NCIS, and others.

    The United States’ democratic enterprise is one of the most profitable constructions via art, in its bid to “make America great again,” at any cost. It is both music and philosophy, a sensory stream of thought feeding generations of writers, political activists, filmmakers, politicians, gender rights activists, academia, and so on.

    Hollywood, democracy and foreign aid do for America what painting and sculpture did for the Italians. They are potent tools for wooing and recolonising the world. Also, both China’s and South Korea’s cultural ascents were deliberately constructed around cinematic narratives aligned with national philosophy. Likewise, Nigeria must birth an artistic movement that elevates, not erodes, the collective psyche. The country’s creative economy stands at an inflection point. With projections estimating a leap from $5 billion in 2022 to $25 billion by the end of 2025, there is an undeniable hunger for indigenous storytelling. Yet, economic prosperity must not overshadow ideological direction.

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    Nigeria must fuse state power with cultural influence to dismantle the criminal economy, using cinema, storytelling, and public-facing art to drive awareness while strengthening intelligence systems with drones, satellite surveillance, digital tracking, and community-powered reporting tools that predict and prevent abductions.

    The government, in partnership with the creative sector, must spotlight the importance of state policing, securing forest corridors and rural communities, using film, radio dramas, and digital content to mobilise public vigilance, while a national forest security command, integrated with trained community vigilante units, constrains bandits’ operations.

    Through socially conscious art and nationwide cultural programming, the government must help citizens understand that no crime thrives where jobs, education, and social welfare exist, and the government must walk in virtual lockstep with what it preaches.

    A nation’s heart beats in its stories. A country without a socially responsible literary and artistic community is a body without a soul. Our filmmakers must move beyond the monotonous tropes of gender wars, feminist-misandrist vendetta-laden plots. Our novelists must cease writing solely for Western patronage and pity.

    Shall we script a new national narrative? One that does not lament Nigeria but reimagines her. One that does not beg for Western approval but commands global reverence.

    It’s about time we resolved the maladies that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, kidnappers, and blinkered murderers.

  • What ails Trump and his allies

    What ails Trump and his allies

    Of all post-independence Nigerian leaders, President Tinubu is perhaps the only one who has a clear idea of the forces that have held our nation down since 1960.

    First, as a nation with nominal independence, we cannot be talking of sovereignty when neo-colonialism, which Kwame Nkrumah described as “the last stage of imperialism”, a situation where our economic system and political policies are dictated from outside, was what replaced colonialism.

    Many even believe neo-colonialism is worse than colonialism. At least with the latter we could report the misdeed of their satellite based official to political office holders in the metropolitan. It is on record that Herbert Macaulay once took the case of land grabbing by British officials to London where he secured victory for his client. Unfortunately, the multinationals that took over from the colonial masters are driven only by profit motive and responsible only to the metropolitan power.

    As a first step towards reclaiming our sovereignty, President Tinubu without upsetting our traditional friends that have exploited us for decades, quietly diversified our economy by focusing on other areas than oil. He also diversified our friends by moving closer to Russia and China.

    Why many concerned Nigerians were calling for restructuring and a return to 1963 constitution, Tinubu understands tribes and religion are relics of colonial rule. He did not think that was the best road to take especially since it is the legacies of colonial rule that shape our today’s political landscape.

    For him, our problem since independence has been that of governance. For instance, all his predecessors embraced inherited colonial government model that promoted ethnic rivalry, inequality and allowed primitive accumulation by the elites who openly pillaged our resources.

    His answer to self-serving critics of his fuel subsidy removal was simple: Nigeria cannot continue to spend the future of their children’

    In any case, the wailing elite were prominent in the fuel subsidy scam, the sharing of power sector assets after government injection of billions of tax payers’ money, the collapse of the banking sector where they have refused to pay millions of naira AMCON deployed to save some of the banks, etc. Tinubu understands these greed-driven elite operate above society and its government. What was needed was persuasion to let them see the need to be on the side of Nigeria. The president stooped to conquer to do exactly that.

    With solid home support of those who own society, he was ready to take on the multinationals. He embarked on diversification of the economy and our friends. He shifted attention to gas and paid less attention to oil where the multinationals have ensured the more oil we sell the poorer we become. In no time, President Tinubu announced to Nigerians that the country now makes more money from other areas of the economy than oil.

    Dangote’s refinery, the biggest in the world became symbol of our independence and sovereignty by meeting our domestic need and exporting aviation fuel to Europe. Dangote stopped the tragic situation where, because we could not refine our own oil, we sell to multinationals at $60 per barrel and buy it back as refined PMS at $840.

    This is not just our victory but victory for Africa where Ivory Coast, the highest world producer of cocoa gets for one year’s pain, about ten percent of the profit of just one chocolate manufacturer in USA.

    There is massive infrastructural development going in the areas of railways, roads, communication etc. courtesy China who did not give us conditions that will compromise our sovereignty. These are facilities we could not secure from our western friends who often referred us to IMF and World Bank that have only prolonged the misery of customers from the third world nations.

    Our ability to stand on our own is Donald Trump’s anguish.  America and the West will not mind creating chaos or even regime change to end our current efforts to end decades of exploitation.

    Insurgency has been with us for over 15 years. American Special Forces involved in training have worked closely with our security men in the area of training technic in fighting insurgency.

    Unfortunately when immigrant Fulani herdsmen and their local promoters engaged in periodic mindless killing, their victims are often Christians because the area is inhabited by predominantly Christians. For the same reason, victim of Boko Haram insurgents in the northeast are both Muslims and Christians while the victims of the of the civil war between Fulani and their Hausa kinsmen, in the Northwest will be Muslims.

    Unfortunately these are facts not known to Trump who supporters of jailed IPOB leader Kanu with permanent lobby group in the US and those of: Peter Obi who campaigned in 2023 exploiting tribal and religion sentiments, are inviting to Nigeria to fight their battle. .

    But let us remind those who refuse to learn from history.

    Those calling for Trump’s help must be reminded of the tragedy that befell nations where opposition elements have, because of social dislocations, sided with American invasion of their countries. The first victims are the people, who often end up without a country,

    Bush in 2001 heading a US military coalition of Great Britain, Canada and allied forces went to Afghanistan to overthrow Taliban and dismantle al Qaeda. America was frustrated out after 20 years .and succeeded by the Taliban.

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    Libya under Muammar Gaddafi where  newlyweds were provided with new government apartments, where education within or outside Libya was free, where there was full employment because all university graduates secured job after graduation and where salaries, allowances and pensions allowed people was the envy of the world.

    But claiming Gaddafi broke the ‘no flying zone over rebels trying to bring his government down, NATO’s embarked on indiscriminate bombing of Libya in violation of the mandate of the UN Security Council. NATO aided rebels to capture Gadhafi as he tried to escape. After his summary execution by rebels who wanted freedom from his tyranny, they discovered there was no more Libya which had “by 2011 achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank” to return to. At the end they settled for the caves where they and their grandfathers lived before Gadhafi transformed a desert to a paradise

    It is instructive to note one of the first things to be bombed by NATO was Gadhafi irrigation program,” the Great man-made River (GMMR)” an enormous engineering project considered the world largest irrigation system.

    But we now know from 2016 publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails that he was killed “to prevent the creation of an independent hard currency in Africa that would free the continent from its economic bondage under the dollar, the IMF and the French African franc. That hard currency would have allowed Africa to shake off the last heavy chains of colonial exploitation”.

    Saddam Hussein in an effort to annex the oil-rich Khuzestan province of Iran, launched an invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980. He was armed by America while the war went on for eight years. It was not until Saddam’s nationalization of Iraq oil that America remembered he was a dictator who killed close to 200 of his Barth Party opponents to remain in power. They knew Saddam did not have weapon of mass destruction, but they lied to the UN and the world.  They needed to kill Saddam, destroy Iraq and create chaos in Iraq society in order to take over Iraq oil. And that was exactly what they did after the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 20 2006.

    Riley Moore who on November 7 introduced a resolution in the house “condemning the ongoing persecution ….after meeting Nigerian delegation led by Ribadu issued a statement on the 19, talking of opportunities to strengthen cooperation and coordination between US and Nigeria”. Last week’s special house special sitting on Nigeria was deadlocked. There are also testimonies by those who know the complexities of a nation of 240million, speaking over 500 languages. But Trump on Fox last Saturday still accused Nigerian government of not doing enough, a narrative he must have got from a section of Nigeria media.  “What is happening in Nigeria is a disgrace”, he said.

    Everything must be done to stop disturbed Trump from coming gun a blazing.

    Proponents of the theory of ‘Comparative Advantage “are also unhappy that we are doubly favoured by same law by virtue owning our raw materials and the capacity to add value.  Promoters of globalisation as the new god we must all worship are in panic because Nigeria now exports aviation fuel to Europe. If trump is allowed to come gun a blazing, his target will be Dangote’s refinery, the symbol of our freedom and source of his anguish.

  • Military zone, keep off!

    Military zone, keep off!

    IT IS A SIGN that puts the fear of God in people, especially those of us that the military derisively call ‘bloody civilians’. The words that make the legend are only two, but weighty and powerful. They give the strong goosebumps, to the dismay of the lily-livered. Land grabbers too see the words, and run, despite being known for their own ‘craze’, to borrow a street lingo.

    The words: ‘military zone’ are as old as the institution itself. They are not words meant to be splashed on any building or land for the fun of it. They are words that indicate the military status of certain places. But, in our environment, these words have been abused. Mind you, the abuse did not start today. It started aeons ago. You might have seen the words splashed on fenced bushy lands or houses under construction. At times, there are uniformed men guarding these properties, which in some instances are owned by civilians, who enjoy the privilege of having top military officers as friends.

    Yet, they carry the frightening words: ‘military zone, keep off’. Peep inside, you will not military activities going on there. The signpost was erected just to scare people away from the land owned by either a top officer or a well connected civilian. There was no such sign, though on the Abuja property which a naval officer, Lieutenant Ahmed Yerima, prevented Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, from accessing on November 11 for verification. The officer claimed he was carrying out the orders of his boss, Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo, a former chief of naval staff.

    Yerima has attained celebrity status since the incident, with an unenlightened but highly educated crowd praising him for standing up to Wike. It is the carryover of the ‘military zone’ mentality that imbued Yerima with the audacity to take on Wike in full public glare. Though, the Abuja property where he stood guard with some of his subordinates did not bear the words: ‘military zone’, their presence alone was the equivalence of those words, and more.The military has over the years used and is still using those words to forcibly enforce its right to any land of its choice. If it takes the Wike incident to curtail these military excesses, the public will jump for joy.

    But first, what led to the tiff? We are told that the land is owned by Gambo, who deployed Yerima to guard it. Under military law, it is wrong to use officers as well as the rank and file for non-military duty. If the naval chief wanted protection for a land, that is purely a civil case, which he should have reported to the police. He did not. Rather, he resorted to self help and used his constituency to enforce his right to a land which is reserved for a parkway, and not residential.

    It was said that the land was sold to him by the allotee who acquired it for the designated purpose of parks and recreation but resorted to partitiong it for sale to the unsuspecting public for residential purpose. Gambo was one of the unlucky buyers. In land law, there is a maxim known as caveat emptor, that is buyer beware. A buyer is expected to make enquiries upon enquiries before buying any land. If he does not, and he is scammed, he will face the consequences of his action. Gambo is paying the price for not doing due diligence before buying the land.

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    He cannot now take out his anger on Wike and officials of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) by using his aides to enforce a right that does not exist. What about the civilian victims of the deal? What should they do? Who will fight for them since they do not have the military like Gambo to help them? People seem to  forget that under the law, every land in Abuja is invested in the FCT Minister, just as the governors in their respective states.

    And just like the governors, Wike cannot stand by and allow anybody, no matter how highly placed, to use might to enforce his right to a land illegally acquired, ab initio. It becomes worse where the military, which should be the custodian of discipline and decency, is involved in a matter that should ordinarily be handled by the police. The illegal protection of a property is not the same as defending the country’s territorial integrity, which is the military’s main duty.

    This ‘military zone’ mentality of might is right has no place in our society. The earlier officers like Gambo and Yerima and their ilk know this, the better for them, and every Nigerian, no matter their profession. Some of Yerima’s superiors and colleagues may be gloating behind the scenes over how he treated Wike, but I leave him with this adage, “if you are sent on an errand as a slave, you deliver it like a freeborn”.

    He and his boss should not be carried away by the misguided notion of having public sympathy on their side. They, like every other serving and retired military personnel, should subjugate themselves to civilian authority and accord Wike as well as other ministers their due respect.

    By so doing, Gambo and Yerima would be honouring their Commander-in-Chief under whose authority they were  commissioned. It is Wike today. It may be another minister or any other citizen, for that matter, tomorrow, and the end result may be dire. We should not wait for that to happen before officers like Yerima are called to order for undermining civilian authority.

  • COP30: The way forward

    COP30: The way forward

    I was at the first Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Climate Change in Berlin in 1995. I was then ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. It just happened that I was privy to the policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1995 after I had served as one of the two special advisers to the honourable minister of foreign affairs. Our delegation was led by the permanent secretary of the Federal Ministry of Works. It included myself as Nigeria’s ambassador to Germany, our representative in the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC,) one or two civil servants from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA). This conference in Berlin was sequel to the first Earth Conference held in Rio de Janeiro Brazil in 1992. It was the first Earth conference which attracted the attention of the whole world to the dire situation of the world to the problem of environmental abuse and climate change and the need to reverse the degradation of the environment if humankind was to survive at all.

    After  Rio de Janeiro were to follow series of COP now numbering 30 again holding in Brazil  because of the importance of the Amazon forest mainly in Brazil as the global lungs, destruction of which may pose existential problems to humanity. The Earth conference was a natural progression from the Gro Harlo Brundtland’s commission. The commission was set up and known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)  set up in 1983 and reported in 1987 raising the issue of sustainable development, that is to say, balancing the issue of development and environment. Gro Harlem Brundtland was a prominent Norwegian politician and physician who headed a UN commission which first raised in a systemic way that resources were not infinite and that for the world to remain viable and liveable, mankind must try to grow and develop without harming the environment unlike the slash and burn agricultural production and natural resources consumption the world was guilty of since the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The Brundtland report became a sing song in international environmental consciousness preceding the Earth Conference of 1992.

    Later, the emphasis shifted to climate change by 1995 which embraced larger subject than the issue of sustainability alone. I again was part of the Nigerian delegation to COP 15 which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009. Over the years, the COP conferences had become more or less an annual jamboree holding in many places all over the continents of the world. The recurring issues were the sharp divisions between the global industrial North and the underdeveloped South, between the large countries and the threatened island countries; between those who were responsible for global pollution while developing and the undeveloped south which logically argued that those responsible for damaging the environment should pay for its cleaning on the principle of “polluter pays“ and on the unmet pledges of capital to be transferred to those who  are underdeveloped so that they  do not go along the polluting trajectory as the developed. 

    There is also the question of the amount to be transferred from the developed to the under developed. There is also the division between carbon resources-rich countries and those who do not have gas, carbon and petroleum and are still undeveloped and, finally, between technological innovators and others not able to manufacture products in which energy was needed in their production.

    Now let me go back to the beginning of COP 1. It was at the Berlin conference that the permanent headquarters of the commission was determined. The German government had gotten in touch with me soliciting our vote if nominated. By that time, German companies were involved in the building of our Aluminium complex in Ikosi Abasi, among other projects which included our electricity, telecommunications and railways and motor vehicles assembly in Enugu and Lagos. I made their request known to my minister, General Ike Nwachukwu who authorized our voting for Germany. I did not only nominate Bonn which would be most attractive for housing when the federal capital would have moved to Berlin, I also campaigned for Germany. When we voted, even the Americans who wanted Geneva could not carry the day. I have followed the movement for environmental abatement since 1995. I even formed an NGO named “Nigerian Environmental Protection Society” to make environmental awareness common knowledge in Nigeria. We had annual conferences focusing on the intelligentsia and we published our proceedings which were widely distributed to the media and the universities. Unfortunately the passion seemed to have waned after leaving the university.

    One of the greatest blows to the global campaign for environmental rehabilitation to ensure that we reverse the global warming to just 1.5% above the pre industrial level was the lukewarm attitude of the conservative elements in the USA and Western Europe and now the USA under Donald Trump has dismissed the whole campaign as a hoax and fraud and this presumably is the policy of the ruling Republican Party. This is in spite of international agreement signed in 1997 at the end of COP3 in Kyoto when an understanding by the international community led to agreed limits by industrialised countries of the amount each country was committed to while the developing countries were to make lesser commitments about their greenhouse gases emissions.to reverse global warming to pre-industrial level even though not legally enforceable. The non-actionable Kyoto agreement was made enforceable in COP21 in Paris in 2015. These two international agreements have been torn into pieces by President Trump because he has said the agreements were against the interest of the United States. He has gone further by denouncing the agreements as a fraud and hoax and said global warming was natural occurrence which will remedy itself. His lapdogs have even disputed the scientific basis of global warming.

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    This does not mean that the struggle is in vain. It is just delayed. This is because in the normal cycle of American politics, Trump and his Republican Party will be defeated electorally. Secondly, the sub national entities, the states and big cities in the USA are committed to policy of environmental enhancement and many of the polluting industrial giants like the automobile manufacturers are committed to it and are producing electric cars and trucks that are emitting less carbon dioxide. Thirdly, China the biggest polluters are producing more green renewable products like vehicles and solar roofs that get their heat from the sun. There are researches into other sources of power like tidal waves, burning methane which apart from carbon gases contributes to global warming. There are great strides in harnessing hydrogen and hydro power from natural falls and dams.

    In spite what some national governments may say and do, some countries are even cutting down on their cattle since it has been proved that cows emit methane, a greenhouse gas which is responsible for 9% of gas responsible for global warming. The campaign against global warming has become personal in civilized countries that are moving away from conspicuous consumption to responsible sustainable development. Despite all the positive progress in the campaign there are still great obstacles.

    From a personal experience, Nigeria like most members of OPEC will not support policies that will suddenly make their economies that are energy export dependent go down the drain by an international agreement that dismisses their concern. This was my personal experience in two COPs I have attended. There is a powerful OPEC lobby at every Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change. The way to bring all nations into responsible climate policy is to share experiences and knowledge and innovation with all countries so that they are on the same plane.

    The current COP30 is deadlocked on who to contribute the one trillion dollars that is to be put in a special facility to fight global warming and if possible reverse environmental pollution with the application of abatement measures that all nations, small or big, islands that are sinking through no fault of theirs, developed and under developed countries can jointly embrace in the common cause.

    I sympathize with our Third World nations who argue on the grounds that those who were responsible ab initio for the problem should carry the can. However, we should make progress through shared and incremental gradation in payment so that no country should be put off though finger pointing. Nobody will be safe in a situation of global homicide if we don’t change our ways and collectively face and solve the problem of present and past pollution resulting into current climate change. The signs are clear because we now have overwhelming heat and cold, unseasonably excessive rainfall causing flooding, unusual heat and dryness causing bushfires, challenging changes causing a threat to biodiversity and rising heat in our oceans and melting icecaps in the North and South poles leading among other things, to unmanageable rise in our oceans and loss of habitats for small islands populations.

    I hope that COP 30 will focus on the climate change problem and not take on board issues that deviate from the main issues. The moment ideological issues of eradication of poverty, status of women just to mention a few non-climate issues that divert attention from the primary concerns; we should know diversions from core issues will undermine seriously the non-ideological question of the climate.

  • Undertaker journalism

    Undertaker journalism

    The Nigerian tragedy is seldom written in the ricochet of bullets alone. Sometimes, it is scripted in newsrooms, goaded by keypad confidence. Thus the journalistic frenzy to thump the “publish” button, a mania amplified by a press that forgets, that journalism, even at its freest, is never free of consequence.

    Today, Nigeria is locked in an existential struggle with terror, weakened by governmental missteps, and a press that often mistakes adversarial passion for professional duty.

    I do not, hereby, plead for capitulation or censorship. The media must never become lapdog to a captured state, nor submit to the patronage of criminal actors. But there is a difference between watchdog journalism and rabid barking that alerts the burglar to the location of the sleeping homeowner. In the case of Brigadier General Musa Uba, executed after being captured by ISWAP terrorists following an ambush, Nigeria witnessed the devastating consequences of a press that prioritised speed over discernment and exposure over prudence.

    Taiwo Adebayo, an investigative journalist, was one of the few to articulate the tragedy with clarity, dispassion, and professional responsibility. His reflections reveal uncomfortable truths about journalistic practice and the deeper malaise of contemporary reportage.

    His well articulated piece highlights the abandonment of social responsibility ethics in an age of hyper-competition, digital ego tripping, click-bait survival, and the commodification of despair.

    There is a lot that distinguishes terrorism reporting from random reportage; it is strategic terrain, in which a seemingly harmless sentence may save or destroy lives, where an innocuous headline or rider may either protect neighbourhoods or expose them to slaughter.

    Brigadier General Uba, Commander of the Nigerian Army’s 25 Task Force Brigade, in Borno, initially escaped the ISWAP ambush and communicated with colleagues, from his hiding in the forest, while awaiting rescue. But he was exposed by Nigeria’s digital media sphere. News media, raring to update and publish first; eager to sate the lust of a public addicted to breaking news, compromised Uba.

     The first wave of reports declared him missing or abducted. Another set, possibly published to reduce embarrassment within military circles, suggested that he had been rescued. But ISWAP, like every insurgent group with digital intelligence capability, was listening. They monitored the reports, identified the window of vulnerability, mobilised a unit, and swept the area. The general was recaptured near a village in Damboa. His phone confirmed his rank and value. Soon after, he was killed.

    While this manifests as military failure; it was also a newsroom-assisted catastrophe. The Nigerian newsroom must hold itself accountable for endangering Uba, for failing to ask the crucial questions in a conflict where human lives hang in the balance: Is this information confirmed? Could publishing it worsen the danger? Is the intelligence incomplete, unverified, or strategically sensitive? Does the public’s right to know in this moment outweigh the risk of losing a life?

    Had those questions guided the reporting, as Adebayo rightly observed, the press could still have informed the nation, without informing the enemy. Responsible editorial judgment is hardly censorship. It is the basic social duty journalism owes the society that protects its freedom.

    General Uba, therefore, was betrayed by the press that should have protected him through thoughtful, sequenced, ethically weighted reporting, until his rescue was complete or his fate was certain.

    But the problem exceeds procedural lapses, it is complex and deeply embedded. Vast segments of the Nigerian press have adopted a posture of reflexive cynicism, an adversarial tone that casts the nation as a perpetual disappointment and its institutions as irredeemable. In the process, patriotism has become outmoded, even suspicious. Love of country is treated as a sign of naivety or complicity.

    Thus, many journalists will celebrate the American military, the British special forces, the IDF, or the French Foreign Legion as the gold standards of military competence. But when reporting on Nigerian troops, they prefer frames of cowardice, incompetence, corruption, or buffoonery. Some of those criticisms are deserved, taking into cognizance, the tactical lapses and operational misconduct that have marred counterinsurgency operations.

    Yet to consistently strip one’s own defenders of dignity while upholding foreign counterparts as flawless heroes constitutes both irresponsible journalism and ideological self-harm. The Nigerian soldier—the one sleeping in foxholes in Sambisa and the one patrolling across vast, hostile terrain—may not be perfect. But those men and women are the living wall between Nigeria and fragmentation.

    The press that reports their battles, therefore, ought to do so with balance, sobriety, and an allegiance to peace above sensationalism.

    Yet media irresponsibility is an illness that extends beyond the newsroom. It is the symptom of a broader civic decay as the journalist is rarely the lone saboteur of the Nigerian enterprise.

    Doctors, engineers, bus conductors, teachers, bankers, students and unemployed youths, to mention a few, have adopted a bitter doctrine of mockery of their homeland. Too many Nigerians speak of the country as if it were a cursed burden rather than a shared project. Thus the gleeful taunt: “If Nigeria happens to you, you will learn the hard way.” This is despair masked as humour. It is helplessness weaponised into collective self-disdain. And until this disposition shifts, no reforms will yield enduring transformation.

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    That is why the media and the literary arts must be courted both as observers and active participants in national renewal. Nations that have overcome great crises, from post-war Japan to post-genocide Rwanda, did so through policy and narrative. They re-authored themselves, telling new stories about who they were and what futures they deserved.

    Nigeria must do the same. Our press and cultural institutions must become partners in reframing patriotism as a responsible civic posture, even as we replace mockery with narratives of ownership and duty. National progress is not a spectator sport thus the need for a practical national reorientation plan, anchored in Nigeria’s capacity to actualise radical reforms and sustain its proceeds.

    The stakes have grown higher amid internal threats posed by terrorists, bandits, separatist militias and external pressures. There are desperate actors abroad, including a missionary political lobby in the United States, agitating for intervention under the guise of protecting Nigerian Christians from targeted genocide. No serious student of geopolitics doubts that humanitarian pretexts have historically served as covers for invasion, regime change, and neo-imperial disruption.

    If Nigeria becomes the next theatre of “saving Africans from themselves,” the loss will be borne by Nigerians, not Washington. It’s our children whose classrooms will be shelled. Our farmlands will become battlefields and our cities will be bombed to rubble. The economy will collapse under artillery and sanctions, and the multi-ethnic federation that we are so proud of, will splinter beyond repair.

    Nigeria has far more to lose from foreign intervention, than it stands to gain. Thus, the press as a chronicler of national events must always protect the country’s security and sovereignty through socially responsible reporting. Going forward, journalists must weigh every revelation with the seriousness of a surgeon deciding where to cut.

    The media must collectively build stronger newsroom ethics for real-time conflict reporting; journalists must be trained on how insurgent groups mine media coverage for tactical intelligence; even as we build institutional structures for dialogue between the media and security agencies.

    The intent isn’t to turn the fourth estate into a propagandist arm of government, but to renew civic patriotism and remind journalists that freedom of the press exists so that society may live, not die prematurely.

  • Quest for state police

    Quest for state police

    Of all apparatuses of state power, the police have more influence and wield more power than judges, bishops, politicians and soldiers. It is also perhaps the most critical institution for the smooth running of communities and survival of society as we today know it. The alternative to public order, enforcement of law and protection of citizen and their property, is of course anarchy, where life becomes the survival of the fittest. It is the de facto government in most rural communities and to some extent in some urban settings. They perform the role of jurors, judges, priests, therapists, peace maker etc. Their station is the first port of call for the aggrieved, depraved, warring housewives and elite members eager to protect the disproportionate share of the nation’s resources they have cornered. This is why a nation that plays politics with its police often pay dearly for its folly.

    But for our continued desecration of principles of federal arrangement, the huge expenses wasted on failed  ‘Operation Sharan Daji (Sweep the Forest)’, ‘Operation Harbin Kunama (Scorpion Sting) Operation Diran Mikiya (Eagle Fighting), “Operation Puff Adder,” “Operation Maximum Safety” aimed not only “at taking the battle to the doorsteps of the criminals” but to “rout-out, arrest and prosecute armed bandits, vicious kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustling gangs operating in Zamfara State, would have been saved. The relief nine years of bombing could not secure for besieged people of Zamfara is what community policing routinely secures for communities where they wield power and influence as representative of government.

    And the reason for this is simple. As against indiscriminate bombing of siblings in Zamfara for example, by strangers, local police recruits from the warring Hausa subsistence farmers and Fulani herders would have constituted themselves into a balance of terror faced with a choice of continued mindless killing of themselves or resolving their differences in the interest of their different communities that look up to them for direction.

    But beyond this, there are places in the north according to Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State, where one can drive for three hours without sighting policemen who are expected to constitute government of such areas. Since there is no vacuum in nature, such areas become haven for insurgents and bandits. This is why for him – there is no alternative to decentralization of the police architecture in order to create state police if “we are sincere in addressing the problem of criminal activities of banditry and kidnapping”.

    Unfortunately, until recently, politicians from the south and the north have always taken irreconcilable positions on the issue of state police The Fulani ruling elite for fear of allowing children of the oppressed Hausa to operate in areas they have monopolized for long, opposed state and community policing even with most part of the north under siege.

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    The governor of Kaduna State, an advocate of state police, took the crusade to the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Distinguished Lecture Series, where he delivered a lecture titled, “The Role of State Governments in Overcoming Insecurity in Nigeria where he insisted “there is no alternative to creation of state police if we are sincere in addressing the problem criminal activities, banditry, kidnapping”.

    President Tinubu who seems to have his hands tied by political consideration has always been a crusader for decentralization and state police. Decentralisation was in fact part of his campaign promises.

    In February 2024, his government inaugurated a committee to develop a framework for state policing. Not long after, the National Economic Council (NEC) announced that nearly all the 36 states had submitted memoranda on the creation of state police, with most of them in agreement with the proposal. The president thereafter, reiterated that the creation of state police is no longer optional but a necessary step to strengthen Nigeria’s security architecture in the face of persistent threats across the country.

    In September this year, the president told the Council of State the need of a revisit to state police after hailing the performance of JTF helping people returning to their homes: “I have looked more carefully at the security situation. I see the efforts of civilian JTF and communities. This has again provoked my thinking on state police. We can work with the National Assembly to design a framework that guarantees local ownership while ensuring political neutrality,” the president declared.

    The president also used the occasion of a recent visit by a delegation of Katsina indigenes led by Governor Dikko Radda to the Presidential Villa in Abuja to assure them of his government’s commitment to the creation of state police. “I am reviewing all the aspects of security; I have to create state police. We are looking at that holistically”.

    It must be noted that the Buhari administration was not opposed to creation of state police following the general demand by majority of the state governors. His only fear according to Garba Shehu, his senior media adviser, was about the capacity of state governors in arrears of staff salaries to carry the burden of new salaries. That fear no more exist today with the humongous amount of money going to the states and local governments.

    Of course we cannot decree against some overbearing state governors from abusing state police.  The consolation is that there will be rule of engagement and there will be a system of check and balancing.

    Our major crisis of nation-building since the collapse of the first republic is non-adherence to principles of federal arrangement as enshrined in our constitution. Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo started the process of overloading the exclusive list with items removed from concurrent list to fulfil their ill-advised policy of ensuring ethnic nationalities at different levels of cultural development even before the advent of colonial rule, now operate at the same level. With the total disappearance of residual list, we started operating unitary rule in the name of federal arrangement.

    Unfortunately, neither the classical model builders that see federalism as “a form of government in which sovereignty or political power is divided between the central and local governments, in such a way that each of them is independent within its sphere”, nor modern proponents of cooperative federalism that emphasize cooperation between the centre and the federating states envisaged a situation where the centre which in any case, is not superior to the subunits, will usurp the power of the subunits to police themselves.

    How will states perform their primary role of protecting lives and properties of citizen if denied the right to police themselves?

    Abridging the constitutional right of the subunits to police themselves is the source of social dislocations we witness across the country. For instance, the sources of conflict in places like Zamfara, Katsina, Benue and Plateau is the rivalry between indigenes and settlers over control of political and economic resources. The cheapest approach since both groups have been condemned to live together would have been recruiting state and community police among the two warring groups. That outcome will be balance of terror that could force the two warring groups to sit down and address their common problem since the alternative to living in peace will be endless reprisal killings.

    Again, quest for state policing is a symptom of self-inflicted crisis of nation-building. The truth is that some of our powerful leaders have no faith in the country. They are more interested in what they can take out of the country than building a nation. All our self-proclaiming patriotic leaders including those who fraudulently claimed they “sacrificed their present for our future”, are responsible for the nation’s nightmare since the collapse of the first republic. After all, it was never lost on any of them that there is hardly any state with federal structure from India to Brazil, Canada to Germany and the US from where we copied our constitution that does not operate a decentralized police force.

    The president has expressed his commitment to creation of state police He must walk the talk by prevailing on the National Assembly to be on the side of the people. Instead of throwing bombs and deploying soldiers to fight warring siblings who live among themselves, I think it is time to allow local people under the supervision of local police who are stakeholders face their own demon. As Governor Uba Sani told us “when states take ownership of security and development, peace becomes sustainable”.

  • PDP, O, their PDP!

    PDP, O, their PDP!

    The Once self-styled largest party in Africa, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), is imploding. In fact, some say it is dead. They may be correct, amid the party’s struggles to rediscover and reposition itself for the future. The process for doing so is somehow proving difficult, as its warring leaders are going in and out of court. At the last count, three courts, all of coordinate jurisdiction, have granted orders either suspending or approving its convention billed to start in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital,  on Saturday, just 48 hours away.

    Its budding national leader and Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde has since vowed that no jupiter can stop the convention. He is doing everything underground to ensure that this comes to pass. But the forces against him, and his counterparts in Bauchi and Adamawa, Bala Muhammed and Umaru Fintiri, three of the party’s remaining eight governors, desperately pushing for the convention are many. Will the convention hold, despite the two orders stopping the exercise and the one approving it? The public is watching with amusement as it awaits further developments (or do we say fresh exparte orders?).

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    Former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido, who is interested in the national chairman’s job, obtained the latest order on Tuesday from an Abuja Federal High Court, stopping the convention. He went to court on October 31 to stop the convention, but Justice Peter Lifu, declined to grant the order on the strength of Lamido’s exparte motion (that is one-sided application). Justice Lifu asked him to serve the other parties so that the motion could be heard and determined in the presence of all. The judge did that on Tuesday, and fixed today for further hearing, after acknowledging that he was aware of the October 31 verdict of his brother-judge, Justice James Omotosho, who also sits in Abuja, stopping the convention.

    But Justice Ladiran Akintola of the Ibadan High Court on November 3 approved the holding of the convention and its monitoring by the independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) based on an exparte motion. When the parties appeared before him on Monday, he declined to lift the exparte injunction as requested by the other side which drew his attention to Justice Omotosho’s verdict. He asked them to return today. Will the convention hold or not? How will Justice Akintola untie the legal knot which his exparte order seems to have become? The holding of the convention depends on him and his handling of this vexed issue. All eyes are on him.