The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Beyond APC Osun debacle

    Beyond APC Osun debacle

    Unlike our traditional political system where groups constituted the building blocks of society, democracy, the new imported value system celebrates individuals. The defeat of incumbent Governor Oyetola of Osun by dancing Senator Ademola Adeleke, last weekend was a celebration of democracy. The problem with our democratization process however has always been the conspiracy of our political elite who see democracy only as the shortest route to power and are ready to destroy political parties, an ingenious 17th century creation of political elite without which democracy can thrive the moment their interests are threatened.

    While with the recent movement of Peter Obi from APGA to PDP, and PDP to Labour and before then, Atiku’s periodic shuffling between  PDP, to ACN, PDP, APC and now back to PDP, it can be said that the same demon afflicts all Nigerian politicians, the effect has been more destructive in the southwest perhaps because of their worldview.  For instance, while the Igbo political elite prefer a unitary  system which will allow Igbo to carry out their ‘buy and sell’ trade anywhere in Nigeria, the Fulani, following Uthman Dan Fodio’s conquest of Hausa states between 1804-1808 have come to regard Nigeria as an ungoverned land  reserved for the rehabilitation of the stateless Fulani across Africa.

    Yoruba who on the other hand are by nature federalists have worked harder than any other group towards institutionalization of a federal arrangement that will liberate groups and individuals from the tyranny of the Nigerian state. Federalism and democracy are of course like twin brothers and are both required for elite consensus needed for the management of diversities in deeply society like ours.  Assaults on these values which unfortunately have always come from the southwest since independence remain the greatest betrayal of our own visionary Yoruba leaders who labored to bequeath a federal constitution unto us at independence.

    For instance, on May 29, 1962, following disagreement over sharing of dividends between AG major shareholders, Chiefs S. L. Akintola, Ayo Rosiji, Okunowo and Akerele were sanctioned for anti-party offences.  But rather than behave like democrats and loyal party men,  they chose to sell their leader and the Action Group, it’s modernization agent to Azikiwe’s NCNC and Ahmadu Bello’s NPC.

    UPN suffered the same fate in the second republic when Akin Omoboriowo, in order to upstage Ajasin, his boss, invited the ruling NPN that purportedly secured for him “landslide and seaslide’ victories in opposition strongholds. Iyiola Omisore similarly joined PDP to destroy his party and derail the development programme of his principal in Osun. Just as Sunday Afolabi, Bola Ige’s deputy as Oyo State governor joined NPN where he was made a minister after working for the downfall of his principal. Ige himself betrayed his Afenifere fellow cult members and their AD party to join Obasanjo’s PDP as attorney general because he lost out in AD presidential ticket contest. Sadly both died tragically working for Obasanjo. One assassinated in his room on December 23, 2001 by yet to-be-identified assailants and the other while awaiting trial over alleged $2m bribe from Sagem, a firm then handling the national identity card project.

    Aregbesola , sidelined by APC Southwest major shareholders  was quoted as threatening to ‘stop Oyetola in Osun as Ambode was stopped’ by his estranged godfather in Lagos’,  Early this week, from faraway US, he celebrated the defeat of his predecessor and his party, with quotes from the Bible. His supporters have also linked the decimation of their party to the internal wrangling within APC while Senator Adeleke, the Osun governor-elect admitted on Channels TV programme, last Monday that Aregbesola’s men worked for him.

    As 2023 beckons, Yoruba must work against this self-destruct tendency which in Yoruba translates to – ‘If the rat cannot eat beans inside the calabash, it can scatter them in the sand’.

    Our current socio-economic problems including corruption, religious intolerance, terrorism and banditry are but symptoms of absence of a workable federal constitution that helped us to manage our diversity until 1966. It was Yoruba politicians’ undermining of that constitution and our party system that resulted in its replacement with ‘Decree 24’, a baleful legacy of Igbo/ Fulani and their military fronts that according to Alabi Isama, ruled our country between 1959 and 2015.

    And if the challenge of 2023  is electing  a visionary leader who must eschew  injustice, ensure fairness and must have demonstrated his capacity to build an elite consensus needed for the management of our diversity, we must start by interrogating the legacies of Obi and Tinubu as governors of Anambra and Lagos at different periods and  that of Abubakar Atiku as vice president who presided over the sale of Nigeria’s total investments of about $100b for a paltry $1.5b to cronies who had access to state funds.

    Of the three, Tinubu so far has been the one that has come under serious scrutiny by his Yoruba compatriots despite having never worked with the federal government, secured contracts or collected grants to set up media empire. And Igbo-Lagos urban immigrants who cannot go to their states for fear of terrorists and kidnappers have joined his Yoruba detractors to do “O to ge” for him in Lagos.

    Similarly, Igbo Christians are the loudest critics of his Muslim-Muslim ticket even when it is not likely they will vote for him even if he decides to pick an Archbishop as his VP candidate from the East. Available records of voting pattern have shown the southeast and south-south led by Pa Edwin Clark, rather than identify with Yoruba aspirations, have, since independence aligned with the north.

    Those Yoruba who never see anything good in Tinubu even though he is head and shoulder better than his other two rivals, always assume they can impose their culture on a nation at different levels of cultural development.  For them, even Awo, the sage, who a British leader said would make a successful British Prime Minister or US President was not good enough. They joined his detractors to send him to jail.  Another Yoruba leader, MKO Abiola who in spite of Igbo and Fulani political elite’s conspiracy, won  a pan-Nigerian mandate died in prison for winning the most credible election in the nation’s history. Obasanjo, an imposition by Igbo and Fulani elite to spite the Yoruba   publicly admitted he is not a Yoruba leader. He will be remembered more for exploiting Yoruba quest for restructuring to humiliate our revered Afenifere leaders.

    Finally may we remind Yoruba pastors teaching our children how to speak in tongues while Israeli  and their Arab half-brothers are teaching their children science and mathematics to prepare them for the challenges of tomorrow, that Adeleke with his Christian/Christian ticket in a predominantly Muslim Osun last week,  defeated a sitting Muslim Governor.

    As discriminatory voters who are never blinded by religious emotions and who Awolowo said would not vote for someone because he is Yoruba, Tinubu is assured of 50% of Yoruba votes.  I guess he thinks by the choice of his vice presidential candidate, he can complement that by sharing the northeast votes with Atiku. As for the northwest, whose son he helped to power twice and on whose behalf, Tinubu stoically carry the scars of arrows aimed at Buhari by frustrated Nigerian victims of herdsmen and bandits attack, he expects one good turn deserves the other.

  • 2023: As cyber-Nigeria turns toxic spectacle

    2023: As cyber-Nigeria turns toxic spectacle

    Today, we relive the infernal crud of the Nigerian personae. The political animal, the apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ and the data-fabulous millennial ‘netizen’ scud to shore national consciousness on the worldwide web, in support of one presidential candidate or the other.

    Ultimately they cuddle one candidate and cringe from the other, as their vanities dictate. They’d call it value-based politics, however. Yet, this minute, cyberspace becomes a spectacle. In this virtual arena, citizens clash in defense and furtherance of random bigotries.

    In this public space, everybody is a political wilding: folk trade bitter realism, infantile whim, pseudo idealism, rancid wit with alarming gusto. They claim to do this for the culture. If Nigerian politics had a culture.

    The internet has become a monument to pseudo-realities and events. It is a place where stereotypes are propagated as reality. The guts and sinews of every pigeonhole, theme-park hatred, and sentimentality, however, hold the same as its professors seek validation in mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.

    A casual visit to Facebook, Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage of sort; the esplanades of public discourse pander and unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with the affliction of ethnic and religious bigotry, and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies – all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.

    In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.

    Here you encounter Nigerians of vast mental stripes: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.

    As the bickering persists, we see the savage mutations of the political Nigerian: persons of presumed higher learning, persons afflicted by poverty, persons of affluence, authority, and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy; the aura vanishes. Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.

    A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion, hope to disenchantment festers in the citizenry’s public engagement with each other and their elected representatives

    But our greatest undoing would be our inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by our utterances and cutthroat politics.

    As we approach the 2023 polls, for instance, our politics must be rid of rancour. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for its political choices and preferred candidates.

    Where such mayhem subsists,  everybody gets burnt: the ruling class, opposition parties, the entitled elite, and the rich upper class. At the bottom of the cauldron, however, roasts the incorrigible hordes of the boondocks, or the electorate if you like.

    Through the inferno and chaos, we seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. Strikeout patriot; it’s about time we redefined the Nigerian. Nigerian – a clownish, simple creature, at times even enchanting within its limitations but ultimately foredoomed to fulfill a prophecy of blind pride, insatiable lust, and suicide?

    It is never my wish to subject anyone to seemingly reckless deprecation but even as you read, the random ‘netizen’ perfects innumerable plots to self-destruct. Behind those suicidal plots lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret – that emotive shingle that often succeeds disreputable nature.

    Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving the essence of humanity and freedom, only to forsake it for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time. Just like we did at the last general elections.

    This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots and rejuvenators of the Nigerian dream. If we look carefully inwards, we will find that beneath our toxicity, selective morality and utter cowardice stirs gruesome airs and a quest for self-preservation.

    Time and over again, a few critics and self-appointed leaders of thought have decried our ethical fraudulence, cutthroat politics, and lack of guts; such curious kinks of the Nigerian electorate, unfortunately, do exist at a grievous price and must be reckoned with. Yet these shameful twists to our psyches make us even more vulnerable as fair game to gangs of the predatory ruling class.

    The latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or bloodshed even if we tried. Yet the surest way to deny them continual access to leadership and power is for us to engage constructively in the ongoing transition process.

    We must shun the urge to emerge grisly manifestations of the Nigerian factor; we must quit personifying the monstrosities standing on our path to humane civilization, progress, and common decency.

    It’s about time Nigeria’s youth stopped personifying such frantic manifestations and chart their path to freedom from toxic politicking.

    Education is the key out of this mental and moral jail cell. A different kind of education borne of critical faculties and divorced from the high-priced occupational training by which the modern university turns several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

    While violence and terrorism are often part of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolt is the non-violent conversion of the forces deployed by the oppressors or the state to hoodwink and enforce dominance, on the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, for this reason, fundamentally non-violent.

    Revolutionary measures, however, fail in Nigeria, because the arrowheads of the movements continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous chant, that hackneyed dialect that is a barrier to development and communication.

    It is the same dialect adopted by the political and corporate con-artists to bait the electorate and reel in their votes; only to hoodwink them afterward, and rig the political process and financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their elite psyops and propaganda labs.

    To strip the incumbent ruling class of power, a new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.

    This can’t be achieved via the 2023 elections. Now is a good time to start, however. We must begin to teach the Nigerian voter: graduate and undergrad, street urchin, trader, commercial transporter, the armed forces, and unemployed, the benefits of restraint and self-sacrifice, critical and realistic thinking.

    We need not bury the lessons and the process in obscure or esoteric lingo. Teach them to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share corn meals and hold town-hall meetings at the dawn of general elections.

    Teach them to scorn the presidential aspirant scudding to acclaim on a sea of lies, sophistry, and half-truths. Teach them to scorn the legislative representatives, who commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower their constituents with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

    Teach them to ask their elected representatives, why they must blindly support the latter’s battles with perceived political detractors or opposition. After all, we are one Nigeria. Teach them to scorn violence, vote-selling, and hooliganism.

    Help them understand that a loss at the polls should never translate to bitterness and withdrawal from the Nigerian enterprise; political violence and hooliganism are never acceptable resorts in nation-building.

    Better tomorrow can only be achieved via humane, visionary politics tailored for the collective good.

  • Kuje jailbreak, symptom of absentee governance

    Kuje jailbreak, symptom of absentee governance

    Again, the Kuje prison tragedy is but one more symptom of collapse of governance in our country – and no thanks to President Buhari’s administrative style ‘of delegation by abdication’, euphemism for absence of governance. At an age when government has become a science, President Buhari puts round pegs in square holes and while not flying around the world in search of loans for his legacy projects, he simply sits back watching his ‘loyal gatekeepers’, serving other tendencies in his government sow seeds of social dislocations that today threaten the very survival of our nation. Since there are no rules, his political appointees set their own standards which make accountability or sanctions unnecessary.

    While our children spend several months at home because of ASUU strike, the president said little as self-conceited ministers of education and labour arrogantly strut and swagger around. They even breached the constitution trying to seek elective positions as government employees paid by taxpayers. The naira is said to be worth less than the paper on which it was printed while the CBN governor, in pursuit of his presidential ambition was setting up structures and hiring lawyers to defend his abuse of position.

    Fuel scarcity whose daily consumption moved from 35million litres per day in February 2018 to 65.7million per day in January this year and jumped to 72.07 million litres a day, in May this year, is biting hard. Mele Kyari, Group Managing Director of NNPC blamed increase in fuel consumption which attracted over N500b subsidy so far this year on smuggling across borders.

    Bandits, herdsmen and other insurgents call the shot. Kidnapped train victims have been kept in captivity for close to three months.  Relatives of recently released seven were said to have raised N800m to liberate their loved ones while 57 remain in captivity. The president who is under stress and strain got little relief from ministers of information, defence, petroleum and digital technology while Abubakar Malami, another round peg in square hole, chose the moment of the president’s tribulation to assault sensibilities of Nigerians by increasing his harem to three with solemnization of marriage with the president’s 41-year-old divorced daughter which, newspapers reports claim, already have six children.

    If we needed more evidence of absence of governance, all we need to do is to interrogate the president’s lamentation as to “how terrorists organize, have weapons, attack security installation and get away with it” during his brief stop-over at the damaged Kuje Medium Correctional Centre en route Senegal where he secured more international loan for his legacy projects and Senegal’s highest national honour for his service to Africa.

    But then President Buhari is the only one who can answer those questions. He alone knows why he appointed Mohammed Maigari Dingyadi as Minister of Police Affairs. Dingyadi, a former secretary to Sokoto State Government and one-time chairman National Commission for Education is undoubtedly an accomplished Nigerian. But without any form of training or experience in the security department, it is only the president who can say if there is anything that qualified Dingyadi for the job other than the accident of coming from Dingyadi Sokoto.

    Dingyadi was honest enough not pretend to be what he was not while explaining the relative ease with which the terrorists accomplished their mission. He had said to reporters: “I think what helped them was the number of people they came with and their superior weapons”. But to underscore the tragedy of our security architecture, his answers contradicted that of the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola who insisted there were enough forces and equipment in Kuje which he said is “medium by size but maximum by the security provided”. He then spoke of a “a platoon of military officers and men … the highest grade of military police and other security forces for deployment for protection.”

    And since both are round pegs in square holes, they did not bother to explain how 300-armed terrorist travelled for hours through the various police checkpoints and military formations around Abuja and why their exits with their priced haul of 60 hardened Boko Haram terrorists could not be blocked.

    Again, only President Buhari knows what qualified Rauf Aregbesola for Minister of Interior after his uninspiring outing as governor of Osun State with a legacy of unpaid salaries. His other enduring legacy was fanning embers of religious intolerance among a people that had coexisted peacefully for centuries as traditionalists, Muslims and Christians with Hijab controversy to cover his inadequacies.

    It is no surprise that as a round peg in a square hole, Aregbesola has spent the greater part of his seven years as Minister of Interior trying to derail his successor’s more focused administration. According to a recent Daily Trust editorial “Between him and the Controller General of Nigerian Correctional Service, Haliru Nababa, there has been more prison breaks than at any time in living memory”.

    In fact, some said there has been an epidemic of jail breaks during their period. There had been jail breaks in Imo, Edo Bauchi and Lagos during which thousands of criminals were set free just as last week’s attack on Kuje was the third in the last two years. Yet the facility’s perimeter fence was not reinforced while both the president and the president of the senate raised questions about the functionality of the CCTV if at all available.

    It is within Aregbesola’s department to address the daily flooding of Nigerians by immigrants who take refuge in the ungoverned forest of the north from where they visit violence on innocent Nigerians. Many of them ferried by lorries to the south take refuge in the urban slums with no name or any form of identification. Sheik Gumi who has visited those he described as aggrieved Fulani herdsmen making outlandish demand such as government pardon and integration into our security architecture seems to have been more visible than the Minister of Interior.

    It is tragic not only for President Buhari who often shoots himself in the leg by the manners of his appointment but for the country that bear the consequences of such actions. President Jonathan back in 2013 admitted that Boko Haram had infiltrated his government and all other levels of government in the country. But President Buhari’s trusted aids still went on to populate his government with Boko Haram sympathisers. Although it was elder statesman, Theophilus Danjuma that first spoke of infiltration of the military by criminal elements, some of governors of besieged northern states today believe the military is compromised.

    This why it is therefore not enough for the military top hierarchy to say “the claim by Femi Fani Kayode that soldiers were withdrawn from the Kuje Correctional Custodial Centre before the attack is laughable” or “that he is ignorant of whose responsibility it is to guard prison,” as recently argued by the Defence spokesman, Maj.-Gen. Jimmy Akpor.

    They should tell Nigerians how ‘the platoon of military officers – the fighting wing of the army in the most sophisticated battle’ Aregbesola talked about, melted into the thin air at the approach of Boko Haram terrorists and why between them, the DSS and the police, the movement of over 300 heavily armed insurgents in and out of Kuje was never captured by intelligence.

    Frustrated Nigerians, safe neither in their homes, work place or places of worship have come to terms that they are on their own. But the successful daring rescue of incarcerated terrorists from subdued state actors that could not rescue their kidnapped citizens from terrorist den even with payment of ransom, is a warning to those playing the ostrich in Aso Rock that there are no more sacred areas.

  • Failure of democracy in Nigeria and the United States

    Failure of democracy in Nigeria and the United States

    For three days from first to fourth of July, I was in Atlanta, Georgia, United States living through the wild jubilations marked with parades and fireworks to celebrate America’s national day especially on the 3rd and 4th of July. I had lived in the United States before precisely between 1979 and 1982 and I don’t remember witnessing these kinds of wild jubilation and celebrations. Perhaps those times were not propitious or auspicious because the country was facing challenges especially abroad. The three years of my stay coincided with the Jimmy Carter years (January 20, 1977 – January 20, 1981) when the entire 50 members of the diplomatic mission of the United States in Tehran were captured by Iranian revolutionaries after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. The young revolutionaries were inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and they seized the American diplomatic mission and locked up its diplomats from November 4, 1979 finally releasing them  on January 20, 1981.

    The celebration this time seems to be perhaps deliberately to emphasise that despite whatever problems America may have, it is still the most powerful country in the world. The prosperity of America is based on its power both soft and hard power and the fact that it was on the winning side after the Second World War in which its national currency became the reserve currency of the world. America’s power is further rooted in its technological expertise, innovation and productive energy of its people. In spite of all this, the American democratic system is broken. There is a disconnect between the democratic leadership of the country and the desires of the people.

    Take for example the epidemic violence of mass shooting and the apparent lack of safety, freedom and expectation of long life of the people and the cry of the people to take away guns fit for warfare from its citizens and the opposition to meaningful gun control of the leadership of Congress dancing to the tune of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The Senate, the powerful upper house in the United States, is beholden to the NRA which has some of its leading members in its pockets. From polls taken recently, 85% of Americans want comprehensive gun control and a review of the so-called Second Amendment to the United States constitution that says citizens have rights to carry guns concealed or openly for self-protection and the protection of the republic. This was a privilege that people had at the initial stage of constitutional development when the security institutions were inchoate and any reasonable person would think this kind of rights should now be surrendered to the state in the overall security of the entire United States.

    But the political leadership especially amongst the ranks of the Republican Party which through gerrymandering and denial of votes to the poor and the minorities dominate the Senate of the Congress without whose control, no legislation can become law. Because of this manipulation, sometimes the winner of the presidential elections especially when they are Republicans run away with victory with less votes than the loser because of the convoluted electoral college which determines the outcome of presidential elections rather than the  majority votes of the people. Over time this has allowed the Republicans to pack the judiciary especially the Supreme Court of the United States. This has led to the Supreme Court coming out with decisions on gun control, abortion, voting rights,  right to equal education  and affirmative action  that are favourable to the ways and thinking of the Republican Party.

    There is therefore a situation in which laws and actions of the United States do not represent the wish of the majority and this makes people mad and very unhappy as witnessed by the general anger of the citizenry that cannot understand the powerlessness of the government with a broken security situation in which ordinary citizens can be shot for no reason by any deranged or angry individual. This is a failure of democracy because this kind of individual freedom to kill others will not be tolerated in the so-called authoritarian states. One doesn’t hear people going berserk and gunning down people celebrating national holidays or little children and their teachers in school being killed as happens all the time in the United States day in day out. While discussing this issue with people, there seems to be a unanimous consensus that perhaps America needs a second revolution to rewrite the constitution.

    In the case of Nigeria where it seems people think periodic election is the same thing as democracy, but policies that have widespread support are left in abeyance by government. For example it seems there is support for restructuring of the country so as to encourage productivity and production instead of every state waiting and depending on distributable commission from oil sales. In my lifetime, I have seen states revenue move away from internally generated revenue (IGR) based on agricultural production to over dependence on the combustible commission on hydrocarbons sales. This of course is unsustainable more so with oil revenue over a long time being unreliable. Secondly, the most serious problem facing the country is insecurity. The governors’ forum representing the majority of the states in the country met and agreed that the present anomalous status of governors being the chief security officers of their state without control of the organised means of violence is untenable. A situation where the so-called chief state security officers have to beg federal commissioners of police controlled by the federal government for the security of their states does not make sense. The argument is that if states’ police controlled by the states are allowed, governors could use them against opposition. The same argument can also be made against the present system where the federal police is controlled by the president. What makes the president better controller of the federal police as against the governor controlling its own police for internal security? It is known all over the world that in federations whether one is talking about the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, the Russian federation and India, police is organised on federal, regional, local, city and in Canada and the United States universities and other tertiary institutions even have rights to raise police forces.

    The reason for this is based on the fact that local police are closer to the people and would have more access to local intelligence and in the case of Nigeria would speak the same language. The reasons for local policing are so self-evident and obvious that the federal government which has lost control of the security situation should have jumped at a suggestion that the whole country has been making. There is total disconnect between the federal government and the people of Nigeria.

    The recent attack on an advance security team of the president in Duntsima on the way to Daura the president’s home town in readiness for Sallah (Eid el Adha) shows clearly the breakdown of law and order in the country. The blatant disregard for security of the country is epitomised by the invasion of Kuje Correctional Centre in Abuja and release of hundreds of terrorists there shows total absence of security even in the federal capital territory. Democracy has obviously failed in Nigeria because it has failed to guarantee the security of the lives and property of the people and without security there is no chance for physical and economic development.

    The kind of security collapse in Nigeria would not happen in places like Egypt, Rwanda, and neighbouring countries like the Cameroons and Benin that are not poster countries for democracy. If democracy is to be attractive, it must respond rapidly to the people’s reasonable request and expectations or else a dictatorship that guarantees law and order will be vastly preferable.

  • Looking ahead in time

    Looking ahead in time

    It was a tricky issue which required all his skills to tackle. It took him long days and nights to arrive at a final decision. Even at that, the noise over his pick is still deafening as I write this four days after he made his choice. Ordinarily, it should not be a matter over which to break bones.

    But, considering the level to which we have sunk as a nation, it has become one. Picking a running mate for a presidential candidate, whether a Muslim or a Christian, should be a walk in the park. Just as it used to be in the past. Painfully, it is no longer so. What should be an easy and simple task has been made hard and complex.

    In the past, even before a candidate emerges, he already knows who his running mate is, or a faint idea of who that person will be. From months of interaction and working together, the candidate would have formed opinion about the person and made up his mind about him. As soon as he becomes the candidate, he wastes no time in naming his running mate.

    That was the era of a political culture under which competence, capability, conviction and courage held sway. It was when politics was played without recourse to region and religion. The twin issues of ethnicity and faith were not allowed to dominate the political space as they now do. Our faith and ethnic nationality are now used as bargaining chips for power.

    Clergymen and monarchs have turned their places of worship and palaces into mini party headquarters where serious political decisions are taking. Key political players court them because of their new found power of galvanising support for the parties they favour. It is a matter of ‘you scratch my back, I scratch your back’.

    Suddenly, a country where merit, competence and ability were celebrated became one where the language you speak and the faith you profess were all you needed to become somebody. It is not the fault of the clergy and the monarchy, but a collective fault. When things started degenerating, we did nothing to stem the slide at all levels and now we are at the mercy of religious bigots.

    Indeed, religion was never an issue in this country. Perhaps, with the exception of those early days when the missionaries tried to divide us by setting up schools mainly for people of their own faith and converting others, even against their own will, before admitting them. Since those days, we have overcome the religion challenge until the Islamic sect, better known as Boko Haram, burst on the scene. Though Boko Haram is a recent thing, the damage it has done to our psyche is unquantifiable.

    Our recourse to religion politics did not start with Boko Haram, though. It started in 1993 when Boko Haram was not in existence. Christendom rose against the Muslim-Muslim ticket of M.K.O Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, describing it as not sellable. The military, an apolitical institution known to be blind to issues of region and religion worldwide, led us down the slippery path when it opposed that Muslim-Muslim ticket, if we are to believe former military leader Ibrahim Babangida.

    Almost 30 years after, Bola Tinubu and Kashim Shettima are reenacting the Muslim-Muslim ticket on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to the stiff objection of again, Christendom and their Muslim collaborators. Their argument is that in a country of over 200 million people, the party should have found a Christian to be Tinubu’s running mate. It is Tinubu’s prerogative to choose whoever he prefers as his running mate.

    He cannot be dictated to on that. But in taking his decision, he must consider many factors, one of which I concede, is religion. But the most important factors are the ability and electoral value of his running mate, and not where he comes from or the faith he professes. Tinubu is in the race to win and to ensure his victory, he has to go for a running mate that will boost his chances at the poll. He cannot opt for a liability as this column wrote on June 16.

    Political calculation informed Tinubu’s choice and not what some perceive as disdain for the Christian faith. After all, if he is elected, he will be the president of all and not of one faith or the other. Many condemning his choice would have taken similar action if they were in his shoes. How can a man who is married to a devout Christian and a Pastor to boot be intolerant of other religions?

    Having made his choice, Tinubu has a lot of work to do to pacify those hurt. There is still time for him to do so before the election and explain that his choice was not a slight on Christians and assure them of a huge role in his administration if elected. This is a game of give and take and not a matter of life and death.

    But at the end of the day, Tinubu may yet be credited for looking ahead in time with this Muslim-Muslim ticket.

  • The ballot is sexier than bullets

    The ballot is sexier than bullets

    “For the love of country” remains our sexiest lie. The curvaceous plague of Nigerian politics. Everybody cops a feel.

    Government and the governed; oppressor and the oppressed; oligarchs and long-suffering proletariat; the old and young; the gbenudake and soro soke generations – all partake in the ghoulish rite.

    Politics, however, fades to melodrama when the ”patriot” in his youth, misappropriates the role of a revolutionary and considers himself greater than the state. In his struggle to usurp privileges and power, he inflicts misery on self and the collective – ordinary citizens, in particular, whose predicament supposedly triggered his defiant ‘wokeness.’

    “For the love of country” becomes his arrant lie, the falsity that becomes his slogan. Thus this minute, random youths pulse to duplicitous love.

    Belligerent, cocksure, digitally-woke, the social media is his brothel; the virtual bordello of his dreams, where pimps of strife and courtesans of the witless, caress his manifest and furtive lusts. Ultimately, they slake his unarticulated toxic thirst.

    If Facebook is his quirk, Twitter is his vice; a new breed of youth is prowling social media. They are less inhibited, less courteous, and inhumane. They do not understand what humaneness means thus toxic rant is fair game and as their rant spills from their soapboxes into the social space, it passes the stink that smelly suds make in an ocean of mental squalor.

    Little wonder the social space pulsates with toxins. En route to the 2023 elections, wild sentimentality and undisguised bigotry are been weaponised by armies of irate youths and the elderly, in defense and furtherance of the political agenda of their preferred presidential aspirants. Many of them are soulless and ignorant.

    It gets scarier where their ignorance, intemperance, and rage enjoy the caress of a dubious demagogue vying for the presidency on a structure of lies. They launch like loose canons at the slightest provocation, cursing and threatening supporters of rival candidates. Armed with their digital devices, they pose motley blessings and applause in one minute and despicable threats in the next.

    Through the mayhem, nationhood careens to the crossroads where patriotic spunk jostles with ignorance, fake news, and mischief. Their conduct recalls the tragedy of the #EndSARS protest when chaos, prancing on the protesters’ digital phones, recited epitaphs across passion planes and boundaries, spilling death onto the streets.

    Some have blamed the resultant carnage on infernal youth and conceit; many have flayed the police for insensitivity, and the protesters for lack of a clear plan and strategy for dealing with venomous leadership. They said they dared to duel with shayateen without a tough shield. Did they?

    With #EndSARS, Nigeria had it coming perhaps; but now, what should start as a peaceful movement to the 2023 polls has been hijacked by mischief makers, bigots, and death merchants. This minute, shady clerics, unemployed youths, political and corporate actors, failed aspirants, and criminal coalitions at home and abroad, all having a score to settle and united in spite, couch venom in patriotic lingo and throw their weight behind one shady aspirant or the other.

    The older Nigerians (gbenudake generation), in particular, have become the butt of rancid jokes and attacks. Lest we forget President Muhammadu Buhari, the mob’s ultimate whipping dog.

    The “woke” guzzle on spite and sound bites without recourse to reason. It would seem that the dubious youth simply adopts any movement that’s anti-government and anti-state.

    Too much duplicity is discernible in the exploits of many whose ‘hardcore’ agitation had been seen to extinguish soon after they attained power, or got ‘settled’ by the ruling class or power brokers aligned to the former.

    Ferocity manifests as a crucial aspect of their passion; the clique culture, cancel culture, authoritarianism, and sense of entitlement characteristic of the ruling class actually manifest among the youth across class divides. It’s a precursor to rite of Nigeria’s rape cycle.

    If the #EndSARS protest and flailing secessionist agenda have taught us anything, it is that the dubious patriot pays lip service to patriotism even as his provocative ‘purity’ incites filth in its wake. Stripped of his slogan, his passion betrays neither breadth nor depth.

    His passion connotes moral emptiness. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode, rimmed with crystalline teeth. His platitudinous chant is disguised as a series of soothing gestures, like rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

    In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of sadism. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love are an assertion of savage lust. He moots no selflessness or sacrifice, only refinements of domination.

    Beneath the glitter and ire of his platitudinous chants subsist a frantic hankering for privileges and spoils of power. For instance, some of the celebrities mauling tact to venom: musicians, religious leaders, motivational speakers, and social influencers hardly represent the country’s finest moral compass despite their declarations otherwise. It is ironic though that they have become the faces of the new dissent.

    Some have been described as “monsters” by their aides, who alleged that they have to endure unprecedented savagery to earn their keep. Yet these ‘superstars’ have barged onto the political stage through the trapdoor, flaunting a poker face and chanting for the underdog – en route to the 2023 elections.

    Some have made videos as their in, into the fast-galvanising protests and toxic political awareness. They have seen a window of opportunity in the ongoing transition. They have latched on to the flailing bandwagon, chanting creeds and popular slogans as a necessary performance of will.

    Their intent is to align with any popular movement just as they did with #EndSARS, hoping it would overwhelm the incumbent ruling class. They hoped to get invited and wooed, afterwards, to seek public office by the army of concerned youth-patriots who would identify them as the real leadership material that Nigeria deserves. Of course, the ill-fated end of the protests put paid to their fantasies.

    The movement failed because the agitation was mostly of a visceral type reminiscent of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s idealised revolt. Most defiant youths share kindred spirits with the incumbent oligarchs from whose oppressive leadership they seek freedom.

    It’s commendable, however, that they have summoned the courage to demand better leadership and a higher quality of governance. Yet constraints of savage origins hatch into their midst courtesy of the demons outside and within.

    Once again, the youths have seized a revolutionary moment, an ideal that is often more emotional than beneficial because it allows them to defy established power.

    This misappropriated sentiment is currently being weaponised by separatists from Nigeria’s southeast and southwest, inciting carnage and shrill whispers of another civil war.

    Through the mayhem, the privileged are perfecting their ‘Plan B’ cum relocation abroad. This message is for the millions without the luxury of an overseas refuge: it is about time we cautioned our youth to desist from inflaming the polity be it as internet warmongers or cannon fodder for physical carnage.

    We need a peaceful country to successfully fight and defeat corruption, governance failure, power outage, infrastructure collapse, substandard health, and education among others.

    If the youths truly seek change, they must achieve a unity of mind and common purpose by constructive participation in the political process. The ballot box is definitely sexier than bullets.

  • Still on the controversial Waterways Bill

    Still on the controversial Waterways Bill

    With a small number of Fulani ethnic irredentist who supported Buhari neither during his first three heroic failed attempts at the presidency nor during his 2015 pan-Nigeria mandate but today hold him hostage while their foot-soldiers wage war against Nigerians, Buhari has no enemies. And if a leader heralded to power with a pan-Nigerian mandate ended up as a Fulani president as against the greatest Nigerian president that ruled with justice and fairness as predicted by Maitama Sule, Buhari will go down in history as a leader who missed an historic opportunity because of his leadership style.

    It is an open secret that Miyetti Allah, their foot soldiers and their patrons are behind our nation’s current nightmare. They did not even wait for Buhari’s inauguration before declaring war on Nigeria. They threatened to make the country ungovernable if anti-grazing laws were not abrogated in 21 states of the federation and they carried out their threat by owning up to killing 73 innocent Nigerians in Benue. The president’s tepid response in form of appeal to victims of mindless killings to be good hosts only emboldened the herdsmen killers to extend their killings to other parts of north central and north-western states of Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara and Sokoto. The president’s mainly northern controlled security apparatus at the beginning gave the impression those visiting violence on Nigerians were invincible.

    Buhari’s loyal gatekeepers, Fulani enablers and sympathisers in government share the same mind-set with the rampaging herdsmen-foisting Fulani agenda including open grazing which they claim is part of Fulani culture, illegal occupation of federating states’ reserved forest and government funded RUGA settlement for Fulani from all over Africa.

    But Buhari’s loyal gatekeepers are loyal only to the tendencies they hide under his government to serve. They share neither his pan-Nigerian vision nor his pains in government. The arduous task of nation-building is complicated by betrayal by his disgruntled Fulani compatriots. And while facing legitimacy crisis as Nigerians, safe neither in their homes nor in churches, blame him for their nightmare  and openly accused of pursuing “Fulanisation and Islamisation” agenda by  Nigeria’s elders statesmen and leaders of ethnic nationalities, his Fulani compatriots add nothing but agony to a president overwhelmed by third world post-colonial crisis of legitimacy, crisis of penetration and crisis of identification as sub-nationalities struggling for self-actualisation demand for dismemberment of the country.

    Yet out of sheer perfidy, this most depressing period was the time his trusted gate keepers and enablers of herdsmen in his government chose to return to the National Assembly, a controversial water bill perceived by the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum as a strategy “to grab land around waterways for cattle herders’ by clipping “the wings of state and local government authorities as well as individuals from making use of the water at their backyard without permit from Abuja”. But driven only by the pursuit of their selfish agenda, the president’s ‘loyal gate keepers’ could not be restrained from inflicting more pain on their caged president or assaulting the sensibilities of Nigerians by returning the Waterways Bill earlier rejected by Nigerians and the 7th and 8th National Assembly that threw it out in 2017 and in 2020 when it was represented by Abubakar Fulata as an Executive Bill.

    This is the same bill dismissed by The Guardian editorial of August 16, 2020 as “The repugnant and detestable land-grabbing bill, which obviously is suspected to grant Fulani herdsmen and Miyetti Allah cattle breeders, unfettered access to land and water resources in Southern Nigeria, can only trigger national upheaval”. But beyond the editorial, this is a bill already declared unconstitutional by various judicial pronouncements.

    The desperation of the sponsors of this Waterways Bill only reinforces the suspicion of sceptics about the usual treachery against our nation. Nigerians remember Babangida and his junta’s similar desperation back in 1993 when they on the eve of their departure from office, promulgated “Decree No. 52 of 1993 which vested the ownership, control and management of all lands within 100 metres limit of the 1967 shoreline of Nigeria and any other land reclaimed from any Lagoon, sea, ocean in the Federal Military Government of Nigeria”.

    With the sharing of over 300 Osborne plots among his soldiers of fortune and their friends, it turned out, the obnoxious decree since struck down by the 2000 Justice Odunowo judgment “on grounds of inconsistency with the rights of the indigenous land owners in Lagos State” was designed to corner Lagos State’s priceless land along with other coastal states in Nigeria.

    But then perfidy has been the major operating instrument of Buhari’s loyal gate keepers. In September 2020, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, and Suleiman Hussein Adamu, his water resources counterpart, dismissed widely- held views that the National Water Bill would cede a vast swathe of land along river banks to herdsmen, and encourage the widely rejected Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) programme of government. But there is no perfect crime. Boss Mustapha, current Secretary to Government of the Federation joined the debate by declaring on Channels Television Morning Ride programme, that Lagos cannot lay claim to her waterways because the source of Ogun River is not in Lagos. The objective of those behind the bill cannot be any clearer.

    The same perfidy was at play with the recruitment of Isa Pantami, Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Shari’ah (SCS) who once argued that “Jihad is an obligation for every single believer in Nigeria” from Islamic University of Madinnah in 2016 as the Director General/CEO of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to preside over the sensitive NIN project. The loyal gate keepers, recruiter of Pantami owe us no explanation as to why the main beneficiaries of the project are today terrorists whose attacks have become more coordinated with seamless ransom telephone haggling with victim’s relatives.

    It was the same deceit that informed President Buhari’s first Minister of Defence, General Mansour Dan-Ali’s response to the rampaging Fulani herdsmen, ranked in 2015 by Global Terrorism Index as the fourth deadliest in the world. His unrestrained assault on our sensibilities was “If those routes are blocked, what do you expect will happen? These people are Nigerians and we must learn to live together with one another”.

    Of course it was the same deceit, dishonesty and betrayal  when the president’s ‘loyal gate keepers’ opposed the southern states’ demand for state and community policing while looking the other way when political sharia states set up 10,000 strong Sharia Hisbah police corps whose duties included arresting anyone sporting “indecent dress”, preventing “gender mix in commercial vehicles” or sealing-up hotels selling  alcohol while bandits and killer herdsmen govern the ungoverned forests of the north.

    The reintroduction of a controversial water bill amidst security challenges that have forced Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna to call for summary elimination of terrorists, Katsina’s Aminu Masari’s  call on his people to arm themselves and Baba Ahmed of Northern Elders Forum’s(NEL ) to call for the president resignation because “We cannot continue to live and die under the dictates of killers, kidnappers, rapists and sundry criminal groups that have deprived us of our rights to live in peace and security” is a measure of how much sympathy Buhari’s loyal gate keepers have for their principal.

  • Strategy for peace in Europe

    Strategy for peace in Europe

    In the last NATO meeting of June 29-30 held in Madrid, Spain attended by all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand as observers, important decisions that seem to change the strategic posture of the alliance were taken. First of all, Turkey seemed to have been pressured to lift its blocking of Sweden and Finland from joining the alliance on the spurious grounds that the two countries harboured members of the militant Turkish Kurdistan Party. Turkey before the Madrid conference was being accused of being a sleeper cell for Russia in the alliance.

    In the Madrid Summit Declaration issued on June 29, the following points were highlighted. The fact of a land war in Europe and its security implications were pointed out as calling into question the security of member states of the alliance. Since the coming of the nuclear age in 1945, the strategy of deterrence in the sense that a war between the two nuclear armed camps of NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries was inconceivable was the prevailing doctrine. Even with the collapse of the USSR in 1994 and the recent re-emergence of nationalist Russia, the doctrine of deterrence remained until now when it is now considered not strong enough in a situation where Russia is prepared to wage a land war against her neighbour. The new NATO doctrine is encapsulated in the Madrid Declaration issued after the recent summit in Madrid, Spain. The statement reiterated the defensive nature of the alliance and that the transatlantic membership of the alliance with Canada and the United States gives the alliance a global reach and indicated that members should take with concern the Russo- Chinese growing threat to global security.  This concern with China must have been at the directive of the United States because countries like Germany and France have strong economic interests and ties with China.

    The way for Swedish and Finnish accession to the NATO protocols was open and that while the process was on, NATO stands ready to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Finland and Sweden and therefore reiterated the alliance’s commitment to the Washington Treaty including Article 5 which says an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all. It declared that the Madrid summit “… marks a milestone in strengthening our alliance and accelerating its adaptation”.

    The summit committed itself to upholding democratic practices and support for them and the basic principles of the rule of law, individual liberty and human rights and international law which were the principles that undergirded the setting up of the United Nations. It therefore condemned the unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine its neighbour and pledged NATO’s support for the poor country just struggling to be free. President Zelensky participated in the summit via zoom.

    The declaration claimed that NATO faces direct threats from terrorists but also most significantly from Russia. The threat from cyberspace was highlighted so was what it called “hybrid and other asymmetric threats and by malicious use of emerging and disruptive technologies”. The summit in a radical statement of its raison d’etre stated that it faced “… systemic competition from those including  the Peoples Republic of China, who challenge our interests, security and values and seek to undermine the rules based international order. Instability beyond our borders is also contributing to irregular migration and human trafficking”.

    In view of the stated threats to its interest, the alliance endorsed a new strategic concept. This consists of deterrence and defence through strength, “management and cooperative security”. The concept also includes strengthening of its political and practical support for Ukraine through a package of delivery of “non-lethal defence equipment”.  It committed the alliance to “equip Ukraine’s cyber defences and resilience and support modernising its defence sector in its transition to strengthen long term interoperability. In the longer term, we will assist Ukraine and support efforts on its path of post war reconstruction and reforms”. The document also stated NATO’s commitment to ”its 360 degree approach, across the land, air, maritime, cyber and space domains and against all threats and challenges”.

    In its new posture NATO by next year will increase troops in its eastern border with Russia from current level of 40,000 to 300,000 with all members spending a minimum of two percent of their national budgets on bringing their military at a level of military preparedness to defend any member that may be threatened by foreign adversaries. Because of its perception of strategic change in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO has decided on new measures to step up practical support for the republics of Bosnia Herzegovina, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova. NATO also welcomes increased cooperation and coordination with what it called friendly countries such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

    Surprisingly the foreign ministers of Jordan and Mauritania were at the summit. Jordan may have some strategic importance as a friendly country in the Middle East but the significance of Mauritania in western strategic consideration is not clear except in France’s military posture in francophone areas of the Sahel.

    What I find puzzling in NATO’s new posturing is the fact that it seems to see possibility of land warfare in its relations with the Russian federation. Finland’s accession to the NATO protocol would increase NATO’s border with Russia by 1300 kilometres and with this comes the possibility of border conflicts between NATO and the Russian federation which is something to be dreaded because a minor hostility on this long border could plunge the world into a thermonuclear war which in the words of President J.F. Kennedy the “the living will envy the dead”. There are significant Russian irredentist claims in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania which could in future become casus belli in a world moved by irrational nationalism. The Balkan nations that are now part of NATO have not fully resolved their old hatred which plunged the world into the First World War and a conflict say between Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina could bring NATO and the Russian Federation into conflict. Instead of NATO expanding eastwards, is there no other way Russia can be brought into the European family of nations where it has historically belonged? Putin probably represents an aberration in spite of his seeing himself as the new Peter the great. Putin indeed  justifiably lays claims of great power status for Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and historically Russia has been more than sinned against than sinned against other European countries. The emphasis on building land, air, cyber and space defences and maritime forces against identified enemies in Russia and China will elicit the same reaction from those two countries, leading to a repeat of the Cold War and military competition which the world had thought we had seen the end of with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994.

  • Harvesting hearts from fresh crops of the dead

    Harvesting hearts from fresh crops of the dead

    The neck, fed to the bloodied machete, is one of the most frightful imagery of modern Nigeria. It depicts the innate, outward torment of our souls and affirms our tongueless sadism.

    Those who dare may speak meaning to pillage and its tongued violence; few weeks after the Katari-Rijana train bombing by armed bandits, gunmen attacked the Catholic Diocese of Ondo, located on Owa-Luwa Street in Owo, the hometown of the State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, leaving about 40 parishioners dead and several others injured.

    Such barbarity has become a pedestrian fact of our daily life. It disinters the bloody pagan spectacle of our “god-fearing” hordes: religious bigots, secret cults, armed bandits and their victims, terrorists and besieged communities.

    Add these to the random abduction and torture of underage school kids, college and university undergraduates – the supposed leaders of tomorrow.

    Through the scrimmage, the individual’s primitive instinct for self-preservation bursts through the mask of political correctness and good manners. Recently, it drove a so-called man of god to cheekily recommend a ‘Plan B’ (relocation abroad) to his congregation. The so-called pastor claimed to have smartly devised his family’s escape to an adopted nation, should Nigeria implode.

    At the backdrop of such disillusionment, agitators for good social infrastructure, stable electricity, affordable quality healthcare, and education are seen as vile rabble-rousers, usurpers of mirth and social stability.

    What we have failed to acknowledge, however, is that, for a long while, Nigeria has lived through semblances of mirth, militarized peace, and stability.

    Patriots who would normally, tenderly clasp and kiss peace and unity as a gentleman would a lady’s hand, are frantically seeking to sever all that bind us together.

    Yet no one must be singled out as the cause of our predicament. Together, we embarked on this Nigerian journey into savage nature, trading bromides of hope for caskets of peace. We cannot speak compassion to barbarism. Compassion isn’t speaking pity to pain either but healing with the pained and living it out.

    Nigeria kindles nightmarish ardour. Our national motto: “Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress” shrivel like branches of the Iroko caught in a bushfire, while we careen at the helm to self-seeking oligarchs, aided by kindred spirits among the electorate.

    The government and the governed jointly manifest like a coven of mythical orcs fanning our wildfire. But we all assume the pose of the proverbial foresters earnestly burning off our infested boughs. What if the foresters are the disease?

    From the northeast through the northwest and northcentral; southeast through the southsouth and southwest, men and women of doubtful intent habitually emerge chanting platitudes to hoodwink a criminally permissive electorate.

    In the southwest, for instance, some have chanted the late sage and political titan, Obafemi Awolowo’s name to endear themselves to the electorate. Among these are men of noble intent. Then there are those who wield and frantically drop his name to force open, hinges of opportunities, in their quest for political spoils and renown.

    Recently, Awolowo, who rested a long while ago, in the spirit house of statecraft, was dubiously exhumed to usurp the identities of a pretender to his wisdom and name. But the late sage’s ghost didn’t approve of the mischievous appropriation of his repute. It scoffed at its summoning to life by the public officer of impish character.

    The ongoing jostle for political spoils at the 2023 polls is the most incantatory of the latter’s political games. It is overtly ritualistic. Circuitous characters relentlessly pursue their personal interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.

    Even the self-appointed progressives have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice as Dolores would say. Amid our suffering, they reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of power and political office.

    Their virtues are short, and their vices, extensive and implacable. Their lips, full of lust and laughter, attach to the country’s bosom like curled serpents that are fed from the breast. Every dispensation, they press with fanged lips where their reptilian predecessors have suckled. Nigeria thus becomes the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps. When kicked out of office, they grudgingly recoil – but never quitting the corridors of power – to accord Nigeria the affliction of deadlier asps in the successive administration.

    Too many actors in nationhood intensely replicate our primitive experience. But they have done nothing but reenact the vast facets of evil that we groomed them to personify. It hardly matters whether we denounce them on the pages of newspapers, in the studios of popular TV, or the highly virulent comment threads of online media, Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain.

    We shall never attain true freedom from their affliction until we treat ourselves as the pathogens breeding the plague. Our homes, families, worship houses, schools, communities, to mention a few, produce and sustain our affliction by corrupt leadership and followership. We must surgically excise from within our penchant for corruption and yearning to self-destruct.

    At the moment, the average Nigerian manifests the electorate’s detachment from patriotic experience. Most guilty is the Nigerian in his youth. He samples dissent but will not commit to progressive intent. Rustling ‘wokeness’ out of tired bromides, his sterile passion stifles patriotic fervour.

    Our reality should scare us: unemployment rate rose from 27.1 percent in December 2020 to 33.3 percent in March 2021, said the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), stressing that the number of the unemployed rose to 23.19 million in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2020 due to job losses occasioned by the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.

    This figure is projected to increase in 2022. Of the unemployed, many have taken to terrorism and other crimes in a country where more than 112 million people are living in extreme poverty, while our richest man cum federal government’s fortune-pet, would have to spend $1 million a day for 42 years to exhaust his fortune, according to Oxfam International. Heck! It’s his money.

    Yet we can’t but rue the cost on less fortunate Nigerians in a country where the government and banks foster a billionaires’ club through unjust concessions and illegitimate loans, respectively.

    This ruling class was borne of tragic citizenship. Nothing trumps our collective survival. No individual or group’s vanities should encroach on our collective well-being and survival.

    Separatists and terrorists comprising armed bandits, killer herdsmen, the southeast’s “unknown gunmen” and Boko Haram emerged to play devastating roles because the government failed us. The former assumes the proverbial mother’s parturient powers, yet terror’s nurslings evolve like vampires because they were suckled by predatory spirits. Eventually, they turn their lips to Nigeria’s bosom only to find her nurturant sacs rubbery and spent. So they drain blood instead of milk.

    They deploy organised strife, mass abductions, killing of our sons and fathers, and sexual assault of our mothers and daughters, as their ritual of coping -their sociopathic therapy to stave off mental breakdown.

    In the chaos, conscience manifests as a feeble tick, eluding creed by a protestant detour. And hunger sheds citizen blood to irrigate its spasms. Like Egyptian Ammit, it burrows deep to harvest hearts from fresh crops of the dead.

    Nigeria thus becomes the terror trove, where citizens live enchained in perpetual flight from the terror within. To sever our bond with such terror, we must shun toxic engagement with self and fatherland.

     

  • Zamfara as a metaphor for Nigeria

    Zamfara as a metaphor for Nigeria

    Zamfara, “a state of three million population, 23 hospitals with 23 doctors, 300 public primary schools manned by a single teacher each”, has been held hostage since 1999 by its hypocritical self-serving ruling political class and serially betrayed by the federal government that the poor masses of Zamfara looked up to for succour. Governor Bello Mohammed Matawalle last Sunday’s ‘misdirected’ directive to his state police commissioner to issue gun license to about 500 residents from the state emirates “who qualify and are wishing to obtain such guns to defend themselves”, was part of the political subterfuge freely deployed to divert attention from the real issues confronting the state by its successive governors and their Abuja collaborators.

    We don’t need to search far for the target of policy thrust that talks of “government’s commitment to adequate security and protection of lives and property of citizens” but ordered the “immediate closure of all markets, in some LGAs and Emirates, banned riding of motorbikes and declared “anyone found riding motorbike a bandit who security agencies are allowed to shoot at sight.”

    Some have been too quick to equate Matawalle’s clowning with a desperate call for help. But help for who – if one may ask? Unarguably, this is a policy designed to strengthen members of the minority governing political minority, the only group in Zamfara qualified and sufficiently endowed to procure and use guns. On the other hand, the policy brings little relief to millions of poor farmers who are currently at the receiving end of violence perpetrated by foreign herdsmen allegedly imported or lured into the country either as herdsmen or Arab mercenaries from ungoverned states of the Sahel region to fight Zamfara ruling minority’s undeclared war.

    If truly Matawalle with the Zamfara ruling minority and their federal backers are interested in fairness, justice and peace, the sources of social dislocations in Zamfara was long ago explicitly articulated.  According to Ibrahim Dosara, the state’s one-time Commissioner of Information, the “genesis of rural banditry in Zamfara started with a conflict between the Fulani and Hausa communities in the state”. The inference, for those who understands the politics of the north was that the source of social dislocations in Zamfara as elsewhere in the north, was distributive injustice –unfair distribution of economic resources and political power between the minority Fulani hegemonic power and the majority Hausa subsistence farmers.

    For leaders committed to the pursuit of justice and equity for all citizens, the most cost effective response to Zamfara’s ongoing civil war would have been community policing as Dosara in fact specifically identified absence of police in the rural communities to serve as arbiter between feudal lords who want freedom to preside over a fiefdom of slaves.  It is on record that the demand by states for state police was shut down by those serving other tendencies other than President Buhari’s pan-Nigeria agenda in Abuja.

    The subterfuge employed was federating states’ paucity of  funds for salaries and equipment when all that was needed was ceding half of the federal police force along with its budget to the states where they are needed while the other half continue with what they currently do best- accompanying  musicians to nightclubs, wives of local council chairmen and Chinese site engineers to fish markets and providing round-the-clock security for politicians including those indicted either by the courts or the National Assembly. We can add even those known criminals whose only qualification for police protection is their deep pocket.

    But sadly Zamfara and its successive governors, rather than the pursuit of justice and equity for its citizens, chose to play the ostrich. Thus Ahmed Yerima on October 27, 1999, introduced Sharia law in breach of the constitution, a venture that contributed to the economic disaster in the state. He employed thousands of Hisbah religious police to prevent sales of alcohol, apprehend ladies adjudged not properly dressed and arrest cabs with male and female passengers while the battle between farmers, herdsmen and cattle rustlers raged on in the suburbs.

    For short-changing the Zamfara’s governed, Governor Yari, his successor was dragged to court by Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) where  he lost N700m when the court “held he could not prove how he got the funds” while or before serving as governor of Zamfara State between May 29, 2011, and May 29, 2019.”  Matawalle while signing the repeal of the state pension law accused Yari of paying himself N360m from the state pensions fund two days to the end of his term.

    Matawalle’s first intervention as a governor in state experiencing daily harvest of death from bandits and herdsmen was in form of a comedy. He wanted Emirs and the ruling political elite, predominantly of Fulani extraction, to swear by the Holy Quran they had no linkage with bandits and herdsmen long after Fulani credible voices have confirmed those waging war against us are Fulani herdsmen.

    It was on record that Bauchi’s Governor Bala Mohammed, spoke of “Fulani herders who needed to carry AK-47 for self-defence”; Ganduje of “Fulani herdsmen using their AK-47 to commit crime against Nigerians” and El Rufai of “Anybody that thinks a Fulani herdsman that is engaged in kidnapping for ransom and is earning millions of naira would go back to his former life of getting N100,000 after selling a cow in a year, must be deceiving himself”.

    Of course since President Buhari’s Abuja ‘loyal gatekeepers’, share the same mind-set with Zamfara’s successive governors, it was therefore not a surprise Abuja chose to replicate the failed Middle-Belt strategy of massive deployment of fire-power in Zamfara despite dismal documented report that such deployment never prevented students from being carted away with buses from  their dormitories, periodic massacre of farmers in Kaduna, Benue and Taraba or ever led to the apprehension or prosecution of killer herdsmen, our security personnel claimed were invincible even while they took refuge in seized  community land of murdered victims or survivors forced to take refuge in IDP camps.

    First was the stationing a full battalion of Special Forces in Zamfara. This was followed by “Operation Maximum Safety” with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles; Joint Intervention Team of about 1000 police personnel; The Nigerian Air Force Operation ‘Diran Mikiya’ and IGP Mohammed Adamu’s “Operation Puff Adder,” 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 some parts of the state.”

    There can be no greater testimony to betrayal of the people than Matawalles’s last Sunday’s antics even as Zamfara remains under siege with mounting daily harvest of deaths.

    The scourge of the nation remains killer Fulani herdsmen. Unfortunately, apart from roundly rejected government Open-grazing and RUGA initiatives, there has been no clear cut government policy on how to protect Nigerians from bandits and killer herdsmen operating unchallenged from all parts of the country.  The only current initiative is to the credit of Sheik Ahmad Gumi who shamed government and its security agencies by visiting the herdsmen and bandits in the forest, and returning to relay their demands to government. He has followed up with a formation of Nomadic Rights Concern (NORIC) as a “channel whereby nomads will have their complaints and agitation addressed to the right authorities”.

    Surprisingly the other initiative was from the belligerent Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore that recently brought Fulani from 16 countries to Abuja to discuss “The Future of Fulani Pastoralists in Nigeria” and the security challenges confronting Nigeria.

    Zamfara remains a metaphor for our country as our elected leaders play the ostrich.