The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • EndSARS: Fighting shadows…

    EndSARS: Fighting shadows…

    I sympathise with Governor Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State who in spite of his valiant effort at finding solution to the demands of the EndSARS protesters continues to experience stress and strain. Tarred with the same brush of mistrusts as President Buhari who has credibility deficit on account of his failure to implement his party policies or apply reasoning towards resolving the killer herdsmen, open grazing and bandits crises, Sanwo-Olu has become a target of anti-Buhari political enemies across the nation.

    I am sure Sanwo-Olu realizes he was target of misplaced aggression.  He therefore during his last week’s emotion-laden broadcast appealed to the good people of Lagos to read in between the lines while warning  those “treating their own prejudices as deeper truths instead of the superficial lies they are”, choosing to take perverse delight in playing unhelpful games of cynicism and suspicion and clinging to beliefs that do not carry the weight of verifiable evidence.”

    And what are the facts?

    By allowing the EndSARS protesters locate their camps at Government House, Alausa and Lekki Toll Gate was evidence enough that Lagos State government identified with their cause. That the governor’s dialogue with the youths resulted in his serving as their ambassador carrying their demands to Abuja was also no doubt evidence of the youths’ confidence in his sincerity. That Sanwo-Olu outwitted the president’s anti-reasoning ‘loyal gate keepers’ including Malami, without whom the president cannot breathe and secured victory for the youths with the president acceding to all the youths demand including the dismantling of notorious SARS was also historic.

    But all Buhari’s foes who were caught unawares by Sanwo-Olu’s breakthrough did  was to focus on Buhari’s credibility deficit to  lionize  our largely uninformed youths who did not understand the social and economic implications of shutting down Lagos that provides daily succor for millions of unskilled workers who will starve if caged for a week. In addition, Buhari’s political foes mischievously focused on how much revenue the managers of the LTG  was cornering every day,  forgetting to remind our impressionable youths that it was suicidal to lock down Lekki which  is not only home to Dangote Refinery, the biggest in the world but also harbours the Lekki Free Trade zone and provide safe havens for le crème de la crème of Nigerian elite including mega bank and  multi-media owners, retired Generals, industry chiefs and top bureaucrats whose laws are our laws.

    At two weeks, the owners of society started to see the LTG siege as a nuisance.  Unfortunately, because the siege was led by amorphous group of  our talented artists/musicians whose role in society cannot be underestimated  but unarguably no substitute for social engineers, ‘the salt of life’ without whose efforts society decays,  expectedly ended in confrontation with police and the soldiers, controlled by owners of society through  the state. Then the hypocritical media and their sponsors that had expected ‘massacre’ started shouting massacre without waiting for evidence.

    Governor Sanwo-Olu worked the night moving from hospital to hospital to confirm the number of deaths but he announced with relief the following morning that there was no massacre. But quoting social media terrorists, journalists including CNN from far away Atlanta continued to insist hundreds of imaginary massacred bodies were secretly carted away by military vehicles. Buhari’s political enemies, victims of selective perception with imaginary figures of casualties in their heads rejected the governor’s report.

    The governor who had originally inaugurated a Judicial Panel of Inquiry to investigate allegations of police brutality committed by the disbanded SARS in the state, saying ‘as a matter of good faith and a sincere commitment to uncovering the truth of what happened on October 20, 2020, “constituted a panel of individuals that we believed were independent, credible, and representative of the various stakeholders with a respected jurist as chairman”.

    The tainted report of the panel was leaked to the press by its pro massacre members who seem to have hijacked the panel to satisfy the long held view that Buhari’s administration is evil, anti-people and likely prone to covering up the massacre of the nation’s youths. Elaborate interviews were held and threats were issued against those who will question their own colour of the truth so that the official release of the white paper only becomes nothing but a fait accompli to consolidate old prejudices and lies.

    While admonishing those who ‘take perverse delight in playing unhelpful games of cynicism and suspicion’ Sanwo-Olu insisted that the decision of his government would be based entirely on the law, the weight of evidence and an unblemished respect for the truth”.  He thereafter released government white papers which declared that “The inconsistencies and contradictions in the entire JPI report concerning the number of persons, who died at LTG on 20th October 2020, and their cause of death rendered the JPI’s findings and conclusions thereon as totally unreliable and therefore unacceptable.”

    For instance even while the JPI attested to the fact that there was nothing contrary to that of Professor Obafunwa, that only one person died at LTG of gunshot wounds on October 21, 2020, names of  nine protesters allegedly killed sprang up on pages 297-298 without the JPI offering explanation regarding circumstances of their deaths.  And the JPI Report also went on to award compensation to only one out of the alleged nine listed as ‘deceased’, which showed that the JPI itself had doubts as to the deaths of eight”. An explanation by a member that the employment of the word ‘massacre’ was supported by its dictionary meaning and not by evidence only brought more obfuscation.

    Again our youths have some lesson to learn from the EndSARS debacle.  First, Buhari is not responsible for the misery of our youths. Soludo back in 2013 had warned that whoever took over from Jonathan would face the current crisis. The challenge before Buhari in 2015 therefore was to resolve our political crisis, the source of our economic woes. For frittering such a unique opportunity, he has a date with history.

    Those egging on the youths to fight Buhari on the basis of his credibility deficit and those manufacturing ‘massacre’ to take over Lagos are jointly responsible for our youths’ misery.  It was they who in the name of Babangida’s commercialization policy sold public enterprises that once guaranteed jobs for our young graduates to their cronies.  The same privileged group during Obasanjo’s presidency jettisoned both the World Bank recommendations and example of privatisation in France and Britain and sold government interest in the banks, communication, media, hospitality business, airlines, insurance oil companies to themselves. Driven only by greed, the new owners today pay their workers who are mostly casual workers slave wages. Like in other business concerns seized from the state, the privileged elite, who are today exploiting Buhari’s mismanagement of our crisis of nation building to divert attention from their criminal conspiracy against our youths, are the same people that live like princes spending billions that should have been spent on workers welfare including gratuities in the name of profit.

    Secondly, the youths who cannot give what they don’t have must study hard to understand the nature of our problems. The federal system the country eventually adopted was the brainchild of 20 Nigerian law students in 1920. Those who carried out the revolution in the West were youths who did not only understudy how their forbears managed society by becoming chiefs, they were involved in intensive  intellectual engagement to come up with alternative policy thrusts in order to outwit NCNC, the dominant party in the West and to convince the colonial powers they were ready for self-government.

  • As Barbados becomes a republic

    As Barbados becomes a republic

    Not many people outside the Caribbean know or have heard about the Island nation of Barbados except the well-travelled and well-read individuals who are au courant with global events of political and economic significance. The fact of Barbadian Republican status would not have mattered seriously but for the fact that its republicanism indicates a significant indicator of the local people’s perception of where power lies in the world and their desire to benefit from the changing political and economic power situation away from neo-colonial dependency to membership of a global community and whatever is derivable from it. This change also foreshadows what is likely to come in other Caribbean Islands which have had post-independence dependence on their former colonial powers.

    Barbados is a small island country in the Caribbean with a small population of less than 300,000 people. It got its independence from Britain in 1966 and it has operated as a constitutional monarchy with the British monarch as its head just like most Commonwealth countries that are not republics. The country is predominantly black with a sprinkling of a few whites and Indians. The blacks come in shades of brown and black and colour of the skin unfortunately confers privileges and advantages in the Caribbean. It used to be said in the local adage “if you are white you are alright; if brown, stick around and if black get lost”. This saying was and is still reflected in employment opportunities in the Caribbean islands till today.

    Barbados was the name given to the island by 16th century Spanish explorers to describe the beard-like leaves on the trees on the island. The island later became British after the series of wars waged by European powers among themselves. The island was to become so successful as a sugar plantation economy that it was described as “the jewel of the British crown” by the 18th century before the British shifted their source of sugar from the West Indies to India. This shift by the 18th century finally culminated in the abrogation of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation of slavery in 1833. The economy of the island was based on sugar production which was on the backs of African slaves after the failure of indentured labour and the death in thousands of the local Carib people. The demand for African slaves formed the pillars of the organized transatlantic slave trade which began in the ports of Britain, noticeably in Liverpool and Manchester and then to West Africa and from there to the Americas.

    My friend and colleague, Professor Joseph Inikori, of University of Rochester, the foremost expert on the demographics of the slave trade, has calculated that about 15 million hapless Africans were carried across the Atlantic to satisfy the demand for slave labour in the Caribbean and the Americas both north and south. This is the figure of those who landed safely in the Americas including the Caribbean islands excluding those who were thrown aboard because of sickness or rebellion. It was this unpaid and free labour according to Professor Eric Williams that built the capitalist foundation of modern America. Eric Williams wrote a Ph.D. in Oxford University in 1947 that shattered the idea that it was humanitarian conscience of the British leaders like Williams Wilberforce that drove the movement towards abrogation and emancipation of the slave trade and slavery but  according to Eric Williams, it was the changing domestic power equation pitting the West Indian sugar oligarchs against the East Indian power nabobs that destroyed the West Indian plantation owners in British politics there by facilitating the ascent of the East Indian trading interest.

    The debate about demand and supply of slaves has had tremendous impact on the history of the Caribbean islands and the Americas as a whole. There is no doubt that the demand for slaves  in the Americas affected the  political and economic well-being of Africa because the pre trans-Atlantic slavery on the African continent was less odious than what slavery did to blacks in the new world and its aftermath still manifests in discrimination against black and brown people. In Africa, a talented slave could become king and in some cases were preferred as military commanders who usually had unalloyed loyalty to the rulers unlike ambitious free born prone to overthrowing then existent power structure. Slavery was not unique to Africa; it existed in Europe and Asia and the people who sold fellow Africans into slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean could not have imagined the wickedness and inhumanity surrounding the institutions in the plantation economy of the west in which the production of such a sweet thing as sugar should have elicited so much suffering and death. This aspect of British, African and American and West Indian history has left so much bitter after taste in the mouths of the three continents.

    As a lecturer in Barbados Campus of the University of the West Indies in 1971, I had problems dealing with the sensitive issue of the slave trade in order not to offend my students while maintaining academic integrity. The political effects of this was the distancing the elite from this aspect of their colonial history while facing the future. It is this aspect that the Republican sentiments in the Caribbean are trying to address. In the 1980s and even up till now, there was a movement towards seeking reparations by blacks in diaspora from European and American countries that benefited from the slave economy. The debate included whether some of the African countries like Nigeria that were awash with petroleum dollars needed to contribute to the reparations fund since their forebears actively participated in the slave trade whether they knew the end result in the new world or not. The dimensions the demand for reparations took undercut the strength of the movement because a critical mass of intellectual opinion in Africa had also felt it could demand for reparations for the exploitation accompanying colonialism. The movement for some kind of break with the colonial past in the West Indies in general and not just in Barbados has been on for the past half a century almost from the time of Independence in 1966. A couple of commissions had sat with preponderant opinion supporting republican constitution away from the then constitutional monarchy in which the British crown was the head of the country.

    The present political leadership of Barbados cut the Gordian knot of proclaiming Barbados a republic within the Commonwealth with its own native born president. The transition was without any rancour and the current Governor General Sandra Mason of the island who had been technically a representative of the queen of England became president while the head of government with the power of the executive and head of government remains in the hands of the  current prime minister Mia Motley.

    Nothing really has changed except for the psychological fact that the head of state is not representative of a foreign sovereign. Kwame Nkrumah, the founding president of Ghana used to say it is better to be a king in hell than a slave in heaven. Many Bajans (Barbadians) may jolly well say this! At the lowering of the royal flag in Bridgetown the capital of the country, Prince Charles, representing the old and ailing Queen Elizabeth II said rather apologetically that the British were not too proud of their participation in the odious trade of regarding fellow human beings as cargoes to be traded for profit without consideration of the feeling of the unfortunate Africans carried across the Atlantic to the West Indies. The British royal family was very fond of Barbados with their love of cricket and the late Princess Margaret, the sister of the present queen had a villa on the island.

    The question now is qui bono? Some British journalists are insinuating that they can see Chinese hands in the move towards republicanism in the Caribbean. They point to increasing investments in the economy and granting of loans and outright grants for the improvement of physical and educational infrastructures on the island. The prime minister dismissed this with a wave of the hand. She said it is ridiculous to accuse her government of pandering to Chinese power while not accusing her of doing the same to Canada and the USA, the predominant owners of the foreign investments on the island. I was on the Island about two and a half years ago and I can say categorically that there is no overt Chinese influence on the island. But there is no doubt that the majority of the people on the island prefer the certainty of being somehow under the protection of the British Crown than being on their own. Even though they were an independent country by 1966, maintaining links with the British crown was some guarantee of security from foreign enemies and even internal subversion. Unless the present government can put in place an economy that benefits the black people of the island rather than the elite, republican status would have little meaning. The domino effect on the rest of the Caribbean will be interesting. The sisterly islands of Trinidad and Tobago which became independent in 1962 made the transition to a republic in 1976. The much bigger island of Jamaica up till now has remained a constitutional monarchy with allegiance to the British Crown. The difference in status between these two countries has not been reflected in the level of economic development and political stability. Barbados now becoming a republic will have little or no influence on the constitutional development of the other islands which are too economically weak to begin to toy with their present constitutional status irrespective of the republican sentiments of the elite. There are more challenges particularly of climate change and internal security arising from the dependent economies of the region as a whole and the vast unemployment of the youth for their governments to toy with the idea of constitutional changes. Perhaps it was time for Barbados, the most economically developed of the islands in the Eastern Caribbean to make the change as such consideration in the poor islands like Grenada, St Kitts, and St. Lucia etc. is simply inconceivable.

  • Scary stuff

    Scary stuff

    THERE is outrage in the land. Three different issues are the immediate cause of this rage. The death of Sylvester Oromoni, a pupil of the renowned Dowen College in Lekki, Lagos, the barring of Nigerian travellers from entering Britain because of Omicron, the latest variant of COVID-19, and the killing of no fewer than 17 schoolchildren in Ojodu, Lagos.

    Sylvester’s death in the hands of his fellow pupils said to be his seniors drew the ire of parents, some of whose children had suffered the same fate in their respective schools in the past. Sylvester was bullied by boys older than him who took advantage of their seniority, no matter the number of years, to molest him. Seniors will always be seniors – showing off and telling their juniors, who they may be ahead of just by one year, that “365 days is not a joke”. That was what they told us in our own time.

    Then, 365 days is not a joke was the catchphrase among those who were our senior by only a year. Any little thing and the next thing you will hear is “365 days is not a joke. Come on, kneel down there”. Woe betide the junior who did not comply immediately. The classmates of the ‘senior’ will descend on the junior with slaps, knocks, kicks and any other thing they can lay their hands on. We took the punishment in our strides because we saw it as part of school life. Boarding school was tough and at the same time, it was fun, because things never degenerated to the point where pupils were bullied to death.

    Housemasters were equal to the task, monitoring what went on in the dormitories and any senior who broke the rule was disciplined. Things are no longer like that and this is why junior pupils are being killed in their prime even in the so-called elite schools where things are supposed to be done well. Sylvester was sent to school to learn and not to get killed. His killers must be fished out no matter how powerful their parents may be and served their comeuppance. A kid who knows how to kill should be ready for the consequences of his action.

    There is no justification for the barring of Nigerian travellers by Britain over Omicron. The latest COVID-19 variant was not even sequenced in Nigeria before it became known worldwide. It was sequenced in South Africa and that country swiftly alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) of the discovery of the variant. South Africa did the right thing by alerting the world. It did not behave like China where COVID-19 originated from late in 2019 by keeping quite. It spoke out so that the world can rally together and find a solution to the ravaging pandemic.

    The Coronavirus keeps mutating from one form to the other. The variants in existence for now are: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Eta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda and Omicron. Some of these variants first surfaced in countries in Europe and America and the western world did not rise in unison as it is doing now to impose travel ban on those nations. Africa is not a continent to be treated with disregard. The continent deserves respect. It may not be as developed as the west, but that does not mean that it should be trampled upon like trash.

    Africa brought this upon itself though. As long as its leaders feel beholden to the west, especially, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) so shall these countries continue to look down on the continent. Just imagine, as at the last count on Tuesday, Nigeria had only six Omicron cases and Britain, 437. By today, I am sure, the figure would have risen to 450 or more. Yet, Britain has the temerity to bar Nigerians from entering its country.

    What an insult. What is so special about Britain? Is it not just another country? This is no time to be diplomatically correct. Nigeria must give it back to Britain in the language it understands. It should be tit-for-tat. With over 400 cases of Omicron to Nigeria’s six, Britain should bury its head in shame rather than be seen imposing travel ban on Nigerians. The ban should be the other way round, considering the high number of Omicron cases in Britain.

    The tragic killing of the schoolchildren at Ojodu once again brings to the fore the menace of traffic managers on the nation’s roads. The police, the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), Vehicle Inspection Service (VIS) and Lagos State Trafffic Managemnt Authority (LASTMA) have become more of a nuisance on the road than traffic managers. They are always after drivers of articulated vehicles and commercial buses in order to extort money from them. They will leave motorists in distress who need immediate attention and go after these drivers in their desperation for filthy lucre.

    On many occasions, they have caused fatal crashes. Since they have never been brought to book, they have continued with their atrocious act with reckless abandon.

    See what they caused on Tuesday, while chasing the truck driver who rammed into those innocent souls on their way back from school, killing 17 of the kids. May the children find rest in the Lord’s bosom and may God give their parents the fortitude to bear this irreplaceable loss.

    All those involved in the kids’ death, that is the driver, the road safety, VIS and LASTMA officials, should not go scotfree. At least, not this time.

  • Because we said a prayer to hate

    Because we said a prayer to hate

    In ‘Grief,’ published on October 29, 2020, this writer dallied in the wormhole of doubt, tiptoeing through the vale of public rage. I was wary of committing spunk to the fiction of the Lekki Tollgate massacre or nullifying it, in uncertainty.

    Evidently, there was no massacre. At least, not at the Lekki Tollgate – until proven otherwise.

    On that day, however, grief, prancing on our digital phones recited epitaphs across passion-planes and boundaries.

    “Retweet aggressively!” hastened rebellious youths, in the language of captives and emotion bandits; seeking to break free from the jailhouse of corrupt leadership, they became prisoners to malice and rage.

    Heroes or villains: they were expendable pawns in a sinister agenda advanced by a coalition of dark minds.

    But for all the flak they incite, they were not without love or beauty. Their passion pulsed with spokes of valour. Their clamour greased the wheels of hope even as they rallied and railed against the excesses of insolent leadership, bandit-SARS, and deadly thugs.

    While we condemn the duplicity of claimants to the LTG massacre, we must acknowledge how we got to this sorry pass in the first place.

    Partisan psychology asserts the ultimate benevolence of human emotion.

    In such a system, the truth logically has no place; truth becomes habitually relative. Today, Nigeria careens about the shove of fickle truths.

    By all intent, the protest was hijacked and politicised. All politics is combat, wrestling with manifest hostilities, compromise, and ghosts of dissent.

    We are only for something by being against something else. People profiting from the status quo, that is politicians, the ruling class, courtier journalists, desperate lawyers, and their cronies, often block from consciousness the tangle of clashing of realities threatening their preferred status quo.

    Frantic gerrymandering and propaganda wars manifest in real-time. The fiction of the Lekki Tollgate massacre is one of the refinements of toxic partisanship, it is the consequence of dubious ambivalence fostered by the demons within.

    A country can be fatal to its citizenry. Particularly when leaders turn to predators in public office. It was in reaction to predatory leadership that Nigerians resorted to virulent politics and emotional cultism.

    The ruling class’ serpentine amorality is also the writhing flora of toxic nature. After all, government reflects the people. The ruling class’ lack of ethics is borne of fear and disdain for the electorate. The latter eventually adopts the right to thwart their oppressors’  insolent compulsions via patronage or antagonism a la #Lekkimassacrefiction.

    More people are questioning the claims of the pro-massacre herd. The claims hardly add up. For instance, most of the bullets displayed by one of the arrowheads of the fiction in her video were unspent shells, argued pundits. The bullets weren’t fired. How did she come by them? How was she able to ascertain that a certain bullet, that allegedly struck a fellow protester – who has never come out to verify her story – was intended for her?

    Then she brandished an unspent bullet like the one that she allegedly “extracted” from a fellow protester? An AK-47 bullet to be precise. Even the pro-massacre herd’s Janus-faced local and overseas sponsors, could not validate their claims of a massacre. They recognised it as a poorly scripted and executed drama. Lest we forget the alarming claim by one of the protest’s drama queens, that she doesn’t need facts or evidence to prove that there was a massacre at Lekki Tollgate. Her pitiful arrogance will eventually do her in.

    We have a duty to respond to their insolent compulsions, by ignoring or thwarting them. By keeping quiet in the face of their mental savagery, we inadvertently honour and validate their forgery of patriotism and poetry of anarchy.

    Savage nature elevates their thoughts to the mainstream, the same way it makes disease the price of promiscuous sex. The permanence of the herd as a political persona is part of the weary weight of insolent sullied liberalism, beneath which ethics, nationalism, and truth founder.

    The pro-massacre herd currently looms as Nigeria’s most boorish national threat; basking in the luminance of mob bestiality, their ‘woke’ sentimentalism wildly beckons, fascinates, and destroys.

    Some may seem articulate, collected, but too many manifest as sociopaths in the social space. This is because they propagate a rancid culture of inhumaneness, and a tranquil apathy to the tragedy of verifiable victims of the EndSARS protest: the 57 civilians, 37 policemen, and six soldiers, who got killed in the carnage triggered by their dishonest claims of a massacre on October 20, 2020.

    From their deviant swerve against reason, to their irreconcilability to logic, the mystique of their herd mentality cannot be translated in mortal terms.

    The danger of their politics, however, is that it leaves them infinitely vulnerable to the plots of shady characters.

    Captive to artifice, they become easy tools and pawns in the designs of criminal masterminds seeking to disrupt the political space. It was a no-brainer that the latter would incite easily, a citizenry segment more disposed to voting for porn actors on a smut reality show than participating in an election that would determine their individual and collective fate.

    They are irredeemably prejudiced and stirred by duplicitous bromides, contrived sincerity, and emotionality, often with ethnic and religious resonance. They see, listen and speak in the language of bigots and the psychologically insecure. They are moved by sentiment and slogans, not logic and realism; this is the bane of their herd politics.

    Politicians and entertainers have learned to steer them into a manipulable herd simply by replicating the faux intimacy established between celebrities and their enamoured groupies.

    There is no gainsaying the Lagos State government hustled itself into a tight corner by inviting the military, after allowing the protest to go on for about two weeks. And it was amusing, really, to see Governor Babajide Sanwoolu invite certain purveyors of the massacre fable for his peace-walk. It was given that they would refuse him and thus score cheap political points.

    It’s about time Sanwoolu conducted himself with the resolve, confidence, and humane airs befitting of a Lagos governor. He could have invited, instead, the widows and children of the slain police officers, soldiers, and bereaved families of civilians, whose lives were fed to the blades of treacherous machinations of the characters that he invited – if anything, the latter should be prosecuted.

    Going forward, Sanwooolu must also resist the urge to throw vanity parties for clout-chasing celebrities or “social influencers,” or a Lagos end-of-year carnival that may resonate as a frantic lunge for approval of questionable youths and the pro-massacre herd.

    We are at the point in our lives, when we must actualise the theory of integrity, that we have so eloquently versified, outside the strictures of sponsored idealism and inherited venom.

    While many of us profess integrity in a superficial sense, we must understand that true integrity is impermeable to the shift from universal truth to emotion-cult and psychological terrorism.

    What we have exercised thus far, is a swerve from the truth and humane patriotism to the chthonian. The eye is magisterial in its judgments; it decides what to see and why. Thus each of our glances excludes as much as it includes. We select, editorialize, amplify and enhance.

    Our truths would continually reverberate as sullied wiles if hindered by cataclysmal sentiments, infernal violence, and bigotries.

    If we choose only to see and substantiate the politically-correct realities in our physical and emotional promenades, every time we speak our ‘truths,’ we would be poetising deceit and saying a prayer to hate.

     

     

  • The serpents within

    The serpents within

    Frantic media become vessels to itinerant grim reapers as you read. Editors of traditional and online news platforms, reporters, and citizen journalists, in particular, have become death’s minstrels.

    Like Ogege, the spirit with embroidered woe, they have turned serpents, rifling through Nigeria’s undergrowth to merge with the hue of the prevailing wild.

    They forget that when Nigeria eventually submerges in the mire of bestial elements, even the press will be cannibalised. Nonetheless, the local media, like global news agencies, serve as emissaries and enablers of the dark, vicious lusts of criminal masterminds. They are the itinerant pallbearers working to increase our funeral pyres.

    This minute, they ennoble our monstrosities and couch our ugliness in activist English.

    It is hardly surprising that the #EndSARS protest remains the subject of the Nigerian media’s perennial fascination. Despite the Lagos government’s issuance of the White Paper on the duplicitous judicial panel report on the Lekki Tollgate shooting, the coarse and duplicitous, wanton and bloodcurdling, are gleefully celebrated and coated in ornamental language by shady segments of the press and pro-massacre hordes.

    In the end, the lies they tell shall ruin us; and our follies shall attain clarity of sort. I speak of that moment when lies we tell evolve into half-truths and the grotesqueness we swore to escape begin to thrive on our watch.

    I speak of that moment when #SorosokeWerey and other wild banalities no longer serve the dubious youth mob. If we do not curb the excesses of this frantic divide, Nigeria may careen into its darkest epoch.

    Dystopia beckons; through the bleakness, we shall grope through the lattices of personal disaster into the ruins of national disaster, wondering how genocide found its perch past Lekki Tollgate’s fictionalised massacre into our lives.

    We shall burn and blaze in the name of sullied activism, self-determination, ethnicity, and sexuality politics craftily fed to our psyches from abroad; the language of our bloodlust shall not be understood by all even as our carnage is enabled and patronized by all.

    While we bleed, our vanishing neighbours in the ‘first world’ shall nourish and thrive; Nigeria shall become that perfect prey for the predatory ‘first world’ to rip off.

    We who should be aid-givers shall tirelessly scream and plead for aid. In the name of aid, more weaponry shall arrive on our shores than the deplorable glucose and rice rations. Every Nigerian shall become a revolutionary soldier; every child, a gun-totter.

    Through the chaos, the much-dreaded class wars shall erupt as the working class and breadlines eventually turn on each other, after hacking to death their common foes among the bourgeois and ruling class; they shall brandishing steel upon steel, shooting, maiming and decapitating their lavish spirits, until they become too bloodied to go on.

    Every national treasure and cash cow shall become principal targets of assault. Every personal asset shall become a spoil of war. Cars, houses, certificates, jewelry, enviable marriages, careers, and everything that everybody had ever laboured to achieve shall vanish in pillage and devastating mob wars.

    We shall watch the deployment of arms to our lost but ‘woke’ youth. Having seen too much bloodshed, we shall learn to think with the machete and speak with bullets.

    We shall hound and hack to death, people with whom we used to be friends, next-door neighbours, and in-laws simply because they are pro-massacre and anti-massacre perhaps; then because they are Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri, Ibibio and so on.

    We shall watch our mothers and wives get raped to death. Our daughters and sisters shall become “comfort women” and hyper-active courtesans to at least four or five soldiers, ‘revolutionaries’ or militia at a go.

    Within such stew and stink, the ruling class shall be nowhere near the scenes of ravage nor would the technocrats on whose watch Nigeria depletes by pilferage and sabotage.

    They shall be comfortably tucked away in their safe houses abroad even as they monitor and direct the carnage back at home, with the connivance of shady foreign governments and humanitarian organisations.

    After the bloodbath is over, they shall re-emerge from their safe havens abroad to continue where they left off, knowing there would be greater chances for consequence-free pillage, in connivance with predators from abroad.

    This minute, Nigeria pulses with EndSARS pro-massacre antics. In the melee, dubious NGOs – at home and abroad – and politicians call the shots, and the youths serve as their disposable pawns, guzzling on spite and juvenile sound bites. The average youth becomes an easy mark in the frantic enterprise. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. He fully immerses into the backward civilization into which he has been lured, evolving bald-barefacedly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim through the trap-door.

    This citizenship business still confounds the pro-massacre hordes. Education has failed to improve them. They have learned too little and they have too little to pass on, save hooliganism, sophistry, insolence, incompetence, and greed.

    As you read, dubious lawyers, politicians, activists, all goons-for-hire, are in bed with each other, in service of often shady characters in a cycle Arundhati Roy would call, a revolving bed in a cheap motel. Journalists, youth leaders, traditional rulers, women leaders, and civil societies are snuggled up under the sheets too.

    It’s hard to keep track of the partners; they change so fast. Each new baby they make becomes the latest progeny of the means to mislead financially and ethically impoverished segments of the Nigerian public.

    By their antics, Nigeria could become that mass grave we dread. Nationhood dies by our knack for turning logic on its head, to fulfill our innate wiles and perversions, leading many to conclude that Nigeria was a mistake. Nigeria was never a mistake. Nigerians are the mistake.

    As you read, the myth of the Lekki Tollgate massacre holds fast. Despite its repudiation by the Lagos government’s official ‘White Paper’ on the bungled judicial panel report, characters that ought to know better acidly pronounce the necessity of chaos as the next best thing that could ever happen to Lagos and Nigeria.

    This myth holds particularly among disillusioned youths because it is all they could manage today. The fiction of the massacre appeals to them not just because politicians, activists, and journalists of vulpine intent and intellect shove it to their psyches, many subscribe to the lie because it reinforces their disenchantment and prejudices.

    There is no gainsaying the EndSARS pro-massacre mob share kindred spirits with Boko Haram and armed bandits; they are the emblems of hope serving as crops of wrath, where prejudice and deceit whet inhuman appetites.

    Even those who know their fiction to be a farce are loath to jettison its dangerous sentimentality.

    It is time to heal. It is time for the Nigerian youth to take their rightful place in the scheme of things. I will never tire of saying that it’s about time we aspired to be untiringly just and humane.

    It’s about time we identified the demons that drive dubious segments of the political class and our friends from abroad, and dispossess our minds of the vanities that make us habitable to similar fiends.

    The tragedy of our generation subsists in our seemingly uncontainable prospects and our desperation to be used, lorded over and contained, at a price.

    Let us not continue to serve as disposable pawns in local and international politics of bitterness and plunder.

  • LTG: A postmortem

    LTG: A postmortem

    Take no mistake about it, the Lagos State Government faced its toughest moment in the October 20, 2020 Lekki Toll Gate (LTG) incident. Before that fateful night at LTG, it had tried to douse the fire of the #ENDSARS protest which engulfed the state, with Alausa and LTG as the epicentres. The protesters were adamant in their demands. They began with a charter of demands codenamed  five for five, which later became seven for seven, nine for nine and then the quitting of office by the government of the day.

    At every point, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu tried to meet them halfway, but without any identified leader to relate with, his job was not made easy. The governor wanted dialogue, the protesters seeemd to be prefer something else. They were emboldened in their action by the Federal Government’s acceptance of their initial charter of demands before they allowed sentiments and poor judgment to derail the protest.

    Youths are the future of any nation. They hold the key to the continued growth and development of their countries. So, nations value them and listen when they talk. When they are angry as we witnessed during the #ENDSARS protest, everything humanly possible is done to placate and reason with them. Sanwo-Olu did just that. He asked them to “come and let us reason together”. He took their demands to President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja. The outcome of that trip was the disbandment of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), the major demand of the protesters.

    The protesters were not satisfied; they wanted more. It was in that process that things went awry at LTG on October 20, 2020. As I have repeatedly said here, there were shootings at the toll gate that night. Everybody watching on television heard guns booming and that sound was not simulated. But was there a massacre? This was the major question the Judicial Panel of Inquiry (JPI) was expected to address besides the other issues before it. It is rather unfortunate that the larger #ENDSARS protest, a laudable action which began well, was later reduced to the LTG incident.

    Today, #ENDSARS is all about the so-called Lekki massacre, which many people, especially the protesters, their collaborators and civil society groups, have held on to. The JPI was charged with untying the Gordian knot of a massacre or not. With due respect, it failed woefully in that regard. It failed because it was not certain that there was a massacre, but in order to satisfy certain interests, it settled for there was a “massacre in context”. What does that mean? It failed to clear the air over the much-vaunted ‘Lekki massacre’.

    I had expected the panel to state unequivocally that there was a massacre, if actually there was one, and support it with  evidence. It could not because no such evidence was produced by anybody or organisation that appeared before it during its yearlong sitting. Was the setting up of the panel, therefore, a waste of time and resources? No, it was not.

    But truth be told. It did a shoddy job of the LTG incident. It pandered to unnecessary sentiments in arriving at its conclusion on what happened there on October 20, 2020. Faulting the panel’s finding on LTG, the four-man committee whose White Paper on the report was released on Tuesday said: “The state government is unable to accept the finding that nine people died of gunshot wounds at LTG on 20th October, 2020. The panel’s findings are clearly and manifestly not supported by evidence before the JPI as attested to by the JPI itself when it said there was no contrary evidence to that of Prof Obafunwa that only one person died at Lekki Toll Gate of gunshot wounds on 21st October, 2020.

    Read Also: #EndSARS, Igboho as faces of unequal justice

    “It follows that the irresistible conclusion to be drawn from the JPI’s acceptance of Prof Obafunwa’s testimony that only one person died of gunshot wounds at LTG on 21st October, 2020, is that there was no massacre at LTG, contextual or otherwise. The findings of JPI that nine people died at LTG on 20th October, 2020 from gunshots fired by the military are based on assumptions and speculations. The inconsistencies and contradictions in the entire JPI Report concerning the number of persons who died at LTG on 20th October, 2020, and their cause of death rendered the JPI’s finding and conclusions thereupon totally unreliable and therefore, unacceptable”.

    Whether in context or out of context, according to the White Paper, there was no massacre at LTG. I bet you, we have not heard the last about this matter. Reactions will come in torrents because sympathisers of the protesters’ cause have already concluded that there was massacre at LTG. Nothing will sway them from that position. Yet, provide the proof, they cannot. They keep saying that the army went away with the evidence. Haba! How?  The army, they claimed, swept the toll gate clean and carted away bodies of victims.

    Is that true? It is hard to believe that such happened in this time and age without someone (not a single person) like the daring woman disc jockey (DJ) being able to capture it on their phones. If people could come up with videos of the military ‘shooting and killing’ at the toll gate, why is it so difficult to produce one where they are sweeping the scene and carting away bodies?

    He who alleges must prove, so says the law. Since those making the allegation could not prove it, the conclusion the JPI should have drawn, especially in the light of the irrefutable evidence of renowned  pathologist, Prof John Obafunwa, was to dismiss the claim. Unfortunately, for reasons best known to it, the panel did not do what is legally right. It chose to be sentimental and in law, there is no sentiment. Law deals with facts, cold hard facts. A judicial panel, like the JPI, should have followed  the law and not what people will say.

    What people will say led us to where we are today. If we would rather continued to listen to what people will say and not do what is right, we will not grow as a nation. Let us live for the truth and be just and fair to all. It is heartening that the White Paper panel rose above sentiments to deal with the LTG incident. I commend its courage and charitable act in not consigning the entire JPI Report into the dust bin for misdirecting itself (JPI) on LTG. It is enough to reject the report on that ground alone. But that will amount to throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

    We do not need that now. Let us learn from the #ENDSARS protest, especially the LTG incident, and move forward.  What we need right now is to soothe frayed nerves and heal our land. May the White Paper bring about the desired healing.

  • As year 2021 advances to the end

    As year 2021 advances to the end

    I don’t want to borrow from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11 and describe this year of our Lord 2021 an Annus horribilis (horrible year) as her majesty described some years ago when everything that could go wrong in her family went wrong as witnessed by breakdowns of the marriages of her children, princes Charles and Andrew and that of Princess Anne. This year has not been a great year for most countries in the world because of the ongoing struggle with coronavirus pandemic and the growing concern with global climate change and its manifestation in unseasonably high temperatures, rainfalls, flooding, snow storms, coastal erosion, sea rise, destruction of bio -diversity and many bushfires all over the world.

    Midway in the year, things brightened up with what seemed to be apparent decline in the incidence of the Covid-19 outbreak. But by the beginning of the third quarter of the year, the decline was replaced with an uptick in the coronavirus pandemic in most parts of the world particularly in the Americas and Europe. Somehow, West Africa for reasons not clear to many scientists remains relatively stable despite low vaccination. This does not mean people are not being affected nor does it mean people are not dying of the coronavirus. I have personally lost a few of my friends and academic colleagues. But the incidence of the disease is not as dramatically severe as it is in America, Europe and India.

    People have suggested that the relatively young population of our countries may be responsible for this.  Other reasons adduced to explain the low rate of morbidity and mortality is the fact that we are outdoors people because of the high temperature of our subcontinent. Because of low level of electricity supply, we don’t lock ourselves in our air conditioned homes but rather open our windows wide open to cool ourselves and because of this air circulation helps to keep at bay whatever viruses that are prevalent in our houses.

    Whatever the reasons may be, we have been reasonably lucky in the tropical areas of Africa but not in the temperate southern and the Mediterranean areas of North Africa with their cold weather. We have however suffered from the downturn in the global economy because of our hopelessly dependent economy on the global North. The situation has been very bad for the past two years. Because of the low production in the rest of the world to which we sell our hydrocarbons of gas and oil, prices have been generally low because of low demand for the past two years. Even the sudden rise in the hydrocarbons prices since September is seen by the Western world as a threat to their economies and the United States has coordinated release of oil from their strategic petroleum reserves with countries in Europe and Japan to bring down prices despite the unease in oil producing and exporting countries. Even if Nigeria has benefited from recent increases in prices, the effects have not percolated down to the struggling and suffering people of the country. This is s because our economy is imports dependent. The western and Asian worlds from where we get supplies simply increased their prices in relation to increase in oil and gas prices. We have thus become victims of imported inflation. Cooking gas, drugs, basic food like rice and wheat flour, vegetable oils, even cows coming from Chad, Central African Republic, Niger republic and other parts of West Africa have doubled in price. Locally produced food crops seem to be in a race to catch up with expensive imported ones. Now we are told that we will pay N340 per litre of petrol next year. This price was apparently arrived at because we buy refined petroleum at the high prices prevailing abroad since we do not refine crude petroleum in Nigeria. We have four refineries which are all broken down and the Dangote refinery has continued to shift its commissioning ever forward. In spite of our pleas to the government to sell these damned refineries or give them out gratis to whoever can make them work preferably to the companies that built them, our governments since 2007 have not acceded to our request; rather they continue their old practice of the annual budgetary allocations to repair them which a cynic described as the “cocoa farms” of politicians and those in the corridors of f power.  The result of this and the pervasive corruption all over the place is that governments have very little left for capital development after paying salaries. Even salaries are sometimes paid by borrowing foreign loans from the Chinese who may in future pick and choose which of our infrastructures they would take over to pay our debts. I hope they will mercifully take over our ports and their entrance and exit roads which this current government for seven years has not been able to fix.

    Read Also: UK’s Queen Elizabeth carries out first duty since hospital stay

    The infrastructure deficit of the country, whether in terms of electricity, and particularly rail and roads, has compounded the insecurity and further undermined the poor economy of the country. A country that is stationary and not moving is a dead country. Roads are uniformly bad in Nigeria. Intercity roads that are under construction have been going on for decades. The Lagos-Ibadan road linking the country with Lagos, the commercial emporium of the country has been under reconstruction for the past decade and there is no alternative road while reconstruction continues interminably. The Abeokuta- Lagos road that could have served as alternative is virtually impassable. The Ikorodu- Sagamu road that could have been redeveloped as alternative remains the way the British left it in 1960 when they were leaving the country. I am surprised that the security services particularly the military do not seem to know the implications of Lagos being cut off from the rest of the country by a hostile power like Captain John Beecroft of the British Royal Navy did in 1851 presaging the eventual take over and conquest of Nigeria in detail. Most of the attacks on people are at the unmotorable parts of our roads and states like Ekiti, Osun and Ondo  are almost cut off from the rest of the country because of bad roads.

    Is there any end to these tales of woes in sight? Nobody knows when our problems will gradually come to an end. What I can say is that we have not had things this bad before. We now have a situation where we cannot go and see the graves of our parents and siblings who have gone ahead of us. We fear taking to the roads to avoid joining prematurely our dead parents not because we are sick but because of fear of bandits, terrorists, Fulani herdsmen who seem to value the lives off their cows more than the lives of fellow country folks who are peacefully traversing the land or engaging in farming to feed themselves and their fellow citizens. Initially when these killings started, we pleaded with the federal government which controls all the security forces in the land, to descend heavily on these terrorists but the government demurred apparently because of ties of consanguinity with these terrorists. Now when the problem has metastasized the government is fighting a rear-guard action against them which one hopes is not too little and too late.

    One is tempted to give up. But what alternative than optimism do we have? All of us cannot like the youth of Nigeria begin to look for escape through the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. We cannot run to Angola, Southern Africa, Kenya and Ghana where we are treated with contempt which we richly deserve as a people who frittered away all our opportunities and chances and are now running all over the world like beheaded chicken before giving up. December signifies the end of the year and the hope of a new beginning next year and it is a month in which we can look forward with optimism because it is the month of ADVENT. This is the month we commemorate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word “ADVENT” is derived from the Latin word “Advenire” to arrive so the ADVENT signifies the glorious arrival of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ which we mark on December 25 every year. Whatever fears we may have about the new variant of the coronavirus, we should all hope for a better tomorrow. In spite of the global anxiety over the new variant, Omicron, I believe what some of the virologists in South Africa are saying, that it is not more dangerous than the prevailing delta variant and  that the fear of it coming from “the dark continent” may be the reason for  the knee-jerk reaction of cutting transportation links with Southern Africa by the global North and their allies in Asia and elsewhere and that the current vaccines will still suffice to handle the medical problems associated with the virus and its various mutations. We shall overcome some day! On our own internal insecurity problems, there are indications of a turn around. This is because the federal government has woken up to its responsibility and perhaps because the terrorists have reached their optimum level of nuisance and reached the nadir of destruction and are realizing that others are ready to defend their own territories and means of existence and that destroying the economy has led to the downturn of demands for their cows. Whatever the case may be no condition is permanent and those who may have been sponsoring and abetting them may also have realized that it is lose-lose situation.

    I have a dream that soon our country after restructuring will once again find its place among the great countries in this world with a chastened leadership that has learnt its lessons from our current tragic situation.

  • Julius Berger and agony on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

    Julius Berger and agony on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

    Julius Berger was once again at work last Sunday. The setting was the ubiquitous Lagos- Ibadan expressway that has for the greater part of the last 20 years become some sort of a torture chamber and a haunted route for millions of Nigerians moving to or out of Lagos from all other parts of the country. The initial mandate was for Julius Berger to reconstruct the 127 kilometres expressway that took less than three years when it was first etched out of a deep mangrove rain forest and commissioned towards the dying months of Obasanjo military regime in August 1978. That task has however so far defied Obasanjo and his PDP’s  16 years of  mis-governance  including the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan which in 2013 re- awarded  the contract to Julius Berger Nigeria and Reynolds Construction Company Limited at a sum of N167 billion and of course Buhari and his APC’s six years of buck-passing.

    I am not sure there is any other thing that has alienated President Buhari from Nigerians than the non-completion of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. This is the busiest inter-estate expressway connecting all parts of Nigeria and which, according to Clement Oladele, Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC)’s sector commander, caters for “no fewer than 16 million passenger during the festive period”, with about 1.8 million vehicles , 72% of which are commercial vehicles, plying the road between December and January every year. The agony on the road is the agony of all Nigerians.

    Julius Berger represents everything that is wrong with the nation. It  shares all the negative attributes of the Nigerian governing elite – impunity, insensitivity, greed and lack of empathy for Nigerians they often treat as subjects as against citizen.  The agony and nightmare experienced by Nigerian motorists who last Sunday spent about eight hours between the Redeemed Camp and Lagos as a result of traffic gridlock deliberately created by Julius Berger was only one of series of repeated assault on Nigerians for which the company has ever been held accountable.

    Ad what was the story?

    The Federal Controller of Works in Lagos on Sunday morning, announced a six-day traffic diversion on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, starting from Monday, to enable Julius Berger, the contractor handling section one of the project, to lay asphalt between Arepo and Warewa, a distance of one and half kilometers. But between 9am and 10am that morning, “about three people who wore Julius Berger apron used a bulldozer to carry barricades to effect the blockage. With total contempt for Nigerians, Julius Berger, a contractor which thinks it is doing us a favour created a gridlock 24 hours before the commencement of work on the affected portion of the road.

    With Julius Berger’s partial shut-down of the Magboro and Warewa, Ogun State ends of the highway, “thousands of travellers’, according to a Punch report, “moving inwards Lagos State and those bound for Ogun State were trapped at the various bottlenecks”, while an overwhelmed Federal Road Safety Corps officials stood aloof even as “motorists struggled to wriggle their way out of the logjam”.

    But such contempt for Nigerians is in Julius Berger’s character. Back in 2016 when it embarked on the work on the long bridge, but for the outcry of Nigerians, it initially ignored suggestions that pathway at the beginning of the long bridge be graded in addition to grading of the bad portion of the road between Kara area and Berger so that vehicles could be diverted to the side lane to provide relief to motorists while Julius Berger worked at its normal snail speed.

    Read Also: Truck crushes three to death on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

    With President Buhari’s  efforts at managing our diversity, ensuring security  and stabilising the economy under repeated attack by his  political enemies and other concerned Nigerians, one area he believes will be his lasting legacy is the ‘rebranding of road networks in the country’. A huge chunk of the loans his administration secured has therefore been channeled into rebuilding the nation’s collapsed infrastructure in general. Addressing guests during the opening of a recent two-day Mid-Term Ministerial Performance Review Retreat at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, the president expressed delight that ‘‘the PIDF projects including the 11.9km Second Niger Bridge, 120 km Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, 375 km Abuja – Kaduna – Zaria – Kano Expressway and the East-West Road are advancing remarkably and   are expected to be completed within this second term of our administration.’’

    But the unending agony of motorists on Lagos-Ibadan expressway now threatens to derail that dream. It was perhaps in recognition of this and the series of delays in the completion of the project that the House of Representative Committee on Works, led by its chairman, Abubakar Kabir, during their oversight visit to roads in Lagos and Southwest on Tuesday, June 1, issued a May 2022 ultimatum to the contractors handling the rehabilitation/reconstruction to complete the project.

    Raji Fashola, the president’s resourceful Minister of Works also understands the implication of the continued delay in the completion of the road on the legacy of his principal.  Back in September, accompanied by Governor Abiodun of Ogun State, he was for the fourth time this year on the inspection tour of progress on road. Fashola during the assessment tour praised the contractors, Julius Berger for having covered “ long-range, citing the lengthy kilometres covered from Ogere, Sagamu, Kara and to Lotto flyover”.

    Work on the Lotto flyover bridge which as far as eyes can see only spans across the expressway has taken over three years with motorists sometimes spending more than one hour of struggling with trailers and fuel-laden tankers to cross that portion of the road even when many at time, little or no activity was going on. I think instead of humouring, Fashola should remind Julius Berger that in February 2020, it took only 10 days for the Chinese authority to build a two-storey Huoshenshan (Fire God Mountain) 1,000 beds Hospital on  the outskirts of Wuhan City to serve exclusively as a treatment and quarantine centre for patients with the 2019-nCoV virus.

    I have searched without finding a difference between Julius Berger and Reynolds Construction Company Limited, the two contractors handling the reconstruction of the expressway. Both have nothing but contempt for Nigerians. I drove from Ibadan end of the expressway to Ife by-pass on Thursday and Friday last week, each trip lasting about one hour. But beyond the traffic gridlock compounded by pot holes Reynolds did not bother to fix, most of the expressway was opened up with motorists, motorcyclists, pedestrians enveloped by red soil. It is not known how long Ibadan residents and those traversing the city will face such ordeal especially since it is obvious no one is thinking of the health implications for those whose only crime is that they live or travel through the city.

    But we know why contractors treat us as sub humans and why Julius Berger cannot but treat German citizens with anything but civility. Professor (Mrs) Angela Merkel, their immediate past leader, while in office, walked with her husband to the grocery store while wives of local council chairmen and state legislators here are driven to the market in official car accompanied by AK-47 wielding police officers.

  • EndSARS: Facts and feelings

    EndSARS: Facts and feelings

    We must accept the leak of the unapproved judicial panel report on the Lekki Tollgate incident for what it was: a premeditated act of sabotage. A criminal plot to bully the government by inciting mass outrage over the fictive lore of a massacre.

    The leak is at once a metaphor of Nigerianness and the leakers’ lack of character. The culprits had murder in their hearts and menace in their eyes; they sought to stoke widespread dissent into bloodcurdling rage. Thus they sang simmering dissent into far-flung choler. If they had their way, Nigeria would burn.

    A lot has been written for and against the leaked report. While more people are questioning its veracity and justness of its verdict, its fabricators are fanatically devoted to its pronouncement of a massacre in strange context; the latter proclaim in dubious spirit, that the Lekki Tollgate shooting resulted in mass murder.

    By their machination, public discourse increasingly takes the form of organised mayhem as local politics and news transform into toxic adjuncts of the malevolence of pro-massacre aficionados.

    The leaked report is a monument to our nation’s cult of bigotry, inherited and sponsored hatred.

    It is a homage to eternal duplicity. The unapproved report was leaked through the mystique of mischief, base sentiment and juvenile angst. It was primed to incite international sentiment against the incumbent government, while stoking the embers of discord to birth an infernal spring.

    The masterminds of the leak believed that if they kept tinkering with public perception and our emotional state long enough, their lies would manifest as gospel truth.

    Conventional rationalism, despite its inequities, should keep the chaos of sophistry and base sentimentality in check. But when the prestige of patriotism dwindles to a low, all the nasty daemonism of selfish instinct pops out.

    Toxicity soars, pervading our private and public spaces. Individualism, the self, unrestrained by humaneness, yields to the coarser servitude of constraint by nature. And every road leads to violence and bloodshed.

    The judicial panel’s recontextualisation of the word, “massacre” and its dubious misinterpretation is an interpretive cloud we cannot dispel by a feeble declaration of truth. The pro-massacre mob can swerve from truth, but they cannot obliterate it.

    Sophistry is their urgent rampart, the fortress to which they scurry every time humane rationalism and the truth get thrust to their perception.

    Fractious before reason, they retreat into chilling crannies of chaos; they are like the ethically comatose patients, who automatically drift toward the fetal position of the doomed, from which they have to be nursed and nourished back to probity.

    Governor Babajide Sanwoolu now understands perhaps that the time for bending and wavering to court insolent youths and their enablers is over. Political capital, social capital, brand capital, are kindred froths in a bubble. None is real; they are all transient spumes atop governmental jetsam and flotsam. Its about time Sanwoolu ignored the gallery of the raucous hordes and respond with unwavering candour.

    It was wrong to allow inordinately biased, pro-massacre enthusiasts an easy ride on to a judicial panel that was meant to be peopled by neutral, dispassionate parties.

    That was the first undoing of the restitution effort. The government unwittingly gave anarchists the chance to play judge and jury of their own case. The consequences manifest even as you read.

    That a judicial panel could use the words ‘massacre in context’ and equate such to a massacre; that the panel could squander precious times, on taxpayers’ fund, rehashing rumours and unsubstantiated allegations spuriously bandied on social media as the soul and foundation of its report leaves a sour mood in the psyche.

    Read Also: Lagos #EndSARS panel report controversy rages 

    That the panel could dismiss crucial testimony of ballistic experts who testified before it that: “no military grade live ammunition (high-velocity) was fired at the protesters at Lekki Tollgate on 20th October 2020, within the time frame of reference (18.30- 20.34hrs). That the GSW (Gun Shot Wounds) injuries (4 in number between 19:05 and 19:45 hrs), which were examined by the Team, can be safely identified as being discharged by either low velocity caliber and/or artisanal/12-gauge firearms (artisanal firearms are locally-fabricated weapons). What is however certain is that had the military personnel deliberately fired military grade live ammunition directly at the protesters; there would have been significantly more fatalities and catastrophic injuries recorded. This was clearly not the case.’’

    That the same panel which deemed credible, the evidence of the Forensic Pathologist, Prof. John Obafunwa, that only three of the bodies on which post mortem were conducted were from Lekki and only one had gunshot injury went on to contradict itself by saying nine persons died of gunshot wounds at Lekki, raised valid questions on the leaked report, according to the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed.

    Although Mohammed’s argument has incited the ire of the pro-massacre herd, nothing about their outrage is driven by actual concern for casualties of the #EndSARS conflict. If justice and compassion were truly their intent, they would extend their glamourised ire and compassion to the 57 civilians, 37 policemen and six soldiers who were killed across the country during the protest.

    But these lives brutally cut short outside the perimeters of the Lekki Tollgate protest or carnival ground, if you like, do not matter in their estimation.

    Their disposition is better contextualised by the horrid reality it triggered; fake news of a massacre at Lekki Tollgate sparked chaos across Lagos, leading to widespread looting, murder of innocent citizenry and security operatives.

    The leaked report and the frantic campaign to browbeat government and questioning citizenry into accepting it, smacks of mischief and duplicity stemming from mental and ethical indolence. It reveals, among other things, the rancid hatred flourishing among Nigerians of vastly different stripes in plain sight.

    The sponsors and purveyors of massacre-stoked angst understand that hatred is a Nigerian currency. They also understand that more people are bound to misunderstand the objects of their hatred hence the scathing attacks on government rebuttals of a massacre.

    It gets more worrisome when self-confessed journalist-crusaders perpetuate the morbid myth of the recontextualised massacre – either as pawns or propaganda masterminds.

    We are at that point when new expediences and indignation are fed to our infernal factory thus turning large segments of the public into insentient robots.

    This is the hell Plato warned us about. He feared the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. Nonetheless, it is the media’s duty to enlighten and educate those imprisoned and bewitched by the shadows on Plato’s mythical cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”

    To restore confidence in his government, Governor Sanwoolu must preside, without compromise, over the issuance of the official ‘White Paper’ on the Lekki Tollgate incident – especially now that the Federal Government has come out guns blazing.

    A single death at Lekki Tollgate would always be too many. The bereaved must be compensated. And Lagos must expose and prosecute the leaker of the unapproved report. The arrowheads of the Lekki Tollgate crisis, who led hundreds of youths to flout a legal curfew thus igniting a chain of events that birthed widespread riots, looting and arson, and the untimely death of 57 civilians, 37 policemen and six soldiers, must also be arrested and prosecuted according to the rule of the law. Justice must be served.

  • Journalists as self-proclaiming heroes

    Journalists as self-proclaiming heroes

    Government has immense and unrivalled powers and authority. In democracies, they are headed by elected sovereigns whose powers can be likened to that of a Leviathan.  The reason society needs a fearful sea monster is because it is inhabited by wild animals whose abiding philosophy ‘is the survival of the fittest’, where the weak dies and strong survives. The most powerful among them want unrestrained freedom to preside over an empire of slaves. Driven by the evil spirit of acquisitiveness and the desire to dominate their environment, men who are generally insane, therefore needed to be kept in check. The only institution that can do this is government whose very end is moving man and society from the state of liberty and license, of enmity and destruction, to that of peace and safety where those who have properties can enjoy them without fear of molestation. Government’s goal is pursuance of the greatest good and happiness for the greatest populace.

    The paradox however is that the rest of us that need protection most from the owners of society not only often see government as enemy, but also forget we are  the government. For instance, we have consistently blamed our economic travails on government, forgetting it was our economists who first told us that for our economic growth, we must embrace import-substitution through which we supply raw materials to multinationals to satisfy the consumption patterns they had created. It was our own economists that told us there was no alternative to structural adjustment programmer (SAP) which led to the collapse of our budding industries, taking our exchange rate from N1 to more than $1 to today’s over N500 to $1. It was Chukwuma Soludo as CBN governor who killed small banks and championed mega banks that today declare multi-billion naira profits through exploitation of workers who are paid slave wages as casual workers.

    Behind most of our today’s divisive issues of our politics, are the political scientists. They recommended the proscription of our political parties and their replacement with military-decreed two-party system which will “evolve from the grassroots, give equal right and opportunities to all Nigerians irrespective of wealth, religion and status”.  Under Obasanjo, an aberration where a federal government funded local governments that are not accountable to the centre,  which Chukwuma Soludo said is the only one of its kind in any federation in the world, was their baby. As Aso rock professors during Babangida’s reign, they accused those who implemented free education and free health programmes in the first republic of insincerity claiming “they have been deceiving our people as they were deceived during the First and Second Republics”.

    Instead of admitting we are the architect of our own misfortunes, we accuse government of the most unimaginable sins. And most guilty are the journalists who pretend not to understand the media is owned by those who have cornered more than their proportionate share of the national resources and needed platforms to protect their warped world view. It must be admitted that Nigeria’s current youths were on a good start with their EndSARS protest in October 2020, with government acceding to all their demands even though they did not have a clear understanding of our problems. But the goodwill of many supporters was frittered away with the media introduction of subliminal message about  the huge amount of money that managers of the Lekki Toll Gate plaza rakes in daily just to score political point on behalf of their  owners who in the absence of debate, bargaining or healthy competition have resorted to institutionalised fighting. They did not say when it became a crime to make money from government even as their proprietors make billions promoting fraudulent politicians through news commercialisation and conferring of honours on dubious bankers on money bags.

    The tragedy is that while making a living by serving multi-billionaires and power manipulators who daily cheat and break the law, we assume the moral high ground trying to pull down government.

    How else does one explain the virulent attack on Lagos State government and, the inquisition of government lawyers who pointed out some discrepancies in the unsigned leaked report of Lagos Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of SARS Related Abuses and Other Matters, last week? While Governor Sanwo-Olu set up a four-member committee to raise a white paper on the submitted report, the media houses have written editorial while some electronic media actually embarked on what was more or less an inquisition of those who dismissed the leaked report as “pure distortion of glaring facts and cannot, in the face of in-depth probe and sophisticated analysis, stand the test of time”.

    The media found an ally on Ebun Adegboruwa who admitted he was invited to join the panel on the basis of his credibility but now accuses Lagos State government of sponsoring attack on his person.  He has argued that “it will be unfair and improper for Lagos State to be a judge in its own cause, by seeking to review the report of the panel.” If the government that sets up the panel cannot issue a white paper, he did not say who should. Both the media and Adegboruwa also gave the impression that it was Lagos State that was behind the attack on one Miss Kamsiyochukwu Ibe said to “be a prominent EndSARS protester who testified before the panel”.

    Of course there are evil men in government. There are similarly overzealous men in government. There are constituency projects scammers. There are pension thieves. But we can yet not do without government. I spent about 30 years in the media where gratuity was gratuitous rising to the highest pinnacle one can reach. I spent just about five years in the public university retiring with a monthly pension of N11,000 and more importantly, access to medical care for minor ailments while most of my media colleagues depend on goodwill of others for their medical needs. But it must be said this is not limited to the media. It is the story of larger Nigerian society where the policy of the vicious men that control the jungle is survival of the fittest or the law of the jungle.

    Finally, the media must stop misleading the youths who today see government as enemy. They must be encouraged to join politics at local level like their forbears did. Ahmadu Bello started at the local government level. He was framed up for financial fraud by his political enemies until Bode Thomas rescued him through the judicial process. Awolowo, Rotimi Williams Akintola, Ajasin, Tony Enahoro all first became chiefs to learn how their forbears managed their society over the centuries. Being used to fight institutional war at Lekki Toll gate was therefore diversionary.

    And as for social media tigers, we have seen their limitations after the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Maghreb notably in Libya that has descended into a Hobbesian society where life is nasty, brutish and short. Egypt today is ruled by an emergent twenty-first century Pharaoh; Tunisia where after the initial euphoria, is today ruled by a dictator and Syria and Yemen, each at war with itself.