The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

War on the Oodua front

Olakunle Abimbola

WAR on the Oodua front! But it’s not unlike that easy but macabre tease, by reggae great, Peter Tosh: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die!

In the gangling, growling, sabre-rattling mood of the season, everyone bawls war! But about everyone too, is cock-sure to live to tell the tale!

The stupidity of scalding passion! The danger of wild delusion! The inevitability of ice-cold reason!

It dawned with the Ondo gubernatorial diktat, the Presidency’s counter riposte, and the acute danger of faulty messaging.

Meeting with Hausa, Fulani and Ebira leaders in Ondo State, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu decreed that herders (who kidnappers fake), within seven days, must quit the Ondo forest reserves-turned-kidnappers’ den.

The governor’s key call here was worsening insecurity. Spikes in kidnappings and killings were intolerable. The lawful majority must be protected. So, the diktat was both reasonable and popular.

Also, these crimes are often associated with “herders”: following endless tales from the seized, that alien kidnappers have turned Ondo forests into ransom-awaiting refuge; and grim slaughter slabs for victims that couldn’t pay.

Yet, these forests stream with herdsmen that speak same language as these alleged criminals, thus making a perfect camouflage. It makes eminent sense, therefore, to clear the area of every noxious element.

Still, under the law — and politics — of the Federal Republic, can a state governor give non-indigenes a sweeping order to vacate a precinct, without provoking similar backlashes from other governors? To every “Sabo” (northern conclaves) in the South, aren’t there Sabongeri (southern settlements) in the North?

Stripped of its ethnic interpretation, that would appear the core of the Garba Shehu Presidency retort, to the Ondo gubernatorial diktat.

Incidentally, the same Shehu had issued two previous but similar statements. One: to press the right of northerners in the East, against threats from some eastern elements. The other: to defend Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah’s residential right in Sokoto, again after some locals threatened to expel him.

So, except you apply the most disingenuous of ad hominem fallacies, Shehu cannot be right in defending Father Kukah’s right in Sokoto, yet be wrong in defending northerners’ rights in the East, or herders’ rights in Ondo — particularly law-abiding herders, not convicted of any crime — just because of accusation that the presidential spokesperson is a Fulani ethnic jingoist.

But even if Shehu has, on citizen rights, been consistent, he dangerously begged the serious security question in the Ondo case.

The governor didn’t just rise from the wrong side of the bed to bark out quit orders. He acted from intolerable kidnapping, many of them by Northerners, plaguing his people. On that he can’t be faulted.

On the security question, therefore, both the Presidency and the Ondo government should be on the same page; not work at cross purposes.

But as these skirmishes flared, sub-state extremists jumped into the fray.

Sunday Adeyemo, aka Sunday Igboho, now styled “Yoruba ethnic activist”, galloped into town at Igangan, Ibarapa North in Oyo State, and ordered the resident Fulani in there to scram — or else …

The comedy, from this brewing tragedy: the Ivy League-educated FFK goads Igboho on, as his new-found Yoruba champion. But Gani Adams warns his fellow sub-state player to beware of a suicide mission — both for himself and for “the struggle” they both push!

For Yorubaland, however, an epochal regression: a people hitherto hoisted on the cutting intellect of the great Obafemi Awolowo, now comfy with the likes of Igboho and Adams — no thanks to some careerist-Awoists, who have morphed into neo-Samsons, ready to crash the edifice on all and everyone!

In all the excitement, a scornful Igboho told Governor Seyi Makinde to go jump into the Ogunpa River, for daring to call for his arrest; when it was Igboho, and Igboho alone, that made him governor!

Somewhat, that echoed a 2nd Republic brush, between the great Bola Ige and ace partisan fixer, Busari Adelakun, in same Oyo State! With that came the serenading of Igboho’s alleged awesome magical powers! Enter: new atavistic champ come to save the Yoruba from the Fulani!

Still, only Igboho and Igboho alone would answer to the law, if charged with any felony.

Of course, intemperate outbursts weighed in from the northern divide, the craziest of which represents a cattle lobby, claiming the Fulani owned every grain of Nigerian soil; and could well do whatever they damn well liked with it!

That such a lunatic could crow and make sense to anyone, in 21st century Nigeria, should bother everyone.

Newspapers, of course, take predictable regional stands. Ironically, Daily Trust, which arguably had the more cautionary editorial, slapped you with a reckless and rabid headline. The Nation essayed a centrist mode, but its southern sympathies were without question. The Punch? A thunderous bombast and tirade, that only preached to the converted.

No surprise at all: both the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the rump of Afenifere, gung-ho, tore at each other, in defence of the right of own people — a Nigerian notorious penchant, to be sure, to talk at (not with) one another.

Still, all of these are the proverbial din, that begs the market question. The critical business is a failing security infrastructure, which both the Federal Government and states must partner to renew and reshape; or otherwise face looming but avoidable catastrophe.

The genteel — among whom most Yoruba regard themselves — would cringe at Igboho’s atavism. But they are no less riled by some cocky criminals from the North, who triggered the Ondo and Ibarapa, Oyo crises.

That you have a constitutional right to roam nationwide does not equate a democratic right to free-wheeling crime. That is true of northerners in the South; as it is of southerners in the North.

But all these wouldn’t be issues if the security infrastructure were adequate — inserting state police, for instance — and security agencies are perceived firm, fair but tough on crime, no matter the tongue, or the ethnics, of the criminals.

This is where the Federal Government must show leadership; and launch critical initiatives, on which it must partner with the states to implement. Had that been the case, most of the current crisis wouldn’t even occur.

But the media too must play its part. You can’t because of a few criminals profile the entire Fulani as felons; or demonize honest herders, as kidnappers.

January 26, 2021
At last, Kogi’s magic formula
By Olatunji Dare

Of the 121,000 cases and 1,501deaths from coronavirus disease in Nigeria as of January 23, 2021 (courtesy of Johns Hopkins University, which compiles and updates such figures from dependable sources, not a single incident or fatality or rumour thereof has come out of Kogi State.

Daily, the media are awash with rumours and reports of Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths, certified by the competent authorities. Most families grieve privately or bury their dead quietly. Not a few buried theirs in rowdy ceremonies that defied the Covid protocols.

But there has been everywhere, a general acceptance that something malignant was in the air, and that the recognition of that reality is the beginning of healthy existence. Everywhere, that is, except Kogi State.

The state governor, Yahaya Bello, dismissed it as a hoax. He said, it was just a species of malaria and would soon vanish. The whole thing had been confected by corrupt medical authorities and political officials to extort funds from the Federal Government. Being a God-fearing person sworn to transparency and propriety in thought, word and deed, he would play no part in that fraudulent scheme, he declared again and again.

Besides, on being admitted to the honourable society of accountants, he had pledged solemnly to abide by the ethics of the profession. Nothing in the world, not even a so-called pandemic, was going to make him violate that pledge in letter or spirit.

And to show that he was not grandstanding, he rejected on the threshold any Covid-19 funds that might be allocated to Kogi. Nor would he allow into the state the concoctions being touted as remedies for the disease.

Whether they came out of the most reputable laboratories in the world or bear the imprimatur of the world’s leading epidemiologists, you have Bello’s word that those concoctions are no better than refined poisons, the sole object of which is to kill Nigerians in the tens of thousands. The indecent haste with which they were produced and rushed to the market – with far less rigorous testing than a toothpaste would undergo: is that not proof enough of the evil designs of their promoters?

Fortified by their governor’s assurances, Kogi residents went about their businesses as they had always done, mingling freely in groups large and small to celebrate one thing or another, congregating in places of worship and journeying back and forth. The state remained open for trade and commerce and social intercourse from all corners of Nigeria.

While they were running out of hospital beds and intensive care facilities in other states, there was not a single hospitalisation in Kogi. While medical personnel in other states were dying or stretched to the point of physical and mental exhaustion, their counterparts in Kogi said they had never found their work so agreeable.

While “mysterious deaths” stalked communities across the country, it was all fun and gaiety and laughter in the Confluence State. Investors fleeing other states found a safe, lucrative harbour in Lokoja, the Kogi state capital.

Governor Bello’s confident assertion that his domain was off-limits to the coronavirus was no idle boast, it turned out. The virus never found a way of insinuating itself into Kogi, not even in its serial mutations or permutations.

Nigerians were mystified.

What was it about Kogi that made the coronavirus keep a respectful distance from it even as the virus ravaged other parts of Nigeria with implacable malignancy?

Army generals, university professors, industry barons, top civil servants, senior clergy across the faiths and regular folk, old and young, featured prominently in the daily bulletin as victims or casualties of Covid-19.

But not in Kogi. The place seemed like a world apart, a bubble, in which the tens of thousands came and went day in and day out and automatically acquired Covid immunity in the process.

Instead of entreating Bello to share with the rest of the country the magic formula he has employed to keep Kogi off-limits to Covid-19 in whatever mutation or permutation, they pilloried him and called him all manner of names. They said he was anti-science, and that he combined pitiful ignorance with brazen arrogance.

But the laugh, alas is on them. The facts on the ground have confirmed his foresight and wisdom. So, he just sat back and watched as hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19 mounted across the country. Kogi stood out as the lonely exception, envied at home and revered abroad as an African success story

At home, there is now excited talk of drafting him to run for president in 2023 so that he can replicate his liquidation of Covid-19 and other malignant diseases on a national scale. A Committee of Friends is currently on a national mobilisation tour in aid of that project. At every stop, it has been received with great enthusiasm.

Meanwhile the Nigerian Conference of Patriotic Journalists is set to confer him with the special award of “World Conqueror of Covid-19,” at a ceremony in Lokoja later this month.

Abroad, the international community will move the Nobel Committee to award Bello the 2021 Peace Prize, if not the substantive Nobel medallion in Medicine, in recognition of his unparalled contributions to global public health.

Following all the attention, and to show his detractors that he is not the unfeeling potentate they love to hate, decided recently to share, free of charge, the secret of Kogi’s stunning success in keeping Covid-19 at bay.

It is not denialism – stubborn, dogged denialism, denialism enforced with every official and extra-official power – that has been at work in Kogi’s conquest of Covid-19. If that were the case, why have other states not employed it in wishing the plague away?

At first blush, the Kogi Formula appears beguilingly simple – so simple that it can be expressed in a just one word, the meaning of which every adult Nigerian knows or can figure out in the proper context. But on close examination, the formula is nothing if not recondite, the product of pure genius.

That formula, it can finally be revealed, consists primarily if not wholly in sensitisation.

At a parley with journalists in Lagos last week, Kogi’s Commissioner for Information, Kingsley Fanwo, who should know, was asked: “How has the state been fighting COVID-19, especially now that the second wave is causing more havoc across the world?”

His response, as reported in this newspaper, bears quoting at some length.

“We have succeeded in sensitising the good people of Kogi state. The best weapon to fight COVID-19 as far as we are concerned, is through sensitisation. When the people know their responsibilities and what they should do to keep themselves safe, it will help in ensuring that the pandemic doesn’t ravage the state. We are still on the fact that there has not been a single case in Kogi State,” (emphasis added.)

“All those other ones declared by the NCDC are controversial and we have rejected those figures in clear terms. As far as we are concerned, we will continue sensitization. Before any other state, we built our communication pillars on COVID-19 and ensured that we are telling the people the right thing about the virus. That is what is working for the state. . .”

There you have it.

Why waste billions on vaccines that will be available only to a privileged few and produce uncertain outcomes when you can, with a rolling sensitization campaign that will cost next to nothing, keep the infernal plague at bay?
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January 26, 2021
Here, our self-help republic

Sanya Oni

IT took two separate – though very related – events in the past week to lay bare any remaining pretences about the state of our union, the sanctity of the so-called constitution and, the impotence of our institutions.

The first is the order by the Ondo State governor, Rotimi Akeredolu’s on herdsmen to vacate all forest reserves in the state within seven days with effect from last week Monday. The governor had also banned night-grazing with immediate effect because, according to him, most farm destruction takes place at night. In the same vein, movement of cattle within cities and highways across the state was also prohibited.

The other is the seven-day ‘quit notice’ issued by the Yoruba activist, Sunday Adeyemo a.k.a. Sunday Igboho, on Fulani settlers in Igangan, Ibarapa North Local Government Area.

The first was clearly a revelation in the Buhari administration’s penchant for cant and subterfuge over a matter that demanded tact, wisdom, even-handedness and if you like, some dose of magisterial detachment. For whereas the governor, a learned Silk, could not be accused of sloppiness with his clear, unambiguous directives, the Presidency on the other hand, which has all of these while, been practically AWOL while the spectre of insecurity raged, couldn’t be persuaded that the directives meant no more than the elegantly worded text – which is that the forest reserves, over which the state government has exclusive proprietary rights, and which had become a haven for criminal activities, should return to its original purpose!

For the purpose of clarity, here is what Governor Akeredolu said: “We have taken major steps at addressing the root cause of kidnapping, in particular, and other nefarious activities detailed and documented in security reports, the press, and debriefings from victims of kidnap cases in Ondo State.

“These unfortunate incidents are traceable to the activities of some bad elements masquerading as herdsmen…These felons have turned our forest reserves into hideouts for keeping victims of kidnapping, negotiating for ransom, and carrying out other criminal activities.

“As the Chief Law and Security Officer of the state, it is my constitutional obligation to do everything lawful to protect the lives and property of all residents of the state.

“ Under-aged grazing of cattle is outlawed. In its usual magnanimity, our administration will give a grace period of seven days for those who wish to carry on with their cattle-rearing business to register with appropriate authorities.

“Our resolution to guarantee safety of lives and property within the state shall remain utmost as security agencies have been directed to enforce the ban.”

To the above, our not-exactly-disinterested presidency would resort to the puerile arguments on the “need to delink terrorism and crimes from ethnicity, geographical origins and religion…!

Who is doing the linking here? The governor sworn to uphold the law or those who choose to interpret well-meaning directives designed to secure the peace for the greater majority from the narrow prism of ethnicity and religion? We are referring to those who not only appropriate undeserved privileges but see them as something to be defended at all costs?

Talk of a sense of priority not only egregious but most dubious. Clearly, if the Presidency chose to feign ignorance to the Ondo State Forestry Law regime (Forestry Law of Western State and National Forestry Policy, 2006), which I understand, makes it a criminal trespass for an individual to occupy a forest reserve without obtaining permit from the state government through the forestry department of the agriculture ministry, couldn’t the fragile security situation in the state and elsewhere have dictated a more nuanced response particularly by an administration often accused of turning a blind eye to the atrocities perpetrated by the herdsmen?

And why should the activities of one particular occupational group continue to threaten the collective peace of the society?

Now it is said that nature abhors vacuum. Last week, we saw more than the typical vacuum associated with absentee governance. In Ibarapa Division of Oyo State, that is, we witnessed what most Nigerians probably feared most: an open clash between constitutional order and a militia in which the former, even with all its pretences to constitutional authority, couldn’t even guaranteed to win!

It took the antics of the self-styled Yoruba activist to jar us out of our reverie about constitutional governance still existing in any real sense here. Two Fridays back, the activist had stormed the Ibarapa area of Oyo State to serve a seven-day ‘quit notice’ on alleged kidnappers and criminals terrorising the axis. Prime target was the Seriki Fulani of Oyo State, Alhaji Saliu Abdulkadir, whom he accused of complicity in several reported cases of kidnaping for ransom in the axis. Not for him the niceties of the law and due process; the police and the court system. The Seriki, he decreed, just has to leave town!

Poor Governor Seyi Makinde; unlike the “Constituted Authority” that once bestrode the state – he could only rail and wail! “No one”, he had said of the ultimatum, “had any right whatsoever to order any Nigerian out of the state”!

That ultimatum expired Friday. And guess what, the man not only made good his threat, it was for him a triumphant rally of youths who sang and danced before their train moved to Igangan Town Hall where he addressed them.

“The criminals”, he had pronounced, “had fled the community”. “Non-Yoruba”, he also let it be known, “are welcome in Yorubaland but that anyone involved in kidnapping and other crimes would no longer be accommodated in the land”.

And in a tone of finality he proclaimed: “They have gone. We have sent them out of our land and they cannot come back again.

For the executive governor that had sworn that the eviction order would not take place, it was a case of formal power residing in Agodi, the seat of government, while the real power had shifted to the streets!

Beaten, the Chief Security Officer could only restate the instruction to the new Police Commissioner Ngozi Onadeko: “Arrest and treat like common criminals those fuelling ethnic tension and fanning the embers of crisis in the state”!

In a country where moral equivalences are never in short supply; and where duplicity has since become a directing principle of state policy, don’t ask me whether or not the latest order – which in any case, is no different from the earlier one – will ever be carried out!

Between the triumvirate of an, effete, ineffectual presidency, a governor unafraid to tread where angels tread, and a militia leader consumed by a messianic even if opportunistic streak; the much that could be said for now is that interesting times lie ahead. However, the forces that have been unleashed are such that the country would not remain the same again.

January 26, 2021
Homegrown COVID-19 vaccine here?

By Sanya Oni

When all is said and done, one of the things that would stick out like a sore thumb among many of the instances of our pathetic response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its variegated correlates is the absence of an enabling presidential leadership. For an administration that has been practically AWOL in all matters substantive, the other noteworthy observation is perhaps the astounding dissonance – the lack of coherence – among the actors at the highest echelon of government. Only that would perhaps explain why the Covid-19 has suddenly become less concerning than a ministerial pet project of getting all SIM cards integrated with the National Identity Number (NIN) and all expected to be concluded within a month. For those who thought that the country should be locked in a different kind of emergency given the surge in recent time of Covid-19 cases, Minister Isa Ali Patami has a contrary view: a country burdened by internal security challenges which in any case would outlast Covid-19 had bigger things to worry about than the super-spreader event that would follow a swoop on the NIMC offices to get an NIN. That is supposed to be a minor price for the citizens to pay given that the latter (terrorism) would still be with us long after Covid-19 is gone!

Dissonance could not have been more apt – or fitting description.

That, as I earlier noted, is however nowhere near the absence of enabling leadership that have characterized the management of Covid-19 pandemic. So much for the foibles of a certain Donald J. Trump, it would seem particularly doubtful that the world would have reached this point without Operation Warped Speed a wholly American presidential initiative designed to speed up the discovery and development of vaccines.

Last July, I had written on this page a piece titled Missing in Action to express my concern about the biggest economy on the continent not only missing in action in the race for Covid-19 vaccine but that she stood little chance of accessing them whenever they are ready. Unfortunately, this is what the events since the emergence of the breakthrough vaccines have since borne out. Thanks to the global pharm giants, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the world might have begun to see a tiny spark of light at the end of a long dark tunnel as far as the battle against the virus is concerned; we are now finding out that only those who get to their money where their mouths are not only gets served first, but also determines who and whether anyone else for that gets served in the end; and that all talks about globalism are cheap – it avails only after the big and the mighty have had their fill.

Now, we are stuck with the Hobson choice: to turn eastwards for the unproven Chinese vaccine, or wait endlessly on the West for the tiny droplets that would trickle down after the rich and the powerful have had their fill.

Sure, Nigeria will get the vaccines at some point; the relevant questions however are which, when and in what quantity.

The country, according to Health Minister Osagie Ehanire, has a working group in place to handle vaccines. It is also working with the COVAX programme backed by the World Health Organization. She is also in talks with vaccine manufacturers as well as teams in Britain and Russia. In fact, the United Arab Emirates is said to have introduced the country to the makers of a Chinese vaccine that its officials had tested.

And the big catch? Nigeria does not at present have many facilities that can store the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, which must be kept at minus 70 Celsius!

Sound familiar?

In all of these, only in the past few weeks was the nation actually reminded of the few worthy names in the local pharma/scientific community not only left in town but whose on-going endeavours could actually make a huge difference at this time.

To be sure, not a few Nigerians could claim to have heard of a certain IVERCOVID Research Group, at least, not until very recently when the group emerged from the shadows to present their work on Ivermectin, a drug, hitherto used in the treatment of River Blindness, to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. The group, said to be led by Femi Babalola, an Ophthalmologist and surgeon, Chris Bode, the Chief Medical Director of LUTH, the chairman of the Medical Advisory Council at LUTH, Lanre Adeyemo; a US-based Clinical Pharmacologist, Adesuyi Ajayi; two project virologists: S.A Omilabu and Olumuyiwa Salu; with Felix Alakaloko as Project Coordinator. Not to these eminent Nigerian scientists a case of seeking to re-invent the scientific/pharmaceutical wheel; rather, what they sought was a “repurposing of an existing drug for the treatment of the pandemic. The work, carried out in the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) was said to have followed the report of a 5,000-fold reduction in viral load by Australian workers with in-vitro use of Ivermectin on COVID-19. Recall that the Americans actually undertook a similar work of “re-purposing” Remdesivir and the controversial hydroxychloroquine – all with limited, although incontrovertible results. Only that this time, the group of eminent scholars are not only well prepared by carefully documenting their breakthrough findings but are also ready to engage their peers in the global community on their findings.

By the way, whatever happened to Helix Biogen Consult, & Trinity Immonoefficient Laboratory, both in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, whose potential vaccine was listed among the candidates way back?

I do understand that the Buhari administration is highly interested in partnering with the IVERCOVID group to ensure that the country reaps the benefit of their work. That seems the reasonable thing to do particularly at this time. In any case, the choice before us is pretty limited: at an average cost of $8 per shot, we have neither the funds to ensure universal vaccination of our 200 million citizens nor the infrastructural wherewithal to take, preserve and deliver the new vaccines!

Unfortunately, if I understand how things work in these parts, that quest would remain a tall order. Not with the ingrained psychology in which public policy is decidedly skewed in favour of procurement; certainly not with a leadership class known to be hostage to foreign interests. In the end, all that would be required for the noble endeavor to be thrown through the window is for one third-rate, no-good bureaucrat-agent of the Big-Pharma to render a one-line unfavourable opinion for the efforts of these acclaimed scholars to come to naught!

Isn’t that what makes us what we are? By the way, when shall be begin to celebrate our homegrown initiatives?

January 19, 2021
After the insurrection

By Olatunji Dare

Americans and viewers across the world who watched the storming of the U. S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s rag-tag army of insurrectionists in horror and disbelief on January 6 are finding with each passing day that what they witnessed was only the foam of the event.

Yes, they saw elements the seething, frenzied, bilious, surging crowd, men and women, young and old, scale the walls and race up the steps of the Capitol screaming imprecations, smashing windows, battering doors, pummeling police officers with their fists, baseball bats, flagpoles, lead pipes and just about any object that could be weaponized.

They saw the rioters swamp the floor and offices of the Capitol, vandalize them, and take selfies while doing so, as if they were momentoes of a carnival.

What they did not see was the grim resolve, the murderous frenzy with which the insurrectionists went about their task. “Hang Mike Pence,” they bellowed over and over. Pence the Vice President of the United States was presiding over the congressional proceedings to certify the election of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, probably the last official act of his tenure.

And this primal scream heard around the world was not just a rhetorical demand couched in the imperative. For good measure, they had erected a scaffold on the floor of Capitol, with a noose dangling from it. It was professional job through and through. They were leaving nothing to chance.

Like the sponsors of the misnamed “Save America March,” Pence is a Republican. Security officials managed to hustle him and his wife and their daughter away just in time.

The insurrectionists reserved an especially blood-curdling treatment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they caught up with her; ditto her progressive female colleagues who felt scared almost as terrified of some fellow lawmakers they were sheltering with as they were of the mob that was closing in on them. At a moment of imminent peril, they did not feel they could take the goodwill of their colleagues for granted.

And all this because of a transparent lie, one of the 2, 400 documented falsehoods Trump had told with a straight face since coming into office, this embodiment of vileness whose reckless disregard for facts is matched only by his reckless disregard for the consequence of his mendacity. If lying was not in his DNA, he had become so habituated to it that he can no longer tell the difference between lying and truth-telling. And that has been his way of getting in in the world.

Lying has been the directive principle of the Trump Administration, the cornerstone of its strategy and tactics. He served notice that his tenure would be predicated on non-stop lying, lies small and big and contemptible when, hours after his inauguration, he claimed against pictorial evidence and against the record of the Parks Service, that the crowd in attendance at the event was much larger than the one at his predecessor Barack Obama’s, and was far and away the largest in History, period.

Did it really matter, you ask?

Everything matters to Trump and matters hugely. So deep is his insecurity, despite all the braggadocio, that his ego will be sorely bruised if anything he has a hand in is not certified to be the biggest, the largest, the best, and the mostest, if not the only one of its kind that has ever existed and will ever exist has served the same purpose for his entire life.

If you rated him lower than any person on any scale on any subject or crossed him in any way, he made you pay for it again and again, with the interest compounded. Like Caligula, he never forgets and he never forgives a slight. If you could somehow take out the grievances bottled up within, you have to wonder what would be left in that hulking, saturnine mass.

Everyone knew or should have known that Trump was lying as usual when he claimed that he won the presidential election while it was still in progress. That lie had the ballot. He had telegraphed that if he did not win, it could only be because the ballot had been rigged. And when he did not win, it followed that the ballot was completely, totally and absolutely rigged.

So much for a self-fulfilling weird prophecy.

Trump knew for certain that an election conducted under his watch, and in which he has a vested interest would be rigged by his opponents and but chose to do nothing to frustrate their design. We are to believe this of a man to whom failure is the ultimate disgrace, a man who claims omnipotence and omnicompetence on every subject or process under the sun and even beyond it?

Claiming that he won the presidential election was the most self-serving and the most consequential of his litany of falsehoods. That is saying a lot about a man who has made a career and lifestyle of lying. This record alone should have alerted the public that this was just another lie.

Because the stakes were so high, Trump held on tenaciously to it, even when it was not backed by a shred of evidence. Election officials rejected it. The courts rejected it, and so did the larger public. Only Trump’s base embraced it – the poor, disconnected and the racially entitled, whom he had inveigled into believing against overwhelming evidence that is their sole, true, steadfast defender and protector in a world stacked against them.

At the very least, Trump bears moral responsibility for a substantial fraction of the 400, 000 Covid deaths that have occurred in the U.S. at this writing, and more than a million hospitalisations. He dismissed the virus as a hoax, mocked the experts and deployed his hate machine against them.

He disdained the mitigating protocols and staged raucous, Covid super-spreader rallies. A pandemic that should have united the nation in grief and firm resolve became in his hands a wedge that sundered it on scale not seen since the Vietnam War.

And instead of charging him with dereliction of the most egregious kind, if not culpable genocide, they took up arms in aid of his deluded cause and set upon the Capitol with murder on their minds and other hands, and threaten more of the same.

Trump kept America perpetually on the boil with his lies and infernal conspiracy theories, and the misnamed social media gave them wings.

The lies, the “alternative facts,” took on lives of their own. The longer they thrived, the more brazen they became. As the election results unfolded, Trump appeared content to claim that he had won. He disputed the outcome in just six states.

By the time he was working up the mob to storm the Capitol, his “victory” had become a “landslide.” A mere victory that was stolen warranted protests and demonstrations; a stolen “landside” victory called for nothing less than the fire and brimstone he and his followers unleashed on January 6.

With the inauguration of a new or re-elected president every four years, the United States re-enacts a rite of renewal – renewal of the promise of America, a reaffirmation of the myths that undergird them.

I have been privileged to observe from within at least six such moments, with all the pomp and circumstance and solemnity. The sobering reminders of the gap between the promise and the actuality were never far from the surface, of course; but they were moments of hope and possibility, and of infectious optimism nevertheless.

For tomorrow’s inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Washington DC is looking more like a city under siege than a theatre of renewal. The atmosphere is more funereal than carnivalesque. This grim backdrop will be replicated across the country.

All because of a threadbare falsehood promoted with manic energy by a demented demagogue slinking into oblivion and swallowed wholesale by his army of deluded believers.

For the sake of our collective humanity, the world must wish Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Godspeed. America’s ideals have never stood in greater or more urgent need of renewal and reaffirmation.

January 19, 2021
Enugu roils peacefully

Gabriel Amalu

The Christmas break usually offer this writer opportunity to feel the heartbeat of the Coal City. Considering the primary interest of the column – law and public power, I use it to gauge the exercise of public power in the state. Informally, I listen to complaints and praises and assess whether the custodians of public power are exercising same in tandem with the laws of the land or abusing it for personal aggrandizement.

As we have seen in faraway United States of America, under President Donald Trump, public power can easily be abused, and yet passed off as public good, by a demagogue in office. Because of the kind of president Donald Trump is, the world is apprehensive of the transfer of power to the elected President Joe Biden tomorrow. What has been observed with pomp and pageantry within our living memory, has become a fearful ceremony because we have a demagogue in power.

Many of the converts to Trump’s demagoguery are still hoping that by some strange means, Trump would still remain president, after he was defeated at the polls and the Electoral College. Many educated Nigerians in this league, have no respect for the sanctity of the electoral process. In their world of make-belief, where Trump is king, facts are ephemeral. In that world, you are free to choose what to belief, and you are entitled to vigorously defend it, facts be dammed.

Those who said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutes are right, and it might as well be punned that power intoxicates and absolute power intoxicates absolutely. I have no doubt that in years to come, the word ‘Trump’ will come to designate promoting falsehood as truth or passing off lies as truth or something akin to that. With demagoguery not achieving the desired purpose, Trump’s supporters have since resorted to armed insurrection, in their misguided effort to retain power at all cost.

As I write this piece, over 20,000 national security guards and affiliate security agencies have massed in Washington DC to forestall a repeat of the December 6, attack on the Capitol Hill. That day will go down in history as the day homemade thugs tried to torpedo American democracy. For his ignominious role as the chief promoter of the insurrection, President Trump has made history, as the first president to be impeached twice, while in office.

It is projected that he will undergo trial when the Senate resumes under President Joe Biden. The speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi who was a target of the insurrectionists delivered on her promise to work for the impeachment of Trump despite the fear-mongering by Trump’s supporters. After the expiration of his tenure tomorrow, Trump will appreciate what it means to be down and out. Instead of being treated with respect for the office he held, he will be harangued and abused for a long time to come.

Such is the disgrace that Trump’s presidency has brought on the most developed democracy in the world. Those who fool themselves that they have turned tin gods because of the position they occupy fail to heed the wise counsel that power is transient. If Trump is convicted and bared from ever holding federal public office, he will lose all the privileges of a former president, and as his arch rivals wish, he may end up in jail for his abuse of power.

In our country, many public officials abuse their powers and privileges. The commonest of such abuses range in doing whatever they can to make life difficult for members of the opposition party. In many states, governors take pride in destroying the properties of their political opponents under the guise of maintaining physical planning. Behaving as if they will be in that privileged position for eternity, such governors delight in throwing their weight around.

Some visit their opponents with physical violence using their minnows. In extreme cases, those who hold divergent political opinion are murdered, all in pursuit of transient power. In some states, prominent opposition members are afraid to visit their home states, and when they wish to do so, it is like going to the lion’s den. Of course, when the chief security officer of a state becomes the chief promoter of political violence, such state remain perpetually on edge.

Interestingly, Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, popularly known as Gburugburu, has towed a peaceful trajectory, in the Coal City, and I commend him for that. How he has been able to maintain peace across political divides in the state deserve a closer study. Of note, well regarded All Progressive Congress (APC) leaders in the state, like former senate president, Ken Nnamani, and a host of others, publicly acknowledge this record of peaceful disposition of Ugwuanyi.

Of course, within the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), there are political disagreements, especially engineered by those planning to take over the state in the 2023 general elections. While political ambitions are legitimate, the governor has ensured that politics is not allowed to overshadow governance. It is encouraging that while the foot soldiers of the major gladiators are freely working for their masters, the political differences have not manifested in violence or palpable tension, and the governor deserves credit for that.

Again, there are those who complain about land use in the state and many have approached this writer with complaints about it. Of particular interest was the land acquired for the Akanu Ibiam International Airport’s expanded runaway, with complaints that the land acquired was far bigger than what is needed. This column had encouraged the federal and state governments to collaborate to see the project through, so I had to take a trip to Emene to see for myself, and clearly the land acquired barely contained the runway.

No doubt, that international airport is a legacy for President Buhari and Governor Ugwuanyi’s regimes, and a boost to the economy of the state. Enquiries also showed that many local and foreign investors now invest in the state, and the cost of virgin lands in the state has skyrocketed. So, in fairness to the state minders, the state is attracting foreign investments, as even part of my village’s farmland has transmogrified to concrete walls for a Free Trade Zone. Of course, for sustainable development, the state authority should ensure that the original owners of the land, get a piece of the cake.

The other issue brought to the attention of this writer is the outstanding pension, particularly for members of the state library board. Agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the national economy and by extension state governments’ coffers weak, this writer appeals for compassion. As we match into 2021, disagreements in Enugu State has not boiled over.

January 19, 2021
Exit, the American big man

Olakunle Abimbola

“Trump is the wrong man for the job” — the final sentence in Bob Woodward’s Rage, Simon & Schuster (2020).

The African Big Man” — that’s the coinage (not unfair) of The Economist: that wry, condescending and often racially mischievous up-market London weekly.

Though that coinage galls — it refers to African (mis)leaders that fancy selves mightier than their countries — it is finically fair.

Finically fair, at least, of this vile trinity: Uganda’s Gen. (Dr.) Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, CBE — Conqueror of the British Empire; Central African Empire’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-named emperor and alleged cannibal; and Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, notorious despot once estimated far richer than the Zaire state he subverted!

The African big man! Though this triad didn’t entirely capture that disgraced tribe, it best epitomizes that umpteenth African crisis of strongmen ravaging puny institutions; with resultant political and developmental catastrophes.

Still with Donald Trump, whose tenure ends in a blaze of odium tomorrow, January 20, perhaps The Economist, wry, laconic but always brutally frank, should ready the biting lexis, to script the American Big Man, from Trump’s crude crust!

The Trump American tempest! It started with an arch-misogynist, pushing his democratic macho to grab women in the rudest and crudest parts, to wild acclaim.

It ended with a Make America Great Again (MAGA) mob — well and truly “maga” (read dumb) in the global eye — storming the US Capitol, the sacred high shrine of America’s 232-year democracy, tragically claiming five scalps, in the mad MAGA equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral!

That dual travesty — profaning the high shrine of American democracy and futile but wilful subversion of the sacred American vote, with a seven-million-plus majority to boot! — may have earned Trump an unprecedented second impeachment, in a four-year single presidential term.

But it is doubtful if it has purged him of his tragic delusion, of playing America’s wanna-be Hitler, for White folks, scared stiff of radically changing demographics.

Still, that tragic bravura — inciting his MAGA mob to storm the Capitol — has earned Trump a free cascade from the global summit, as America’s commander-in-chief; to the nadir, as the global pariah-in-chief, aside from a butt of caustic jokes!

If you doubt, ask Twitter (where his dark shadows once loomed, tweeting reckless lies, as if that noxious genre was dying out), Facebook, Snapchat and allied social media platforms); banking giants, like Deutsche and Signature, where Trump was once royalty; and other brands like Marriott, Blue Cross, Shopify, et al, now scramming from Trump and family, their once-upon-a-time business aristocrats!

Why, it appears a 21st century rollback of the Pericles experience in ancient Athens!

In 444-443 BC, Pericles, via potted chards the Greeks called ostrakon, was voted out of the Polis, for subversive popularity. Ostrakon would go on to cement the English word “ostracize”.

Yet, Pericles would serve out his brief ostrakon ban; and power back to become the greatest lawgiver in Athens history (460-429BC). The Golden Age of Athens — in politics and democracy, art, theatre and culture, philosophy and the sciences — was dubbed Periclean Athens.

For Trump, however, January 2021 is final(?) infamy: three successive Wednesdays (as a CNN analyst brilliantly quipped), and his well-earned sink — January 6: the Trump insurrection; January 13: the Trump second impeachment; January 20: the power Trump never wanted to leave, will leave him in a sorry pile!

Again, courtesy CNN, a new American parents’ putative cry: may you never be like Trump, undone by his hefty lies!

Still, might Trump survive his looming Senate trial, which if convicted could earn him a life-time ban from public office?

If he does, would he power his MAGA mob to Trumpian America — some severe MAGA glory; or palpable decline, that could sack the American civilization, like barbarians at the gate of Rome, with racial tension and endless catastrophes? Time will tell!

But before getting too excited either way, we should revisit Bob Woodward’s damning verdict on Trump, that opened this piece, from Rage, his 2020 book on the Trump power years.

Woodward’s full quote, in that book’s last paragraph: “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

The Trump Capitol debacle all but confirmed that harsh but fair verdict. An American president, that levies a murderous mob to sack the American first estate of the realm, to brazenly steal an election that he lost, earns thick odium, fair and square.

Yet, that wasn’t entirely unexpected. Indeed, it was debacle waiting to happen.

Trump’s merry penchant for self-ruin (and institutional iconoclasm, for all the ultra-selfish, ignoble reasons) was clear from the very first day he took power. His post-3 November 2020 electoral defeat tantrums were only a sad climax.

Yet, any telling parallels, for the noise-some army around here, trump-eting everything “saner climes” (including Trump’s basest follies) as utopian, but decrying everything local (no matter how wholesome) as hellish? Plenty — and for starters, the religious order in troubled times! The American Evangelicals, wild and right-wing, sanctified the Trump garbage as neo-piety. But post-election defeat woes, climaxed by the Capitol insurrection of January 6, they now endure rotten eggs on shamed faces!

A wild section of Pentecostal Nigeria, hate-filled and baleful, dredged up holy rot to tar an otherwise decent president, at a very testy juncture of Nigerian history. Their fate, harsh or benign, comes with the judgment of history.

Then, the willy-nilly Libertarian party: to which freedom (of speech and allied rights) is absolute; and to whom the social media is virtual, sacred and untouchable cathedral, to lunch democratic insurrection, with absolutely no repercussion!

Well Trump, even as all-mighty POTUS, just got cured of that costly delusion: from commander-in-chief, to pariah-in-chief!

That his Humpty-Dumpty crash emerged, not from some high-minded legislation but from stark, Big Tech business decision, is hard reality check: Big Tech ruined Trump before Trump could ruin its bottom line! No sentiments. Just plain business!

As for the Nigerian media, that often baits anarchy to prove its “patriotism”, the CNN response to the Capitol invasion is instructive. The same CNN that here thumbed down clear anarchy and giddily fuelled a fictive “Lekki Massacre”, is now bawling and screeching and yelling and wailing “coup at the Capitol”, run, run run!

Trump has ruined himself — and about time too! It is America’s headache if, even after his unprecedented second impeachment, it allows a malevolent, disgraced and unhinged former POTUS to power back to ruin it.

But if in 208 weeks Trump nearly crashed America’s democracy of 232 years, then democracy must be fragile.

Moderation is, therefore, the big take-away from the Trump debacle.

Happy new year!

After a sound rest, it’s sure great to be back. Thanks to readers of this page, who almost decreed my leave be annulled, to take Ripples’ take on tumbling news. It’s good to be loved and missed. Thanks again, and happy new year!

January 19, 2021
The siege on the Capitol

By Sanya Oni

I know a tribe out there who still maintain that the attempted coup on the Capitol on January 6 was not pre-meditated; that it was merely a case of protest gone awry. That Donald Trump, the wily showman couldn’t have imagined that the insidious forces which he unleashed in the aftermath of the United States’ November elections would end up in undermining the very institution in the world’s greatest democracy.

I guess those in the tribe still imagine that those serial attempted criminal subversion of the election were simply fake news. Add to it the curious mathematics in which his 75 million supporters made him WIN BIG leaving his opponent Joe Biden with 81milliin votes a LOSER! Moreover, that the Electoral College which he also lost by 232 to Biden’s 306 actually counted for nothing – at least in the eyes of the Trump mob. And then the tales by a certain Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump was alleged to have implored him with veiled threats and lies to change the outcome of the election; that was supposed to have been sexed up. Never mind also: those frantic calls – and if you like to add the shuttle from court to court -to torpedo the will of the voter – were part of the supposed democratic process.

Welcome to America’s exceptionalism – the theory that the United States is inherently different from other nations. Or better still superior to other nations or having a unique mission to transform the world.

For me, it is a good thing that the January 6 infamy happened. Had things turned otherwise, we’d probably still be under the illusions of the so-called greatest democracy on earth being the exemplar of its finest tenets. Now with five dead and probably scores of heads broken not to talk of the damage and desecration of its sacred symbol, the iconic Capitol building – victims of a riot incited by a law and order President Trump, there might just be one or two things still left from that old manual of democracy a la Uncle Sam!

How much of things have turned asunder in God’s Own Country remains a matter of debate. But then, if the world was caught in any surprise, it was because it failed to pay attention to the character-portrait so apt, of the man at the centre of the storm by no less a man than the late conservative columnist, the late Charles Krauthammer years back: “This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value – indeed exists – only insofar as it sustains and inflates him … (He) is dangerously out of the mainstream and temperamentally unfit to command the nation.”

Of course, he had more to say – like for instance when the news surfaced that his campaign had sought to obtain dirt from the Russians on his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. He had written inter alia: “Once you’ve said ‘I’m in,’ it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended … (The) three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play …It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal … It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbours”.

Coincidentally, such sinister plots, familiar as the skin to him, would consume his administration when he turned to Ukraine for dirt on his current nemesis, Joe Biden and his son Hunter. With Nancy Pelosi’s House having none of it – he was summarily impeached by the Democratic Party-led Congress.

Like the prophet, Krauthammer had surmised of the Trump odyssey: “Trump” he said “is a systemic stress test” for America even as he had noted that, “the institutions of both political and civil society are holding up well.” Hence his abiding faith that “the sinews of our democracy” will thwart “the careening recklessness of this presidency.”

That summation, though somewhat prescient, unfortunately fell short of explaining, not just the Trump phenomenon but his mythical, cult-like following – the throng once described by Hilary Clinton as “deplorables”. For a country that prides itself as the most ‘civilised’ in the world, that some 75 million odd American citizens – more than a fifth of the population actually fell to Trump’s twitterdom of lies and wild conspiracy theories, is itself indicative of pathology far deeper that the episodic rants by their culprit in chief.

Thanks to January 6 storming of the Capitol, the ugly side of America’s public life, long in denial, has now been fully revealed. More, the fabric of a nation that claims to be God’s Own has been sundered by those to whom the right to lord over others has come to equate divine right.

Of course, Trump didn’t happen by chance any more than he would suddenly disappear from public view after January 20. Expect the impeachment axe, currently hanging over Trump to drive the lunatic fringe among the hordes of his supporters over the edge, as America prepares for the worst in the coming weeks.

Understandably, there are those Americans who would rather halt what has become an inevitable curve in humanity’s collective march for progress. And to imagine, as the eminent Tatalo Alamu puts it, that the “struggle has taken up most of the last three centuries and has witnessed a momentous civil war, horrific massacres of native Americans, emancipation of African-Americans from slavery, race riots, civil rights campaigns, protest marches for the rights of all American to vote and be voted for, affirmative action in colleges, the rise of extreme and murderous right-wing clans and a countervailing upsurge in a radical Black prelacy and the election of an American president of African extraction”.

Now, short of an outright civil war, those gains – although too little and somewhat incremental – would appear to have come to stay hence the current rage across the vast lands of America. For America, it might yet be morning on creation day.

Finally, a word for Trump’s religious enablers – the Evangelicals and their local protestant minions. Trump might be their Cyrus the Great, the famed annointed king of Persia, prompted by God to decree that the Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt. He may have pandered to their religious fancies; but to put him in the pedestal of that remarkable monarch under whom the Babylonian captivity ended is to abuse the import of history. By now, they ought to be humbled by the knowledge that God’s ways are not necessarily theirs just as their claims to exclusivity in the divine order, are more often than not, without the so-called ecclesiastical basis.

January 12, 2021
Nightmare at noon in America
Olatunji Dare

IN America, they are still reeling from the terror unleashed last week by President Donald Trump’s goons on the U.S. Capitol, in Washington DC, where members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were staging the final act of last November’s Presidential election: the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the duly elected President and Vice President, respectively, of the United States, preparatory to their taking office on January 20.

Trump would have none of it.

He had disputed the outcome even before the election, declaring that he would not accept it unless he won. A Biden win could occur only through rigging, and he was not going to accept it. He maintained this claim in the face of documented efforts by his fellow Republicans to rig the ballot through a sustained campaign of voter suppression, voter intimidation, and disinformation.

They left nothing to chance. At a time when the postal service should be at its most efficient, they set out to undermine its capacity to deliver, scrapping tens of thousands of postal outlets across the country; they took out and cannibalised thousands of functioning automated sorting machines and cut the work drastically.

If the post office could not deliver before deadline the hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots, a recourse favoured disproportionately by Democrats, would not count. Advantage Republicans.

The right to vote is perhaps the hardest-won right in America’s civil and political life. Millions of citizens marched and picketed for it; thousands were beaten, brutalised and jailed for demanding it; hundreds were killed in the process, many of them dispatched with a savagery that calls the humanity of their assailants into question.

Trump and his henchmen and women placed in strategic offices in the States sought to turn voting into an obstacle course and confidently expected their hand-picked judges at every level of the judiciary to seal the steal, a strategy he had perfected in a life time of skullduggery.

He lost the election unequivocally.

The master of the art of the steal bellowed at every forum, his face turning crimson, that the election had been stolen. He pivoted on six states which the GOP had traditionally won, and challenged the election outcome there. In every one of them, the courts dismissed his petition for lack of merit, while taking judicial notice of its shoddiness. In one court, the judge was so scandalised by the quality of the petition submitted by Trump’s attorney that he considered a verbal rebuke too mild; he was going to report the shyster to higher officials of the judiciary and the professional Bar.

And the matter went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of the justices appointed by           Trump, two of them for the express purpose of giving the Conservative justices a permanent 6-3 majority, voted to deliver a unanimous 9-0 decision against Trump, affirming the verdict of the lower courts that his petition was meritless.

Georgia, long a reliable Blue (i.e. Republican) state, was his last stand. Even if he was awarded its six electoral votes, that would still not have translated into a Trump presidency. They recounted the ballots by hand, and still he lost. His Georgia petition was denied, like all his previous petitions.

Fast running out of options, Trump confected yet another scheme: implore, threaten, cajole, or otherwise suborn Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 12,000 votes that would flip the result of the presidential election in the state. The official, a fellow Republican who knows more about honour and fidelity to oath of office than Trump can ever pretend to know, refused.

Not daunted, Trump saw a silver lining in the darkening cloud. The Republicans would win the two outstanding Senate races in Georgia, leaving the Republican Party in control of that powerful chamber to protect his baleful legacy and frustrate Biden’s agenda.

Another will o’ the wisp.

Scheme after desperate scheme fizzled, leaving the Congressional certification of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice-president elect respectively as his last chance to flip, beg your pardon, steal the election. He was counting on Mike Pence, the vice president and his Man Friday, to execute the steal by a parliamentary subterfuge. Pence, the designated presiding officer, said he had no such powers.

The U. S. Congress was going through the solemn formality of certifying the winners of the 2020 Presidential election when Trump loosed his febrile followers who had massed in their thousands on the precincts of Capitol grounds from all over the country brandishing their handcuffs, guns, lead pipes, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails and all manner of cudgels.

Their mission, as defined by Trump in an exhortation perfused by violent imagery: To prevent their victory at the last election from being stolen. Republicans want to be nice, respectful of everyone, including “bad” people. Not anymore.

“We are going to walk down to the Capitol. . . You’ll never take back our country with weakness, so you have to be strong . . . You’ll have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have, and we can’t allow that to happen. . . We will never give up. We will never concede . . . You don’t concede when there is theft involved, and that is what this theft is all about. . . We will stop the steal.”

They had come fully prepared. Hadn’t Trump warned them that it was going to be rough?

It was more than rough. It was mob action at its most barbarous. They raced up the steps of the Capitol their weapons, screaming and cursing, pushing and shoving the few police officers standing guard, using the pipes and crutches and their fists and their legs as battering rams in a futile bid to break the door leading to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite.

Others clawed or bludgeoned their way into the Capitol and trashed it with a malevolence that you thought only the bitterest enemies fighting a war of attrition could carry out. Americans and the whole world watched in horror and in disbelief.

By the time the Capitol police was reinforced four hours later by the National Guard, two police officers and three members of the invading force lay dead. If the lawmakers had not been spirited away to safer spaces, or taken cover wherever they could find a shield, however flimsy, there would have been bloodshed on a much larger scale.

House Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence were marked for the cruelest treatment.

From the White House, Trump who had said he would march with his supporters to the Capitol, watched the mayhem with bemused satisfaction on live television, surrounded by his family.

He stopped just short of congratulating the insurrectionists on their heroism. They were patriots, who did what they had to do, he told them in a video address. Mission accomplished, it was time to disperse and go home. “We love you,” he told them as he signed off.

When the smoke had cleared and the hoodlums had departed, the Congress resumed its deliberations and certified the election outcome Trump had fought with might and main to block.   He cannot now claim, as he would have done if his goons had succeeded, that the election was inconclusive at best.

Even as he fiercely disputed the election results, Trump and his lawyers and his proxies provided not a scintilla of credible evidence to back his claim that the whole thing was rigged. Their case was based almost entirely on conspiracy theories, the most ludicrous of which was that his bête noire, Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela who had died some six years ago, had been seen orchestrating the fraudulent transfer   of Trump’s ballots to Biden.

They forgot to add Fidel Castro. And Muammar Gadaffi. And Robert Mugabe. And John Lewis.

It has been asked insistently in America and abroad: If the crowd that was just one step away from riotous action had comprised Blacks or Latinos, of Muslims, would the law-enforcement officials have related to them with such indifference we witnessed, to say nothing of the friendliness they showed the insurrectionists, exchanging banter and taking selfies with them?

The inescapable truth about America lies in the answer.
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January 12, 2021
‘Goodbye to bad rubbish’

By Olatunji Dare

That seems to be the dominant verdict cross the world on the year gone by.

By any reckoning, the year was horrible, and much more so than any in recent memory.

It was the year of Covid-19, the tenacious pandemic that has claimed more than one million lives worldwide, upended the rhythms of life and propagated death and misery and suffering on a biblical scale.

It was the year U. S President Donald Trump, “the leader of the Free World,” confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt that there was nothing so debauched, so malignant, so repugnant, and so bereft of the human graces that you would not find him engaging it and championing it.

In Nigeria, it was the year the marauders of no nation (thank you, Fela) determined that Nigeria was ripe for the taking and upped their creeping encroachment on Nigerian territory to a level that has the markings of an occupation and raised its assaults on residents of communities in their path to levels of savagery almost beyond belief.

Goodbye indeed, to bad rubbish.

But “bad rubbish” is no respecter of our desires or wishes, however fervent. It has a way of ramifying, of morphing into other forms that are even deadlier than the original rubbish, confounding efforts to contain, tame, or eliminate it. It has a way of spreading, and spreading, and spreading.

Take the coronavirus as an example.

From Wuhan, China, it spread rapidly across the world, its dismal harvest to reap. It has spared no part of the globe, no human population.

That is what makes it so juvenile, and alas so dangerous, that the mimic napoleon who lords over Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, insists with supine stubbornness, against logic, against evidence, and against commonsense, that not a single case of Covid-19 has occurred in his domain.

What is so special about Kogi that it alone, wedged though it is amidst Nigeria’s 36 states stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Sahel, has been spared a visitation by the scourge? What incantations did he chant over the terrain to make it a no-go area for the virus? What oblations has he made to the evil forces animating it?

Or can it be that Yahaya Bello had secretly built a huge, invisible, antiseptic bubble and inserted Kogi State securely in it, thus rendering it impregnable to the most insidious pathogens, so much so that conducting the usual diagnostic tests would amount to a waste of time and resources?

Time will tell. But he should know that, when the reckoning comes, the blood of those who could have been saved by a forthright response will be upon his stubborn and uncomprehending head.

Pardon the detour, but it has to be acknowledged that, despite its general wretchedness, 2020 was also the year in which vaccines to tame the ravaging virus were developed in an astounding feat of ingenuity and global cooperation.

Finally, the world can breathe easier that the coronavirus will be subjugated sooner rather than later, and not by voodoo and quackery in their virus guises and disguises, but by science, the same platform from which HIV/AIDS, the avian flu, the Ebola virus, and other plagues were conquered.

Developing the vaccines, it would now seem, was the easy part, however.

Distribution has proved much more intractable. False starts, botched manufacturing and delivery schedules, petty rivalries (“vaccine nationalism,” they call it), poor coordination of actual vaccine administration, not forgetting the weather, have combined to dampen popular enthusiasm for the vaccines, which was only slightly above average in the United States anyway.

Among Blacks and the indigenous peoples, it was decidedly cool, given the sordid history                       of vaccine abuse perpetrated on them by the establishment. In perhaps the most unconscionable of such abuses, poor Black folk in Tuskegee, Alabama, suffering from latent syphilis, were recruited by U. S. Army doctors into a program offering treatment.

Instead of giving them the new antibiotic, penicillin’ which had proved an effective remedy, the army doctors gave them placebos. Then, they sat back and watched and took copious notes as the syphilis wasted their hapless subjects. Many of them became blind or lapsed into mental illness. Most died slow, agonizing deaths.

Memories of such premeditated cruelty linger still and rankle still in the African American community.

In most parts of Europe, vaccine distribution is running smoothly, and there is growing confidence that a vaccination rate will be attained that will render the coronavirus an irritation rather than a death sentence.

In Nigeria, we have not made a start. Shipments of the vaccines are being awaited, with no plans for distribution or administration. Such plans are useless anyway; the political and bureaucratic elite will as insinuate themselves at the top the receiving line; those, who can, will buy, bribe bully or muscle their way their way to the next line and national priorities, equity, etc, be damned.

The rest have the assurance of the evangelicals and Pentecostals that their faith will give them divine protection, the kind that no human contrivance can provide. They are going to need it.

That kind of protection is at least to be preferred to Trump’s formula of sustained denial, defiance deception, and disinformation in the face of a ravaging pandemic – a lethal cocktail     that his gullible followers and his obsequious courtiers, many of them otherwise sensible people, have embraced to their grief.

Although the United States has less than one-fourth of the world’s population, it has the dubious distinction of recording more than one-fourth the global total of Covid-19 deaths and an even greater fraction of hospitalizations from the disease. That is Donald Trump’s baleful legacy as he leaves or is dragged out of office two weeks from now discredited and disgraced, a standing rebuke to the enablers of his ruinous reign.

American graveyards are littered with thousands of those he led to believe that the virus was fake, that it was no more bothersome than the seasonal ‘flu, and that real men (and women) don’t wear facial masks. As the grim tally mounts, a society that has been conditioned to regard health as a commodity rather than a right belonging to all persons in society, and to privilege entertainment over health, is ruing the consequences of its false choices.

Vaccine or no vaccine, this situation is unlikely to get better very soon, as the best authorities have warned. Trump will be gone, but a great deal of bad rubbish from 2020 is still going to be around in the United States.

A cursory review of the front pages and the headlines of Nigerian newspapers on any day will show that the bad rubbish constituted by Boko Haram and the aforementioned marauders of no nation who are now in effective occupation of about one-third of the nation’s territory are, if anything, consolidating even as we wish them goodbye.

Each passing day drives it home that bulletins first issued four years agoand updated every so often proclaiming that these nihilist outfits have been degraded, overwhelmed, neutralized, technically defeated or otherwise contained, are more than slightly exaggerated.

A weary and besieged population led by the National Assembly, has been crying out for a change of strategy, which should start with the dismissal of the military High Command.   President Muhammadu Buhari is not about to allow the legislature and civil society to usurp his constitutional mandate of Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s Armed Forces.

But that mandate goes with the duty and responsibility of protecting the lives and livelihoods of Nigerians and ensuring as far possible their safety at home, at work, at play, at worship, and on the streets.

Only a minority of Nigerians will vouch that he has discharged that responsibility to their satisfaction.

“The persistence of various forms of violence” in the most affected parts of the country, the president acknowledged in his New Year Broadcast, “has meant that the fabric of inter-communal harmony woven through years of investment and building trust, mutual respect and harmony(sic) has been under threat.”

It is worse, Mr President. The whole edifice faces existential threat, and so does the myth of “national unity” you are forever swearing by. Whatever the strategy, it is no working

It is heartening indeed that the president evinced a new determination and outlined a new strategy in his New Year broadcast. It consists in “reorganizing and re-energizing” the apparatus and personnel of the armed forces and the police so as the “enhance” their capacity to “engage, push back and dismantle” the operations of “internal and external extremist and criminal groups” warring against various peaceful communities across Nigeria.

You have to ask: What was the mission of the armed forces at their deployment?

January 5, 2021