By Vincent Akanmode

There is a popular joke to the effect that if you have something to hide from Nigerians, your best bet is to keep it in a book. Doing so, there is almost a hundred per cent guarantee that it will remain a secret because the average Nigerian does not read. This point was made eloquently by the National Librarian and Chief Executive Officer of the National Library of Nigeria (NLN), Prof. Lenrie Aina, in November last year when he led top officials of NLN to the headquarters of the Nigeria Correctional Service to donate N2 million worth of books for distribution to 37 custodial centres around the country.

Quoting World Culture Statistics on the occasion, Prof. Aina said Nigeria ranked as one of the countries with the lowest reading culture in the world. He said: “In the last three years, we have been very active because there is what is called World Culture Statistics which tries to measure the art of reading all over the world. In the statistics, only two African countries were listed among countries that are reading. The countries are South Africa and Egypt. Nigeria was not among them. As a matter of fact, Nigeria was rated among the countries with the lowest reading culture in the world.”

At an award ceremony organised by the Ogun State Government for its deserving citizens in August, 2007, former President Olusegun Obasanjo openly boasted that he does not read any Nigerian newspaper. His reason: the print media lack in integrity. He said the print media had been using his name to sell their papers, threatening to charge a commission from any of them that used his name for a story.

Mercifully, the same does not seem to be the mentality of President Muhammadu Buhari if the public pictures of him savouring the contents of a copy of The Nation at the dawn of his administration in 2015 are anything to go by. That is the basis on which I am recommending for Mr. President’s perusal a three-page interview the National Publicity Secretary of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, granted this paper last Saturday.

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The views expressed by Baba-Ahmed were like a direct response to President Buhari’s claim that his government has done exceedingly well in spite of public opinion to the contrary. In his address at a retreat held for ministers, permanent secretaries and other top government officials at the State House Conference Centre, Presidential Villa, Abuja in September last year, the President only stopped short of blaming the media for the widely held opinion about his government as a non-performing one.  He charged his cabinet members to go on the ‘offensive’ by spreading the news of the many successes of his administration so that ‘politically motivated’ statements would not take the shine off his government’s exploits.

Also in the course of his interviews around May 29, the President had said that Nigerians were not fair to him and his government considering where the country was when he took over the leadership of the country from former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. But asked his views on the President’s statement, Baba-Ahmed said: “This is the kind of thing that people write for him to read. For me, there are clear criteria for President Buhari to assess himself. That is if only he would accept that he is accountable to Nigerians; that how he performs is important to him.

“In terms of the security of the country, we are a lot worse than we were in 2015. I was part of the build and the campaign of President Buhari. I know what he inherited and I saw him mismanage even that opportunity to rebuild the country. And now we have a lot more security challenges than we had in 2015.

“So, I don’t know what his definition of fairness is, unless he just wants people who have become victims of crime and violence to just say thank you very much, sir, for claiming to have done the job that you have not even done.

“But we judge him by how many people are kidnapped by the day; how many people are murdered by the day; how many people are pushed away from their homes, villages and their farmlands; and we judge him by the threat to the security and integrity of the nation.

“So, I think when he says things like we are not fair to him, he merely reads the speeches but he doesn’t read the country.”

The views canvassed by Baba-Ahmed would have been easy to dismiss as the ranting of a biased and disgruntled ethnic irredentist if they had come from someone other than the highly cerebral spokesperson of the highly influential Northern Elders Forum. But as a kinsman of President Buhari from the North, Baba-Ahmed’s voice is akin to that of the proverbial epileptic which must be taken as celestial truth because he goes to heaven on a daily basis.

By Vincent Akanmode

Until he took it upon himself about seven months ago to lead the battle for the liberation of the inhabitants of Igangan and other communities in Ibarapa North Local Government Area, Oyo State from the alleged stranglehold of some Fulani settlers and herdsmen, Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho, was largely an anonymous entity on the national scene. But in an instance of the instability of human condition, he has in a space of six or seven months metamorphosed into a national and international figure and now a potential source of diplomatic row between Nigeria and its neighbouring Benin Republic.

The news broke during the week of his arrest by security agents at the international airport in Cotonou, the capital city of Benin Republic as he made to jet out to Germany about three weeks after he was declared wanted by the Department of State Security (DSS) for leading a campaign for the Yoruba to break away from the rest of Nigeria to form an independent Oduduwa Republic. The bid by Nigerian security agents to get him repatriated was reportedly stalled by the huge population of his Yoruba kinsmen in the neighbouring country, many of whom had been forced to migrate from their homelands by marauding herders who forcibly took over their farmlands and turned them into grazing fields, killed their hapless men, raped their defenceless women and kidnapped others for ransom.

It was in the foregoing circumstances that Igboho appeared on the scene in January, issuing the Fulani community in Igangan a seven-day quit notice after leading some youths to the palace of the Sarkin Fulani of Oyo State, Alhaji Saliu Abdulkadir, to register their displeasure. The failure of the Fulani to heed the ultimatum resulted in a deadly attack on the Sarkin Fulani’s palace and the bloody reprisals that have since been launched by the Fulani against the indigenous population. Inspired by the hype that greeted his new found status as the liberator of the oppressed in Ibarapa land, Igboho felt he could push his luck a notch further by extending his agitation from freedom for Ibarapa to freedom for Yoruba land.

In his self-imposed task of ‘midwifing’ the birth of a republic within a republic, Igboho had drawn inspiration from the goings on in the South East where Nnamdi Kanu was leading a secessionist movement known as the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB). The difference between them, however, lies in the fact that Igboho is a victim of ignorance because he is barely literate while Kanu is a beneficiary of it because he is sufficiently educated and urbane to take advantage of the ignorance of the thousands of uneducated able-bodied Igbo youths recruited into the Eastern Security Network (ESN), the military wing of IPOB allegedly responsible for the killings, arsons and jailbreaks that have rocked the South East in recent times.

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Realising the availability of millions of Igbo youths that could easily be manipulated to join an army whose mission they really could not comprehend, Kanu, as revealed in the confessions made by some arrested members of ESN, gave them promises that were clearly not realizable, just to secure their loyalty and even stake their lives. He sold them the dummy of Biafran currency and they bought it. He issued a document touted as Biafran passport, they fell for it. They were even told that the United Nations was on the verge of declaring Biafra a sovereign country and they believed without asking questions.

For instance, Emeoyiri Uzorma Benjamin a.k.a. Onye Army, a 28-year-old secondary school dropout and one of the commander of ESN accused of killing security agents and destroying private and government property in the South East and South-South regions of the country, said he joined in the group’s killing spree because he was told that he would automatically transform into an army general the moment Biafra became a reality. On that basis, he joined the group that attacked the Owerri  Correctional Centre in Imo State and set close to 2,000 prisoners free. He joined in the attack on the country home of Imo State governor, Hope Uzordima and even joined in the hunt for 10 innocent girls whose heads were used to prepare charms that would fortify the group against police bullets! “Mazi Nnamdi Kanu also directed us to bury Ikonso (Kanu’s deputy who was killed by the army) with 2,000 human heads but we have killed only 30 so far,” he added in an interview he granted about three weeks ago.

There is, indeed, no better proof than the goings on in the nation that ignorance is far more costly than education. And that also is evident in the activities of the stark illiterates at the vanguard of banditry and insurgency in the northern parts of the country who understand no other language than kill, maim or kidnap their innocent kinsmen for ransoms. Anyone who wants to know the value of education only needs to ask Nigeria how much ignorance costs.

By Vincent Akanmode

It sounded like a piece of sublime joke when the story first filtered out that Kogi State governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, was nursing an ambition to become the president of Nigeria. Many people did not take the story seriously because they could not understand the basis on which the governor of the North Central state would undertake a mission requiring not only financial muscle but goodwill and competence, none of which he is endowed with in profuse abundance. The reality, however, is that the presidential ambition of Governor Yahaya Bello is as real as daylight, and he has demonstrated this in more ways than one. Apparently, his fortuitous emergence as governor in 2015 and his controversial re-election victory four years later are pushing him to believe that he can become the Pope even as a Muslim.

And no one should begrudge that, except that it is taking a toll on the poor state’s fortunes. In recent months, Lord Lugard House, the seat of government in Lokoja, the state capital, has hosted all manner of guests in furtherance of the governor’s avowed mission to become President Muhammadu Buhari’s successor in 2023. In March, for instance, scores of Nigerian actors and actresses converged on the Confluence City at the behest of the governor who hosted them with tax payers’ money amounting to millions of naira. For good measure, the governor seized the occasion to announce his readiness to host this year’s edition of Best of Nollywood (BON) Awards scheduled for Saturday, December 11. Understandably, the founder of BON has already boasted that the edition scheduled for Lokoja would be the biggest in the history of the 11-year-old annual event.

Even international soccer stars, whose monthly wages compete favourably with the state’s monthly allocation from the federal purse, are numbered among the beneficiaries of the governor’s bonanza extravaganza.  Last weekend, he hosted scores of senior media practitioners at the exotic Transcorp Hilton hotel in Abuja as a follow-up to the more than N2 billion he recently sunk into adverts on the front pages of major national newspapers. Now there are words that he will cap his patronage of the media with the hosting of this year’s edition of the Nigerian Media Merit Awards (NMMA) in October.

Before I am reminded of the saying that dog does not eat dog, I should make it clear that I have not set out to antagonise my professional constituency. My views are propelled by my concern for the beleaguered state and the realization that I am as much an indigene of the state as I am a member of the fourth estate of the realm. After about six years in the saddle, there is yet no recognizable project the Bello administration could be said to have executed or even embark on. Workers and pensioners in the state are groaning from the pangs of hunger because they are owed many months of salaries, stipends and allowances. With kidnappers and armed robbers persistently on the rampage, Kogi ranks as one of the most insecure states in the country, next only to the North East and North West states which are ravaged by insurgency and banditry.

In spite of the foregoing state of affairs, the only thing that seems to matter to Governor Bello is the presidential ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He would host any kind of gathering just to keep himself in the spotlight ahead of the party’s national convention scheduled for God knows when. It leaves one to wonder what business a man who could not make an impact after six years in the saddle as the governor of a state would do as the president of the most populous country in Africa. In an interview posted on the website of ebirareporters.com during the week, Governor Bello’s former deputy, Simon Achuba, was quoted him as saying that he could cite 30 projects that were flagged off by the governor but never executed. The lack of will on the part of the governor to execute projects, he said, was the genesis of the crisis that saw them fall apart.

Achuba said: “You are given a state to manage, you cannot manage the state but you are talking of managing the entire country. Has Nigeria become a cheap nation or a failed state such that Bello will become its President? If it is, it means that everyone should carry his load and relocate to any nearby West African country because there will be no hope. I wonder why the leadership of the party allowed him to be wasting the people’s resources and deceiving himself.”

Ordinarily, it would not be anyone’s headache even if the governor aspires for a place in the moon if only he would bear the brunt of his ambition alone. But as things stand, it is the people that are bound to suffer dysentery when the governor consumes excess sugar.  While no one begrudges his constitutionally guaranteed right to vote and be voted for, his personal aspirations must not be met at the expense of the people’s welfare. His right to swing his arms must necessarily end where the people’s right to defend their noses begins.

By Vincent Akanmode

After years of endless speculation, it finally came to light last Saturday that the controversial governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, has no ambition whatsoever to become President Muhammadu Buhari’s successor in 2023. For one and a half decades before the vociferous governor cleared the air last Saturday, the word on the street at the market place and even at worship centres was that El-Rufai’s ultimate political ambition was to occupy the nation’s number one seat at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa. Courtesy of an interview he granted the Pidgin service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) last Saturday, we now know that El-Rufai does not only lack interest in the 2023 presidential race, he is so averse to it that he would not touch it even with a six-inch pole if presented to him on a platter.

While some busybodies had literally turned speculating about his presidential ambition into a vocation, El-Rufai, speaking with all the seriousness he could muster during the BBC interview, declared that whereas he had “suffered presidential ambition suspicion for 15 years”, a 62-year-old man like him should have no business presiding over the affairs of the nation.  He said: “Look at me. Look at my grey hair. If you see my picture when I was sworn in (as Kaduna State governor in 2015), my hair was very black. But look at how it has become. This is a very difficult job. And that is just state governor; one state out of 36. A big one, yes; a difficult one, yes, but it is not the same as Nigeria. Presidency of Nigeria is a very serious job. It is too much for a 62-year-old.”

Read Also; El-Rufai: I’m not interested in 2023 presidency

Political analysts will no doubt be grateful that the Kaduna State governor thought it expedient to clarify his thoughts about the 2023 presidential election. If nothing else, it will reduce the number of names they have to grapple with in their permutations and analysis on the next presidential race. The only thing they would find difficult to understand is why the Kaduna State governor allowed himself to “suffer presidential ambition suspicion for 15 years” when he could have saved himself the trauma with a simple clarification that would require fewer than three words.

They will also find it curious that his expression of no interest in the presidency is coming at a time that the popularity of the ruling party on whose platform he rode to power has waned considerably, particularly in Kaduna State where the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) backed by the governor was roundly beaten by that of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the by-election for Sabon Gari Constituency in the Kaduna State House of Assembly held a few weeks ago. This coupled with the collective declaration by the governors of the southern states on Monday that Buhari’s successor must come from the south has caused many to wonder if El-Rufai’s avowed position was actually impelled by his advancing years or his realisation that the sun was going down after the shadow he saw on the wall.

It is hard to think of a magic by which any individual would create so many enemies and fight so many battles like El-Rufai has done without the colour and texture of his hair taking a blow. The Kaduna State governor is at war with many members of his political family. He is at daggers drawn with virtually all the political heavyweights in his state. He is involved in a running battle with bandits and insurgents on account of whose threats he had to withdraw his children from the public school where they were enrolled. He is in perennial battle with Southern Kaduna people and in endless war with organised labour among other forces. It is, indeed, a surprise that the governor’s hairline has not beaten more frantic retreat.

The good news, however, is that he can still redirect his political future and even arrest the speedy deterioration of his hair colour if he mends his cantankerous ways and live at peace with his numerous adversaries. Only then would he realise that age is nothing but number. If Buhari could become President of the world’s most populous black nation at 73 and Nelson Mandela, one of the most amiable leaders the world has known could become the President of South Africa at 76, it is defeatist of El-Rufai to give up hope at 62 except he is insinuating that voting Buhari as president was an error. The immediate past American president, Donald Trump, assumed office at 71 while the incumbent, Joe Biden, was already 78 when he was sworn in on January 20 after setting a record as the presidential candidate with the highest number of votes in the country’s democratic history. El-Rufai surely has no reason to despair once he mends his querulous ways.

By Vincent Akanmode

Penultimate Friday, President Muhammadu Buhari took one of his fastest decisions since he became the country’s leader in 2015. Prior to that, the slow pace at which he took decisions, even in matters that other leaders would consider an emergency, had earned him the sobriquet of ‘Baba Go Slow’ in some quarters. In homes, in public buses, in offices and even on the traditional and social media, the word was that we had a president whose speed at taking decisions on state matters was slower than the snail.

He himself admitted that much during a dinner he hosted in honour of chieftains of the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja in January 2018. “I keep telling people that while I was in uniform, quite reckless and young, I got all the ministers and governors and put them in Kirikiri (maximum prison). I said they were guilty until they could prove their innocence. I was also detained too. I decided to drop the uniform and come back. Eventually, I am here. So really, I have gone through it over and over again. This is why I am not in a hurry virtually to do anything. I will sit and reflect and continue with my clear conscience,” he said.

But that changed for once last week as the President proclaimed a ban on the operations of Twitter in Nigeria 48 hours after the social media platform deleted a post in which he threatened to deal with secessionist agitators “in the language they understand”. All hell has been let loose since the President announced the ban as individuals, groups, governments, world leaders and supranational bodies have taken turns to threaten, criticise, urge or beg him to rescind the decision they considered an affront on the fundamental human rights of 200 million Nigerians, particularly the right to free speech.

President Buhari, apparently convinced that he had taken one of his best decisions since he took charge of the nation’s affairs in 2015, has stuck to his guns, insisting that the decision to ban the micro-blogging site would not be reversed until the owners do their penance and vow to no longer make it available to be “persistently used for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence”.

As it would be expected, the media have been awash with reports of billions of dollars the country is losing on a daily basis on account of the suspension of Twitter’s operations. On personal level, influential Nigerians, including President Muhammadu Buhari himself, have reportedly lost contacts with billions of their followers on the social media site, translating into a huge loss of revenue. But of what significance is the loss of a trailer load of pound sterling to a cause designed to preserve and protect the corporate existence of a heterogeneous country like ours, particularly at a time the drumbeats of war are getting louder and louder?

President Buhari’s critics ought to realise that he would not have risked losing his 4.1 million followers on Twitter as reported in the news media if money and followership were all that mattered. If only they were blessed with half his gift of vista, foresight or clairvoyance, they would realise how grossly insignificant the billions of dollars the country might lose to the ban on Twitter is in the face of the massive social and economic benefits the ban would attract to us as a nation.

For the first time in a very long while, the global spotlight is on President Buhari and not on Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho, Abubakar Shekau or his other local political rivals as had been the case in recent years. Nothing can be more gratifying than the realization that the President, once regarded as a passive leader, has become the subject of a global discourse. So much so that for the first time in contemporary diplomatic history, the leaders of G7 countries are practically on their knees, begging our President to rescind his decision about Twitter.

Obviously, Buhari’s critics are oblivious of the saying that there is a silver lining behind every cloud. At a time the government is racking its head on how to save the jobs of the staff of the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) and other agencies rendered obsolete by the internet and other modern systems of communication, there is no better way to achieving it than impose a total ban not only on Twitter but any medium of communication with structures that can be exploited by subversive elements whose number appears now to be on geometric rise. I have no doubt that national peace will be guaranteed if Buhari returns the country to using town criers as veritable tools for communication.

By Vincent Akanmode

One of my favourite artistes is a Jamaican group called the Mighty Maytones. And one of the songs that endeared me to them is the title song of the album called Madness. In it they sang that there is too much madness over the land. They noted that madness had taken control of the youths’ brains, wondering if it was due to too much drinking or too much smoking.

Being Jamaicans, it is unlikely that the vocal duo had Nigeria in mind when they released the popular tune in 1976. But more than four and a half decades after the song was released, it has become a prophetic rendition that encapsulates the current situation in the largest country of black people.

Concerned Nigerians thought the country had seen the worst when the deadly Boko Haram terrorists launched their bloody campaign in the Northeast in 2009, killing, maiming and subjecting innocent Nigerians in that part of the country and even the Federal Capital Territory to untold horror in the name of religion. Since then, other groups ranging from bandits to secessionists and other forms of militias have risen in different parts of the country.

The situation now is such that our homes are not safe because dare-devil robbers or kidnappers can invade them at any time. We cannot run to the police station because policemen themselves can no longer guarantee their own safety at the hands of secessionist agitators and hoodlums masquerading as protesters. And running into the bush is not an option because you may be walking straight into the hands of heartless kidnappers who have turned the bush into their permanent abode.

South African poet, Oswald Mbuyiseni, might not have Nigeria in mind when he wrote his famous poem, Nightfall in Soweto. Yet the poem would seem to capture the current mood in Nigeria now better than it did the situation in his country when he composed it many decades ago.  ”Where is my refuge? Where I’m I safe? Not in matchbox house where I barricade myself against nightfall,” he wrote.

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Somehow, we all seem to have lost our sense of humanity, practically co-habiting in a zoo where, like the late Reggae music sensation, Bob Marley, observed in one of his captivating songs, only the fittest of the fittest shall survive.

A scene I witnessed as I journeyed through Ife-Ibadan Expressway in January last year reminded me of how deeply our sense of humanity has fallen beneath the standard of animals. At the section of the expressway around Ikoyi-Ile a herd of cows were crossing the road when one of the animals suddenly realised that it had left its baby behind. The mother cow immediately turned back and headed in the direction of her baby, resisting the efforts made by the herdsmen to stop it from going back. In the end, it was the herdsmen that bowed to the resolute mother cow as she crossed the expressway the second time to take her baby.

As I pondered over the incident and wondered how an animal could exhibit such passion for its offspring, I realised that we were at the junction of Ikoyi-Ile, the Osun community where a student of Lagos State University (LASU) allegedly took his girlfriend from the same school to a ‘pastor’ for money rituals. They gruesomely killed the female student and with her heart, the pastor made a pepper soup which the so called lover and his mother devoured with an assurance from the pastor that by doing so, they would never be poor again.

A few years ago, there was the story of a herbalist and his accomplice in a part of Lagos, who smashed the head of a housewife with a pestle, made a meal of her intestines and washed it down with spirit. One of the high points of the recent #EndSARS protests was the killing, in Lagos, of a policeman by so called protesters who shared the body parts among themselves.

For most of last week, the news media were awash with the story of Iniubong Umoren, an innocent female job seeker in Akwa Ibom State who was allegedly lured by a stone-hearted youth to a hotel with a promise that she would be offered a job, only for her host to murder her.

At the base of the bestial society that has evolved in recent years is lack of respect for the rule of law by both the government and the governed. The primordial acts that have turned our country into a human zoo are impracticable in societies that are guided by law. The earlier we imbibe the culture of allowing the law to take its course where and when necessary, the better for us all.

By Vincent Akanmode

One of the fairy tales that made my day in my formative years was that of a young man and his younger brother sent by their father to fetch him flowers with a promise that the one whose flowers were more beautiful would be handsomely rewarded. The two brothers went into a bush in the neighbourhood in search of flowers, but as it turned out, it was the younger brother whose flowers were more beautiful. On their way home, the jealous elder brother hacked the younger one to death, buried him and went home with his flowers.

A few months later, a pawpaw tree grew from the grave of the younger brother and continued to flourish until its beautiful leaves attracted a child in the neighbourhood and he decided to make a flute with one of them. To the shock of everyone in the neighbourhood, however, the sound produced by the flute was the voice of the boy his brother had killed and buried earlier, explaining how he became a victim of jealousy.

Of course, as a fairy tale, the story cannot be taken for its face value. It nonetheless teaches the unmistakable lesson that nothing is hidden under the sun, and like a shadow, our yesterday is always on our trail, haunting or aiding us as the case may be.

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The foregoing was the context in which Norman Coombs, the author of The Black Experience in America, wrote when he said: “Whether we know it or not, the past is always with us and clings tightly to us like a cloak. We have the choice of recognising it and dealing constructively with it or ignoring it and living in bondage to it.”

But Coomb’s point would appear to be lost on the Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media, Malam Garba Shehu, who in a tepid response to the widespread agitation for the removal of Dr. Isa Pantami as the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy for his open and vigorous demonstration of support for the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda, the two terrorist organisations responsible for the bombing of America on September 11, 2001, would rather have Nigerians adopt the biblical saying that old things have passed away.

Responding to the clamour for Pantami’s removal from Buhari’s cabinet on Thursday and dismissing same as a “cancel campaign” targeted at the embattled minister, Shehu had said: “The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami is currently subject to a ‘cancel campaign’ instigated by those who seek his removal. They do not really care what he may or may not have said some 20 years ago: that is merely the instrument they are using to attempt to ‘cancel’ him. But they will profit should he be stopped from making decisions that improve the lives of everyday Nigerians.”

Shehu, who said Pantami had apologised for the views he expressed in the early 2000s for which he is being crucified now, however, admitted that “the views were absolutely unacceptable then and would be equally unacceptable today were he to repeat them. But he will not repeat them—for he has publicly and permanently condemned his earlier utterances as wrong. In the 2000s, the minister was a man in his twenties; next year he will be 50. Time has passed, and people and their opinions—often rightly—change. “

It would seem, however, that most well-meaning Nigerians are not taken in by Shehu’s expression of optimism that Pantami has so much evolved from an Islamic extremist to a benevolent moderate who would gladly accept the chance to lead a church service. Religion being an opium, according to the world acclaimed champion of socialist movement, Karl Marx, they cannot understand the alchemy by which a man who had so openly and eloquently expressed support for the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda would be so much weaned of his terrorist instincts that he now qualifies to lead the battle against, Boko Haram, the local equivalent of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda at whose mercy the nation’s survival lies.

It smacks of unmitigated hypocrisy that  some of our countrymen who were at the forefront of the clamour for the resignation of the former Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, after a sordid part of her past was dug up are now the ones at the vanguard of the Pantami-must-stay campaign. Why, for instance, did Shehu not make a case for Adeosun, knowing that she would likely approach the issues concerning her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate differently now that she is older? And to think that the journalist that exposed Adeosun and caused her resignation as finance minister is now the one leading the campaign for Pantami to retain his cabinet position!

Borrowing from the great American human rights activist, Ella Baker, Adeosun has given the light by honourably resigning her position as finance minister; it is now left for Pantami to find the way. As the custodian of our national data, his past is like June 12; we can only wish it away at the nation’s peril.