Category: Tony Marinho

Tony Marinho

COVID-19 deaths approaching 2,660,000, 119,625,000 diagnosed cases. Nigerian cases approaching 162,000 with 2,020 deaths. Sadly, Nigeria is not considered one of five African countries capable of Covid vaccine manufacture.

Why no air and ground saturation surveillance and monitoring of cell phones 50km around the 37 kidnapped, brutalised students of a federal government forestry institution? Bandits must not be repelled but encircled and neutralised. Fifteen soldiers killed by ISISWA. God rest our gallant men.  Murderers do not deserve two weeks ultimatum but ‘Immediate Effect’.

This is WAR! Where are our commando units using local intelligence and infiltrating our forests locating hideouts? Where are our snipers and drones? Foreign affairs minister, what is the position of our National Space Research and Development Agency, NSRDA’s satellites including NigComSat -1R,  and Nigeria’s international relationships and cooperation agreements signed to get real time heat signal information on movement and motorcycle heat trails, from partner governments and companies in AU, SA, UK, EU, US, China, Russia and India, Google, Airbus etc which own or sell data or have thousands of overlapping satellites over Nigeria? Google the history of Nigeria’s three surviving satellites and the cost including partnerships from Akure to China! Every second someone somewhere worldwide has satellite photographic access to all Nigerian space. Government must use or purchase such international goodwill to locate and eliminate bandits every second, every day. These are 2021 murderers among us with bazookas, cell phones and motorcycles. Every armed force today has drone units embedded in every troop using thousands of drones etc with heat-seeking and human form confirming capabilities.

In terms of quick build-up of military capacity, we can use international forces as partners, not mercenaries before it is too late.  There are millions of Nigerians who are children of those driven away under Babangida economic disaster regime and Abacha terror regimes. Perhaps that is where our ‘Modern Nigerian Security Solutions’ miracle lies? Those forced to leave may help us with their knowledge?

Many contribute send $20billion+ annually. Already well trained in high technology end of security application, those Nigerians in foreign lands who are serving or have retired, in armed forces and security and telecom hostage tracing, rescue, stun techniques, and Wizz kids, etc in the diaspora with experience of 2021 warfare and security monitoring and spying can be lent or lend themselves to Nigeria, not as mercenaries but as patriotic Nigerians with Nigerian ancestry offering service to their grand-mother country. Their relations are being kidnapped and killed. Nigerian refugees in tens of millions will not be welcome in any country worldwide! Our armed forces are very, very capable and need high tech empowerment. Everybody should welcome immediate specialist help. Learning from them and training others can be at the same time.

The repeated kidnapping and public whipping of the children of innocent girls and boys merely seeking an education is an insult to the entire nation. The authority’s security over the nation’s roads is lost.  Negligence or inadequacy of numbers has placed travellers at the mercy of the murderous bandits who have just this past week attempted and successfully kidnapped on many roads nationwide and attacked at least three schools.

It is a pity that in the five years of this regime, it did not take recruitment into the armed forces and police as a serious security strategy. It can no longer blame past regimes for manpower and equipment shortages. The problem is beyond politics and choosing the name which best to call murderers- kidnappers, bandits, terrorists, armed herders. It is difficult asking soldiers and police to lay down their lives for a country which repeatedly demonstrates it loves nobody but politicians in power.  Nigeria is at a serious security crossroads. Apart from the military and police, only the terrorists are armed.  The authorities are very quick to publicly disarm and sometimes disgrace villagers trying to defend themselves. This sometimes suggests collusion with attackers.

Currently if you put a flag of remembrance for everyone kidnapped, killed, deprived of their farms and livelihoods the map of Nigeria would be flooded. The bestiality of attacks confirms the need to quickly curtail the murderous nature of the perpetrators.

‘Lagos-Ibadan Expressway Lives DON’T Matter’.  Government makes an insulting pronouncement and moves on. ‘Lagos-Ibadan ‘Expressway’’ postponed to 2022!’. Really?? So what??? It is massive neglect of government responsibility to act in a timely manner to save us from these robber-herder-pothole-kidnapper-on every-road days. The road is only 120km, 240km adding both sides together. Why did government place an expensive massive concrete median and postponed the simple tarring to 2022 from 2015?? For suffering travellers, our travel problem is magnified for another unquantifiable year. Our suffering, our mumu neva dooo????!!

Other governments are working on Mars and 90-storey skyscrapers in less time frame.  We are earning more oil dollars now and must complete of contracts before new ones! Suffer on, Nigerians!! Who cares?? Ask yourself why ‘Lagos-Ibadan Expressway Lives DON’T Matter’ and have not mattered for 15 years? And now they want to use the UK recovered money from former Delta State Governor, Ibori. Was it given him personally by the federal government or taken undetected from the state? Massive stolen money for 50 years is why the naira is rubbish and our youth are ore jobless today, but if UK did ‘give’ us Ibori’s money, no road, no bridge by 2023??

By Tony Marinho

COVID-19 deaths approaching 2,610,000 among 117,500,000 diagnosed cases worldwide. Nigerian cases approaching 159,500 and 1,975 deaths. Was it necessary for an official reception for a non-human like a vaccination?

To all long suffering fearful and overcoming women-Happy Women’s Day. Aluta continua!!

Chief Bola Ige ended many articles telling us not to cement our gardens but to grow vegetables. Today others are saying that 80% of perishable food are ‘internally imported’ from across the River Niger? So, first the cow was weaponised and destroyed farms North and South! Now we have a transportation boycott demonstrating the North/South food chain is easily weaponised with guaranteed war monetary compensation for ‘losses’ while five-year long five million IDPs in and out of IDPs camps and the farmers with stolen or burnt harvests or murdered raped family members inexplicably get no compensation. A crime against Nigerian humanity!  The North-South transporters, however, rightly demand an end to multiple roadblock corruption spots extorting trucks as they do all travellers across Nigeria including on the Apapa Tin Can Port axis where an internet call up system may finally reduce corruption.

For years we have recommended that we add ‘boycott cow meat’ to the weapons as a way of stopping the ‘blood cow’ murders across Nigeria. Sadly, the greed for meat overcame our humanity and need to defend the farmers. We have no AK47s, at last ‘banned by Buhari’, but the citizenry, by changing their meat source can slash the sale-for-meat value of cows to zero!! Medically, no one will die from not eating meat. Throughout history people have said ‘No to Meat’ often including eggs, milk, cheese and animal cruelty. They are currently 8-10% of the world population and are called vegetarians.

Stricter non-meat, no animal products eaters like milk, cheese, eggs and those who reject animal cruelty products like leather are called VEGeteriAN shortened in 1944 by Donald Watson to ‘VEGAN’. There are about 79m vegans today. Famous vegans can be googled and include Pythagoras, Buddha, St Francis of Assisi, the blind Arab poet Al-Ma’arri, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B Anthony, Albert Einstein, Coretta Scott King, Beyonce, Bill Clinton, Paul McCartney, Madonna, MYA, Forest Whitaker, Ariana Grande, Erykah Badu, Venus Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lewis Hamilton, WILL.I.AM. Veganism has a month Veganuary – January to advertise the health benefits. So do not fear any boycott.

The North-South food-chain boycott has had the welcome side effect of revealing a development defect. This welcome reality jolt should stimulate Nigeria’s states to ramp up local production of all food, no matter the cost. Poor good herders should not have to suffer for bringing cows up. Neither should farmers. Shamefully with over 100 major and minor agriculture institutes across the Southwest and the mighty Development Agenda for Western Nigeria, DAWN Commission’s Reports driving agriculture 2021, we still have our pants around our ankles. Before we fall over on our face in our fertile land which forcibly feeds other people’s cows ‘FREE yam tubers, corn and ewedu for lunch’, we must take agriculture seriously.

Back to the beginning. Our parents through taxes and visionary Great Awolowo Project leadership- the South West People’s Odu’a Investment Co. Ltd, a Conglomerate, held in trust by South-western states shareholding governors through the owner governments can better impact on, for example, local goat livestock development, through, for example, its Westlink Integrated Agriculture Ltd (WIAL) which is interested in tomato paste and cassava tubers. It must already be having emergency meetings around the big picture now that the boycott happened. Good!

Enough research has been carried out in the Southwest based IITA, CRIN, FRIN, IAR&T, or the 10+, public and private university agriculture faculties, and other agricultural research institutions in Southwest. These have for 50 years using ‘Southwest earth’ for research. The problem to be overcome is the poor or non-existent translation of that mountain of agricultural research on successful high yield, quick turnaround methodology, simple agricultural equipment implements and seeds for our 6million+ small scale farmers for quick Southwest development. Westlink needs to harness the results for immediate implementation.

Of course, research is on-going and needs further Odu’a funding.  How does Odu’a and its WIAL link with and support, for fees, the teeming Southwest farmers, if they are ‘politically mistakenly-on-purpose’ left out of the federal government’s funding of agricultural programmes? Odu’a is an $80b mega Southwest public concern. No Nigerian, North or South, should be able to initiate food hostage of other Nigerian. There should always be ‘Food Alternatives’ for hostage taking cows and perishable foods. The DAWN governors are the Odu’a governors are one and the same-a powerful weapon for change. They and institutions have ‘Agriculture in the 2021 South West Nigeria’. Governors must grow agriculture and protect the citizenry from insult and injury and grow the wealth and not allow political stealing or corruption at a time of near war with ISIS-WA etc. Each state must introduce better funded and monitored agricultural programs.

Stop the federal government taking over the waterways as it will subjugate or kill state agriculture. All this depends on safe access to farms and roads with massive marked up security to deal with banditry, rape, robbery, kidnapping and murder. States must design education programs for almajiris, school dropouts, JSS fail and SSS fail because if not rescued they will remain the seeds for cannon fodder of riots, cults and agberos. If not, we face an impending nationwide famine.

Tony Marinho

COVID-19 second wave brings deaths approaching 2.3million among 106,650,000 diagnosed cases worldwide. Nigerian cases approaching 141,000 and 1,700 deaths.

A governor has called for different Federal Medical Centres, FMCs to each specialise in a different disease e.g. heart, kidney, and liver in different states perhaps where such diseases are common locally. This suggesting is well-intentioned coming from a good man fighting for the lives of his citizens against insurgency and health challenges including hepatitis and Covid. God Bless him. One must suggest that the citizens of each state in 2021 deserve the best treatment for any disease within the boundaries of the state. It used to be heart-breaking to see sick fellow Nigerian patients, many with language and cultural differences, in Ibadan for ‘specialised cancer care’ from all states of the country. The huge undocumented costs of ‘Interstate Medical Tourism’ in travel, accommodation and family dislocation trauma is a drain on state resources and an unnecessary burden on the citizen.

Most medical specialists recommend that the key is not to get the ‘few patients to the specialist in another state’ but to get the ‘specialist to more patients in the same state’. FMCs must provide all what the larger traditional teaching hospitals deliver in specialty care bringing all state citizenry to within one day’s journey of care. The citizens deserve this in view of the huge funds state governments received over the last 30 years. FMCs should be all-encompassing specialist centres. There are 15 teaching hospitals in London alone.  Even a state with 2.2m is as big in population as Gambia, Botswana, Gabon or Lesotho making it equivalent to the 146th most populated country, bigger than 50 or so other countries. Our governors have a presidential responsibility to upgrade all facilities to international standards. Temporarily, next-door states can share the specialities to bring specialist care quickly to the citizenry.

States are notorious for neglecting and underfunding health and under-employing and underpaying medical specialists and lag behind in getting expensive equipment. But a fantastic health specialist service would be an accolade and money maker for the state. The citizens would not travel 500-700km for care in overcrowded facilities which often break down.

Governors must make top-quality medical services a priority. Unfortunately, most states neglect even minimum care and ‘Specialist Maternal and Child Health Services’ are woefully below WHO and SDG standards causing a tragic murderous high death rate among our poor defenceless women and innocent children on that most dangerous day in the life of a woman and child in the ‘War of Life’- the ‘Delivery Day Battle’. Remember each state in Nigeria is bigger than 60 countries worldwide which have Heads of State. Our governors, with similar population responsibility, must provide hugely better medical and social services. Most of their predecessors failed, squandering the money. Governors must provide excellent state medical specialists and facilities.

President Buhari welcomes a guard change by South Africa at the AU. Unfortunately, he does not practice what he congratulates others for. His regime is rife with insulting violations of federal character, a key ‘Citizens‘ Comfort Factor’ in the citizen’s perception of the ‘unity of Nigeria’. We all witness the strange elongation of tenure for the armed service chiefs and the ‘nearly’ outgoing IGP. It boggles the mind that the president refused to appoint successors among the teaming highly-trained high-ranking officers and gentlemen with military dispatch thus damaging morale and disturbing the ‘order of service’. It is doubtful if the service chiefs will be admitted to any Human Rights-conscious countries as ambassadors.

‘Sit-tightism’ is a problem in Nigerian politics negating growth and SDG achievement. Nationwide, the citizenry faces fear, gunfire and machete attack with blood flowing anywhere anytime with kidnapping and heartless mindless and callous execution of the hapless victims even after on payment of ransom often with the subsequent kidnap of the person who delivers the ransom.

So, we are a country, not a nation, struggling against a twin terror of first unbridled banditry and terrorism – 19 people killed and abductions in Kaduna-, by foreign imported and local militia under WA-ISIS and Boko Haram supported by some powerful forces. The second terror is the astronomical rise in ‘Cow Terror’ where cows, and their AK-47s herders [who asked them who bought their guns] spit frequent fire, life-terminating, and supported by blood-letting machetes, demand, devour and destroy with total right-of-way across ancestrally farms and lovingly tended farm produce. That farm produce, paid for with an Agric-bank or extended family loan, was destined for the citizens’ stomach not a free meal in a wayward cow’s stomach. Yet no one is prosecuted to deter repeat offences.

Nigeria has been at a dangerous crossroads for years reaching a murderous head. Could we all soon be dead? Stop your cows! No other Nigerian would dare drive pigs, goats, chicken, and turkeys onto anyone’s farm, nationwide, without expecting a justified angry reaction for wilful damage and destroying another’s hard work. The owners of the renegade cows must be stopped, brought before a commission of enquiry and forced to pay compensation for life and livelihood lost before we have no cows and no farms.

On the scale of life, one human is worth more than all the cows in the world.  No country can survive in 2021 if it forces its farmers and citizens to ‘Bow to the Cow’ or die!  Nigeria will never ‘Bow To The Cow’.

Tony Marinho

COVID-19 second wave brings deaths approaching 2.5million among 105million diagnosed cases worldwide, Nigerian cases approaching 135,000 and 1,650 deaths.

Why do we do nothing like with the Petroleum Industry Bill, always promised but never passed in 20 years but in contrast go overboard with draconian laws guaranteed to increase corruption?

So, Nigeria’s way to get people ‘Covid Compliant’ and to obey Laws of Covid Prevention is a judicial enforced N20,000 fine and a six-month incarceration in overcrowded prison cells. Sadly, medically this prison aspect of punishment is a guaranteed Covid spreader and will give the ‘Covid Convicts’ ‘Covid on arrival’ or during the six months.

Or perhaps the prisoners will carry Covid to the correctional service and its guests- the prisoners of Nigeria. And please, even the fine is a ‘government crime against the citizens’ and hugely disproportionate in Nigeria with 70% poverty with 80% of those working earning less than N500/day. N20,000 is more than the minimum wage before it was raised to N30,000 a sum still not paid by businesses and even government organs. A fine of N1,000 per offence sounds small but would be sufficiently irritating for anyone convicted to commence mask-wearing.

It is unfortunate that the fiscal crime of ‘over-fine’ or ‘hyper-fine’ against the citizens is a very common weapon of governance, but often unchallenged by the entire SANship of Nigeria, PLC-Please Leave Cheque! Examples abound like malicious traffic fines, land use and ground rent charges higher than UK fines. Such fines are morally indefensible in Covid-time with joblessness and little successful business with no or minimal profits. Why must citizens always suffer? Where is our Ombudsman or O-woman?  Yes, many disbelieve Covid, swallowing misinformation made worse by poor health levels of education in media outlets and the maybe defunct National Orientation Agency, NOA. In fact, we have inadequate NOA action. Of course, Covid itself is an issue but the NOA is expected to be the leading and loudest voice in every ear and poster everywhere we turn shouting and signing the correct Covid information at federal, state and LGA levels to ensure that everyone, even those who deny, are aware even if they refuse to comply.

Covid News Update: There is in the scientific and social media one preventive and curative drug commonly available which some studies have shown kills COVID-19. Of course, we have had wrong information before. However, this drug is old with 30b doses given for parasitic infestations. Medically, it is harmless except to the few with allergies or dizziness. Is it worth taking, just in case it works in your case? Discuss with your medical experts. The UK apparently has approved the drug. Unfortunately, the pharmacies are already overpricing the drug. However, the drug may, with any one of the new Covid vaccines, put a stop to the pandemic by mid-year June/July 2021.

With more than 1000 citizens dying a day in some countries it is appropriate to REMIND YOU AGAIN OF ‘COVID COMPLIANCE’ AND PLEASE CUT THIS OUT AND USE IT AT HOME AND OFFICE…

1. ‘WEAR A NOSE AND MOUTH MASK’ -not a ‘MOUTH ONLY’ or ‘THROAT’ mask,
2. ‘WASH HANDS’ frequently AND
3. ‘WIPE CONTACT POINTS’ like utensils, door handles, chairs.
4. ‘KEEP SIX FEET APART’ aka ‘SOCIAL DISTANCING’ in office and from staff who go out of home and office. These points will save someone you know and love and many unknown casual contacts from being needlessly buried six feet under!

Government is rejecting Transparency International’s assessment of Nigeria’s fight against corruption. It is called ‘Perception Index’. Regardless of the TI rating ask yourself and 10 or 50 people around you if the consensus in your area of operation is that Nigeria has improved or remains static in a quagmire of corruption witnessed every day by everybody everywhere – even children. Does the average Nigerian feel that corruption has fallen in service delivery by MDAs, security services, health facilities, customs services etc? Look at the stories of corruption related to the permanently disgraceful failure of governance called The Apapa Wharf gridlock.

Government is wasting time, energy, media space, manpower and money fighting back against the TI’s indicting report. Why not learn lessons and move on to working to improve the TIPI 2022 Report? Has Nigeria ended even the most visible and simplest and most disgraceful corruption problems?  Like police force wrongful arrests, bail demands and abuse of power and also at customs- the port entry points strangling businesses and paralysing the economy so much that many businesses died, never started, left for Ghana or diverted goods to Togo etc which then cross into Nigeria by bribery, hook or crook?

A severely under-policed Nigeria awaits ‘Permission from Government’, and the new armed forces chiefs to defend itself against the onslaught of heavily AK47+ armed men, with or without cows, who have already destabilised citizens nationwide.

Governance is not a joke but a 24-hour alert leadership requiring drones, phones and spies communicating in undertones. The president’s trip to Daura is of doubtful succour to the millions of traumatised IDPs in and outside camps or the millions of farmers, farmhands and families with stolen lands, livelihoods and crops and over 120million terrified citizens from further invasion of states by murderous terrorists sowing murder, kidnapping, food shortages and a famine – ingredients of WAR. We must be defended, or defend ourselves, before we are all dead.

Tony Marinho

COVID-19 second wave brings deaths approaching 2.15milliion among around 100 million cases worldwide, Nigerian cases approaching 122,000 with 1,510 deaths.

Economics: The statement that Nigerians pay one of the ‘highest implicit taxes’ by [Prof to be] Dr. Adewumi Adesina, re-elected president of African Development Bank, is known to Nigerians earning and spending honest money. It is only unknown to those who are the heaviest, least productive burden on society, particularly politicians, the civil service and contractors whose 60-year main job was to provide infrastructure. This is another undocumented extractive industry which including bribes, exorbitant ‘Salaries And Perks’ for politicians and inflated contract fees for which the citizenry has paid a price too heavy in underdevelopment. It makes them need to stay in power or be connected to power for continuous extortion payments to meet these perks which should have been provided d the citizenry.

Countries stagnate and die if corruption is more than 10%. Sadly, our financial corruption level is estimated at 50-100% with many totally undelivered but fully paid for contracts for which loans have to be paid back making the cost an unimaginable 110% corruption. This means innocent citizens are forced to owe money for the corruption of fellow Nigerians in authority added to the corrupt duplicity in our international dealings. These have conspired to impoverish the citizenry financially further compounded by Covid-19.

Adesina has added to the acknowledgment by financial and academic authority of our burden of each being a ‘Local Government Area’ having to provide all infrastructure adding weight to the cost of doing business with generators, fuel, water purchases, vehicle repairs from bad roads, delays, customs problems etc. Nigerians have faced a tough service delivery failure time. Even this was compounded by the disgraced naira precipitated by a poor foreign exchange growth culture.

Why do Nigerians not get tax relief for government’s ‘failure to provide’ electricity? This should be recognised and therefore all economists and taught in schools of economics and social and political studies can now include a tax line on ‘Implicit Tax’ as an item for tax relief in their calculations.

Nigeria’s heavy heart: Insecurity.

The economics of Nigeria’s milito-political-economic Corruption Incompetence, Neglect and Selfishness, CINS, are no longer the full story of our horrible road to the current suffering. We face a more sinister corruption than financial corruption and it is finally precipitating a disaster. Everyone has been tested by today’s unjustified and unnecessary terror as there was no threat by farmers or anyone else. This is a self-made terror and self-made war! We face Federal Government Policy Corruption – the unhidden and hidden agenda policy corruption- since the military and its 1999 constitution. Ask yourself the ‘National Anthem Question’ -Do ‘Truth and Justice Reign’?

Nigeria’s heavy heart beats sadly. More deadly attacks and bandits killed. Suffering today’s terror travails common only in countries worse Nigeria, the self-acclaimed giant of Africa. Nigerians, including 2.5+mllion traumatised human beings labelled IDPs in camps, fear for themselves. We have witnessed 50-100,000 murders related to government’s inability to protect first, farmers from those claiming, without government arrest for treason, to ‘own the country’ and then, failing to protect Nigerians from terrorists and kidnappers. They are not simple deaths but vicious murders by machete and machinegun. Nigerians fear for wives and husbands going about daily chores or work. They fear for children at home or in school. They fear their workers, drivers, domestics and maintenance staff invited into the house for repairs. It was better in the past but has become dangerous now.

Nigerians are peaceful and just want a safe haven to benefit from being ‘Faithful, Loyal and Honest’, tenets in the ‘National Pledge’. They live in peace, intermarry, have best friends from other ethnic groups and have freely travelled around Nigeria in safety and expectation of safe arrival. Nigeria’s ethnic groups generally do not trample over the human rights of the ‘indigenous citizens’. Above all, in their own native part of the country, they expect respect for ancestry, inheritance and ownership based on legal, family or financial purchase terms.

We have boundary tensions. However, the herders who march through other people’s property burning produce and destroying lives and farms are a real and present menace made worse by presidential policy compounded by foreign and local terrorists. And please add poverty which has thrown millions towards petty and sometimes major criminality seeking a living. Our less than fantastic courts have not convicted enough corrupt Nigerians with long enough jail time or fast enough to curb corruption.

A county where any group claims the country and abuses the rights and property of others without federal government condemnation is in a war situation or facing anarchy.

I could have been born elsewhere, lived in village running a farm and suddenly being run off that same farm or murdered because I object to someone feeding my 300 days hard farmer labour and a bank loan crops to cows?? No compensation for malicious damage? How many must die before we cry? How many murders before we are permitted to arm to adequately defend ourselves. We do not live peacefully in our own family plot. How much is the price we must pay to stay alive in our own little corner of our own country? How much blood must be shed-5pints x 100,000 -a blood? Or is the policy plan for us all to be docile, domestic servants or dead?

Tony Marinho

CVOVID-19 second wave brings deaths approaching 1,950,000 among 90,500,000 diagnosed cases worldwide, Nigerian cases approaching 1,000,000 with 1,400 deaths. Will Nigeria get the vaccine against Covid-2019 in 2021? Masks protect you from others an others from you.

TO REMIND YOU…

1. ‘WEAR A NOSE AND MOUTH MASK’ -not a ‘MOUTH ONLY’ or ‘THROAT’ mask,
2. ‘WASH HANDS’ frequently AND
3. ‘WIPE CONTACT POINTS’ like utensils, door handles, chairs.
4. ‘KEEP SIX FEET APART’ aka ‘SOCIAL DISTANCING’ even in the office and from staff who go out of home and office.

Close attention to these points has saved millions of lives and will definitely save someone you know and love and many unknown casual contacts from being needlessly buried six feet under!

The USA events have clearly shown what the maniacal politics of one man can inflict on even the supposedly exemplary leading stable nation known for selling, spreading and even going to war to disseminate democracy. Not it faces ‘democrazy’ actions of one man in what history will record is a ‘Tempestuous Tantrum’ which has shaken those at home and abroad. The US is not without its embedded faults especially its racist methods of police actions and its ingrained racism perpetuated by institutionalised differential government investment for different racial segments of society unchanged and now challenged more widely as it has been shamelessly unleashed during this ‘Terror Term’. Nigeria has long been subject to such ‘one man maniacal’ milito-political events for years because of a self-interest politics overwhelming the need to grow and develop the sick country bleeding its pride, its currency and under-developing its long-suffering citizenry. Today we must publicly question the legality of the tsunami of lies told by electioneering politicians in the US. Lies are the wrongly legitimised weapons of war in our own politics in Nigeria.  We live on political lies about budget allocations, census figures, employment statistics and death counts.  Why are politicians allowed to lie worldwide so much? How do we hold politicians to account for the mega-lies they routinely tell against each other, the state and the citizens?

It is a new year but old problems explode around us. The prayers did not ‘vanish’ our problems. We are reaping what politicians sowed for us over the last 50 years and now our farmers cannot farm without fear and huge being killed or kidnapped. Famine is a real threat.  The media sickeningly vomits the daily terrors and ‘instant murders’. Man’s primitive and professional inhumanity knows no limits. Insecurity is a constant and very depressingly companion. Trust has been eroded. Crime affects every profession and workspace, every social class. The greed of some in the upper classes has precipitated neglect of the lower classes. The lower classes know their numerical power now and only a massive SDG/welfare plan will prevent a backlash. It could consume the good and a few of the bad perpetrators who miss the escape routes and planes.  Just as everyone has a misery Okada story from the ‘Okada Epidemic’ and with the police so too now everyone has a personal, family or work story of a physical crime. Wherever families gather, a census will show that at least one member has been a victim or knows a victim of crime.

The high crime rate is astronomical and can be directly related to many years of a greedy corrupt self-enrichment ‘Poor delivery/ Low outcome’ of governance at federal, state and LGA level, under-budgeting for health and education, electricity paralysis destroying Nigeria’s industrial growth and job market. Add a refusal to maintain, develop road and rail infrastructure with strangling of our port services and clogging our transport arteries. Nigeria is being strangled and nearly killed because the leaders loved themselves above the need for country’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Serial government refused to match population growth with police service and security growth except the abuse of governance to acquire personal security. Personal political and ‘big man’ security takes a large number of the police service personnel. Properly paid for that would beef the police budget allowing recruitment of other officers for the rest of us. We need more police and soon but at what level-federal, state LGA or Community?  At last Nigerian states, after a long battle, have been given permission to have Community Police by Arewa and Northern Governors’ Forum, so used to saying a retrogressive ‘No’ to almost every move that does not come from them. This is evidenced by the 900+ Community Police trained by, I believe Kaduna State, and quickly followed by Community Police in Lagos State and elsewhere.

Nigerians have asked for community police and state police for many years. But this is only one failure in a raft of failures to a country and its people by the overwhelming power of a selfish politics which fails to deliver security but insisting on a personal police detail.

Even with Community Police we must actively prevent community Police crime. The lack of strong internal safeguards and ‘Policing the Police’, have hampered the growth of the police.

Within the police the lack of world police practice has hampered security. Fingerprint and Photograph Databases are available today in SIM, BVN, NIN, TIN, PIN, Driving Licence, Passports, Voters Card costing multibillions of naira. They must be interlinked and used against our outrageous crime rate in 2021. This is an age of science in crime.

Stay safe- cover your nose and mouth!!