Category: Hardball

Hardball

There is confusion in the land. News of the release of more than 300 students abducted from Government Girls Science Secondary School, Jangebe, Zamfara State, turned out to be fake.  After the initial public excitement that greeted the news died down, there were questions about how such fake news was circulated in the first place. The false information was attributed to social media.

Commissioner of Police Abutu Yaro clarified the issue in a statement, saying, “From the records available to the police command, the abducted students have not been released. However, the command in collaboration with other security agencies and the state government are intensifying efforts that will lead to the safe rescue of the students.”

Then there was news that the state government was collaborating with supposedly reformed bandits to negotiate the release of the schoolgirls abducted by unreformed bandits. This was another evidence of confusion.

Governor Bello Matawalle was reported saying, “We are using the leaders of the repentant bandits to rescue the schoolgirls from the kidnappers. Very soon, we are going to witness the release of the abductees.”

Using so-called ex-bandits to negotiate with unrepentant bandits is a sign that the authorities are confused and don’t know what to do to rescue the abductees. It is bad enough that the state government is negotiating with bandits-cum-kidnappers. The situation is worsened by the fact that those negotiating on behalf of the government are said to be former bandits.

The governor added that his administration “is going to continue the peace process with bandits, considering its impact in addressing security challenges facing the state.”  This means that security in the state is now the responsibility of the government and lawless bandits.

There was further evidence of confusion when traditional rulers in the state visited Matawalle “to express our sympathy over the abduction of our children.”  Their chairman, the Emir of Anka, Alhaji Attahiru Ahmad, said to the governor: “We are seriously disturbed by the development which we know is not your fault… this is something ordained by God and so, cannot be termed as a weakness…”

The idea that the abduction was predestined means that the security architecture is not to blame. It reflects confusion to think that the abduction could not have been prevented by an effective security system because it was something like an act of God.

After striking mass kidnapping of students in Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara and Jangebe in Borno, Yobe, Katsina, Niger and Zamfara states, the confusion continues. It is a tragic continuity.

Hardball

The way frontline Islamic cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi carries on, he would sooner have the notion accepted that bandits responsible for dastardly  criminalities against Nigeria are hapless victims who need protection. By the same token, the brutalised nation is to be perceived as the wicked victimiser needing to urgently repent and restitute against the bandits. That is the gist of the cleric’s narrative since he embarked on a controversial mission of negotiating with the bandits.

In the latest instance, the cleric branded Nigerian journalists criminals for describing the activities of bandits as criminality. Speaking when he featured on Arise Television late last week, he said the media was fuelling insecurity in Nigeria with words being used on bandits; and that for the bandits to surrender, they should not be castigated or referred to as criminals but rather that nice words be used in reporting them. “You are emphasising on criminality, even the press (journalists) are criminals too because they are putting oil into fire. These people are listening to you, you should not address them as criminals if you want them to succumb,” Gumi said, adding: “Youths are ready to put down their weapons, now they hear you call them criminals, how do you want them to cooperate? You have to show them that they are Nigerians, that they should not hurt children and that they should be law-abiding. That is the language we want to hear from the press to assist us in getting the boys. You see, when we talk to them in nice words they are ready to listen to us (and) put their weapons down; but when the language is about criminality, this is what we will keep having.”

The Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) rejoined to the cleric, saying his utterances showed him up as an abettor  and inciter of bandits. “Sheikh Gumi’s attempts to seek amnesty for killers and abductors of innocent citizens, especially school children, is most unfortunate… In saner climes, a non-state actor involved in negotiations with criminal elements should have been behind bars,” NUJ President, Chris Isiguzo, said inter alia in a statement.

Since he undertook negotiating with bandits, Sheikh Gumi has become their advocate and deodorizer; he argues more for redress for them than for victims of their misbegotten enterprise. But his advocacy ignores the terminally ruinous effects of those attacks like people who get killed directly or by association, for which there ought to be hard accounting by the bandits, not to mention the battered psyche of victims who survive the experience. Besides, his mission and advocacy doesn’t seem to have had much restraining effect on the bandits themselves. Now, if they are not to be called criminals, what are they: saints?

The Yoruba have a saying that you do not because you want to eat beef call cow senior kinsman. But that is what Sheikh Gumi is demanding of us. C’mon, cajoling has its limits.

Hardball

Ted Cruise or Fled Cruz — the punning was severe.  It’s about a US senator that, with family, flew into warmer climes in Cancun, Mexico, as his Texas constituents literarily froze to death.

This gripping, wintry, American tale also had a comic Nigerian side.  As the Texas utility restored power, for the first time, after four days of bitter, deathly cold, Nigerians out there, many of them — if not most — caught up in the power snafu, danced and leapt for joy, screaming and singing: “Up NEPA!”  “Up NEPA!”

Up NEPA!  In Uncle Sam’s territory, the very God’s own country?  A compatriot, thrilled or riled, just commented on a thread: Nigerians!  You can’t take from them their Nigerian-ness! But not that alone.

Videos, that went viral, showed a queue of Texans, fetching water from a public point, plodding in the forming bog, even as life went on in the traffic, not so far away.

That again, in far away USA, is another echo from the Nigerian homeland — for good or for ill — folks queuing for water, when available.  CNN would later show a Texas mission hospital manager.  Asked how his hospital chain had coped without running water, he replied he just realized how they had taken running water for granted!  Taking running water for granted?  That remains a dream out here!

Meanwhile, an e-vignette was showing a freezing water closet, between the floor and the bowl, developing own icicles, not unlike icy stalactite and stalagmite, after four days of freezing cold, collapsed power and zero heating!   Folks that complain of too much heat here — wouldn’t they thank God for small mercies?

This Texas metaphor, of an all too human universal story, is replete with many lessons.

First, the run-away Fled — sorry, Ted — Cruz, who was accused of cruising hypocrisy, after earlier himself slamming a public official for abandoning duty.  The reigning national pastime, here right now, is to point fingers and throatily heap blames.

As legitimate and democratic that is, it is no substitute for pushing out hard-wrought solutions, which comes with hard thinking, less hysteria.  Poor Ted Cruz is finding that out the hard way.  Had he been less prone to pointing fingers in the past, perhaps he would have faced less flak, even if his apology appeared genuine enough.

Texas itself suffered this meltdown, perhaps from the arrogance of going it alone — again, not unlike many lobbies, in Nigeria’s ongoing crisis of nationhood.

By the way, while Donald Trump was purveying his moonlight rigging tales, of an election he lost fair and square, Texas wasn’t short of Republican hotheads, that threatened the rest of America with secession, just because they couldn’t stand losing a presidential election.  Nevertheless, they savoured their successes in the down tickets, in the same election!

That zero-sum game thinking perhaps fired the Texas decision to go it alone on its power utility, Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), so much so that its power grid isn’t linked with any other part of the country.  That could be a good one for self-sufficiency.  But the price of standing alone, in severe pride, could be hefty, as Texas found out — for the second time, the first being in 2011 — in its chilling days of power failure, during a merciless snow storm.

Again, this is a huge lesson for Nigeria, in these days of fashionable threat of secession, because of dire challenges that, if well managed, could well be temporary.

 Hardball

For a country battling deep-seated cynicism about the Covid-19 pandemic, the strategy the Federal Government proposes for imminent vaccination of Nigerians appears a long shot in getting as many as possible into the net.

Government, on Monday, announced that 57million doses of vaccines are being expected from the COVAX and the African Union (AU) windows, and that citizens eligible for vaccination would need to log in electronically and pre-register so to prevent overcrowding. Speaking at the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 briefing in Abuja, the Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr. Faisal Shuaib, said government planned to vaccinate all who are eligible from 18 years upwards – including pregnant women under strict provisos, with priority populations being frontline healthcare workers, people aged 50 years and above, people aged 18 – 49 years but with significant co-morbidities, and some other at-risk groups.

“In order to facilitate the implementation process, the TWG has come up with a strategy of pre-registration and scheduling of the target population to avoid overcrowding at vaccination posts. We have come up with a strategy called the TEACH approach, which will harness all the benefits of traditional, electronic, assisted and concomitant house-to-house registration to optimize the use of innovative technology. A URL link will be deployed for the electronic registration tool, which will be rolled out this week for healthcare workers, to register and appropriately schedule them for the COVID-19 vaccination,” Shuaib explained, adding that excluding Nigerians under 18 years, the goal is to vaccinate some 109million eligible citizens over the course of two years.

The proposed strategy seems to assumes pervasive enthusiasm and high level of enlightenment in the polity about the imperative vaccination as a firewall against the raging pandemic. It is doubtful, however, there is such enthusiasm and enlightenment. Of course, the elite and strategic groups like frontline healthcare workers appreciate the imperative and would warm up to pre-registration; after all, reports have it that while Nigeria awaits its first consignments of the Covid-19 vaccines, some of these have shopped abroad to book for early jabs in the drive for self-preservation. But they do not represent the bulk of citizens who’ve argued all along that they doubted the reality of Covid-19, saying it was at best (by whatever alchemy) the ‘disease of the elite.’ It is a long shot expecting people who were pressed hard before obliging non-pharmaceutical safety protocols to pre-register for vaccination against a medical challenge they live in denial of. Covid-19  vaccination may be not too different from the experience with polio vaccination involving grueling mobilisation against cultural cynicism.

If government aims to get the greatest number of eligible Nigerians into the Covid-19 vaccination net, it would have to think up ways of delivering the vaccine to the doubters, who seem to be in the majority.

We want to know who owns the land,” the late Sonny Okosuns crooned in his hit album, Papa’s Land, in the heat of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, “we want to know who owns the land!”

That was an impassioned rendition for love, against a state structured on racial hate.  That was the White regime of South Africa, and Okosuns, who waxed many albums to push racial love and conk racial hate, would have none of that.

Well, it so happened, that bang on lovers’ day 2021, a Makurdi church was posing that same question — who owns the land?  Pissed congregants or their embattled pastor?  Indeed, who owns the land, of a church that belongs to Papa God?

The Nation of February 15 reported the Valentine kerfuffle, at the NKST Church, a predominantly Tiv church, at Achusa, Makurdi, the Benue State capital.  Trouble broke out when some members of the church declared themselves unsatisfied with the pastor’s officiating methods, and therefore decided to press a showdown, on Valentine’s Day, which fell on a Sunday.

But then, other members equally rallied for the pastor, calling the bluff of those blocking him from conducting Sunday service.  While the anti-pastor flock accused him of “strange doctrines”, told him to vacate his seat and leave the church, the pro-pastor bloc countered the embattled pastor was going nowhere.

In this (un)civil war, of two opposing blocs of the children of God, the neutrals among them were caught in the cross fire.  While the two camps flexed muscles, a good number of others were just locked out of the church premises, milling around, gawking at the locked gates.

While the drama played out, the pro-pastor group claimed that under the church rules, only the Synod at Mkar, the church’s headquarters, could remove a resident pastor —  not furious congregants.

Still, might Mkar not have got wind of the rumble, before it climaxed in that showdown?  If it did, why didn’t it manage the tension?  If it didn’t, was it not monitoring events in its various tributaries?

Just as well the showdown didn’t degenerate into an outright fracas!  That would have been a scandal, on the day that was a celebration of love, the love that is God, that brings together all of His children!

Let NKST call its clergy and laity to order.  The house of God should be commodious enough to house everyone, in harmony; not a disorderly Babel that demand, from one another, who owns the land.

Hardball

The acquittal of former US President Donald Trump, at his unprecedented second impeachment trial, leaves America’s 232-year democracy with its worst conundrum of the modern era.

Wilfully attempting to strong-arm and overthrow a valid election, based on brazen lies and baseless conspiracy theories, was bad enough.  Goading brain-washed hooligans to sack the US Capitol, to subvert the final rites to ratify that election, was the ultimate.

The Trump infamy wasn’t helped by the fact that five lives were lost on the day; and another two Capitol security personnel committed suicide a few days after, unable to reconcile themselves with the shame of it all.  If the Trump act wasn’t manifest evil — and the blustering coward is not even contrite — it’s hard to define what else is.

Yet, at a critical point in its history, America’s much-ballyhooed good conscience let it down.  A succumb to partisan fealty left national sanity in the lurch.  An America that can’t punish manifest evil appears self-doomed, at not being able to laud manifest good, no matter how alluring, when it sees one.

By a 57-43 vote to acquit (instead of convict) that rotten presidential crime (10 short of the 67 needed), America tends to beckon to post-Trump presidential lunatics to bring it on.  Perhaps, with the fire on the Capitol next time, a future Vice President Pence, and family, won’t be lucky with a narrow escape.  Indeed, perhaps a future President Biden would have his mandate annulled, ala Babangida’s June 12, by an American presidential strongman!

It’s then America would realize, with a start, it had lost the bragging rights, over its so-called oldest democracy in the world!  Rots do start in bits, climaxing in epochal collapses, as it is with previous empires!

Clearly the most nauseating, of all the characters at the Senate impeachment trial, was Minority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, fairly accused of active collusion, in Trump’s brazen misconducts over four years, just to claim partisan scalps.

After acquitting Trump of (and thereby approving of his) rotten and subversive conduct, he blathered that he acquitted on alleged unconstitutionality of trial (a question settled, twice by vote, in the trial preliminaries), not because Trump wasn’t guilty as charged!  That has got to be the starkest example of the opposite of John Kennedy’s profile in courage!

But it was a fitting irony, like a truthful lie: the Republican Senate minority leader faithfully mirrored the moral spinelessness of his caucus, when everyone ought to stand up and ripple and bristle with moral courage, to save America’s commonwealth, from Trump and vandals.

Still, America will solve America’s problem, for good or for ill.  But there is telling lesson for Nigeria.  America has been at it for 232 years.  Yet, see how constant pouring of hate, into its system, has blighted its corporate mind, so much so, it can’t even punish a presidential misconduct so obvious the rest of the world pukes?

To those pouring relentless hate into the Nigerian body-politic, for whatever justifications, citing whatever provocations, let them know they push the country, ala America, to be stone-blind to manifest good or manifest evil, since either can be rationalized.  That seldom ends well.