The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Bandits and their collaborators

    Badly, insecurity continues to hit the headlines. Last week, no fewer than 50 persons were said to have been killed by bandits in Zamfara. This happened   in Kaura Namoda Local Government Area of the state. The dead included members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF).

    Responding to the recent cases of banditry in the country, President Muhammadu Buhari was quoted as saying: “How can I be happy and indifferent to the senseless killing of my fellow citizens by bandits?” Buhari’s Senior Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, quoted him in a statement.

    Buhari said:”I am human and I understand the pains of the victims and their families who have been traumatised and impoverished by constant ransom demands by bandits… Almost every week, I summon my security chiefs to get an update on the strategies being devised to defeat these mass murderers. There is no issue that dominates my mind every 24 hours like security…”

    The President drew attention to why bandits are winning, saying they have informants in some communities and certain communities have protection deals with bandits at the expense of other communities.

    The Minister of Defence, Gen. Mansur Dan Ali, corroborated the information.  A statement by his Public Relations Officer, Col. Tukur Gusau, said some highly placed persons, including traditional rulers, had been collaborating with bandits. His words: “In spite of the concerted efforts of the Armed Forces and other security, some unpatriotic persons, including highly placed traditional rulers in the areas, were identified as helping the bandits with intelligence to perpetrate their nefarious actions or to compromise military operations.”

    This situation certainly complicates the issue.  The security challenges in the Northwest, particularly in Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina and Birnin-Gwari axis of Kaduna are compounded by the strange collaboration. No doubt, the collusion is a threat to the Nigerian Army’s Exercise HARBIN KUNAMA IV in Zamfara, Katsina and Sokoto states. “The purpose of the exercise is to effectively flush out the activities of criminal elements in the Northwest,” the minister said.

    Since the President and the minister are on the same page on the question of collaboration between bandits and some influential people in the concerned areas, why have the authorities not arrested those allegedly colluding with bandits?

    It is not enough to identify those “helping bandits with intelligence.” The Federal Government must move decisively against bandits and their collaborators, no matter who they are.

  • Dogara and his cant

    Just as well Yakubu Dogara, “Speaker” of the House of Representatives, is a Christian.  So, he would understand the concept of the pious repetitive chant called the canticle.

    But take the piety from canticle, and all you have is empty and hollow cant — just as taking morality and decency from Dogara’s current position, and it is clear what is left is contemptible chaff of opportunism.

    It is called immorality in general concept.  In politics, in this particular situation, it is called illegitimacy.  Or how do you dub a fella that flaunted his Christian minority status, to corral the position of Speaker; and yet his Christian conscience became dead, when it was time to renounce that office, when he voluntarily became a minority legislator?

    Hardball supposes quitting an office on the nobility of high moral grounds — the minority shunning what belongs to the majority — is alien to a cabal without honour, even if the legislative conclave they belong to comes with the honorific prefix of “Honourable”.  What devastating irony!

    That was the smelly pus, issuing from Dogara’s lengthy and hollow cant, to new inductees into the soon-to-be-promulgated 9th National Assembly.

    To start with, that a Dogara would stand before any decent company, and address them as “Speaker” is a violent assault on Nigeria’s evolving democracy and its troubled parliament.  In what sane parliament, all over the world, would a minority representative say he is Speaker and continue to crow about it?

    As if that slur wasn’t enough, he went on and on and on, in meaningless humbug, on how not to choose parliamentary leaders!  Gosh!  Did he realize how shallow and hollow he sounded?

    He boasted of experience: how long he had been in the House to know how things worked — wonderful CV!  But in all of his years in there, when his present party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) called the shots, did he ever recall any Alliance for Democracy, or All People’s Party (later All Nigeria People’s Party or Labour Party  — indeed, any of the minority parties — produce a Speaker?

    Or did any PDP speaker defect to other parties, yet crow before new House members, in a lecture on parliamentary leadership?

    That is exactly Hardball’s point.  That was the moral gargoyle the Speaker presented, as he gave his hollow lecture!  Still, history would dutifully record all these against his name, in this odd season, when Nigerian parliamentary democracy is really going crazy!  But these times would pass!

    By the way, Dogara appears not to have learnt from the electoral pulverization of Saraki and his putative political destruction — again, traced to high-wire parliamentary abuse that pawned institutional sanity for cynical, personal gain.

    Nor has he learnt from the grim experience of old vomit, turned new beverage, PDP.  That party abused everything decent under political sun, until it found itself languishing in opposition.  Yet, it’s not done with self, its latest suicide mission being pushing parliamentary anarchy, where the minority swallows the majority.

    Well, as our elders say, the lost dog is stone-deaf to the hunter’s whistle.

     

     

  • Governors as gremlins

    The original title of this piece is: ‘Hardball raps governors-elect.’ But I quickly cringed from it when it occurred to me that I came to this world seeing this headline on the pages of good old Daily Times in the 70s. Some titles are like the Rock of Gibraltar, they are constant and permanent. Editors, (poor souls) would pick a handy headline as if it were a high street damsel and throw it in the mix. This is in the wee hours of production when the cranium is heated up and the gray matter is in a semi-addled state.

    Of course Hardball is not about to rap any state governor or toast him; far from it. He is about to slam them; to give ’em hell, to say it like the Yankees. To say that state governors are the bane of Nigeria is to write cheat tripe. Our governors are actually grey gremlins swarming in the system and impeding motion.

    And they are like children of the wayward wench; hardly any of them has managed to show some exceptionality; hardly.

    The other day, Mr Audu Ogbeh, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, said governors were not interested in agriculture. He noted that initiatives from the federal level slump and dissipate when they get to the states.

    He pointed at the farm settlements set up by founding fathers like Awolowo and Okpara which lay waste across the country. It won’t cost much for states to revive these wasting assets, Ogbeh laments. The same way they won’t revive industries littering their domain; not even educational and health institutions which were hitherto pride of their localities have been kept at the world standards they were.

    In other words, Ogbeh is accusing governors of not being creative or imaginative. It means they are not interested in either improving or diversifying their economic base. Most of them only collect federal allocation and local taxes and set about on a binge of squandermania.

    But let us assume that they have an acute inability to think and produce, but they can at least deploy the resources at their disposal with a bit of commonsense. But it seems they cannot. Here are some reasons:

    Annual budget: in most states, the ritual of making financial projections is actually what it is, ritual. Immediately the motion of passing it through the Assembly has been concluded, there it ends. Nobody refers to that document ever again till the next budgeting cycle. Most states’ funds are disbursed at the whims of the governor; hardly according to budget.

    Local government administration: governors in Nigeria deliberately emasculate the LGAs. Result: emasculated country.

    What more can we say!

  • Ndume’s defiance

    It’s a familiar drama. The central character is different this time, but the play is recognisable.  Senator Ali Ndume wants to be President of the Senate in the 9th National Assembly, against the position of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    The APC is backing Senator Ahmad Lawan for the top seat in the upper chamber of the federal legislature.

    Ndume, on April 2, released his nine-point agenda ahead of June 9 when the next Senate President will be elected. The former Senate majority leader representing Borno South pledged to “work harmoniously and inter-dependently with the executive without undermining the principle of separation of powers.”

    It is noteworthy that the APC National Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, had earlier indicated that the party wanted Lawan to head the next Senate.   But Ndume had argued that Oshiomhole did not express the party’s position on the matter.

    However, according to the party’s spokesman, Lanre Isa-Onilu, “The ticket he (Ndume) is holding belongs to the APC and he cannot go and work with the opposition to give what belongs to the APC to the opposition, like it happened in 2015 when the position of the Deputy Senate President was given to the opposition by some desperate former members of the APC.”

    Isa-Onilu added: “Ndume will be wrong to be calling out the party’s national chairman. The national chairman spoke on behalf of the party. And when we talk of the party in this instance, it is not just about the NWC. The President (Muhammadu Buhari) was there when he said it. He did not say anything that the President was not aware of. He did not say anything that the leaders of the APC are not already part of.”

    So, what is Ndume up to? The APC‘s leadership has made it clear that what happened four years ago will not be allowed to happen again.  The outgoing Senate President, Bukola Saraki, who was then an APC member, had got the position by working against the party’s preference. It is no surprise that Saraki’s anti-party scheming brought him a burden.

    Party supremacy means the party is supreme. If the party had picked Ndume for the position, how would he have responded if another party member had challenged the party’s choice?

    Ndume needs to rethink his defiant posture.  He should learn from history. He can’t afford to work against party discipline, party cohesion and party integrity. A word to the wise is enough!

  • Between love and hate

    Between avid love and scalding hate, there is but a thin line!  Nothing reinforces this delicate but fatal slip more than reported cases of lovers, sentenced to hang, because they killed girlfriends, or even wives, they once doted on.

    An Ondo State high court just sentenced one Chukwudi Onweniwe to hang for, two years ago, strangling his undergraduate girlfriend, the late Nifemi Adeyeoye, then an HND student of Rufus Giwa Ploytechnic, Owo.  Nifemi, the victim’s name, is rather evocative.  “Nifemi” is Yoruba for “love me”, a plea for love, or more emphatically, an assurance of love.  Love is life and peace and bliss. But alas in this case, love turned fatal!

    Another reported fresh sentence was the one involving the murder of the daughter of a former deputy governor of Ondo State.  The victim and murderer were said to have been in a four-year tryst; broke off for some time, but after resumed their romance.  The girl was also reported to be a student of Adekunle Ajasin University, (AAU), Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State.

    But again, an expected sweet tryst turned sour and gory.  Her boyfriend was said to have killed her, shaved her skull and pubic hair (reportedly for money rituals), dug a shallow grave right inside the room where she was killed, buried her and cemented the shallow grave to block any trace — Lord have mercy!

    But the foul ooze from the room gave away the secret.  The boyfriend was reported to be involved in some Yahoo-Yahoo money ritual, of which his former lover was a gory victim!  For his brazen crime, he will also hang.

    Still, what would make someone who professes love for another, to end his lover’s life in such a callous, grisly manner?  Free-wheeling crime?  Mad love for money?  Or plain stupidity that he can get away with the crime?

    It’s even more puzzling for spouses that had tied the nuptial knots, sworn to living for better and for worse, but reported to have killed or seriously armed one another, this time with wife either killing the husband, or the husband killing the wife.

    Beyond crime and punishment, given how rampant what Hardball would call “love crimes” have become, perhaps the Nigerian state should take that extra steps to probe into those hearts of darkness, that see nothing but death and torture from love.

    It’s such a great contradiction in terms that maybe a branch  of psychiatry could do serious clinical probes into such cases.  God is love.  Love is life.  Romance is sheer paradise on earth, at least for the pleasure-seeking.  Even the stoic can do with a little love, to cushion his proverbial stamina to endure.

    But when love turns to hate; and delivers cruel deaths?  Crime and punishment isn’t enough!  High time science proves into this anomaly, to save future victims.

     

  • Revolution consuming own children

    Help! Help!  There is “civil war” in Christendom Nigeria — but not over the straight and narrow path that leads to salvation, but over the wide and merry ways that lead to perdition!

    The National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) is at war with the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), over a congratulatory visit to President Muhammadu Buhari, on his re-election.

    The legalistic NCEF described the visit as “shocking”, since the election is “sub judice”; as Abubakar Atiku, and a coterie of the defeated, had headed for the courts, to challenge PMB’s victory.

    But CAN countered, insisting it only followed the Biblical injunction to respect and pray for leaders without ceasing.  Besides, as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had duly returned the President, he is  the winner — at least for now — in the eye of the law; and in the eye of common sense.

    Then, CAN brought out the big guns: on what plank is NCEF challenging CAN — CAN, the apex Nigerian Christian body that stands solidly on law; and is draped in the legitimacy of the authentic representatives of Nigerian Christians, against an impostor NCEF, that had allegedly been “disbanded”, yet persists as a busybody, screeching all over?

    It’s a savage tragedy of two Christian bodies.  They have lost their bearing.  But they dance naked in the market!

    On this particular case, however, CAN would appear to stand on more solid grounds.  Access to the seat of power is its by right, as a pressure group looking out for Christian rights, in a multi-religious but mutually suspicious country.  So, it has every right to visit the seat of power, and make legitimate demands on behalf of its members.

    Besides, by the often NCEF ridiculous posturing, it wouldn’t have been beyond the excitable “elders” in its ranks to howl and scream and screech “Islamisation!”, if it looked around and didn’t see CAN, on a day the equivalent Muslim body visited the President.

    On this one, CAN can hardly be faulted.  NCEF intervention, rippling with bad grace, only underscores NCEF’s rising notoriety for extremism, when Christ Himself, the holy fount of Christianity, preached love and temperance, even when dealing with enemies.

    Still, despite CAN’s proper step this time round, the NCEF griping betrays panic at a collapsing conspiracy, against the powers-that-be — again, a wild and reckless spiral into the wide and merry way, that can only call CAN’s and NCEF’s professed Christianity into question, even among right-thinking Christians themselves.

    Every church boasts of as many members as there are political sympathies and persuasions.  So, why would any priest begin to mount partisan pressure on its congregants, to vote or not vote, at the risk of a spiritual curse?

    That can’t be defended by any tenet of Christianity.  Yet, many top shots of CAN reportedly did that without shame, in the build-up to the 2019 elections.  So, if NCEF gripes at CAN’s congratulatory move, you should know where it was coming from!

    On the part of NCEF, the thought of “Islamisation” is, to it, not unlike waving a red flag at a rampaging bull!  But which kind of elders, particularly of Christian hue, would appear driven more by permanent anger, if not outright impulse?

    NCEF, from its doomsday releases, would thunder and rave over the “killing of Christians” by alleged “Islamising” militia,  real or imagined.  Yet, when the Christian killers wing — retaliatory or free-wheeling — pounce on other innocent souls from the other faith, NCEF becomes mealy-mouthed.

    Is it then the Nigerian age of Crusaders and Saracens, the Middle Age band of boogie-seekers, who claimed to wage war for the God of their faith, as if God the Almighty needs PDP anyone to fight for Him?

    Since the advent of the PMB presidency, Christendom Nigeria has derailed, and is busy bounding and blundering on the wide and merry way.  That is expressway to perdition it must retrace forthwith.

    If it did, NCEF would not get fixated over faith tension; and CAN won’t waste its time over who or who doesn’t get political appointments.

    Both should rather concentrate on the moral cleanliness and spiritual depth of their members, such that whoever gets the opportunity to serve in any public position, would be a Christian lodestar and pride to the rest of the polity.

    But alas!

  • Saraki learnt nothing

    It is said that you can’t give what you don’t have. So it isn’t surprising that the outgoing President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, missed the point when, according to an April 2 report, he “advised political party leaders to allow elected federal lawmakers to choose their leaders on the day of inauguration in order to achieve stability of the 9th  National Assembly.”

    There is no doubt that Saraki, a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), targeted the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), whose members will be in the majority in the 9th National Assembly. Under normal circumstances, the APC is expected to produce the principal officers of the next federal legislature.

    Saraki had talked to journalists after a lecture by the Clerk to the National Assembly, Mohammed Sani-Omolori, at an orientation programme for newly elected federal legislators in Abuja. He said: “The point I am making is that we should not make too much noise on the process of electing presiding officers. What is important is for the members of the Senate to decide who is the best to lead them, so that they can have stability.”

    Considering how Saraki became Senate President in 2015 when he was an APC member, his words show that he learnt little or nothing from the scandalous episode. He attained the position by scheming, pure and simple.  Saraki’s political manoeuvrings had got him the office against his party’s preference. But, predictably, it was a Pyrrhic victory; and it worked against him at the helm of the Senate.

    Saraki’s anti-party plot to get the top seat in the Senate had resulted in a strange power-sharing arrangement. Normally, the Senate President and the Deputy Senate President should have been members of the majority party.  But a member of the minority party, Ike Ekweremadu of the PDP, became Saraki’s deputy in a leadership combination that left a lot be desired.

    The APC’s response to Saraki’s advice was predictable.  The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Lanre Isa-Onilu, said:  “The position of the party remains that those positions that belong to the majority party belong to us. Members of the minority party should mind their own business. They should find a way of occupying the positions that belong to them. It is not in their place to start telling us what to do and what not to do.”

    Indeed, Saraki needs to learn to distinguish between what is normal and what is abnormal.

  • Between love and hate

    Between avid love and scalding hate, there is but a thin line!  Nothing reinforces this delicate but fatal slip more than reported cases of lovers, sentenced to hang, because they killed girlfriends, or even wives, they once doted on.

    An Ondo State high court just sentenced one Chukwudi Onweniwe to hang for, two years ago, strangling his undergraduate girlfriend, the late Nifemi Adeyeoye, then an HND student of Rufus Giwa Ploytechnic, Owo.  Nifemi, the victim’s name, is rather evocative.  “Nifemi” is Yoruba for “love me”, a plea for love, or more emphatically, an assurance of love.  Love is life and peace and bliss. But alas in this case, love turned fatal!

    Another reported fresh sentence was the one involving the murder of the daughter of a former deputy governor of Ondo State.  The victim and murderer were said to have been in a four-year tryst; broke off for some time, but after resumed their romance.  The girl was also reported to be a student of Adekunle Ajasin University, (AAU), Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State.

    But again, an expected sweet tryst turned sour and gory.  Her boyfriend was said to have killed her, shaved her skull and pubic hair (reportedly for money rituals), dug a shallow grave right inside the room where she was killed, buried her and cemented the shallow grave to block any trace — Lord have mercy!

    But the foul ooze from the room gave away the secret.  The boyfriend was reported to be involved in some Yahoo-Yahoo money ritual, of which his former lover was a gory victim!  For his brazen crime, he will also hang.

    Still, what would make someone who professes love for another, to end his lover’s life in such a callous, grisly manner?  Free-wheeling crime?  Mad love for money?  Or plain stupidity that he can get away with the crime?

    It’s even more puzzling for spouses that had tied the nuptial knots, sworn to living for better and for worse, but reported to have killed or seriously armed one another, this time with wife either killing the husband, or the husband killing the wife.

    Beyond crime and punishment, given how rampant what Hardball would call “love crimes” have become, perhaps the Nigerian state should take that extra steps to probe into those hearts of darkness, that see nothing but death and torture from love.

    It’s such a great contradiction in terms that maybe a branch  of psychiatry could do serious clinical probes into such cases.  God is love.  Love is life.  Romance is sheer paradise on earth, at least for the pleasure-seeking.  Even the stoic can do with a little love, to cushion his proverbial stamina to endure.

    But when love turns to hate; and delivers cruel deaths?  Crime and punishment isn’t enough!  High time science proves into this anomaly, to save future victims.

  • Majority power

    With 65 senators-elect, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is clearly the majority party in the Senate.  The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has 42 and the Young Progressive Party (YPP) has one. The APC is also the majority party in the House of Representatives with 223 seats. The PDP has 190 and other parties have 10.

    So there should be no confusion about which party should get the leadership positions in the upper and lower chambers of the Ninth National Assembly. Specifically, the President and Deputy President of the Senate, as well as the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, should be APC legislators.

    It is curious that there are those who think this clear situation is not so clear, or not clear enough. For instance, PDP spokesman Kola  Ologbondiyan said in a statement: “The PDP… does not only have a constitutional say in the process of the emergence of the leadership of the Ninth National Assembly, but will, as a matter of constitutional right, field candidates into presiding offices of both chambers, if need be.”

    Also, a former President of the Senate and PDP member, Senator David Mark, said to journalists at his residence in Otukpo, Benue State: “The election of the President of the Senate also translates to the selection of the chairman of the National Assembly because the person who emerges as the President of the Senate automatically becomes the chairman of the National Assembly. Nobody should interfere in the selection of President of the Senate. The senators should choose amongst themselves who should be their leader not based on number of political parties that won elections into the chamber.”

    That was Mark’s response to the question whether the Senate President should come from the ruling party, or the party that is the majority party in the Red Chamber. Mark, a retired Nigerian Army Brigadier General, was President of the Senate from 2007 to 2015 when his party was in power and the majority party in the Senate.  Now he thinks numerical strength does not matter, but it did when he was at the helm of the Senate.

    The outgoing Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, had created an abnormal situation with Saraki, then an APC member, and Ekweremadu of PDP controversially combining to lead the Senate.

    Surely, that era of political absurdity is gone, and only absurd politicians would imagine minority party members in leadership positions in the Ninth National Assembly.

  • Banditos from the hills and evil forests!

    What impunity would lead the rustic to come to town clad only in his skimpy, smudged loin clothes? This is a Yoruba wise word roughly translated. The Yoruba language of the people of southwest Nigeria is rich and pithy. You are bound to lose some grains and granules upon its translation.

    This is what has happened as Hardball grapples with this case. But imagine a fellow right from the depths of the thickets; clad in his grimy one-piece historical artifact and with some red earth still stuck to his hardback. Imagine this anachronism strutting about your town in jocular abandon! This is the scenario wise people of old had viewed as unmitigated affront, nay assault on modern civilization.

    Why would Hardball worry about the ways of the uppity, adventurous bushman? Simple: it reminds one of the hordes of bandits holding the northwest of Nigeria hostage for nearly two years.

    The states of Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna have been besieged since last year by armed rustics officially described as bandits.

    Last week, Abdulaziz Yari, governor of Zamfara State after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, in the Presidential villa, Aso Rock, Abuja, told State House correspondents that the bandits in Zamfara were better equipped than the Nigeria military.

    “They are in control of the kind of weapons that the command in Zamfara does not have.

    “In one armoury alone, they have over 500 AK47s; we saw it, our people were given the chance to take pictures,” says governor Yari.

    Early to mid last year, the scourge of so-called bandits began to manifest and escalate rapidly in the northwest of Nigeria. They were recording fatalities almost more than the Boko Haram terrorists of the Northeast. In July last year, villages around Gandi in Rabah Local Government Area of Sokoto State were stormed and over 50 dwellers killed and houses razed.

    Gwaska village in Birnin Gwari Local Government of Kaduna State and a few other local governments in Kaduna, Katsina, down to Nasarawa states have been infested with flashes of mass killings by a mass of killer rustics. Their tactic is simple. They would swoop upon a defenseless settlement, shoot, slaughter and raze the place. Then they vanish into the forest and hills.

    Pervasive graft and poor governance over the years have left vast territories ungoverned and vulnerable. Local government administration has long become moribund in many of these states, leaving swathes of unmanned spaces.

    It is, therefore, a vast jungle out there where a mixture of self-protection from rustlers, ethno-religious conflicts and political intrigues has converted a hitherto peaceful northwest to a killing field.

    Even the world’s best military will fail in a jungle. Let’s return to local governance first.