The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • TELCOS terrorism

    Have you ever been on the highway driving home after a dog’s day at work and your phone rings? You peek at it. It’s an unknown number and you ignore it. It rings off and rings again. You take another look; again an unknown number but a rather peculiar one. It’s a ‘mature’ number as a friend of Hardball would term it: In the sense that it belongs to the first or second generation series of numbers.

    And it keeps ringing relentlessly as if you are about to miss a major job if you ignored it. You reach out and manage to pick it and put it on speaker; disregarding the traffic code against fiddling with the phone while driving. And what do you get? A recording – someone desperately trying to sell you something.

    Gosh! Your brains literally explodes in ire and you reach out quickly to shut down the irritant; you miss with the first jab and the second … your car swerves a little. You ignore the phone; reclaim your wheels as the promo continues to rant searingly running its full course. Now you are probably boiling over and cursing furiously under your breath. You feel so thoroughly ravaged and your blood pressure may have gone up one notch.

    There are as many scenarios as there are GSM phone users in Nigeria. The telecommunications companies have grown from feeding frenzy on us their helpless game to the realms of terrorism. When this ravenously bad habit started about four years ago, it was enough to stay with those text-and-win promos.

    You must remember that crazy era when some of the telcos offered SUVs and millions of naira to be won if you recharged. That epoch ended when one of the firms lost its mind and offered us an aeroplane. RECHARGE-AND-WIN-AN-AEROPLANE was the promo that ‘killed’ all promos. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) eventually got shame-faced enough to snap from its slumber and tried to moderate the madness.

    No sleek-fingered telco has offered us a Concorde jet ever since but they have not stopped pecking at us like vultures upon a dying game. Hardball chose to keep his treasure of short messages from his service providers and in just one month of August, he got no fewer than 100 messages from each of the three lines he uses. The barrage of messages is a curious admixture of picking my pockets and obtaining by all manner of unscrupulous guises.

    Here are a few examples: Dateline August 11, 2016, time 20:33: Dear customer, you have successfully subscribed to MTNsports EPL and N50.00 deducted from your account. Your service will be renewed on 2016-08-18. To cancel, text stop EPL to 5836. Enjoy!

    One never remembered subscribing to the above and even if perchance I had been tricked into it as they are wont to do these days, I never received one word of information on the EPL game.

    But every week one gets the notification for renewal and deduction of N50.00. This is just one example. There are so many more from all the firms.

    If this is not criminality bordering on terrorism, then what is it?

     

  • Quixotic CAN “de-Christianize” Osinbajo

    Ever read Nkem Nwankwo’s My Mercedes is bigger than yours?  O, that was the golden era of the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), where new literary voices from Africa were following the Chinua Achebe motif to register their names in the global literary mart.

    Well, it is a not-so-golden era of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), fast becoming a hollow can of quixotic controversies, over alleged Islamization of Nigeria.  Yet, the (il)logic is not so different from the cheeky Nwankwo and his fictive shade of Mercedes Benz cars.

    One thing is common though, between that past golden season and the present not-so-golden one, trapped in a can of ludicrous claims: vanity and vacuity — then of the post-colonial African elite, now of CAN bristling with holy cant.

    Because Vice President Yemi Osinbajo doesn’t share CAN’s fictive Islamization and lost little time to say so, CAN seems to question his commitment to the cause of Christendom Nigeria — in Nwankwo-speak, my Christianity is purer than yours!

    Yet, if there is any individual that lives to the fullest the high tenets and ethos of the

    Christian faith, it is Osinbajo, who lugs a near-excellent public service record, right from his days as Attorney-General and commissioner for Justice in Lagos State (1999-2007).  That he has more or less carried to his current higher responsibility as Vice President of the Federal Republic.

    Well, if a furious CAN de-Christians the vice-president, it is simply because of the dross of Christian politicking, vis-a-vis fast and furious competition with the Muslims, in the Nigerian public space.

    After CAN and its Christian Elders affiliate have thrown around so much muck on allegations of how the Buhari “Hausa-Fulani” presidency was “Islamizing” Nigeria (a claim Osinbajo told them was pure fiction), CAN in its latest riposte has gone shopping in the past for “evidence”.

    Such “evidence” include the Shehu Shagari presidency meeting with the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) in London in 1983; the Babangida military junta doing a follow-up meeting with OIC in 1989 and “had issued a communique to Islamize Africa with Nigeria capturing a great attention.  This is a public knowledge while facts could be obtained from Wikipedia with links on OIC’s conference in London, 1983 and Abuja Declaration of 1989”.  Seriously?

    Indeed, it’s public knowledge past military governments had tried to railroad Nigeria into OIC.  But it is also true that the move was strafed in the media, on the basis of Nigeria’s secular constitution.

    But pray, how does that indict the Buhari government, in which Osinbajo serves as vice-president, which CAN has always pointedly accused; but when challenged to prove its fiction, bolted into the past to shop for “evidence”?

    Even with this past “evidence”, CAN’s grand Islamization charge could not stop two “Christian” presidents, Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, from ruling a “grandly Islamized” Nigeria.

    Indeed, under Jonathan, CAN was in the vortex of the racket of un-Christian conduct, by a Christian president, that cleared the public till!  All CAN did was to defend that un-Christian rebuke to the very end, even if it negates its very essence!

    CAN should stop mocking the Christian essence.  If they cannot approach God and repent for wrongly projecting their faith and embarrassing genuine Christians, they at least owe themselves some golden and dignifying quiet.

  • Charity begins in UK

    There is a penetratingly scalding saying in Igboland about people who are overly charitable outside the household in the face of gaping needs within. They are branded okanmanama – he who is most gracious only outside his homestead. Or to make it more plain, he who rushes to fix another man’s roof while his own leaks profusely.

    So Mr. Okanmanama is further derided as always doing too much seeking to belong or be accepted by outsiders while often neglecting his immediate relations and family members. In the end, while the crowd you bend backwards to please hardly notice or take you for granted; you have incurred the ire of your homies as they say, leaving them distraught and generally full of dissing   for you.

    This must be exactly the feeling many football fans and lovers of the Nigerian game probably have towards many of Nigeria’s corporate bodies and multinationals. Some of these firms operating in Nigeria may be described as okanmanama’s. They pump funds into the English Premier League (EPL) while finding Nigeria’s home football industry unworthy of any considerations.

    Information Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed was so peeved at a point he mooted the idea of making any company sponsoring an EPL club to commit a fraction of the sum in the local league. This condition may well be worth looking into considering the fact that sponsorship of top English clubs are often worth millions of pounds sterling.

    Hardball understands that corporate bodies are leveraging on the global identities of English clubs to trade, sell more products and curry goodwill but this must not be at the expense of complete sponsorship blackout of the local league and clubs.

    Just as the EPL was not built in one day, so does the Nigerian league need even more corporate funding to grow and become a global football giant someday soon. The Nigeria Premier Football League (NPFL) has actually recorded some appreciable growth in the last five years. It certainly needs sponsorship dollars to do even better.

    This is needed in areas of jersey and kits branding, stadium branding and sustainable partnerships. Standard Chartered Bank for instance brands Liverpool F.C’s jersey as well as carries out local promos with the Liverpool FC name. Same does MTN with Arsenal while Glo and Guinness sponsor EPL matches on television.

    We have a duty to deepen our football industry as has been done in South Africa. Let charity begin in Nigeria please!

  • Hubris setting in on NFF?

    The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), under Amaju Pinnick, has set a record in Nigeria’s FIFA World Cup quest.  Unlike in the past when the last round of qualifying matches equated severe heartaches, and even grimmer permutation in the anxiety-gripped Nigerian mind, this season is easy does it.

    Nigeria has already landed in Russia.  Whatever happens in November in Algeria — win, lose or draw — is absolutely of no significance.  Nigeria could go in for the highest possible qualification haul; with it hoping to land an easier opening group at the Mundial.  Algeria too might want to save some national pride.  But beyond these, absolutely no issue.

    Which might be why, it would appear, Christopher Greene, NFF Technical Committee chairman,  is talking like a greenhorn, flexing muscles over nothing when he ought to focus his minds on the substance, and creating what may yet become a useless controversy over Vincent Enyeama.  According to  Sporting Life (the sports paper in The Nation stable),  Mr. Greene threatened Gernot Rohr with sack, should he continue with his come-back talk with Enyeama, former Eagles skipper and number 1 goalkeeper, before he retired — or more accurately, forced into retirement — by former manager, Sunday Oliseh.

    To be sure, Oliseh was a lethal weapon of mass destruction, the way he in no time destroyed the team the late Stephen Keshi left behind, forcing many senior team members to quit (Enyeama’s case was particularly instructive, for it came from disputes over permission or not to attend to a domestic issue and demotion as captain), en route to running the team aground.

    Perhaps struck by the gargoyle he had created, Oliseh himself fled, leaving the team in the lurch, on the virtual eve of crucial World Cup and AFCON qualifying matches.  But thank God: Rohr came and, with his team of near-rookies, he walked through the virtual shadows of death unscathed —  and qualified in style.

    Which makes Greene’s threat of we-sack-you-should-you-again- talk-to-Enyeama as rather amusing, if not outright ludicrous, in more senses than one.

    For starters, who so easily dismisses a coach that would appear on the way to building a formidable team out of almost nothing?

    Then, who sacks a coach, not because he didn’t deliver on his contractual mandate but because of the pettiness of talking or not talking to a player he may be convinced is crucial to the success of his assignment — and in a milieu where the same NFF blares “giving Rohr a free hand” as some newfound NFF national anthem?

    Greene and co — if he has any sympathizer in house — should stop playing God.  Rohr has been diligent in his work.  Yes, Rohr wouldn’t have been possible but for the astuteness of the NFF Board.  That is  marvellous — even then, that is a management function, which should stay at the NFF Boardroom.

    But it was also a saving grace — the same NFF board that invited Oliseh to rout the team has brilliantly made thing good with Rohr.

    Still, to come into the open and threaten the manager on such inanity, which reeks with pettiness?  Absolute balderdash!

    Let Rohr be free to talk to and pick any player he feels is central to his plans.  He will stand or fall by his choice of players.  It would appear reassuring though that the NFF secretary-general has disowned the Greene comment, saying the NFF didn’t know about it.

    That is the direction to go.  We can’t because of the hubris of a few create a distraction that could plague the team in Russia.

  • Electoral absurdity made in Kenya

    It’s uhuru as King Kenyatta II just won a crushing victory of 98 per cent, in Kenya’s gift to the world in monarchical democracy!  It’s all in the making of Kenya bathetic high drama it called an election re-run.

    Of course, there is nothing, on the face of it, like monarchical democracy — for democracy is term-limited (even when subject to renewal) and monarchy is carte blanche for life.  Yet, in Kenya’s skewed politics, you could somewhat see a graft of the two in full Technicolor!

    Take the two current dramatic personae, Hardball would for now call Kenyatta II and Odinga II.  Both are Olympians (if you must borrow from Greek mythology) that have succeeded their Titan forebears, but without the Olympian panache.

    Jomo Kenyatta (Kenyatta I) was Kenya’s prime minister — later president — at independence.  His great rival was Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Odinga I).  Kenyatta I held the sceptre.  Odinga I held the opposition club, with which however he could not clubber Kenyatta I at the polls and seize his democratic(?) sceptre.

    That age passed away.  Kenyatta I died holding away over a one-party state.  Crown Prince Daniel arap Moi reigned in his stead.  Needless to say, the opposition bastion was crushed, with Odinga losing his club.  Nevertheless, he died with head unbowed.  King Moi was to live happily ever after — until some Air Force boys shattered his bliss in a shocking coup attempt.

    Welcome then, Kenya’s so-called multi-party democracy and elections.  Irony of ironies: Mwai Kibaki, chief beneficiary of that new phase, would claim victory for second term, in an election which tally the Kenya prime electoral chief could not vouch for!

    Well, Odinga II, son of  Odinga I, is now roughing it up with Kenyatta II, son of Kenyatta I and old nemesis; passing victor and nemesis into the second generation, in the midst of consistently sickening politics!

    That is the rich background to this latest Kenyan rot.  En route to the present mess, the Kenya judiciary had chalked a fine one for prompt justice and stout judicial independence by, without much ado, cancelling Uhuru Kenyatta’s purported victory, and ordering a re-run.

    But the re-run has ended in even more absurdity — 98 per cent win, followed by outright rage.  Only in Africa!

    But what’s Hardball’s point — to gloat over Kenya’s misfortune, borne out of arrested democratic development?  Of course not!

    It is to remind the romantics that feel and scream Nigeria’s salvation is in embracing the 1963 Constitution and changing to the parliamentary system.  That could well be.

    But the big exception: despite all the nostalgia, made somewhat credible by the arrant mess of the military era, the 1963 Constitution failed — or more correctly, its operators failed it, and everyone.  That explained the messianic entry of the military, and the dashed hope of that best forgotten era.

    Many, getting wise after the fact, now claim Nigeria would have been better off, had the military not intervened.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    But want to see how Nigeria would have lumbered on, with the reactionary mindset of those who back then controlled federal power?  Look no further than Kenya’s Kenyatta legacy of stunted democracy and its current mess.

    Blessed are those painfully aware of their weaknesses, for they would escape the Kenyan grand illusion.  Ninety-eight per cent victory margin, my foot!

     

     

  • Sons of perdition

    Every new day seems to dawn with new demons. Today’s burns your ears and you think it could never be worse; but tomorrow’s news seeks to burst your tympanum and your chest threatens to explode.

    The other day, it was discovered that a police inspector was buried in a standing position. Some conjecture that he must have been interred alive with his hands and feet tied. Call it communal bestiality or collective Satanism for it would have taken a community to agree and to dig a sizeable grave to accommodate a standing man. Even the village Bale (head) of this infernal community in the Ajah area of Lagos State who is now with the police, is alleged to have led this sacrilege.

    In Port Harcourt, Rivers State, a year two student of the University of Port Harcourt allegedly defiled an eight-year-old child of his relative and benefactor. He then went on to behead her and harvested some of her body parts. But this is just half the story; he was arrested by local vigilante and handed to the State Police Command and now the real story: the mysterious disappearance of this son of perdition from the safety of the police station.

    And how about this? Cult men apprehended while preparing pepper-soup with the intestines and liver of his kidnap victim. The men of darkness, according to the Police, kidnapped a pastor in Ahoada area of the state, August 15, 2017.  They had severed his head and were caught as they made the soup and plantain portage with his internal parts.

    Rape has become so commonplace in the land today that the country may well be christened the land of rape. Recently in Kano, a group of women could not take the daily rape bulletin any longer. Under the aegis of Professional Women Group in kano, they took to the streets. They needed to do something drastic to save their daughters from unguided rampaging phalluses.

    Priests, teachers, fathers, uncles, neighbours, everyone seems to be marching on this road to Golgotha. And there is no age limit or range – from a pulpy few days’ old baby to grandmas, none is safe. One of such cases that prompted the Kano women involved a 14-year-old Hassana who claimed that her father had defiled her since she was seven.

    The good book, the bible has described such men as captured here as sons of perdition or the lawless ones. It also terms what is happening today as the mystery of lawlessness. The Book says that because they did not know the truth, they are under great delusion enjoying the pleasure of unrighteousness. They are those bound to perish, as recorded by Apostle Paul in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians. If only they know…

     

  • What’s IYC blabbing about?

    What is the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) blabbing about — that inanity about “judicial persecution”?  Youths may be callow.  But that doesn’t mean they should be lexically wayward.

    That’s right — lexical waywardness is what “judicial persecution” amounts to.  It is such a violent contradiction in terms, for what is “judicial” (read legal fairness and due process) cannot be “persecution” (read outlawry and skewed process).

    For a group of youths, to push such a violent lexical contradiction out in its name, even as a form of media grandstanding, does extreme violence to whatever they claim their cause is.

    That is unfortunate.  But it is not even the fundamental flaw of this suspect cause.  The fundament of the rot is IYC’s supposition that because Citizen Goodluck Jonathan was once president, then he is above the laws of the land; and therefore cannot be summoned to testify in court — excuse me!

    Just going back memory lane.  Even among the minorities, Jonathan belongs to the minorities of the Ijaw minorities.  Yet, it was him that the law vaulted up and above everyone to be president.  So, how can the law be wise in thrusting him up as president and yet be foolish for compelling him to testify in court?  That is the basic inanity of IYC’s stand, claiming it was humiliation for a court to summon the former president to testify before it.

    There is even a more fundamental case of justice and citizens’ rights.  Citizen Olisa Metuh is in the dock and, if convicted, risks losing his liberty.  Now, fundamental to his defence, his lawyers say, is a testimony by the former president and Sambo Dasuki, the former national security adviser (NSA) under President Jonathan.

    So, how can these summonses be a slight on anyone?  When did it become fair and just to play politics with the freedom of any citizen in a republican democracy?  In any case, if IYC wants justice for Jonathan to preserve his ego, why does it want less justice for Metuh to preserve his liberty?  Pray, which one is more basic — preserving egos or securing a citizen’s fundamental right to liberty?

    But the IYC inanity flowed from a fundamental flaw — the illusion that anyone could be above the law because of a former position, which the same law ironically conferred!  Is there anything more ridiculous?

    Oweilaaemi Pereotubo, factional IYC president whose faction issued that ridiculous press release, should know that Nigeria is governed by law, not by anyone’s whims.

    Jonathan is not diminished by appearing in court after a summons.  To suggest so is to conjure the judicial equivalent of the Chinua Achebe brat who got so powerful — or so he thought — that he challenged his chi (personal god) to a wrestling bout.  It is nothing but a suicidal voyage to dreamland.

     

    IYC even went beyond itself by suggesting Jonathan’s court appearance would undermine “Nigerian unity”!  That unity then must be made of the most unreliable of straws!

    IYC must stop this nonsense forthwith.  To testify in court — fairly and truthfully — is a civic duty.  If Jonathan does so, he only deepens his bona fides as a lawful and responsible citizen.  That can only strengthen the law; and the rights and privileges it confers on citizens.

    One of such rights and privileges,  by the way, is the right of individuals to organize themselves into IYC, and thunder — sense or nonsense — at the state, through its prime agent, the government.  Enough of this rascality!

  • Ortom’s autumnal and guber insomnia

    Are we perchance going to witness a season of insomnia for our state governors soon? Some context first: recall that President Muhammadu Buhari recently whooped state governors wondering how they could in good conscience find sleep while their workers go to bed on empty stomach. He could neither understand nor live it down, he told them as they salivate for more funds from the national treasury.

    But last Monday, Benue State governor, the gentlemanly Samuel Ortom confessed that he actually cannot find sleep. Hear him: “But honestly I feel pained, I’m not sleeping either because there is no way I can have my peace when I have a challenge like this affecting everybody in Benue State including my own family who are also on my neck to ensure salaries are paid, that is how traumatized I am on the matter.”

    Gee, how wonderful it would be if all governors who cannot manage to pay their workers suffer this manner of psychological hiatus. They are not allowed to snore and rumble under their elaborate, silky white duvets. But let us return to the self-confessed vicissitudes of kindly Governor Ortom.

    The Benue helmsman from his account is truly troubled by his inability to discharge his basic function. He seeks understanding; he seeks empathy and help even. He also waits on time. And there lies the problem. He seems to hope that with time enough, the current woes would vanish; or by some alchemy, the price of crude oil would jump back to $100/per barrel and he would be awash with cash once again. This is governor Ortom’s distorted mindset.

    This explains why he apparently would not think through nor attempt to confront the problem in a businesslike manner. Consider his debacle: he met a debt of about N69 billion in arrears of salaries, pensions and gratuity. He met a monthly wage bill of about N8.2 billion when he came to power about three years ago. He managed to work it down to N7.8 billion. He has a monthly federal allocation of N5 billion (which has increased to N6 billion as crude price rise) and he generates about N600 million internally monthly.

    Now hear this strange confession of Ortom’s: “Do you know that so many people are residing in parts of the country and they come here to draw salaries? I know of a chief who has 15 wives and all of them are on the payroll of a local government; he has about 20 children in secondary school and tertiary institutions… they are drawing salaries.”

    Well, Mr. Governor, if Benue State were your personal business, would you in good conscience carry a monthly wage bill of N8 b? Would that fraudulent Chief and his ilk not be in jail? Would you not harness more revenues from Benue’s rich agric wealth?

    Well, Hardball thinks any governor who cannot pay salaries really shouldn’t sleep.

     

     

  • Hubris setting in on NFF?

    The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), under Amaju Pinnick, has set a record in Nigeria’s FIFA World Cup quest.  Unlike in the past when the last round of qualifying matches equated severe heartaches, and even grimmer permutation in the anxiety-gripped Nigerian mind, this season is easy does it.

    Nigeria has already landed in Russia.  Whatever happens in November in Algeria — win, lose or draw — is absolutely of no significance.  Nigeria could go in for the highest possible qualification haul; with it hoping to land an easier opening group at the Mundial.  Algeria too might want to save some national pride.  But beyond these, absolutely no issue.

    Which might be why, it would appear, Christopher Greene, NFF Technical Committee chairman,  is talking like a greenhorn, flexing muscles over nothing when he ought to focus his minds on the substance, and creating what may yet become a useless controversy over Vincent Enyeama.  According to  Sporting Life (the sports paper in The Nation stable),  Mr. Greene threatened Gernot Rohr with sack, should he continue with his come-back talk with Enyeama, former Eagles skipper and number 1 goalkeeper, before he retired — or more accurately, forced into retirement — by former manager, Sunday Oliseh.

    To be sure, Oliseh was a lethal weapon of mass destruction, the way he in no time destroyed the team the late Stephen Keshi left behind, forcing many senior team members to quit (Enyeama’s case was particularly instructive, for it came from disputes over permission or not to attend to a domestic issue and demotion as captain), en route to running the team aground.

    Perhaps struck by the gargoyle he had created, Oliseh himself fled, leaving the team in the lurch, on the virtual eve of crucial World Cup and AFCON qualifying matches.  But thank God: Rohr came and, with his team of near-rookies, he walked through the virtual shadows of death unscathed —  and qualified in style.

    Which makes Greene’s threat of we-sack-you-should-you-again- talk-to-Enyeama as rather amusing, if not outright ludicrous, in more senses than one.

    For starters, who so easily dismisses a coach that would appear on the way to building a formidable team out of almost nothing?

    Then, who sacks a coach, not because he didn’t deliver on his contractual mandate but because of the pettiness of talking or not talking to a player he may be convinced is crucial to the success of his assignment — and in a milieu where the same NFF blares “giving Rohr a free hand” as some newfound NFF national anthem?

    Greene and co — if he has any sympathizer in house — should stop playing God.  Rohr has been diligent in his work.  Yes, Rohr wouldn’t have been possible but for the astuteness of the NFF Board.  That is  marvellous — even then, that is a management function, which should stay at the NFF Boardroom.

    But it was also a saving grace — the same NFF board that invited Oliseh to rout the team has brilliantly made thing good with Rohr.

    Still, to come into the open and threaten the manager on such inanity, which reeks with pettiness?  Absolute balderdash!

    Let Rohr be free to talk to and pick any player he feels is central to his plans.  He will stand or fall by his choice of players.  It would appear reassuring though that the NFF secretary-general has disowned the Greene comment, saying the NFF didn’t know about it.

    That is the direction to go.  We can’t because of the hubris of a few create a distraction that could plague the team in Russia.

  • Snakes, charmers and witch-doctors

    One of the small joys of writing this column is the fact that one is never short of materials. Considering that we are merry dwellers of a corner of the globe seemingly subsisting on ribaldry, Hardball has a queer job of serving you a daily broth of lampoon. In a land fertile for pale frangipanis and mirthless black teas, let’s say adversities have their uses too.

    And last Monday was boon day for this column. A dozen incongruities littered the news pages and yours truly was so spoiled for choice he opted for a salad. Here:

    First: charmers’ bazaar: Umaru Musa Yar’Adua University (UMYU) in Katsina, Katsina State is said to have employed the services of snake charmers to check the influx of killer snakes into their premises. The Dean of Students Affairs of the institution confirmed this story with much gusto: “Yes, we have employed the services of snake charmers to assist in getting rid of snakes on campus.”

    But the tragedy behind this story is that Zainab Umar, a final year Economics student died a few days ago following complications from a snake bite on the campus.

    Now Hardball confesses he doesn’t understand the works and workings of a snake charmer so we shall have to live by conjectures. How many charmers shall be needed for a vast university campus for instance? A hundred, perhaps a thousand? So they can man all the nooks and bush paths.

    Does a snake charmer live by sight, smell or sound? Or does he have a way of calling out the slithering crawlers? Something like: “Common, ropy-dopy out, Mr. Charm loves you!” thereupon the forked-tongued creeper would wriggle into the warm embrace of the charmer.

    Well what do you know? When science fails a citadel of modern learning, it just might be wise to resort to the good old art of magic and superstition; while praying       that no other student is bitten to his or her early death.

    Second: Maina, a snake and charmer: The story of a certain Abdulrasheed Maina is so fascinating that the top dog civil servant could well be a snake and charmer morphed into one. Maina was called in to clean up a pensions mess and he is alleged to have cleaned out the scheme to the tune of hundreds of billions of naira. Put on wanted list, but like a great snake, he could neither be detained, arrested nor even sacked. He still snakes around government offices like a dreadful serpent.

    Finally, the charmed lives of George Oppong Weah: One time world footballer of the year, Weah who faces a re-run in the Liberian presidential election November 7 visited TB Joshua in Lagos last Sunday. Here are Pastor Joshua’s charming words: “We are not herbalists or witch-doctors; we are people of God. God’s choice is our choice.” Dear reader, only an amen will do here.