The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Policing criminals and criminal policing

    It has often been said that in Nigeria, anything and everything is possible. So why does Hardball think that some things should not happen in Nigeria of 2016? Why is he struck dumb when he hears or reads about certain strange stuff? Is it sheer naivety or is it that he is not in tune with reality?

    Here is one good example of such matters that set Hardball tizzy. At about 9:30 pm on May 30, 2016, as the report goes in a national newspaper, a detachment from the Owutu Police Division in Ikorodu area of Lagos State pounced on Ori Okuta in the Agric area of Ikorodu. They seized anyone in sight, intimidating and subduing them – boots and butts and ‘abducting’ them to their station nearby.

    They ‘captured’ over 70 persons, including a 15-year-old boy and a Lagos State Polytechnic student. At the station, according to the account of the student, it immediately became a sordid mammy-market of sort where you bargain-and-pay-for-your-freedom or you are doomed. In a while the place was a beehive of activities as relatives of ‘captives’ converged quickly to ‘rescue’ their people lest they stay in the cell overnight for a start.

    The price for freedom was between N5000 and N30.000 depending on your ability to bargain with the police and whether you tried to prove you know the ‘law’ or your right. Those who insisted on their innocence and their right paid more.

    Such was the case of the student, Taiwo, who wanted to know what his offence was slapped to muteness. He bought his freedom with N30.000 and with profuse ‘abeg’, as we say here, according to his account. Another victim, Yemi, recounted that he was in front of his wife’s shop and only intervened when the police picked up the 15-year-old son of his friend. The lad had called out as they made to haul him away.

    But he too was pummelled by the team and taken away. He too had to pay for his freedom.

    But if you thought this was Hardball’s usual elasticitification (this is a Hardball special, don’t bother rushing to your dictionary) of facts, here is the police’s side of the story. The officer in charge of the Nigeria Police Complaint Response Unit (CRU), CSP Abayomi Shogunle, has this to say: “It is a week-long operation and it is in response to recent cult-related attacks in Ikorodu town. Some of the apprehended persons found not to be linked to the ongoing investigation have been released after initial screening, while 120 persons of interest… have been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department, Yaba.”

    Hmmm, what more can Hardball add than to say that if you have to haul in the whole community in order to find the criminal elements therein, then sorry, Hardball must term it CRIMINAL POLICING that is starkly bereft of intelligence. Would Scotland Yard work like this?

  • NPFL: pitch darkness

    It’s one of those days that Hardball is hobbled by headline. For a long moment, even hours, you just cannot put a handle on your title. Sometimes every bit of the piece may have taken their natural sequence and fallen into place but you still do not have a suitable head. Imagine having a headless body in your hands!

    But what you see above (NPFL: pitch dark) happens to be a passable alternative after toying with about half a dozen others. Of course NPFL stands for Nigeria Professional Football League; meaning top football as we know it in Nigeria today. Though there are other lower rung leagues, they may be said to be inconsequential compared to the NPFL which is the equivalent of the English Professional Football League, EPL.

    Now, the above title has been triggered by the recent retrogression of the Nigeria’s premier football league since the beginning of the current season. The local football managed by the League Management Company, LMC, has actually seen some modest improvement with the coming of the LMC in the last five years or so. But the modest gains are now being eroded gradually.

    For instance, since the beginning of the current season (which seems interminable and winding), football matches have disappeared from television as Supersports (the South African cable network) which aired it suddenly stopped. And there is no official reason till date. Why our boastful Nigeria Television Authority, NTA (Africa’s largest network) cannot air at least some local league matches, must be a technical mystery.

    But the story is that while many African countries’ premier league are viewed live across the continent, Nigeria, the giant of Africa can be said to be playing football in the dark. This explains the title above, “Pitch dark”. NPFL must be among the very few major national leagues in the entire world today not aired on television; if not live, at least recorded. It’s so, so primitive.

    The straight analogy is playing football in the dark. And the dark result is that the league is fast becoming comical, if not farcical in which teams commit criminality on home turfs in the bid to win at all cost.

    Here is a sad checklist: hardly any away victories; referees toy with regulation time; probably more penalties are awarded here than in any other league; abuse of the offside rule and stopping of matches abruptly to stop a goal-bound move. A general criminal abuse of discretion by obviously compromised referees.

    The stench now stinks to the heavens that even LMC officials hold their noses. Some referees were axed recently. But that’s silly solution to say it nicely; let’s stop playing football in the dark. Simple!

  • Bad eggs

    When policemen are caught by the long arm of the law, the irony is remarkable.  Two recent instances involving policemen who, ironically, broke the law, and paid the price, show that those paid to enforce the law are not always on the side of the law.

    In the first case, four policemen were dismissed for extortion.  According to a report, “the affected officials were attached to the Ijebu-Ode Division of the Ogun State Command.” The police reportedly said the dismissal was “in line with the fight against corruption.” The dismissed policemen: Mufutau Olaosun, an inspector; Adebayo Temitope, a sergeant; Bakare Taiwo, a corporal; and Adesoye Ayokunlehin, a corporal.

    Following a complaint by a member of the public, said a police bulletin, “The policemen were identified and it was discovered that they apprehended the complainant on 7th June, 2017 without any reasonable cause and extorted the sum of Fifty Thousand Naira (N50, 000) ‘Bail Money.” The bulletin continued:  “The extorted N50, 000 was subsequently recovered from these unethical policemen who were armed in plain clothes on the day of the incident.”

    In the second case, three policemen were dismissed for their involvement in illegal arrest and detention as well as extortion. They are:  AP. No 136005 Inspector Okelue Nkemeonye, F/No. 355897 Sgt. Braimoh Sunday and F/No. 359928 Sgt. Yusuf Olukoga. They were attached to Area Command, Ijede-Ikorodu under the Lagos State Command.

    A report said: “The policemen, who were armed and pretended to be members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), harassed their victims and collected N200, 000 from them before they were released.” In a statement, the Officer in charge of Public Complaint Rapid Response Unit (PCRRU), Abayomi Shogunle, stated that the lawbreakers tagged their victims Internet fraudsters – “Yahoo Yahoo boys.” Shockingly, the policemen collected N90, 000 through the ATM and N110, 000 through mobile bank money transfer to a third party account provided by the policemen.

    It is reassuring that, in both cases, the police followed due process in arriving at punishment for the offenders. They were found guilty and dismissed after Orderly Room trials and endorsement of the recommended sanction by the relevant Nigeria Police Force (NPF) authorities.

    Police extortion is particularly unjustifiable and inexcusable because the police are supposed to enforce the law and not to break the law. It amounts to tragic role subversion when policemen become extortionists. It is obviously a contradiction in terms to speak of criminally minded policemen. There should be no room for bad eggs.

  • Palm Avenue: open sore of a council

    In one of his countless interventions, Prof. Wole Soyinka, our on WS, spoke of The Open Sore of a Continent, as his personal narrative on the Nigerian conundrum.

    Back in the University of Ibadan, in those years — maybe, still now? — you’d hear excited freshers, just introduced to the less-than-fair international order, prattle about the “centre of the periphery” and “periphery of the centre”; with only a few piping the “centre of the centre”, the golden core of the metropole, where, as they say, the real action is.

    Is Hardball essaying Political Science 101 garnished with literary putdowns, ala WS, on contemporary seedy politics?  Hardly.  Well, maybe — if a road that hosts a council headquarters (in that metropolitan lingo, the “centre of the centre”, is so neglected it can easily pass for the very “centre of the periphery”.)

    In all of Mushin, it is doubtful if any road boasts the panache of Palm Avenue. These days there are not many palm trees, nestling this major artery, in their magical foliage.  Were there ever any, from the very beginning?

    Still you feel some calm, some rare order.  You could never have believed the raucous Mushin Oloosa, and allied neighbourhoods, that gifted Mushin its tough reputation, were just a stone throw away!  Little wonder the Mushin Council, even in its original pristine form, claimed a spot on that road as its fitting headquarters.

    Today, however, Palm Avenue is so debased and degraded it indeed passes for the open sore of a council.

    At the Owhin Street T-junction with Palm Avenue is a huge crater.  Those who well and truly love their cars can’t just trundle inside and out.  They therefore wait for the opposing traffic, before stealing past those craters. That often results in needless jams.  That once-upon-a-road is almost bang in front of the Mushin council headquarters.

    Then, just barely 30 metres away, past the Mobil service station, is another; at the Oremeji Street T-junction with Palm Avenue.

    Pray, how can two huge craters, within a 30-meter distance, hem in a council headquarters, and the council’s public work gang appears to have no presence of mind, not to talk of institutional shame, to do some repair works to ameliorate the situation?

    Where, in the name of God, is this council’s sense of community service, nay duty, to so neglect its immediate environment so gravely, yet still has the audacity to answer the name local government council?  What government — that of the unfeeling? And what council — council of the insensate, with zero community value?

    Congrats to the newly elected Mushin Local Government chairman.  But he must know that his council is a big joke, if it can’t at least fix the road which hosts its headquarters.

    If it fails in that, how does it cater for other numerous roads, the real “periphery of the periphery”, always screaming for attention?   Indeed, on open sore.

  • Don’t cry for us…

    Don’t cry for me Argentina

    The truth is I never left you

    All through my wild days

    My mad existence I kept my promise

    Don’t keep your distance

    The above title of course evokes the popular pop song, “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and sung by Julie Covington. Of course (again) it is the theme song of the popular 70s musical “Evita” and which of course (yet again), depicted the will o’ the waspish life and times of Eva Peron, the legendary one-time First Lady of Argentina.

    Evita (Eva Peron) is an extraordinary narrative of the almost transcendental life of a grass-to-grace woman. But it is not about Eva today; it’s about an Internally Displaced Persons’ camp known as Bakassi IDPs’ Camp in Maiduguri, Borno State of Nigeria.

    So what is this camp got to do with Evita? Well not much except that the refrain (above) from Evita’s musical can easily be adapted to the situation in this particular IDPs camp. But first let us take a peek into this Bakassi IDPs’ camp, which is better described a misery camp.

    Located in Maiduguri, the embattled capital of Borno State, it is reported to be probably one of the largest camps in the state. It is said to have about 21,224 inmates altogether. About 3,201 of these are expectant women while 2, 254 are reportedly nursing mothers.

    The camp is said to have been hit by acute shortage of food for the past one month with no respite in sight. Inmates could barely get one meal supply most days. They have thus been pushed out to the streets to fend for themselves – some as beggars, maids, wood gatherers and fetchers of water.

    The inmates also claim that the camp officials have turned the IDPs into business venture. They say that unless supplies and donation items were shared out directly to them by donors, officials diverted most of it.

    Hardball therefore garnered some inspiration to re-do the Evita song for the IDPs thus:

    Don’t cry for us Nii—gerians

    The truth is.. you never loved us

    All through our tough days

    Our sad existence

    We kept hope alive

    (But) you keep your distance

    Yes, eulogistic outpourings for Evita easily becomes elegiac for hapless Nigerians of 2017. To think that what we have is what can be termed a ‘small’ terroristic shuffle and we are soon bequeathed with such endless, unending and seemingly unmanageable human misery not witnessed even in full-blown warring nations.

    The question then would be: would this ever end? If everyone (including the military) is benefitting from this tragedy, then the answer is most likely a loud NO!

  • Serious unseriousness

    When Mr. Olukoya Ogungbeje, the lawyer representing the self-confessed big-time billionaire kidnapper, Chukwudumeme Onwuamadike, better known as Evans, was fined N20, 000 by a court as “punitive cost” for unprofessional conduct, the fine seemed puny indeed.  Justice Abdulazeez Anka of the Federal High Court, Lagos, who awarded the cost against Ogungbeje on July 13, said the fine must be paid before July 20.

    What did Ogungbeje do wrong?  Justice Anka said: “Counsel wrote a letter seeking for an adjournment without copying the prosecution. This, to me, is unprofessional. The court hereby warns counsel to desist from such type of practice.” Justice Anka added that Ogungbeje would not be heard until he had paid the fine.

    On July 20, Justice Chuka Obiozor of the Federal High Court Lagos, declined to hear Evans’ N300 million rights case because his lawyer had failed to pay the fine. What happened in court that day? A report said: “…counsel for the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Effiong Asuquo, said Ogungbeje gave him a N20, 000 post-dated cheque. He said he rejected it since that was not the court order. Justice Obiozor agreed with Asuquo and directed Ogungbeje to comply with the order.” Justice Obiozor adjourned the case till July 27 to allow Ogungbeje to comply with the order.

    It is intriguing that Ogungbeje tried to pay the fine with a post-dated cheque. Why did he do that? Didn’t he know it fell short of compliance with the order?  Did he expect acceptance of the cheque?  These questions call into question his professionalism. Considering that he was fined for unprofessionalism, this amounted to another unprofessional move on his part, which compounds his unprofessionalism.

    It is unbelievable that the fine in question is N20, 000 only and a billionaire’s lawyer can’t pay it promptly. What kind of billionaire’s lawyer would let such a puny fine get in the way of things when his billionaire client’s freedom is at stake?

    A report said: “In his fundamental rights enforcement suit, Evans, through Ogungbeje, is seeking a court order directing the police to charge him to court immediately or release him on bail. Ogungbeje argued that Evans’ detention since June 10, 2017 without being charged to court was a violation of his client’s fundamental rights enshrined in Sections 35 (1) (c) (3) (4) (5) (a) (b) and 36 of the Constitution.”

    It should be said loud and clear: By his unprofessional actions, this lawyer is sending a signal of serious unseriousness.

  • Ajekun iya Academy

    Heard the news?  Ajekun iya video exponent and senator of the Federal Republic, the irrepressible Dino Melaye, just gifted his constituents with two brand new school blocks!

    Brand new?  Well, like everything Dino, which must carry its own din of controversy, there is already a howling controversy over any claim to “brand new”.  It is a function of that controversy that even the crowing picture, popping out of Dino’s Instagram page, itself fuelled the controversy.

    The “din-y” senator triumphantly announced — well, pictorially — the completion of another initiative to sate his constituents of Ife Olukotun, in Yagba East Local Government of Kogi State, with the proverbial “dividends of democracy”, as the cliche goes.

    A close-up on the picture reveals: “Senator Dino Melaye Constituency Project FCT/TB/(2016)(2)001 Olukotun”.

    From the green/yellow painting, it appears like a renovation of old structures.  But if a renovation jazzes up an old structure, does it not have a logical right to some “newness”? Besides, the triumphant announcement, in the peculiar Dino “din-y” way settled all doubts — it’s new(ly renovated?) all right!  But that only leads to another din of arguments.

    On that score, the cyberspace is still on fire, between Dino proponents and opponents, while the senator — the one without a dull moment — looks on bemused, while pondering the next Ajekuniya escapade.

    But on one score, there is no controversy — the imperative to give the Dino latest intervention a befitting name.  Dino himself led the debate on the score — a point of order, Mr. Speaker, or Mr. President!, as they say in the red chamber — already kickstarted the debate on that.

    Well, he christened his project “Senator Dino Melaye Constituency Project”.  Naaaaaa!  That’s too simple, too banal, too ordinary, without the Dino drama.  It can’t be Dino, except it is so raucously and dramatically racy, can it?

    That has kicked off a fresh controversy.  What about Chairman’s Seeds?  Oh yeah, seeds: didn’t you hear Dino declare, in his affidavit in a suit, that he was eyeing running for chairman in his local government, in his post-senatorial days?  That has a strong basis in literature, especially for those who crave community value.  Remember Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native?

    Still, “seeds” suggests some seediness, which, alarm of alarms, suggests the senator’s project has gone to seeds!  That can’t be.  There’s got to be a better name.  Hardball agrees.

    Well, what about Ajekun iya Academy, in cognizance of the millions of youths nationwide, and billions of their ilk worldwide, merrily linked by cyberspace, doting on Dino’s Ajekun iya philosophy, after watching his monster hit, Ajekun iya video?

    That’s something, you know!  A philosophy whose time has come, lapped up by youth, disoriented for too long!  But such stellar philosophy must not be limited cyberspace alone.  There has got to be some physical manifestation, some defining temple, some befitting shrine.

    Well, there you have it: Ajekun iya Acadamy, live and direct to teach Dino’s Ajekun iya credo.  Indeed, a philosophy whose time has come!

     

  • NASS’ scorched-earth budgeting

    In the days of yore when yam was the king of crops in Igbo land, men with the largest yarn barns were the elite and by extension, the leaders of the community. The tuberous crop was held in such high esteem that a festival was devoted to it at harvest time. Iwaji subsists today and no true son of the land ate new yam before the annual thanksgiving offering to the gods of fertility, of clement weather and wholesome, regenerative existence.

    Yam represented goodliness and the essence of life. In terms of food value it was versatile, amenable in the kitchen and to the taste buds like no other food crop. It was indeed considered an amiable companion in the household thus its elevation to royalty.

    Further, it was tended and managed like no other crop – from giant mounds to special stays for the climbers; directing the tendrils; specialized harvesting and of course, that special abode known as barns. And even in the barn, yam tubers were not littered carelessly; there was a special art to stringing the tubers in neat straight rows.

    These rituals must have elicited the sagely saying that: “If a man considered his yam truly yam, so it would be”. This interprets to mean that if your yam were truly important to you, you would shower it with the attention fit for royalty and of course it would yield to you bounteous harvest.

    Phew! What is Hardball going on about? Well, putting it most plaintively, let’s say if a country considers her budget crucial, so would it reflect in her growth and development.

    Today, Hardball likens Nigeria’s budgeting system to yam cultivation in Igboland of the medieval times. Except that our legislators do not quite seem to grasp the importance and magnitude of the Appropriation Bill. Just as yam was the mainstay of that medieval economy, so is the budget the soul of the modern nation state. You mess up your budget, you mess up your country.

    Over the years, in fact since 1999, successive sessions of the National Assembly (NASS) have failed to understand the true import of the annual budget.

    First, the budget has never been presented on deadline since 1999. In deed in one of those years, perhaps 2001, the entire year ran out without a federal budget. Can anyone quantify the cost of that?

    That the country is so direly underdeveloped despite huge budgets is signpost to the fact that the NASS has failed woefully in its duties by the people. Apart from the usual lackadaisical attitude today, legislators deign to have powers to initiate, approve, and oversight projects at the same time?

    Sadly, major federal strategic infrastructure which had been abandoned by previous governments but recently being revived are to be abandoned once again because of an obdurate NASS? We have taken one step forward and about to take ten backwards because of the scorched earth politics of our NASS members? What calamity!

  • Absurd abductees

    IT is troubling that kidnappers and kidnappings continue to grab the headlines these days, which may well be a reflection of hard socioeconomic conditions across the country.  In other words, biting recession may well be a strong factor in the rising cases of abduction. But this possibility cannot make kidnappers and kidnappings right.

    Kidnappers teach the wrong thing, and some people learn the wrong thing from them. On July 3, a man, Ufom Udoh, was reportedly abducted in Apapa, Lagos.  On July 4, a 37-year-old Ibadan businesswoman, Mrs. Bukola Ogun, was reportedly abducted in Oyo State. On July 5, Chief Yusuf Ogundare, who was the Baale of Shangisha in Magodo, Lagos, was reportedly abducted.

    Interestingly, it turned out that that the three alleged abductees actually arranged their abduction, meaning that these were cases of self-abduction.

    The police said: “Udoh was not kidnapped. It was all planned. He staged his own kidnap so that his elder brother can pay a ransom. The suspect said he made calls to the victim’s elder brother with an unknown number demanding a ransom of N60 million. Udoh was later picked up and he confessed to the crime. He said he checked into a hotel at Iyana-Ipaja area on July 3, where he spent three nights without food and water. The suspect said he trekked to Ifo in Ogun State, only to return to Lagos looking frail for his story to look convincing.”

    In Mrs. Ogun’s case, the police said: “The incident happened at 7.45 p.m.  on July 4 when three armed hoodlums stormed the home of the supposed victim and ‘kidnapped’ her to an unknown destination. Barely four hours later, the suspects contacted the victim’s husband and demanded N10 million ransom as a condition for his wife’s release. Unknown to him that the kidnap was actually arranged by his wife, the hapless husband reported the matter to the police.”

    In Ogundare’s case, the police said:   “On July 11 at about 10pm, a team of RRS patrol officers working around Alausa had sighted a vehicle drop a male adult in a suspicious manner close by Shoprite along the Secretariat road. The speed with which that car drove off attracted them to that spot… and a quick enquiry revealed that it was the Baale that was allegedly kidnapped. Immediately after, while Ogundare was being debriefed, he sold a dummy that the kidnappers dropped him off but… it had been found out that on the 5th of July, the day he was allegedly kidnapped in Lagos, investigation had revealed that he was driving around in Ibadan around Ashi; he went to Ilorin, he went to Iwo, he was just on a frolic.”  He arranged his abduction in order to implicate the Oba of Magodo and embarrass the Lagos State Government as well as the security agencies. He got his comeuppance and was deposed.

    It’s bad enough that there are alarming cases of real abduction. Self-abduction makes matters worse; and those who do it should not go unpunished.

     

  • Matthew? Naaaaaaa! Call me Sege!

    What irks Matthew Olusegun Aremu Okikiolakan Obasanjo, aka Ebora Owu, otherwise known as Baba Iyabo, against his Christian name of Matthew?

    The other day, the former military head of state and two-term elected president  dared people to call him Matthew and risk seeing the red in his eye.

    That most sensational renunciation of a Christian name could well crawl into the Guinness Book of Records, as the most earth-shaking identity volcano of the year!

    What is more?  The Ebora — okunrin meta! — is bracing himself for his crowning intellectual glory, a PhD in Christian Divinity from the National Open University (NOUN).

    So, what sensational paradox would that be, a newly minted Christian scholar of the most rigorous crust, with more than a generous dose of native intelligence and street wisdom, throwing off his treasured Christian name.  What’s happening?  The end-time virus?

    In Obasanjo’s book, Matthew, the biblical tax collector turned Christian saint, was much a social fall guy as Judas Iscariot was a religious one.

    It was written: the Christ Jesus would die to save humanity.  If he didn’t, humanity would perish from sin.  But that “death” of the divine wouldn’t have been possible, without the divine decree that condemned Judas to betraying his master.  As it so happened, humanity hailed the divine gift of Christ’s death — and eternal life.  But condemned the “evil” fall guy who made that divine breakthrough possible!  Tough luck.

    In the terrestrial plain, tax is the blood which pumps the life of the state.  Without tax, what can anybody do?  How would the body of engineers Baba Iyabo was addressing even land those big public sector projects, without taxation?

    Yet, here was Obasanjo pillorying Matthew, the tax collector, in the service of the Jewish state of his day, though under Roman imperialism.  If there were no Matthews, how would that state have thrived and delivered development?

    Well, ill luck, as they say, is not transferable.  So, is the fate of Matthew the tax collector, at least in the books of the Ebora Owu.

    Well, what do we now call him, in view of this repudiation, particularly as the general seemed to suggest that he had always rejected Matthew but just chose to dramatically make it public?

    And o, by the way, no one should dare the Ebora Owu’s red eye.  In the  awesome Ebora community, the Ebora Owu is in a formidable world of his own.

    So, what do we call him?  Well, not Matthew.  Maybe Aremu.  And if that one has too much of a local feel — the other day, a former fellow soldier-turned-political-traducer dismissed him as Aremu of Ota  — why not just simply Sege?

    Trendy, even for an old man, isn’t it?  Baba Iyabo would love this.