The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Oil theft: Weird ignorance

    Finally, this government admits that it has failed woefully but even in that admission, it still denies that fact and chooses to exhibit what someone has described as “weird ignorance” (an act of pretending to be confusedly stupid or vice-versa). In this merry state, you play at being perfectly dumb, you simply roll with all the punches and allow all the barbs to fall at your side as if you are wearing odighi eshi bullet proof. This is the only meaning Hardball could read from Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s outcry last week that Nigeria loses 400,000 barrels of crude oil to thieves every waking day!

    By this supposedly arm-wringing confession and prostrate admittance of failure, one expected her to throw in her resignation letter in the circumstance that her boss is politically forbidden from resignation. Okonjo-Iweala ought to resign and others like the Oil Minister, and all the heads of the oil parastatals ought to be cleared out for abysmal failure. How could a country lose N6 billion everyday under their watch yet they still enjoy the pleasure of clinging to their seats? Unless there is something else to the story, how could a country be haemorrhaging to the tune of about N2.2 trillion per annum yet nobody is taking responsibility and none getting fired? Are we going to be moved to act only when we lose our entire oil revenues to ‘thieves’?

    Government’s admittance that it does not know how to protect the country’s most important asset is to admit that it is no longer fit to run the economy and manage the country. They are simply admitting that the so-called oil thieves have out-smarted and grown bigger than the government, the entire military and security agencies of state; the simple import of Okonjo-Iweala’s outcry is that our sovereign state is in retreat if not surrender. If our government cannot protect what is most important to us, the implication is that the rest of us citizens are doomed.

    If President Goodluck Jonathan and members of his cabinet care, if they wish to know the truth and if they wish to escape the perdition of history, they must accept that the rampaging oil theft phenomenon if not contrived and orchestrated, is the result of unbridled corruption. When the other day the president told us that he didn’t give a damn about showing good personal examples in the fight against corruption, he never realised this singular canker could utterly overwhelm him and torpedo his government. Corruption is like the thief you come upon harvesting in your farm, if you hesitate immediately holler and chase him, he will sooner begin to holler and chase you. The day Jonathan begins to show that he no longer co-habits with corruption and starts to deal decisively and openly with the corrupt people around him most of our national challenges will begin to abate.

    We have been told that the National Economic Council (NEC) has approved a task force to tackle the problem. This is merely tunneling down the grimy paths of corruption. The legal task force, to be headed by the Attorney–General of the Federation, Mohammed Adoke and to be populated by all sorts will begin by trying about 500 alleged thieves. So we actually have 500 oil thieves locked up somewhere awaiting prosecution? Who are they? Are they little pilferers or the powerful rogues?

    Finally, let’s not kid ourselves that the NNPC does not know what to do to protect our oil pipes; that the DPR does not know what metres to install to capture production figures; that the navy is supine and incapable of manning our waterways and that the judiciary could not prosecute and jail nary one oil thief of note all these years? One more point: Hardball insists that the Federal Government is up to its usual tricks again, especially with a major election around the corner. If they do not have any shame up there, we are still quite bashful down here. It will actually require an invisible sub-marine to steal this quantum of oil daily; and they forget that this is not the only oil producing country in the world. Do we need lessons from Ghana?

     

     

  • Erelu’s lone voice

    It can pass for infanticide, or if you prefer, prolicide which is the killing of offsprings. This is the verisimilitude of what the Senate endorsed last Wednesday when it reversed a vote to outlaw under-aged marriage in the on-going constitution amendment. The Senate actually amended Section 29(a) of the 1999 Constitution that pegs full marriage age to 18! But what rankles is not the fact that the ‘distinguished’ men and women in the hallowed chambers of the legislature have proposed the legalisation of child ‘abduction’, no, it is the fact that our women folk – mothers, aunties, big sisters and even grandmothers have kept a deathly silence at a moment that requires tirades, placards and even chest-baring.

    The Senate’s stealth, slimy legalising of girl-child abuse had gone almost unnoticed except for the vigilance and lone voice of the wife of the governor of Ekiti State, Erelu Bisi Fayemi who was reported to have ‘slammed’ the Senate. What could the Senate be thinking to have tampered with Section 29(a), what is the rationale, what is the nobler motive, what is the edifying thoughts that informed the un-pegging of marriage age from 18 years? Now that they have left it loose where do we draw the line? If there is no upper limit of marriage age, is there a lower limit?

    Man’s wickedness and inhumanity is best symbolised in the girl-child living with the open, smelly and festering sore of a damaged vagina. It is an ugly condition called Vesico-Vaginal Fistula (VVF). It is caused by under-aged pregnancy and childbirth which leads to the damage of the victims’ reproductive organs. But sadder still is that these little girls are often abandoned and left for dead once they have met this horrid fate. The man walks away to seek yet another prey leaving behind a life nipped in the bud. It is estimated that there are about 400,000 ‘little girl-mothers in the North suffering this fate. It is also instructive that most of the Senators who voted for this callous amendment are from the North.

    Does the Senate require special seminars to learn that age 1 to 18 of a child, especially the girl child, is key for parental care and mentoring, physical maturation and development of vital feminine organs? Does the Senate need to be reminded that this is the crucial period of a child’s life for life training, education, social and psychological stabilising required for adulthood? How on earth could a Senate legislate that marriage could be consummated before a girl-child is 18 years of age? What is the great hurry to get a little girl married off if it is supposed to be a life-time commitment? What manner of adult man would put in a family way, a little girl who hardly has breasts to suckle a baby?

    Hardball wagers that the Senators in proposing this amendment were thinking with their phalluses. It is a vile piece of legislature concocted in the heat of a weird libidinal seizure. Unfortunately, bizarre legislature like this takes its toll mainly on the poor and downtrodden; no little girl of any Senator will be married of at 12, never. But this law will not stand; all the Senators in the land will have to give away their all 12-year-old girls in marriage first. Just because Nigerians accepted it when a grand-father Senator took a 13-year-old for a wife the other day, now they have made it a law.

    Mrs. Fayemi has made the clarion call: “I want to charge the women to rise up and reject the action by pressing for the criminalisation of early marriage in Nigeria.” This is the fight for all mothers in Nigeria, a just fight. March down the Senate if you must but this masochistic, primitive law must not stand.

  • All the President’s jets

    Nothing underscores the epicurean and wasteful tendencies of this Presidency than the growing fleet of jets at its disposal. With ten aircraft and two more in the offing, Nigeria’s president probably boasts of the largest fleet in the world. As if to take a cue from their president, the Nigerian rich have managed to earn the record of owning more private jets than their counterparts in most other countries. Starting from the African continent, Ghana president reportedly has only one jet, same for South Africa.

    In Europe, the British prime minister and the and the queen fly chartered British Airways planes thereby eliminating the cost of purchasing and maintaining official jets; the Netherlands has only two, Japan, Malaysia to name a few, all have seen the need to run a lean presidential fleet. These are not only rich, developed countries of the world, they manufacture different calibers of jets or essential components yet prudence in governance and a culture of fiscal responsibility ensured that their heads of state do not engage in such whimsical public expenditure.

    The story is told of how President Joyce Banda of Malawi had been invited to one of such banal summits organised by Nigeria’s First LadyPatience Jonathan in Abuja last year. When it was discovered that Mrs. Banda may not honour the invitation due to inelastic travel logistics, a jet was dispatched from the presidential fleet to fetch her from the East African country to Abuja and back. President Banda, prudent, wise and accountable to her people had sold off the only jet in her fleet because it was not in the interest of Malawi’s economy for her to continue to run a jet. She chose to put the economic well-being of her country above her personal comfort.

    Nigeria’s obdurate leadership has no such national consciousness. Many airlines across the world do not boast one dozen airplanes. It must be one reason Nigeria’s national carriers never work: our president has jets at his disposal to shuttle to the ends of the world and back. The Nigerian aviation industry is in turmoil, it doesn’t matter; billions of naira is spent annually to service the first family’s reckless lifestyle, it doesn’t matter. Oil revenue is dwindling and government revenue projections fall short; it doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing seems to matter here so long as the presidency is taken care of.

    Perhaps all these may not have mattered if the economy is being properly managed and driven down the path of growth. If power, the backbone of modern economy, had been fixed; if infrastructural development is in high gear and government institutions are primed for sustainable development, one could live with a bit of executive expansiveness. But Nigeria is passing through a phase of acute political turmoil, social upheaval and economic uncertainty. With the discovery of viable alternative energy, crude oil revenues will only fall in the years ahead and it is predicted that oil will increasingly become less significant in the near future. With no industrial base, derelict infrastructure, shambolic education and R&D, what will be the fate of Nigeria in the next decade?

    These are the kind of strategic thoughts one would expect Nigeria’s leadership to address its mind to and steer the populace in that direction. The Presidency’s obscene opulence and fiscal recklessness of acquiring jets for his personal use is writ large in other spheres of governance and public service – junkets, elaborate ceremonies with no value to the economy, worthless seminars and workshops, characterise our public life. What glorious fantastical life; what fairy tale life of jet-set bohemians! Hardball fears that we shall wake up from this infernal somnolence one day only to find ourselves in a cheerless place, a dank planet all of our own.

  • A Garrisoned country

    War comes in different forms and guises – even in the dimmer recesses of homesteads, wars of sort go on daily. But the wars of tanks and mortars; combat gears and long guns have become the signature tunes and indeed, pastime of the modern world. Thus when there is no war, we create one, when we are incapable of creating one we just call out the men all the same. In fact one rascal Hardball cannot readily remember now once said that: the world is perpetually at war – from day one! Please don’t ask whence was day one? That is not the issue of the day. The matter at hand is that unknown to all of us Nigerians, the country has been garrisoned. The army has encircled us as if we are in another civil war (as if we are not!).

    The National Security Adviser, (NSA), Col. Sambo Dasuki, drove the point home recently at a security gathering in Abuja when he made it known that soldiers are currently deployed in 28 states. What this means is that only eight states are devoid of active military presence in Nigeria today. How we have inexorably run back into the arms of the men in starched uniform only 14 years after we shooed them back to their barracks. After seizing political power and running our affairs for over three decades, Nigerians managed to subordinate them under civil rule by reclaiming the mantle of power in 1999.

    A soldier’s place is on the war front or in the barracks, he is neither to be heard nor seen except he is on exeat. They are trained to defend the territorial integrity of their sovereign countries; for external aggression. So how come soldiers are all over the place in Nigeria today controlling traffic, settling matrimonial quarrels, guarding bloody civilians and ballot boxes; pursuing armed robbers, hunting down kidnappers and engaging terrorists in gun duels?

    Is this a new kind of Nigeria or a new kind of army? Where on earth are the police? Why have we harvested a flowering of nearly a dozen quasi-uniformed people ostensibly keeping the peace? There is the civil defence, traffic police, road safety corps, WAI Brigade, Peace Corps, the ICPC marshals, the EFCC marshals, drug law agents, customs, militant marine guards, just to name a few. Must we mention the more conventional air force, navy, state security service, national intelligence corps, military intelligence, etc. Our world is full of peace keepers yet we are so troubled. We are besieged by uniformed people and trained security professionals yet we have never been more anxious and vulnerable than now.

    Nigeria has been garrisoned by a cavalcade of regular police, fraud police, uniformed, plain cloth and armed state personnel yet armed robbers still hold sway, pen robbers are having a field day, militants dare the government, kidnappers operate at will and terrorist are not intimidated. Just yesterday Finance Minster, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala tearfully announced to the nation that we are losing 400,000 barrels of crude oil daily. Since all else have failed, Hardball recommends that the entire population be mobilised to mass around the oil installations and ward off the oil thieves. Oh, how we have been garrisoned by mis-governance.

    In closing, the monstrous incongruity of a country encircling itself with its army seems lost on us all especially the ruling ‘elite’ that has morphed into a snoring Rip Van Winkle. A peace time country under the siege of the military may well be working hard to fulfill its own prophesy

  • Of barbarians and bumblers

    Though soccer may have its ancestry in England, Brazil seems to be the official residence of the god of the round leather game while Nigeria is likely may be able to lay claim to a respectable annex office. Two recent incidents will support these assertions. No, it is not because a certain young Brazilian named Neymar has just moved all the way from a Brazilian club to Spanish giant Barcelona for a king’s fee of $57 million. Of this haul, Neymar’s father who is supposedly his manager of sort reportedly kept about $33 million. It is not even because this lad led Brazil to lift the FIFA confederation trophy recently. No, our stories come with far more drama than the Neymar phenom.

    Nigeria and Brazil are sharing big world headlines in a most peculiar manner: first, the Brazilian story. On June 30, 2013, somewhere in a rural Brazilian town called Centro do Meio, an amateur football match was being played. The referee, 20-year-old Otavio Jordao da Silva had sent off a player 31-year-old Josemir Santo Abreu. Apparently angered by the marching orders, Abreu hefted the referee and threw him to the ground, thereupon the referee on getting up pulled a knife and stabbed Abreu in the chest. He died before he could make it to the hospital.

    The players and spectators at the stadium were reported to have mobbed young referee Silva; tying him up by his arms and legs, they had hit him on the head with a spike and broken bottle. They finally dismembered and decapitated him, the gory report went. The police have made some arrests while a manhunt is on for the other killers.

    Nigeria’s own bizarre soccer story is more ribald than gruesome. It happened on Monday, July 8, 2013 in Plateau State, North Central Nigeria. As in the Brazilian case, four amateur clubs seeking promotion into the lowest rung of professional football (Nigeria Nationwide League) were involved in a scandalous and bumbling match-fixing affair quite rare in world football. The teams are Plateau United Feeders which beat Akurba FC 79 goals to zero and Police Machines FC which mauled Babayaro FC by 67 goals to zero. The results were so extraordinary that even the CNN found them newsworthy. The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) has instituted an investigation.

    Though the Brazilian and Nigerian stories are of different hues, they are one in their spectacular nature. They signpost the growing importance of football in the world and the sign of things come in the decades ahead. With the world increasingly troubled and weary, football (and baseball, to a lesser extent) has continued to grow in importance as a means of therapy and escape. It has in recent years continued to enjoy exponential fan following which naturally translates to big business via mass markets, advertising and sponsorship revenues. Football has grown into such big business which has the capacity to translate to instant wealth for talents even in remote parts of the world. A young lad in a local football league in Brazil, Nigeria or even Vanuatu could become a multi-millionaire the instant his talent is noticed by an European club. It is one of the biggest foreign direct investment earners for countries like Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, etc. It is not by chance that US, Russian, Arab and Asian moguls are buying up the biggest clubs in Europe, especially England, which boasts of the most fascinating and lucrative league in the world today.

    Hardball wagers that if football governing bodies do not get up to speed, referees will carry more dangerous objects than knives to the pitch, fans will steal the show more and more and club owners will get so desperate they will make keepers duck instead of catch a shot at goal. On a last note, even Hardball would have put in a couple of hat-tricks in that free-scoring 79-goal cracker. And how refreshing it would be to watch a real fixed match for a change!

     

  • al-Mustapha the hero, Kudirat the villain?

    al-Mustapha the hero, Kudirat the villain?

    What a decidedly deleterious end to a 15-year cause; what political, historical and judicial ferment that would emanate from this singular judgment of the Lagos Division of the Appeal Court? To paraphrase Williams Shakespeare, all the elements, including the facts are so mixed (up) in this cause that the heavens would quake at its inglorious finale. If the prosecution was dodgy, the defence was cagey and the bench lackluster in marshalling the majesty of the law. Thus what would have been a landmark pronouncement, a defining moment in Nigeria’s legal history has left us all in a grand quandary that will keep us deliriously busy for a long time yet.

    Hamza al-Mustapha, the loquacious Chief Security Officer (CSO) of the late military head of state, General Sani Abacha was on January 30, 2012, sentenced to death by hanging by the Lagos High Court. He was found guilty of the murder of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola on June 4, 1996. Kudirat was the wife of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election and Chief Abiola was in detention for insisting on his mandate when his wife was assassinated in broad daylight in Lagos. But last Friday, July 12, 2013 that verdict of the lower court was upturned by the appellate court which discharged and acquitted al-Mustapha claiming that it could not find sufficient ground in linking the accused persons with the commission of the crime. Alhaji Lateef Shofolahan, an aide of Kudirat accused of masterminding the killing was also let off the hook.

    While Hardball will allow learned folks and judicial experts to chew the legal curds of this intricate matter, it needs noting that the appellate judge was particularly scurrilous and disparaging of the 326-page judgment of the lower court. In what sounded like throwing of tantrums, the appellate judge said: “It was preposterous that a 326-page judgment was only concerned in securing a conviction at all cost..” It is hard to see the need for so much harsh words and so much berating in upturning the position of the trial court. If the lead appellate judge showed little verbal felicity in discharging her duties what do we make of the Kano State Governor, Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, who described al-Mustapha as a hero?

    “Hamza al-Mustapha was taken away in 1999 in tattered clothes and in chains under a pitiable situation; but today, he has returned a hero. We have always insisted that he was unjustly held. We felt concerned and decided to be part of justice.” It is curious though not explained, how the governor became ‘part of justice,’ but Kwankwaso’s remark was unguarded, insensitive and uncalled for, especially if we consider al-Mustapha’s antecedents as exposed during the trial and at the Oputa Panel. Though the former Abacha henchman has been acquitted of the death of Kudirat Abiola, he was in the thick of the intrigues surrounding that death and other deaths and near-death like Pa Alfred Rewane, Alhaja Suliat Adedeji and Chief Alex Ibru, to name a few.

    Have we forgotten so soon that of season murderous impunity when terror stalked the land with an especial swagger. al-Mustapha was at the helm of that official terror machine and he can neither be acquitted of nor absolved from that. Leaders must show particular sensitivity in public speech. The law of the land may have afforded al-Mustapha a reprieve but the fact is that Kudirat Abiola remains dead, murdered in cold blood on a Lagos highway. Her children are entitled to justice and Kwankwaso, if he were a leader he was truly meant to be, ought to be sensitive to that fact. Finally, no country can deign to make progress if it does not know its heroes and heroines. M.K.O. Abiola died in the struggle for democratic ideals in Nigeria, his wife was murdered, his businesses were ruined and there has not been restitution yet; to describe the chief suspect in the gruesome drama as a hero is for want of another word, regrettable.

     

  • Imperfect alibi

    Nigeria’s running political sitcom which Hardball had earlier titled ‘Morbid Obsession’ is yet far from achieving denouement. And if you thought the Aso Rock edition which we titled ‘Tunneling Down’ was interesting, last Tuesday’s episode, let’s call it ‘Imperfect Alibi’ was a firecracker of a show. It was a portrayal of the farcical side of civil rule; it was democracy at its most banal and bizarre. It was a show of jungle democracy so real that it could have been true. Or was it true?

    Well let’s consider the narrative, the plot and sub-plots. At about 9am on Tuesday July 9, while President Goodluck Jonathan and about one third of his cabinet were airborne en-route to China, trouble broke out in the trouble-weary Rivers State in Southsouth Nigeria. Inside the rarefied chambers of the Rivers State House of Assembly (RSHA) to be precise, five renegade members bearing a fake mace, sat and deigned to impeach the Speaker and to install one of their kind as Speaker. Where was the Nigeria Police when this sacrilege was being perpetrated, you might ask? The police, which you may be free to describe as Aso Rock police, was part of the grand plot apparently. Suborned and compromised it seemed, they aided and abetted the savaging of the constitution, their own very life-string and essence. But they neither knew any better nor just didn’t they care.

    It was almost late in the day when a quorum of the House woke up to the retrograde act of the renegades. In fact it took the storming of the House by Governor Rotimi Amaechi and his team before the encircled majority could fight back. The bogeyman of a Speaker sitting under an ersatz mace, was already making an acceptance speech when he was nudged from his brief, precarious perch. In the ensuing free-for-all, skulls were cracked and work equipment were damaged. It turned out a mini theatre of war and ingenious tactical options were freely deployed by men we thought were mere law makers. Eventually, the barbarians were dislodged and anarchy prevented – no, postponed since the sitcom is still running.

    The grand plot was to yank off the Speaker, Mr. Otelemaba Dan Amachree to pave way for impeaching the governor of Rivers State, Amaechi. A hare-brained and utterly unconstitutional plot you would think in which five out of 32 members sought to over-run a House but this kind of show is not a novelty in the ruling party (PDP) democracy. We have about half a dozen examples to cite.

    But President Jonathan’s oriental alibi falls to pieces because the fight in Rivers is his fight. The foot soldiers who visited with him in Aso Rock a few days ago to ‘solidarise’ with him and plead on behalf of Governor Amaechi were all at the ‘battlefield’ last Tuesday directing proceedings. But yet another plot has crashed, the president would have learnt to his chagrin. We see no letting up however. The presidency is obsessed with ousting the government in Rivers State and it has tried every trick in the books including pulling the party’s rug from under his feet, stationing an enemy police chief, attempting to stampede him out of the leadership of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum and literally shutting down the state. Remember we called this running drama ‘Morbid Obsession’.

    Let us leverage from Barbara Tuchman, the great American historian and Pulitzer prize winner in her essay, An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government. She posits that: “The lust for power, according to Tacitus, “is the most flagrant of all the passions” and cannot really be satisfied except by power over others.” Tuchman could have been here to witness the “flagrant” attempt to defile Nigeria’s democracy in Rivers State, last Tuesday. Next plot please!

  • Boko Haram as ghost story

    Boko Haram as ghost story

    Tales out of Nigeria seem so ghoulish lately that it gets a bit difficult to differentiate between the real and the surreal. And things happen so fast like flashes of lightning that before one can track one activity to a logical train of thought, several others interject rudely leaving you somewhat inebriated and dizzy. Consider this sequence of events: terrorists suspected to be Boko Haram (or a splinter thereof), invades a government secondary school in Yobe State slaughtering no fewer that 40 pupils in cold blood. This was Saturday, July 6,. The following day, Sunday July 7, gunmen reported to be Fulani herdsmen invaded Akuruko village in Guma Local Government of Benue State, leaving in its wake, about 34 dead and houses razed. The marauders were said to have made their way from the neighbouring Nasarawa State and they were wielding sophisticated arms.

    The third day, Monday July 8, it so happened that the Federal Government had “reached and understanding” with the militant Islamist sect, Boko Haram, which would lead to the signing of a ceasefire deal with the group. Tanimu Turaki, Nigeria’s Minister of Special Duties and Chairman, Presidential Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of Security Challenges in the North revealed this “understanding” in the Hausa Service of Radio France International. This “understanding” with the leadership of the Boko Haram, according to Turaki, was reached after weeks of “discussion” and “interface” with them.

    On the same day, Monday July 8, 2013, the British Home Office (equivalent of ministry of internal affairs) had approached the British Parliament to pass legislation banning Boko Haram and two other Islamist sects based in the United Kingdom. Boko Haram has also been outlawed by the Nigerian government and its leader, Abubakar Shekau declared wanted. The United States government recently placed a bounty of $7million on the sect’s leaders.

    From the foregoing, do you see why the affairs of this clime seem like a long-running ghost story with confounding twists and turns? Now if a government has proscribed a group and declared its activities illegal and acts of terrorism, with its leader on its wanted list, how come the same government is in “discussion” with such an illegal and terrorist group? If the Federal Government has elected to “discuss” with terrorists, why is it on the terms and conditions of the terrorists which we suppose includes shrouding the so-called “discussion” in secrecy? It is common knowledge that the first condition precedent to negotiating with any armed group is to down tools and cease fire? How come the Federal Government has been “discussing” with terrorists under the boom of the guns? The leaders we have been discussing with are they the same ones who are on the wanted lists across the world?

    Now who are the terrorists we are in discussion with? Are they the same ones locked in a bloody battle with Nigeria’s military in the Northeast? Who is the terrorist, who is the peacemaker and who is the government? In this ghost trail, who is the ghost? If all of this would result in billions of naira of amnesty booty, even Hardball would step out all so coolly, lugging his own Kalashnikov defiantly and wearing a natty, slightly graying beard to boot. So why should we take Turaki for his word? Why should we take it for granted that he is discussing with the authentic Boko Haram sect as many splinter groups seems to have emerged? When you do your business at night or left-handedly, you are bound to encounter ghosts every step of your way or put differently, you are bound to smell like a ghost. We are trapped in a woolly, spooky time aren’t we? Don’t howl now!

  • Our cursing president

    Our cursing president

    If curses were some kind of magical instrument of statecraft, President Goodluck Jonathan would probably be the best leader on earth for if there is an art he seems to have mastered so well, it is reeling out curses to ‘enemies’ of the state. While last Saturday’s gruesome attack of a school and slaughter of pupils is nonpareil in the annals of Nigeria’s recent terror madness, the President’s stock response and numbing reaction is becoming a study in presidential paralogia.

    Nobody seems to have the accurate figure of the number of pupils killed at the Government Secondary School, Mamudo, in the Northeast state of Yobe, but it is not as much the number as the method and viciousness. Some national newspapers reported between 20 and 29 while the American wire service, Associated Press (AP) seemed quite definitive about 42 dead students and teachers. Here is one account: “It was a gory sight. People who went to hospital and saw the bodies shed tears. There were 42 bodies, most of them students. Some of them had parts of their bodies blown off and badly burnt while others had gunshot wounds,” a local resident reportedly told AP.

    Another account from escapee teacher and pupils say the gunmen gathered their victims in a hostel and threw explosives and opened fire. They burned the pupils alive, reports an injured student from his sick bed. The insurgents believed to be of the Boko Haram sect were especially bestial, adding a satanic fervor to their act this time. But this is not their first attack on schools; indeed this is the third in the last one month having struck in Maiduguri (Borno) and Damaturu (Yobe).

    What this suggests is that they had established a pattern of targeting schools in recent months and we ask, why had our security agencies not cottoned on to it and deployed preemptive measures. It is scary that ill-trained bandits could invade schools and public facilities, unleash mayhem, have a field day and disappear into the sand dunes without a trace. We appreciate the vast and tough terrain; we appreciate that not every inch of the large states of the Northeast of Nigeria can be manned. What this calls for therefore, is improved and relentless intelligence surveillance. There must also be efficient and rapid response. We know that what is going on is not a James Bond movie but we are thinking of a situation where any strike or heavy deployment of arms anywhere in the country ought to trigger an alarm. For how many more schools will be attacked and how many more innocent pupils will have to be cut down in cold blood before we can brace up to this challenge.

    Finally, if this manner of free-wheeling attacks and killings is embarrassing, it is even more so when President Jonathan reacts. In this latest attack he had this to say: “The killing is barbaric, completely wicked. Anybody who will target innocent children for any kind of grief or emotional dysfunction will certainly go to hell.” Going about placing a curse on killers and plunderers is certainly not part of a president’s call. A president’s duty, especially in a time of national conflict and emergency, is to project steely resolve, character, courage and a certain invincibility that reassures the citizenry. He is expected to assess the situation quickly and objectively and assert authority, including sanctioning negligent aides. To curse is a sign of weakness never to be associated with any president. To lapse into curses like a fish wife is to abdicate responsibility, to surrender.

     

  • Ahoy! Lagos girl, IBB wants you

    Ahoy! Lagos girl, IBB wants you

    Wow, our own IBB (General Ibrahim Babangida, rtd) has done it again. The fellow we love to love and hate with equal passion has just given us one fat dollop of matter to chew again. Last Sunday, he granted what we mischievously call a full-dressed interview in the industry to the Sunday Tribune. The chit-chat lived up to its top billing running into five long pages. It also lived up to the quintessential IBB-speak. It was all wind, and a lot more wind with little sense or sensibility.

    Hardball took time and tallied up 55 questions thrown at the dangerously genial gap-toothed general and he gobbled them all up giving nothing in return. The only answer that made any sense whatsoever is to the question: “… people are wondering why you have refused to remarry?” In answering even this question he went on his usual trips and de-tours before returning to the matter thus: “If I will remarry, I will go to the Southwest. I will go to Lagos and get a Lagos girl. I was in Lagos for 18 years. I know much about the girls and women.”

    Jeez, did you hear that? This general has been to the East, he has been to the North and he has been to the South but Southwest is the best and he is not shy to say it, indeed he wishes to take the woman of his evening from there. Well in case dear Lagos Girl, you missed the interview, Hardball hereby gives you the tip of your life: you are wanted by the greatest general alive in Africa today, a coup-meister, the only African president in army fatigues; the great annuller who organised the best election ever in Africa and then went ahead and quashed it. The spirit who lives in a 50-room mansion on a hilltop (he had the opportunity to debunk this claim in this interview but he side-stepped the question).

    Such is the peculiar genius of this Nigerian statesman that he would field 55 questions yet would have said nothing to his compatriots. Not a word of particular wisdom or edification; not an incisive critique of extant policies to guide the people at the helm; not any insightful drawing from experience and hindsight to light up the path to the future. After wading through pages of rich equivocation and worthless verbiage, Hardball was of one mind to pronounce a no-interview ban on IBB. It was an exercise in shadow boxing of the well-practised type.

    Once again he had the opportunity to shed light on the historic June 12, 1993 election he botched, but as he has done over a dozen times in the past, he missed it. Here is a sampler. Asked if he has any regrets about annulling the election, he responds: “…As a military president, at that time, I organised the best, free election for the first time in this country. Nobody is asking me how I did it. Many are shouting that I should be crucified. You still complain. You complained in 1999; you complained in 2003; you complained in 2011. And you will complain in 2015. Mark my words. Nigerians accepted the June 12 election; the world accepted it.” Phew! If you understood that answer dear reader, you will understand astrophysics.

    Well, suffice it to say that this general still doesn’t get it, in which case we must move on and leave him to his woes. One cannot help but feel some pangs of pity for the aging general. Twenty years after June 12, IBB comes across like a man permanently fitted into a gabardine of lies that have become him. He doesn’t even know the difference anymore. Just say June 12 to him and he goes on a blabbering spree. IBB’s last act, hardball dares to suggest, would be to come to terms with June 12 and SPILL IT, lest he returns to his maker bearing a fat hunch on his back.