Category: Hardball

Weird things happen, many times in the mass delusory context of religious devotion. Karl Marx must have thought of this when he cynically dismissed religion as the “opium of the people.” Or how do we explain the choice of some people to commit suicide by starvation at alleged prompting of a religious leader?

Nearly 90 bodies had been recovered as at early this week from mass graves in a forest in eastern Kenya. The bodies were suspected to be those of followers of a church-based cult whose members believed they would go to heaven if they starved to death. Exhumations were ongoing in the forest area, which Kenyan authorities had declared a crime scene, and the toll was expected to rise.

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Followers of the self-professed Good News International Church had been living in secluded settlements in an 800-acre area within the Shakahola forest, near Malindi in Kilifi county. The cult leader, named Pastor Paul Mackenzie, allegedly taught that they would go to heaven if they starved to death, and the members believed and obliged him. And as they died, they were interred in shallow graves all over the forest. Mackenzie, was arrested on 14th April following a tip-off about the existence of shallow graves containing the bodies of his followers. Upon visiting the scene, Kenyan police discovered some 50 bodies in mass graves as well as eight found alive and emaciated, but who later died. Reports said other survivors were rescued but they refused to eat, while some others were suspected hiding away from authorities in the forest. Kenyan Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki referred to the occurrence as the “Shakahola Forest Massacre.” Following his arrest and impending trial, Mackenzie himself refused to eat and drink.

Why any leader would get the kicks from followers dying en masse boggles the mind. But that the followers complied with Mackenzie’s weird teaching again illustrates the extent to which gullible minds could be preyed upon. And this holds true everywhere. A historical parallel of the Shakahola deaths was the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 in which more than 900 followers of Jim Jones died in a mass suicide-murder under his direction – famously dubbed the Guyana Tragedy. But we have instances aplenty in Nigeria as well. Remember a purported ‘rapture flight’ in April 2022 for which Pastor Noah Abraham camped his members in a remote compound in Omuo-Ekiti and charged them N310,000 as fare. Remember also the gulag in an area of Ondo township where Pastor David Anifowose secluded followers for more than six months in anticipation of rapture. Neither of those self-professed clerics have been put through trial till date. We shouldn’t wait for a Mackenzie to show up in Nigeria before we sanitise the ‘opium’ field of religion. 

We know from elementary lessons in Biology that a basic trait of living organisms is growth. Progressive growth is an indication of life, and it is from this we draw an analogy that underscores the paradox about the death row of the Nigerian prison system. It is the death row, but it balloons steadily owing to continual sentencing of convicts that neither gets implemented nor commuted to lesser sentences. So the death row grows, and thus lives in a manner of speaking.

The Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), last week, hinted it was overwhelmed by the dysfunction of the death row. Spokesman for the service, Mr. Abubakar Umar, was reported saying the death row population across custodial centres in the country now stood at 3,298 inmates. According to him, some inmates await the hangman’s noose for more than 15 years after conviction for capital offences as there is a moratorium on execution of offenders. The last execution, he noted, was in 2016. Meanwhile there’s been routine sentencing of convicts to capital punishment. Umar explained that some convicts had been in custody for countless years – from when they were arrested through the period of trial (which by itself is protracted) up to when they get eventually sentenced. And after sentencing, the suspense continues. “There are often long periods of uncertainty for the convicts while their cases are being appealed at higher levels,” the spokesman said inter alia, adding: “We have quite a number of them. As of today, we have a total of 3,298 inmates on death row; they constitute about 4.5 percent of the total number of inmates in our various custodial centres nationwide.”

The reason sentences are not being carried out is that governors are withholding from signing execution warrants owing to pressure from human rights activists. But neither are they commuting the sentences as they could in lieu. “We encourage state governors who shy away from signing the death warrants to commute them into other sanctions. This will ensure that the toga of death is removed from the convicts. It will also help us to properly manage them,” Umar said.

Nigeria’s custodial centres are over-congested, such that Interior Minister Rauf Aregbesola in July, last year, couldn’t help calling on governors to sign death warrants just so to decongest the prisons. A ballooning death row in an over-congested prison system doesn’t seem a perfect scenario for dealing justice or, indeed, safeguarding the rights of the inmates. Their excellencies must rise to their prerogative of commuting death sentences if they can’t bring themselves to sign warrants. And why do we keep capital punishment in our statute books anyway if it isn’t workable? Review is overdue. 

This year 2023, Nigeria’s election year with the usual spin of Armageddon, has been different, with the Lent and Ramadan, Christianity and Islam’s most pious rites, co-mingling in more senses than one.

The Lent, always fixed and calendarized, was on when Ramadan, always fluid, being powered by the moon, “joined”.  So, Nigerian Christians and Muslims, not always the best of pals when weaponized and manipulated for politics, found selves fasting together.

Not only that.  April 7 was Good Friday, the climax of Lent.  April 10 was Easter Monday, the climax of Easter, with adherents’ visit to Galilee to “see” the risen Christ on Easter Monday, after his glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Come el-Fitr, the Ramadan Eid this year — and what days did the Federal Government declare as holidays?  Friday, April 21 and Monday April 24!  Another Friday and another Monday!

Now, what does that tell you in a year where some clerics and politicians, united in election-time demagoguery, had tried to divide the people along faith lines just to garner cynical votes; not to talk of those playing the “youth” against their elders and criminalizing old age, just to plant deceit in innocent hearts to gain dirty votes?

But here and right now, Nature is speaking loud and clear!  The wilful and delusional worlds of “Yes Daddy” clerics and “religious war” of menacing mendicant-politicians, with the wild cry: “Church, take back your country!” are just phantom.  Citizens just can’t turn instant and sworn enemies, just because they differ in faith and partisan choices, can they?

And again the “youth”, weaponized for emergency messianism.  Did the “youth” observe Lent or Ramadan different from their elderly folks?  Did they attend different iron-clad Easter and fitr Eid services to consummate the successful completion of the holiest months in their respective faiths?

There’s just got to be a limit to faith quackery, just because desperadoes want to play cynical politics!  Cynical politics is itself a function of barrenness of ideas.  Folks should shun such, because they are steeped in deceit, colourful and grand.

That’s the ultimate lesson of Lent/Ramadan-Easter/Eid-el-Fitr “rapprochement” this year.  Those weaponizing faith and demographics for politics have nothing to offer.  Don’t waste your vote on them — not now; not ever.

Ancient wisdom teaches that a boat does not get piloted by two captains without getting shipwrecked in a bruising ego crisis. There must be just one person calling the shots at a time. Even in aviation where you have two people in a flight cockpit, only one is the captain-in-command while the other is a second officer or the flight engineer. You do not have two henchmen commanding parallel armies simultaneously in one country and not expect a wrecking conflict as the nation of Sudan is presently experiencing.

More than a hundred civilians have died as collateral casualties and some 1,500 others injured in the fighting that broke out last Saturday between Sudanese military under the command of General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Military casualties are reportedly difficult to tally. The clashes followed tension between Burhan, who is Sudan’s de facto ruler, and Daglo his deputy. The military and the RSF have effectively held power in the country since the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The two generals also jointly led the October 2021 military coup that derailed Sudan’s short-lived transition to democracy. Following the delayed transition to civilian rule, the RSF were to be integrated into the armed forces, but this has led to a rift between the allies. Dagalo accused Burhan of clinging to power, while the military under Burhan called for dismantling the RSF it labelled a rebellious militia. Both sides ruled out talks and Dagalo called on Burhan to surrender.

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Fighting broke out Saturday morning in Khartoum, with the RSF claiming Sudanese soldiers entered their headquarters in the south of the capital city. Reports said RSF fighters attacked the airport at the city north and the presidential palace. Heavy fighting also raged on Sunday in Khartoum, the adjoining city of Omdurman and in flashpoints across the country. Both sides reported combat victories that contradicted each other. The terror spread to residential and non-combatant zones where civilians were killed. Among fatalities were three staff of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which has suspended its aid mission owing to the killings. The European Union envoy to Sudan was assaulted in his residence, while a United States diplomatic convoy was attacked but reports said no life was lost.

Diplomatic efforts are underway to effect a ceasefire. But fears are rife of possible descent into civil war in a country with about 46million people that had been hobbled for some while by pro-democracy protests. The catch: nearly 10million of Sudan’s population are Nigerians. President Muhammadu Buhari was reported to have deplored the Sudanese crisis, but we may need to prepare for emergency evacuation of Nigerian nationals in the country if matters come to that.

To history-vacuum Obi-dients and co-delusionists, who the other day went begging at Defence HQ for a military take-over, just because their candidate lost an election: train your eyes on the unfolding tragedy in Sudan, where two power grabbers are putting hundreds of innocent lives at risk.
Sudan’s two power prodigals, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the armed forces chief and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, are betrayers of sacred trust of the country that trained, clothed and armed them.
That is the mark of any military that overthrows the civil authority — power bandits. The pair had, before, conspired to overthrow civil authority.
But now, like a pair cursed, they have fallen upon each other. But instead of bleeding alone, they are cutting short the lives of innocent compatriots, not to talk of their respective canon fodders — troops under them.
Beyond the hot, fatal crossfire, however, is state capture. The Sudan military, under Burhan, usurpers of power for much too long, are near-permanent parasites on the Sudan economy, as was the case in Nigeria for many decades.
Dagalo’s RSF, on the other hand, aside from its notoriety of alleged ethnic cleansing in the rebellious Dafour region, are also known to run rackets in major gold mining areas, making hay with the commonwealth, by sheer force of licit arms used so illicitly.
Why? There’s even a part of Dagalo that echoes the Sani Abacha dummy, during Nigeria’s June 12, 1993 presidential result annulment crisis. While IBB was taking all the flak — as he should — Abacha was busy posturing as the so-called “democracy general” (whatever that hollow oxymoron meant!) — until he showed his fist of mail.
That’s what Dagalo is feigning now, accusing Burhan of reluctance to hand over power to democratically folks, in the long and flagging negotiations, still on. You believe any uniformed man in power and you can believe anything — as James Hadley Chase, the famous crime-busting fiction writer — would have snapped.
The international community should fashion adequate punishment for the duo, for wasting the lives of fellow Sudanese in their wayward match-up for power: something close to a war crime.
But the power insanity shows how unfortunate it is for any people to be under military rule — and that’s the point these reckless Obi-dients didn’t get, just because the sore losers they support were too busy hustling for military-era crumbs, to join the fierce no-retreat-no-surrender war to push the political military back to their barracks.
That is one chapter Nigeria MUST never open again. Whoever has issues with February 25 should push his or her case in court, as prescribed by law.

Legendary country folk singer, Don Williams, it was who sang the song ‘Time, oh time, where did you go?’ That poser resonated strongly as Nigeria and other concerned persons in the global community, last Friday, marked nine years since 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. About 180 of the girls are reckoned out of the abductors’ hold while 96 remain unaccounted for.

On 14th April, 2014, terrorists stormed the dormitories of GGSS in rustic Chibok and herded off the girls, reportedly in school to write their final exams, into the long night. The armed marauders trucked the girls, mostly teenagers, away presumably to their dens in expansive Sambisa forest in what constituted one of the most daring affronts on Nigerian security. They were neither intercepted as they staged the attack nor as they trucked the girls away. Fifty-seven of the abductees managed to escape by jumping off the moving trucks, while 219 others were taken away.

Next to the affected girls, statistics has been a major victim of this incident. The Goodluck Jonathan administration, under whose watch the abduction happened, was at sea for long and couldn’t tally up the exact number of girls abducted. Even now, the statistics of recovery is fudgy. In September 2022, the  Army announced that 98 of the schoolgirls remained in captivity. Head of the intelligence unit of the Joint Military Taskforce in the Northeast, Operation Hadinkai, Colonel Obinna Ezuikpe, told journalists, “Out of the 276 abducted Chibok girls, 57 girls escaped in 2014, while 107 girls were released in 2018. Three girls were recovered in 2019, two in 2021 and nine were rescued in 2022, bringing the total to 178 girls out of captivity and 98 remaining in Boko Haram captivity.” Between last September and now, two more of the girls have found their way out of captivity.

But at a prayer meeting organised by the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs last Friday to mark the anniversary, Women Affairs Minister Pauline Tallen said 122 of the girls had so far been rescued while 97 remained in captivity.

There’s no question much has been done by government jointly with development partners to rehabilitate the recovered girls, including enrolling them at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) in Yola. A couple of the girls have found their way to the United States where they are being sponsored through college by charities. But families and the girls themselves remain in great anguish until those yet in captivity are retrieved or accounted for. Neither they nor Nigeria will move on until this is done. After all, no detergent is potent enough to wash clean a sullied conscience.

It’s not like Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) candidate in the February 25 presidential election, to rush to deny a spin; or even stay taciturn on any matter.

Yet, both have been his lot over his “Easter odyssey” with UK Immigration officials at London’s Heathrow Airport. 

Obi, in-bound London, was reported to have been arrested, questioned and sent back to Nigeria, though no one would say why — not the British, not the Nigerian government, and not even Obi himself, who normally wastes little time to extract the full propaganda value from any situation.

The Obi in the public space would by now be making zealous rounds in Arise TV, or Channels, or any friendly medium, cooing his own side of the story, spicing all up with his customary China stats.

Not this one!  But for Prof. Chinyere Akunna, one of Obi’s ex-commissioners when he was governor in Anambra that blew the lid, Obi himself wouldn’t directly share — at least not with the media.

Then, surprise of surprises: Obi promptly denied the spin that the UK Immigration authorities had “apologized” to him, for his wrongful detention and questioning.  Obi was first to puncture that spin, which was gathering traction on the “Obidient” media, quite characteristically.

Indeed, this Obi saga is one that could be tagged spin put-in-check!  First, from LP came the official line that Obi might have been flagged, detained and questioned because an alleged felon could have cloned his biometrics; and may be committing crimes in in his name, to the wonder of UK authorities. 

Then, the “warning” that the UK authorities must track down that felon before his dirty deeds soil Obi’s immaculate name — hardly an illegitimate call, were a felon really impersonating the saintly folk hero, whose abiding zeal for the presidency was to birth a new Nigeria that worked for all!

But when Obi himself promptly shut down that lie that UK had apologized to him, the alarm bells started ringing — at least in the mind of the wary. What the hell is going on?

Whatever is brewing, the public have a right to know.  Which is why the involved triangle: the UK and Nigerian governments, as well as Obi himself, should tell us what they know.

Yes, the U.K. Immigration Office has turned down any query: “We do not comment on individual cases,” they dead-panned on The Nation inquiry.  That leaves Obi himself, should the Nigerian government adopt the same sentiment.

What’s brewing?  The more the public know, the less the chances of reckless rumours.

Nigeria has wrestled over time with having a satisfactory headcount with little success. Censuses held have been dogged with hollow credibility that seemed aggravated with subsequent headcounts and defeated the whole purpose of staging the exercise, namely to get reliable data for planning and governance purposes. Worse, the country hasn’t been able to keep up with the global best practice of conducting headcounts at 10-year intervals. The last time Nigeria conducted a census was in 2006 and her population was put in that exercise at 140.43million, including 71.3million males and 69.0million females.

The country is set for another population and housing census fixed for 3rd to 5th May, this year. Questions have been asked as to why the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari Administration whose tenure expires on 29th May can’t leave the project to the incoming Bola Ahmed Tinubu Administration, but that is by the way here. Trouble with Nigerian censuses hasn’t always been with the integrity of the enumerator body, but also notions associated with headcounts that are extraneous to the objective of headcounts, like the one being plied by proscribed the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) on the impending census.

The National Population Commission had stressed that to ensure a credible outcome, citizens living away from their states of origin should not travel home for the headcount because people are to be enumerated at their places of residence. To discourage such travels, the commission ruled out public holidays during the exercise. “There won’t be public holidays because during public holidays people can move from one place to another, and there may be restrictions on movement based on past experiences,” spokesperson for the commission, Isiaka Yahaya, said in an interview. But IPOB has a different idea. The group urged Igbo people resident outside the Southeast to return home to be counted so to help to ascertain the region’s population size as could strengthen its claim to significance. IPOB’s spokesperson Emma Powerful said in a statement last week: “The mass return of our people during this forthcoming population census will help us quantify the population of Biafrans in Nigeria. Therefore, we must seize the opportunity the Nigerian government is offering to our benefit. They have always told the world that we are a dot with an insignificant population… We must prove them wrong once and for all.”

IPOB and others who think like it must be educated that the objective of censuses is not to ascertain political population, but to gather data on spatial distribution of people in places of their actual domicile for planning purposes. It distorts that data when you travel to where you are not resident just for the headcount. Don’t do it!

Between Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto and former President Matthew Olusegun Obasanjo, there is little difference. 

Both love to bully and talk down on others: the one seizing the holy privilege of his pulpit; the other seizing the not-so-holy media, to write adjective-infested letters to rile anyone that threatens his relevance, particularly sitting presidents: teaching stuff he himself couldn’t attain as both junta head and two-term elected president.

Folks, it’s a tale of two Mathews!  The one spiritual, the other temporal — but both hideous bullies that haven’t made any spectacular difference at their own stations.

The latest broth Kukah cooked is predictable — another sacred abuse of the pulpit.

“As you prepare to return to Daura or Kaduna,” he told President Muhammadu Buhari, “I do not know if you feel fulfilled or that you met the tall dreams and goals you set for yourself such as: ending banditry, defeating corruption, bringing back our girls, belonging to everybody and belonging to nobody, selling off presidential fleet and travelling with us, etcetera.”

Defeating corruption!  If PMB indeed had a “tall dream” on that, did Kukah even dream at all?  Didn’t the same Kukah tell folks to forget the gangling sleaze of the Goodluck Jonathan years and “move on”?

By the way, who did Kukah belong to, while making this un-priestly appeal?  And after he was shouted down — and rightly so — what especially did he contribute to the anti-sleaze war, beyond his periodic rude salvos at those in power, masquerading as sacred exhortations?

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As a Catholic clergyman, the holy Father has “forever” intermingled with the powers-that-be, military or elected.  How much did his moral authority impact on the rotten military years?

Ay, what dent did Kukah, as priestly and moral agent, make on the free sleaze of the Jonathan era, despite being fond of, and close to, that “Christian” government? 

How fulfilled does the holy Father himself feel, when all around him moral has collapsed, but church tithes that gift the clergy sacred gravy are ballooning?

Talk is cheap!  Pulpit bullying is rich!

Did it ever occur to Father Kukah and co that had they conscientiously done their own part to society, PMB would have had no need to launch any war against graft?

PMB is near-completing his eight years.  He has struck a great blow at corruption.  More than all these preening holy of holies, none could link any rot to his name. 

Should these uppity priests then not be humbled by that, quit their high horse and accept that fixing broken down morals belong more to their jurisdiction, than to any other institution?

The latest Kukah cooking is still a far cry from that, which is a ringing shame.  Or is it a case of blessed are those who can self-cover own sins?