Mayor of London Borough of Southwark in the United Kingdom, Councillor Micheal Situ is set to celebrate Ibironke Adeagbo (IA) Foundation’s efforts at reducing illiteracy amongst children in Nigeria for the past 5 years of establishment.
The Celebration will be in aid of out-of-school children with the Nigeria’s Acting High Commissioner, Ambassador Cyprian Terseer on the 2nd of February, 2024.
The Founder of the NGO, Mrs Ibironke Adeagbo, explained that
factors responsible for increase in the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria and how to find a panacea to the menace will be dissected at the event.
She noted that getting the political will and buy-in to tackle the issue, getting the citizens to socially invest in reducing out of school children and raising awareness of the issue internationally and helping UN achieve its SDG4 will also be looked into.
“Dissecting the factors responsible for increase in the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria.
“Getting the political will and buy-in to tackle the issue. Getting the citizens to socially investing in reducing out of school children. Raising awareness of the issue internationally and helping UN achieve its SDG4,” she stated.
According to her, the foundation had been advocating and picking children from the streets and putting them in the classrooms and paying their school fees, buying their uniforms, books, and bags.
She implied that such effort will reduce poverty, insecurity and crime, adding that social mobility will increase and ensure they are economically active.
“The Mayor of Southwark, Councillor Micheal Situ will be celebrating 5 years of IA-Foundation’s efforts to reduce children illiteracy in Nigeria by helping to reduce the number of out of school children in Nigeria by advocacy and picking children from the streets and putting them in the classrooms and paying their school fees, buying their uniforms, books, bags etc.
“The impact of this, is that poverty, insecurity and crime will be reduced. It will increase social mobility and ensure they are economically active.” She said.
Ibironke expressed assurances that attendees would be made aware of the dangers of not addressing this issue now as it would have dire consequences in the nearest future by way of insecurity, increase in crime, unskilled workforce, poverty, teenage pregnancy etc.
IA-Foundation is a charity/NGO founded by Ibironke ADEAGBO , a chartered accountant in the UK, five years ago to help reduce the number of out of school children in Nigeria.
Over the last five years, it had picked up over 100 children from the streets and put them in school and paying their school fees, books, food , bags, shoes etc. It distributed over 4000 learning devices and over 9000 educational materials and built a borehole in Makoko.
It had several awareness campaigns, TV/ newspaper interviews, organised two summits and four flagship fundraising events to raise funds in aid of out of school children.
The President of Anchor International Outreach Ministry and Chairman Board of trustees of Anchor Humanitarian Care & Social Medical Initiative, Dr Bolarinwa Omotosho has been certified as a Peace educator by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) in Sydney Australia.
The newly certified Peace educator thanked God for the honour and said he accepted the award as “IEP Peace Ambassador”.
He bagged the award on December 15 after the completion of the IEP Ambassador Programme.
The honour is a selective, cohort-based programme of peacebuilders based around the world from various disciplines and sectors who are chosen for their personal, professional, and/or academic contributions to peace.
A letter of award by Rebecca Pursche, the Education Programs Manager, and Lea Perekrest, the Director of Partnerships at the Institute of Economics and Peace, Australia explained: “ The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) would like to congratulate you for completing the world-renowned IEP Ambassador Programme.
“This program engages and educates peace leaders by providing in-depth information and training about IEP’s research and methodology around the annual Global Peace Index, Global Terrorism Index, Ecological Threat Report, and Positive Peace”.
Omotosho, a veteran youth worker, humanitarian, and social worker par excellent, is a dedicated global peace advocate, committed to reaching and engaging Nigeria’s most excluded and isolated communities with humanitarian aid and peace education.
He has in different capacities promoted effective leadership and championed peace and harmony in the Nigeria, which got him appointed as World Citizen Peace ambassador in a letter signed by Lisa Krupp of World Citizen Peace in April 2023.
Omotosho said through the training, he has acquired new tools to undertake peace initiatives at the local, national, and international levels to share ideas within respective communities.
Reacting to the certification and award, Omotosho said this is not a position to be filled or a chieftaincy title but a huge call to be more committed to peace education and humanitarian work because “A certified peace educator should be a responsible global citizen with a vision for positive change.
“The educator is motivated to serve and actively involved in the community where he finds himself and the educator is a lifelong learner. This is a call to further learning”.
A passport is a special book that the government gives an individual to enable them to travel to other countries which carries picture, name, birthday and some other details with a bunch of stamps in it from all the different places you’ve been, if you have been to other countries/places.
These passports can also allow their holders to travel to a large number of countries without having to apply for a visa in advance which can pose a significant advantage for business travellers, tourists and people who need to move frequently for other reasons.
Although there are other weak passports in Africa, below are five passports from African countries that are considered weak in terms of global mobility:
As one of the world’s newest nations, South Sudan faces a unique set of challenges in terms of passport strength. Political unrest, ongoing conflicts and the establishment of diplomatic relations play significant roles in limiting the international reach of South Sudanese passports.
The South Sudanese passport provides limited visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to other countries, making it one of the weaker passports. As of 1 January 2017, South Sudanese passport holders had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 37 countries and territories.
2. Ethiopia
Ethiopia, with its rich history and growing economy, struggles with passport strength due to a combination of internal and external factors. Challenges include limited diplomatic ties, political instability and issues related to border disputes. These factors contribute to the restricted global mobility as its passport has limited visa-free access, particularly to Western countries.
The Sudanese passport faces restrictions in terms of global travel with limited visa-free options, particularly to countries in Europe and North America. The Republic of Sudan, which started issuing electronic passports to citizens in May 2009, allows its holders visa-free access to 41 destinations worldwide.
The Sudanese passport is ranked 96th among global passports, according to the Guide Passport Ranking Index which is due to the degree of global entry it guarantees to Sudanese passport holders.
4. Eritrea
The Eritrean passport offers restricted access to many countries, limiting the global mobility of its citizens.
According to the VisaGuide Passport Index, the Eritrean passport ranks 189th in the world as of November 2023 . Eritrean passport holders can travel visa-free to 12 countries in the world. However, to enter the remaining countries, they must apply for a visa beforehand.
5. Libya
Due to political instability and security concerns, the Libyan passport faces limitations in terms of visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to numerous countries, affecting its global mobility ranking.
In conclusion, the weak passport strength of these five African countries is mostly linked to a myriad of factors, including political instability, diplomatic challenges, security concerns, and bureaucratic hurdles. As these nations work towards overcoming these obstacles, the hope is that their passport strength will strengthen, allowing their citizens greater access to the global community. Ultimately, fostering international cooperation and stability is essential for enhancing the passport power of these nations in the long run.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) should review the sanctions it imposed on Niger following the coup last July to mitigate the adverse impacts on citizens, the International Crisis Group (ICG) has urged.
In a report titled “ECOWAS, Nigeria and the Niger Coup Sanctions: Time to Recalibrate” published on its website on December 5, the group says the sanctions are hurting civilians in Niger and Nigeria, and should be reviewed to target the generals that disrupted democracy.
Noting that ECOWAS’s initial reaction to the coup was “understandable”, as it was informed “by legitimate concerns about the risks of coup contagion in West Africa”, the ICG says it “sent a strong signal of disapproval concerning coups and have undoubtedly created external pressure on Niger’s generals”.
Crisis Group, however, observes that ECOWAS and Nigeria – its most influential member and current chair – “appear to have overshot the mark” as the sanctions “have created severe hardship in Niger with adverse boomerang effects on Nigeria”.
For Niger, ICG says the suspension of official trade with member states, particularly Nigeria and Benin Republic, has created scarcities, fuelled inflation and worsened chronic food insecurity, in a country that was already facing its second-highest level of food insecurity since 2014, even before the coup.
The global conflict prevention and peacebuilding organization is equally worried that the cut of electricity supply from Nigeria – which was providing over two thirds of Niger’s need – is further damaging the landlocked country’s brittle economy.
For Nigeria, Crisis Group notes that the border closure is “crippling a vibrant cross-border economy” along the over 1,600 km-long Nigeria–Niger border, officially estimated at over 238 million US dollars in 2021.
“It is also disrupting livelihoods in border communities and exacerbating humanitarian challenges in the northernmost states, where many residents are still grappling with attacks by terrorist and bandit groups. Such disruptions could render unemployed youth more vulnerable to recruitment by diverse armed groups,” ICG warns.
The report further observes that the border closure is also jeopardising two major infrastructure projects that were designed to boost the economies of Nigeria and Niger.
These are the 284km Nigeria-Niger Railway line and the 4,100km Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, through which Nigeria plans to supply up to 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas to Europe yearly. Both projects are now “at risk of delay or worse”, the report warns.
ICG also observes that the sanctions, as presently being implemented, could undermine Nigeria-Niger security cooperation, particularly in fighting Boko Haram in Nigeria’s north east and banditry in the north west.
To resolve the present impasse and develop arrangements for returning Niger to constitutional rule, Crisis Group urges all parties – ECOWAS, Nigerian government and the junta – to show flexibility, formally drop its threat of military intervention and “aim for a constitutional transition”.
It argues that while ECOWAS must press on for restoration of democratic rule in Niger, the regional bloc should review its sanctions package, focus it on the interests of the junta leaders in Niamey, and sparing the wider populations of Niger and northern Nigeria further hardship.
For the junta, Crisis Group urges it to initiate comprehensive dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in Niger – including political parties, civil society groups and regional leaders – and agree on steps for quick return to constitutional rule.
Titled “Climate Change: Africa’s Cooked and Sinking Communities”, the documentary highlights the threatening impacts of climate change in Taita Taveta County, Kenya; Kambele, Cameroun; and Ayetoro, Ondo state, Nigeria.
The documentary exposes the impact of mining and oil extraction in those communities, reinforcing the call for a Loss and Damage mechanism that will address the plight of local communities across Africa who bear the most brunt of climate change.
In the context of the UNFCCC process, loss and damage is the harm caused to human societies and the natural environment by human-generated climate change.
In Kenya’s Taita Taveta County, the documentary tells the moving story of drought in a community once known for agriculture and animal husbandry. The hitherto, agrarian community has been transformed by climate change into arid terrain where farmers are compelled to adapt by becoming emergency miners, further exacerbating climate-related challenges.
Gideon Ndambuki, a resident in Taveta, speaks about the harsh drought in the community: “This land which you are seeing here was used for farming for all of our lives. But things have changed. We used to plant cassava here, we used to plant sweet potatoes here, we used to plant green grams here.
“For the last three years, we haven’t gotten anything from this land. We have been waiting for rain for all this time, and it has not rained. So, this land now is no longer productive, this land is no longer suitable for agriculture due to changes in the climate.”
In Kambele, residents have battled landslides, incredible heat, and irregular weather patterns as a result of indiscriminate gold mining. Close to 150 persons have died from landslides and open pits dug by gold miners. That is aside varying degrees of health problems residents battle daily.
Kulu Nduanghan Florin, a native of Ngaland Le Trois, explained the hardship caused by mining-induced changes in weather patterns: “The first problem is that of the climate. We are in October. Since I was born, we have always known the month of October to be the rainy season.
“The sun hardly came out, but now we are experiencing climate change. I am wondering if this continues till December or even January, are we going to live in the swamps? Aside from that, we used to experience flu during the dry season, but since the Chinese arrived with their toxic chemicals, we no longer know when the flu starts or when it ends.”
For Ayetoro, it is the sad story of a city sinking because of ocean surges. This, according to the locals, became aggravated immediately after oil extraction facilities were installed close to its shoreline.
The Oba of Ayetoro, HRH. Oba Ojagbohunmi Oluwanmbe JP said: “In the latter part of the 80s when oil exploration started, our people noticed that it used to be a normal cycle of the sea to take a few portions of land away and after six months, it would add that same portion or even more; that was normal.
“But, in the latter part of the 80s, our people noticed that the rate at which it was taking the soil was higher than the rate at which it was returning it.”
CAPPA stated that the plight of the communities and several others across the continent reinforced the need for sustainable climate finance for the continent.
“These sad stories make it imperative for COP 28 to come up with a predictable, democratic, and sustainable mechanism for operationalizing Loss and Damage that will address the impact of climate change in frontline communities across Africa,” said CAPPA Executive Director, Akinbode Oluwafemi.
“The West owes Africa and the global south climate debt. The time to start paying is now”, he added.
You can watch the documentary here: https://youtu.be/rSLsbwzEmNU
The president of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Touray has said that most of the ECOWAS member states posted impressive economic growth in 2023.
He, however, stressed the impact of inflation and huge public debt.
Touray said: “Despite a difficult international environment and the slowdown in the global economies, continued inflation, deteriorating fiscal balance and mounting public debt have eroded the welfare and standard of living of ECOWAS citizens.
“The ECOWAS Institutions have performed creditably well during the 2023 fiscal year despite numerous challenges.
“Notable achievements include the establishment of the ECOWAS National Biometric Identity Card (ENBIC), the introduction of ECOVISA, a single visa system, and the adoption of a set of 96 ECOWAS Standards (ECOSTANDS).”
Touray identified geo-political conflicts, the persistence of inflationary pressures, high and rising public debt, and tightening of monetary policies as some of the challenges confronting the community.
In the area of opportunities at the disposal of the sub-regional body, Touray listed implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), increased investment in infrastructure, and development of the digital economy.”
The report therefore recommended strengthening of regional cooperation and integration, promotion of private sector development, investment in human capital as well as enhancement of resilience to shocks as some of the measures to be considered
Meanwhile, Nigeria presented its report at the ongoing second session of the ECOWAS Parliament in Abuja.
Presenting Nigeria’s report, Hon Linda Ikpeazu, outlined the country’s progress in the areas of politics, security, economy, and human rights.
Ikpeazu also stressed the country’s commitment to implementing ECOWAS texts, including the Protocol Relating to the Community Levy, the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons and Goods, and the Supplementary Act on Equality of Rights between Women and Men for Sustainable Development in the ECOWAS Region.
The report also affirmed Nigeria’s commitment to advancing the growth of the ECOWAS region through various community development initiatives. The government is also committed to fulfilling its obligations under ECOWAS treaties and protocols.
Go Africa Dot Radio, an African digital radio station based in London, United Kingdom has announced plans to establish a physical presence in Africa.
In a statement, the head of A&R for Go Africa Dot Radio, Denzel Kabelo Mphisa, emphasised that the need to have a physical presence in the continent is very necessary.
According to him: “The company has reached a point where we have established very close relations with some big names in the African music industry, and most of these artists have expressed interest in further developing the African music industry, but then when it comes to logistical issues like delaying or even outright refusals of visas, this halts progress in the development and expansion of the African music industry.
“We have decided to set up base in two countries , Nigeria and South Africa, as we believe that these two countries are are the current leaders in the development and expansion of the African music scene.”
Chief Executive of Go Africa Dot Radio, Ikenna Okere, in another statement, added: “This was not part of the original plans for the Station, but I believe that the move is going to be beneficial to both the big players in the African music industry and also for Go Africa Dot Radio.”
The plans for Go Africa Dot Radio to set up bases in Nigeria and South Africa is going to cost around 1.2 million USD.
Part of the budget will go to state of the art equipment for a live and a recording studio and also obtaining a broadcast license, which we have already managed to secure.
Okere also spoke about plans to end the radio station’s subscription service for African countries.
He started: “I think it was a ridiculous idea in the first place, allowing African countries to pay subscription for a service that they own.
“It’s like asking the head chef of a restaurant to pay for his own lunch in that same restaurant he works for.
“Although the free service will remain available for African listeners with low internet bandwidth, the premium version will provide an alternative but this time it’ll be free.
“Our aim is to push African music until it is recognised not only by Africans, but by music consumers all over the world,” Okere stated.
Go Africa Dot Radio is streamed in 102 countries and has recorded just under half a million monthly listeners, of which are predominantly based in mainland Europe.
He added: “We are hoping that this move further connects us to the best and brightest in the African music, great talents like Producer Omit ST, Female Vocalist Starr Healer, Producer DJ Khyber, Female Vocalist Basetsana, MFANA KAH GO GO and Poly Da Nqoe who has just joined Go Africa Dot Radio as a radio host.”
Go Africa Dot Radio is listed on over 32 radio directories and can be streamed on any Alexa & Google Smart devices and also the Deezer app.
Naija Diaspora magazine, an internationally-based publication situated in Cameroon, recently commemorated its 10-year anniversary with a grand celebration. The momentous event, held at Best Western Hotel in Douala, Cameroon, was marked with a gala night, where prominent Nigerians were honored in recognition of their outstanding contributions.
The celebration was a testament to the magazine’s significant and noteworthy contributions to the media industry beyond Nigeria’s borders.
Borno State Governor, Babagana Zulum, was awarded the Exemplary Leadership 2023 for improving the lives of indigenes and revitalizing the state from insurgency. The award was received by Ambassador Lawal Bappah mni on behalf of the governor.
At the event, Dr. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, OON, Chairman of the Nigerian Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM), was presented with the esteemed “Woman of the Year 2023” award in recognition of her remarkable contributions to the diaspora community. Her significant achievements in this field have been widely acknowledged, and this award is a testament to her unwavering dedication and hard work. We congratulate Dr. Abike Dabiri-Erewa on this outstanding achievement and look forward to her continued success in the future.
Air Peace boss, Allen Ifechukwu Onyema was also decorated with Lifetime achievement award 2023 for unarguably join forces to rescued diaspora humanitarianly.
The publication celebrated its 10th anniversary with a two-day event that included the Symposium and Annual Diaspora Excellence Award. This platform provided a unique opportunity for collective learning, networking, and gaining insights into government policies that relate to communities. Attendees were empowered to navigate pathways of positive change. The Symposium lecture was titled as: ‘Building a Nation’, with several dignitaries as speakers.
In attendance was Inspector General, Regional Services of the Littoral, Mr Kengni Erve Simplice, representing the Governor of the Littoral Region, Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, who received an Exemplary Leadership 2023 award at the event.
In a rousing speech, Ismaila Adegbola, the Editor-in-chief of the publication, underscored the significance of the magazine’s decade-long journey of impactful storytelling in the diaspora.
Adegbola’s speech was a stirring call to action, highlighting the magazine’s dedication to excellence in journalism and its unwavering commitment to promoting cultural awareness.
He highlighted the critical role of impactful storytelling in shaping perceptions and inspiring change. Adegbola’s speech was a reminder of the power of journalism to make a difference, and the magazine’s decade-long journey is a testimony to its unwavering dedication to providing insightful and thought-provoking content that inspires and challenges readers to make a difference.
“Today, we’re not just marking a milestone; we are recognizing a vision that has shaped narratives, bridged continents, and celebrated the positive work and impact of Nigerians and Africans globally,” said Adegbola.
He continued: “I started the magazine admist so many uncertainties and difficulties with the sole purpose of celebrating Nigerians and Africans making impact and changing lives globally, in the last 10 years, the magazine has been a beacon of inspiration, navigating challenges with resilience and conquering obstacles in the pursuit of excellence.” “I extend our deepest appreciation to the Cameroonian government for their hospitality towards foreigners, creating an enabling environment where diverse voices can harmonize to create a tapestry of unity and progress. The symbiotic relationship between Nigeria and Cameron has not only fostered collaboration but has also become a blueprint for mutual growth and understanding.
“This award stands as a testament to the individuals and groups who have not just treaded the path of excellence but have carved a lasting legacy. As we recognize the outstanding efforts in leadership, mentorship, corporate social responsibility, government, public policy, and community improvement, we embark on a journey to celebrate those remarkable souls who have left an indelible mark on the diaspora narrative.
Also speaking at the event was Minister of Communication and Spokesperson of the Government of Cameroon, represented by Madam Moukoko, Delegate Regional of Communication of Littoral.
“First and foremost, I do, congratulate the Naija Diaspora Magazine team and its Publisher / Editor in Chief, Mr. IsmaIla Adegbola, on the successful navigation of a decade in publication. A journey of this magnitude I am sure carries its share of challenges, and yet, here we are, celebrating resilience, creativity, and a commitment to excellence. The presence of a magazine like Naija Diaspora in Cameroon is not just a cause for celebration, but also a testimony to the interconnectedness of our global community. The positive impact it has, showcasing the stories of Nigerians and Africans making a difference, is truly inspiring.
“As we celebrate a decade of Naija Diaspora Magazine, let us also celebrate the potential that lies in collaboration. Together, let’s build bridges that connect our nations, minds, and hearts, ensuring a future where the exchange of ideas and innovations knows no boundaries, ” he said.
Others awarded at the event are: Consul General of Nigeria Buea, Amb. Lawal bappah mni, Consul General of Nigeria Douala, Amb. Queen Efe A. Clark-omeru, Douala City Mayor, Dr. Roger Mbassa Ndine; Nigeria Ambassador to Chad, Amb. Lami Sauda Remawa-Ahmed; Immediate past Nigeria High Commissioner to Cameroon, Ambassador Abayomi Olonisakin; Governor Littoral Region Cameroon, Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua ; Minister of Communication Cameroon, Sadi Rene Emmanuel; CEO Achuka, James Kamaha Chona; King of Yoruba Community, HRH Bashiru Aweda; Senior Managing Partner, Nico Halle & Co Law Firm , Barr. Nico Halle; Paramount Ruler of Bafaw People, South West Region / Honoray Consul of Turkey, HRM Nfon Mukete Iv Ekoko; Nigeria Ambassador to Sudan / Former Consul General Of Nigeria, Douala, Amb. Safiu Olukayode Olaniyan; Chairman Air Peace Airline, Barr. Allen I. Onyema, CON; Former Nigeria Ambassador to Cameroon, Amb. Hadiza mustapha fwc; Founder and Chairman M2b Conseils Plc, Rollin Foko; Vice president Nigerian Community Douala, Sir Lovinus Eze; CEO Synco Ltd, Chief Ozo Syvelster N.C. Ogbuanu; High Chief Fidelis Nwudo; CEO /MD, UBA Cameroon, Jude Anele, Dangote Cement Cameroon, Air Peace Cameroon, UBA Cameroon; Patron Nigeria Community Littoral, Dr. Azeez Mustapha; Patron Nigeria Community Littoral, Hon. Uche Obiekwe; Chairman of Anambra State Douala, Sir Emeka Uzoka; President of Nigeria Community Douala, Hon. Bic okwujiaku; Nigerian Union Women’s wing, Center region; CEO Dozass Auto Douala, Anselm Dozie Ofoezie; HRH Jonathan Thomas Onyengubor, Eze Gburu Gburu of Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo Cameroon; International Friends Club; Imo State Union Douala; Nigerian Union Littoral Region
Gaza, you Black woman! Gaza, you trash! Gaza you bitch! Gaza, you daughter of a huge whore, just like your mother Gaza!”- Lior Narkis.
The popular Israeli singer Lior Narkis sang these disturbing and deeply insulting words to a wild and ecstatic crowd of dancing and cheering Israeli soldiers who received them with wild and loud expressions of joy, adulation, praise and adoration as he went on a tour of numerous Isreali military camps whilst Gaza was being bombed and a few days before they began their ground offensive.
I am constrained to ask the American Jew, Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro), who is the leading Zionist, pro-Israeli columnist, author and commentator in the United States of America and a man who has enormous influence throughout the world given the fact that millions of people read his write-ups, value his opinion and follow him on both the social and traditional media, the following question: is this the sort of rhetoric and sentiment and the type of people that you and your Zionist collaborators expect the civilised world to offer their unquestioning support and applaud?
As someone rightly asked, why is this vile and racist singer touring IDF bases rather than facing charges for hate crime?
The answer is simple: he reflects the mindset and thinking of the Zionists and their views, not just about the Palestinians and the Arabs, but also about people of colour.
His songs and views are SICKENING and unacceptable and my Christian faith compels me to resist it and those that encourage and applaud it with every fiber of my being.
I wonder whether you, as the greatest defender and apologist of Israeli genocide and the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian children in America today, has anything to say about this or can muster the courage and moral gravitas to condemn it?
Sadly, judging from your consistently obstinate, implicitly racist, intellectually bankrupt, logically flawed, constantly shallow and habitually bigoted contributions in your inglorious column in the American Daily Wire and your handle on X, I doubt it very much.
Permit me to share another relevant contribution from no less a figure than Brazilian President Lula Da Silva for your consideration as well. He said,
“If Hamas committed acts of terrorism when it did what it did, the State of Israel is also committing acts of terrorism. I have never heard of children being the preferred victims in a war. The number of women and children who have been killed in Gaza is unheard of in any other war. They (the Israelis) are killing innocent people.”
I would suggest that you carefully ponder on these profound and deeply insightful words and take them very seriously indeed because they reflect the thinking of the entire civilised world.
Now to the point.
My dear Ben, I am sharing my concerns with you in this open letter simply because I am inclined to take you more seriously than others of your ilk due to the fact that your level of doublespeak, deceit, misinfirmation, disinfirmation, historical revisionism, mendacity and propaganda are second to none and this makes you very dangerous.
To put it mildly you are literally America’s version of Josef Goebels (Hitler’s Nazi Minister of Propaganda & Information) on steroids only your target audience is not just Nazi Germany or America but rather the entire world.
Yours is to defend the indefensible and to justify the unjustifiable.
You continue to mislead and confuse millions of people all over the world with your pro-war, pro-apartheid, ultra-conservative and ultra-Zionist essays, podcasts and social media contributions when you present falsehood as truth and truth as falsehood.
Had it not been for the fact that so many gullible and naive individuals read and listen to your every word and consider them as gospel truth I would not have bothered puttng pen to paper and writing this epistle to you.
However your constant disrespect and contemptuous disdain for the basic facts and plain truth when it comes to the abominable atrocities that are being perpetuated in Gaza by the Israeli Government and Armed Forces coupled with your constant bullying, armtwisting and misplaced rage and wrath visited on anyone and everyone that does not accept or propogate your false and perfidious narrative constrains me to do so.
Before I go into the ugly events in Gaza permit me to remind you of just one example of the expression of your inherent racism and debilitating insolence.
On September 27th 2010 you posted the following on your X handle:
“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue”.
Kindly tell me what you would call this type of rhetoric if not hateful racial stereotyping and bigoted and ignorant racism in its most vulgar, crass, primitive and crude form?
Your racial slurs against Arabs remind me of the the language employed by the Afrikaans-speaking White Boers of apartheid South Africa who regarded black South Africans and black people generally as nothing but “sub-human, low born field hands and slaves” and who described them in their apartheid constitution as nothing but the Biblical “hewers of the wood and drawers of the water”.
Again your words remind me of those of the infamous Dutchman, navigator and sailor Jan Van Reebeck, who was one of the earliest Europeans to arrive in South Africa and who upon landing on the beaches of the South African Cape in 1652 referred to our African brothers and sisters as “stinking black dogs”.
The truth is that those that speak and think like you are worst than the German Nazi’s who subjected your forefathers to such horrendous treatment and sought to wipe them out.
Quite apart from that, given your racist disposition, I suspect strongly that you were conceived, born, bred and raised in the same crap and open sewage that you have accused the Arabs of living in.
Now to Gaza.
Permit me to begin with the graphic and moving words of His Excellency Abdullah Abu Sawesh, who is the High Commissioner for the State of Palestine to my country Nigeria.
In a press statement which was released earlier this week he wrote, inter alia, the following:
“The unconditional, unshakeable political, military and media support that the Israeli occupation is receiving from western countries has perpetrated the current textbook genocide and the continuance of the Palestinian NAKBA that started 1948. By continuing airing and screening the occupier’s propaganda and picking the side of the executioners, the main western media outlets are completely complicit in the current textbook genocide. On the 40th day of this frenzy textbook genocide all the news that still came from the occupied Palestinian territories and in particular from Gaza are heartbreaking. As unfortunate as it is, I have no other choice except to start with the bloody statistical figures. With the deepest sorrow the death toll among the Palestinian civilians has exceeded twelve thousand (12,000) and the majority of them are children and women. Out of more than two thousand still missing, there has been groaning still coming from under the rubble which means that some are still breathing and fighting for their lives. The casualty toll in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has also climbed up as Israeli occupying forces and settlers ratchet up their violence on Palestinian civilians, now 186 killed, including 46 children, and 2,400 injured. Hundreds of bodies of Palestinian victims are decomposing in the courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital, on the streets and under the rubble and there is no opportunity to bury them with the respect they deserve. More than 750 journalists from dozens of news organizations signed an open letter, condemning Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza and criticizing the Western media coverage of the aggression against the Strip. The letter, amongst many other things, said newsrooms are “accountable for dehumanising rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
Can anyone hear such words and not shed a secret tear for the people of Palestine?
Can we not acknowledge and recognise the fact that there is indeed a grand plan and not so hidden agenda to externinate them and wipe them off the face of the earth?
This is not about fighting Hamas or seeking the terrorists out for destruction: this is about killing or displacing every single Palestinian man, woman and child and turning their entire race into a distant and fading memory.
What the white Americans of the old “wild west” did to the native “red” Indians of the mid western and western prairies is precisely what the Jews, the Zionists and the State of Israel wish to do to the Palestinian people.
They wish to break them, kill them, displace them, destroy them and herd those that are left alive into barren reservation camps in the Sinai desert where they will be treated like worthless slaves and beggars and turned into feeble minded and pitiful drug addicts and alcoholics.
May God forbid that this should ever happen.
Yet this is precisely what degenerate and twisted little Zionist monsters like you Ben actually pray for and crave in your lust for land, power, hegemony, expansion, domination, control, subjugation, conquest, treasure, gas and oil, plenty of which lies below the soil of Gaza and off its coast.
A few days ago you posted a picture of a hole in the ground on the same X account for your 6 million followers.
You claimed that this hole is under a Gaza hospital & you alleged that it leads to a web of military tunnels below the hospital.
As usual you have provided no evidence to substantiate your allegation or the veracity of your assertion but the truth is that such “trivial” matters like the provision of credible evidence means little or nothing to you.
You expect us to believe what you have said and regard it as truth simply because YOU said so and YOU must never be doubted, disbelieved, denied or challenged in the presentation of YOUR so-called facts.
Worse still anyone that challenges those “facts” in your twisted, warped and intellectually anaemic mind must be “antisemitic”, “an enemy of the State of Israel” and “a Jew hater”.
Such base and infantile poppycock is rarely seen in serious public discourse or intellectual debate but of course people like you always lower the bar.
The truth is that the hole whose picture you shared and passed off as a passage to a tunnel used by Hamas terrorists may well be one that simply leads to the hospital sewers or to the hospital basement.
Yet you expect us, nay command us and demand of us, to believe your assertion and categorisation that it leads to a complex network of Hamas military bases & tunnels simply because you & the Israeli Defence Force @IDF have said so.
Whatever the case, is this your justification for bombing hospitals & butchering 12,000 civilians, 6000 of whom are children in Gaza and 186 others, 46 of whom are children, in the West Bank all in 5 weeks?
Is this your rationalisation for killing or causing the death of one child in Gaza every ten minutes?
Is this your justification for turning Al Shifa hospital into a stinking and death-stenched cemetery for children and babies and a concentration camp filled with rotting and maggot-infested bodies?
Is this your reason for targetting hospitals, killing little babies in incubators by denying them oxygen and electricity and turning them into what can best be described as little mice being prepared for the slaughter?
Is this your rationalisation for slaughtering over 1/2% of the entire population of Gaza & flattening 60% of its infrastructures in that same space of time?
As Professor Norman Finklestein, the respected Jewish American scholar and author posted on X,
“it is now 24 hours since Israel invaded al-Shifa hospital. No sprawling Hamas command-and-control center. No arms caches in the tunnels. No secret passageways. No nothing except: DEAD BABIES IN INCUBATORS WITHOUT FUEL.”
Can you Ben Shapiro or your Zionist collaborators and co-conspirators legitimately dispute this?
Frankly you make me sick. You are not only a delusional & blood thirsty degenerate but you are also a psychopath who has a craving for the spilling of human blood.
Whilst the world is sickened by the heartless slaughter of Palestinian women, children & babies you, like the twisted voyeur and perverted sexual deviant that you are, sit back in your chair, bring out the popcorn & enjoy watching it every night.
You are a troubled little man who has an insatiable appetite for the spilling of children’s blood & whose secret desire is to subiect every single Arab (both Christian & Muslim) to mass murder, genocide & ethnic cleansing & wipe them all off the face of the earth.
You are worse than Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram, Daesh, Al Shabab, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah & Al Qaeda all put together because you are not only a brutal, blood lusting, merciless beast & terrorist enabler & sympathiser that has no value for life & no interest in peace but you, like Hitler’s Nazis, also seek to rationalise your unrelenting barbarity with a pseudo-intellectual garb trying to defend & present as acceptable something that no civilised or sane individual with even the tiniest modicum of humanity can EVER accept as being normal.
Your hateful and provocative rhetoric and disgraceful & deeply insultng commentry about the Islamic & Christian faiths over the years & your unacceptable insults on the greatest, most noble, most righteous and most reverred Prophet of Islam, Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu ‘Alayhi Wa Sallam) coupled with your denigrating and demeaning description of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Lord of Hosts, the Ancient of Days, the Creator of all that is, the Lord of the Universe, the El Shaddai, the Elohim, the Adonai, the Alpha and the Omega and the Resurrected Lord as “just another Jew who died for a cause” has not gone unnoticed.
You are of course entitled to your views but let me tell you frankly that if every Jew had your deplorable, warped, bigoted, racist, asinine & utterly despicable mindset & deplorable disposition about the two greatest & most popular faiths on earth the world would be filled with anti-semites & Hitler would have been celebrated as a saint & a hero even though we all regard him as one of the worse monsters & tyrants that ever lived.
You are the biggest & single most repugnant, perfiduous, malevolent, deceitful, malicious, insincere, wicked, malodrous, dangerous & intellectually dishonest voice in the Zionist camp today & you have made more enemies for the State of Israel by your vicious & unrelenting racism, your endorsement of apartheid, your blatant lies, your pathological mendacities & your inexplicable & unfathomable fabrications than any other human being on earth.
I do not agree with everything that men & women like Dominique De Villepin, Professor Norman Finklestein, David Icke, Professor Naom Chomsky, Jackson Hinkle, Mehdi Hassan, Clare Daley MEP, William Scott Ritter Jnr., Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Andrew Tate, Professor John Mearsheimer, James Corbyn MP, Julius Malema MP,
Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Oman, Professor Cornel West, the Torah Jews, Professor Isa Pantami, Antonio Gutteras, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus & all the other pro-ceasefire, pro-peace voices say but every single one of them displays a level of logic, foresight, justice, equity, compassion, sensitivity & humanity that you are incapable of doing & they are better & far more enlightened than you in their rationalisations, reasoning & historical knowledge of the events in the Middle East and Palestine.
Unlike you they do not suffer from tunnel vision and they are not blinded and encumbered by their own subjectivity or delusional emotions.
Even the hitherto reticent Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, who all along had refused to criticise the genocidal excesses of Israel appears to have finally found the courage to join the ranks of these noble men and women, the forces of light and the legions of the righteous and speak up for the oppressed and suffering people of Gaza when, just a few days ago, he said the following during the course of a press conference. He said,
“I urge the Government of Israel to exercise maximum restraint. The world is watching on TV, on social media. We are hearing the testimonies of doctors, family members, survivors, kids who have lost their parents. The world is witnessing this killing of women, of children, of babies. This has to stop”.
Let us hope he goes even further and calls for a total and complete ceasefire.
Unlike you, each of these men and women are motivated by truth & guided by their consciences and the quest for justice & fairness.
You do not share these noble qualities, virtues or motivations.
You are no better than a primitive, half naked cheerleader & court jester dancing naked in the town centre and attempting to get noticed like a stale & out of fashion village idiot and lady of easy virtue that is well past her expiry date.
You are just a lost, irredeemable, unconciable soul that has no conscience, that has lost his humanity and moral compass and that is being paid and sponsored to write unadulterated rubbish by the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States of America and the State of Israel.
By all means defend Israel if that is your decision but you do not need to throw away your humanity and fully embrace depravity to do so.
Sadly that is what you have done but what the hell do you care because you sold your soul to satan years ago in return for notoriety and infamy.
Hell awaits you Ben and when you get there you can exchange notes with your soul-mates and fellow beasts like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, King Leopold 11 of Belgium, Genghis Khan, Mohammed Al Baghdadi, Idi Amin, Jeanne Bedie Bokassa, Christopher Colombus, King Herod, Pharaoh, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, Nebuchadnezzar, Vlad the Impaler and so many others.
You will learn the hard way that supporting the evil that is being perpetuated in Gaza today by Israel will eventually have dire consequences for the Jewish state herself and indeed the entire world.
I have always loved Israel and a part of me still does. Together with millions of others all over the world, I wept for her when she was attacked and brutally savaged by those that are worse than animals on October 7th and I not only condemned it but share the view that Hamas must be eradicated from the face of the earth.
Despite that I simply cannot bear what the Jewish state is doing in Gaza and I hate those who are cheering them on in their barbaric slaughter of innocent civilians.
Permit me to garner this contribution with a few posers.
Are we supposed to stand by Israel even when she is indulging in blind, rage-induced and vengeance- motivated genocide?
Are we supposed to join the Americans and say that Israel can do and get away with ANYTHING and not demand for a ceasefire?
Are we supposed to clap for the Israeli Minister of Heritage when he says “anyone who carries a Palestinian flag should not be allowed to live?” or when he says a “nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza” or when he says “Gaza’s 2.5 million people should be pushed in the desert or sent to 100 different countries as refugees at 25,000 Gazans per country?”
Is this the sort of rhetoric we are expected to espouse, endorse and support?
Is this what criminally insane, genocidal maniacs and complicit religious bigots and messianic zealots like you Ben Shapiro expect us to embrace?
Are we expected to jump with joy and applaud him when the Israeli Minister of National Security says “even those that are sharing sweets on the streets of Gaza should be targetted and slaughtered as well?”
Are we supposed to express our approval when the Minister of Defence of Israel says “what is being done to Gaza may also be done to Beirut?”
Is this wholesale espousal of barbarity, slaughter and savagery to be regarded as the new norm? Are we expected to accept and celebrate it?
Is there no more sanity in the world?
Are we supposed to accept it as the norm when the Israeli Finance Minister says “there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation, there is no such thing as Palestinian history and there is no such thing as a Palestinian language”?
Are we supposed to hop up and down with joy and express our unending adoration when a Member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) is questioned about the fact that thousands of innocent Palestinian women and children are being killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza and his response was “there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian” meaning that every single Palestinian, whether man, woman, child or infant, should be bombed, crushed and wiped off the face of the earth?
Where is this hateful and genocidal rhetoric coming from and why should we shy away from challenging it?
Are we cowards? Should we be filled with fear and trepidation and shy away from speaking the bitter truth about what Zionism has done to the Jewish state?
Does the Bible not tell us that “God has not given us a spirit of fear but one of power, love and sound mind”?
Does is not admonish us not to fear the one that can kill the body but “only He that can throw the soul into hell”?
Today the Jews that have taken objection to others saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” and that claim that such words are nothing but genocidal hate speech and an expression of a sinister and subterranean desire to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the earth are themselves saying that Gaza and the Palestinian people should be totally eradicated.
They are themselves wiping out Christian and Muslim children in Gaza and judging from what the Israeli Defence Minister is saying it may soon be Lebanon and Beirut as well.
Does this double standard make any sense? Is it just? Is it fair? Does it not make any right thinking person sick? Is it right or proper for anyone to be talking about wiping out any race in this day and age?
Are Israel, the Zionists and the Jews above the law and do they have the right to do unto others what they do not want others to do unto them?
Has Israel not taken us down the sanguine and bloody path of carnage and madness where restraint and the application of even the most basic norms of military engagement, international law and the law of war no longer apply?
Are crimes against humanity and war crimes against innocent civilians, including women and children, now acceptable forms of combat?
This may be so in Ben Shapiro’s Zionist controlled insane world but not in mine.
Today it is Gaza, tomorrow it could be your city or country. Think about that whilst you are watching the show of shame and unprecedented carnage from the comfort of your home and bedroom on CNN, Al Jazeera or the BBC.
May God have mercy on us all.
Permit me to conclude this contribution with the following.
I have written thousands of words over the last few weeks about the horrendous slaughter that the State of Israel was subjected to by a group of savage and barbaric demons in human flesh on October 7th.
The attack was unprovoked and indefensible and the carnage that it left in its wake beggars belief and was second to none.
It was undoubtedly the worst and most devastating attack on the Jewish state and the Jewish people since the holocaust and I joined millions of Nigerians and indeed people from all over the civilised world of every faith, including Muslims and Christians, in condemning it and insisting that Israel not only has the right to defend herself but also a duty to totally and completely wipe out the terrorist organisation known as Hamas.
These are all “givens” or what lawyers describe as “settled law” but what puzzles me is the fact that when some of us express our angst, disgust, opprobium and horror at the disproportionate and sickening overreaction and incontrovertible savagery and barbarity that the State of Israel is subjecting the innocent people of Gaza to in the name of fighting and crushing Hamas and the fact that we are utterly mortified by the sight of Palestinian women, children and infant babies being blown to pieces and slaughtered like sallah goats and christmas turkeys whilst in their homes, hospitals, steeets, ambulances, schools, churches and mosques and when we cry out in horror and say enough is enough and that this must stop, we are treated with disdain and contempt by the pro-Zionist and pro-Israel lobby and declared as being antisemitic, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel.
Is this not absurd?
Should the wholesale slaughter of Muslim and Christian babies and infants not attract the same level and degree of anger and horror as the wholesale butchery of Jewish and Israeli ones?
Are they not all babies before being Muslims, Christians or Jews?
Do Christian and Muslim babies, women and children not have the right to life as well and are they not worthy of being considered for protection at a time of war or should such consideration be offered to only the Jews and citizens of Israel?
Does the Holy Bible tell us that killing babies of ANY race or religion is the right thing to do?
Does the New Testament of the Word of God not specifically and clearly tell us that the violent abominations of the Old Testament such as ethnic cleansing, mass murder, genocide, racism, religious bigotry, injustice, inequity, racial and religious intolerance and the slaughter of our fellow human beings for ANY reason whatsoever is no longer acceptable and that instead we must treat one another with compassion, kindness, mercy, charity, forgiveness, patience and love?
Does it not say that we should “suffer not the children” and that we should treat women, the young, the elderly, the defenceless, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable with kindness and sensitivity?
Is it not for this specific reason and purpose that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ came and sacrificed Himself on the cross?
Did He not say that the greatest display of love is to treat our fellow human beings as we would treat ourselves and that we should be ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of others?
Did He not say that “vengeance is mine, I will repay” and that we should “turn the other cheek” when assaulted or insulted?
Those that have overlooked these biblical admonitions and that refuse to acknowledge them or that are still stuck in the angry, violent, frightful and vengeful rhetoric of the Old Testament of the Holy Bible are truly lost.
They forget that the New Testament is not only a fulfillment of the Old but was also established to ameliorate its harshness and excesses and those that think otherwise must be reading a different Bible to mine.
The Christian that says that Jews and the State of The Israel can do no wrong simply because they are supposedly “God’s chosen people” and that it is alright for them to commit mass murder and kill babies is not only a lost and pitiful soul but also an accomplice to and enabler of genocide.
Such a person is not a real Christian but an insensitive, misguided, ignorant and deluded barbarian.
Christianity can NEVER support injustice or the murder of innocents and neither can Islam.
Why should the Jews believe they can do so under ANY circumstances and get away with it? Why should they regard themselves as being infallible and untouchable?
Should a Jew bear hatred or resentment for Christians or Muslims simply because his people have suffered persecution in the past given the fact that millions of members of both of these great
faiths have stood by Israel on several occassions, defended her and acknowledged her right to exist?
Is this not what the “two state solution” is all about?
Was that not the basis on which Camp David and the Oslo Accords were established?
Is this not enough to prove that not all Muslims are ISIS and Hamas and that not all Christians are Nazis?
Did millions of Christians and Muslims from all over the world not sacrifice their lives during WW11 fighting against the German, Italian and Japanese Nazis whose sole purpose and intention was to wipe out the Jewish race and erase them from the face of the earth?
Has humanity not paid its dues to the Jews by re-establishing the State of Israel in 1948 and displacing millions of Palestinians from their homeland just to do so?
These are pertinent and relevant questions given what Israel is doing in Gaza and given the fact that those of us that have said they have gone too far and that it must stop are now being branded and labelled as anti-Jewish by the likes of Ben Shapiro and the Prime Minister of Israel himself, Benjanin Netanyahu.
Must the barbarity and obscenity of infant and child slaughter be considered acceptable when it is perpetrated by the Jews and only condemned when unleashed on Jewish children?
Is this right and proper?
I think not.
Surely all life and all children are precious and the burchering of ANY, regardless of race or faith, MUST be condemned by ALL.
And those that think otherwise like Ben Shapiro are obviously suffering from a rare form of mental illness which needs to be exposed, challenged and contained lest they plunge the entire world into Ww111.
Just how long do they think the Muslim world particularly will sit by idly and watch members of their faith being slaughtered in this way?
Do they not know that everyone has a limit to what they can take and that if this madness does not stop there will be a terrible and irresistible reaction which Israel may not survive?
Can people like Ben Shapiro and the Jewish extremists and Zioninsts that think like him not see this coming?
Can Israel fight against the whole world bar America and survive it? Will America herself risk her survival for an Israeli state that has gone rogue, lost its mind and become a terror to the citizens of the world?
Do Christian and Muslim lives not matter too and is Jewish blood any more precious than ours?
Again are Jewish babies more important than that of the Arabs or ours?
Where is this madness coming from and why are so many egging it on in the name of political correctness and out of fear of the Jewish lobby and America?
And if the truth be told this madness, hypocrisy and double standard is driving the world to the precipice of a conflagration the likes of which have never been witnessed before.
I say this because the entire Muslim world is boiling with rage and anger.
Nothing reflects this growing anger and grave danger better than the words of the Afghan Taliban Government when they were asked why they did not attend the recently concluded summit of Arab and Muslim leaders in Riyadh Saudi Arabia last week.
Afghanistan was the only Muslim country that did not attend.
They offered an explanation for their absence by writing the following on X:
“Saudi Arabia sent us an invitation to which our Supreme Leader replied, ‘we don’t need an invitation: send us the location where Muslim armies will be gathering.”
This was indeed a chilling and sobering response if I ever saw one.
Thankfully Saudi Arabia withdrew their invitation after that but the words of the Afghan Government have eloquently and graphically depicted the rage and extreemly dangerous sentiments of the overwhelming number of Muslims in the world.
And frankly, who can blame them?
Israel needs to sheath her bloody sword and stop the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank before the more moderate Arab Governments and Muslim leaders can no longer hold the line, are swept away and the whole world is confronted with a massive and irresistible jihad in which literally millions of people on all sides of the political, religious and ethnic divide will be killed and after which the world will never be the same again.
For the record it is not just the Muslim world that is enraged. South Africa, along with a number of other countries, have not just broken diplomatic ties with Israel as a direct consequence of their barbarism in Gaza but they have also called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Clearly the clock is ticking for the Zionists that take pleasure and pride in the slaughter of infants.
By her despicable, graphic and morbid display of savagery and her clear reflection of what can best be described as a psychopathic, murderous and barbaric disposition, the State of Israel has now become a danger to the peace and security of the world.
The world is now left with a choice about what to do with her but in my view the bottom line is best reflected by the following anecdote.
Consider this: when a lion runs mad and seeks to kill every single living thing because its cubs were attacked and killed by a rogue pride you can understand its rage but you cannot allow it to kill and decimate every single living thing in the jungle as an act of vengeance.
You must save it from its momentary madness and violent grieving rage by putting a bullet in its head before it wipes out everything that has life including itself.
That is the story of Israel and if she is not reigned in at the soonest and compelled to regain her senses that is what her fate may ultimately come to.
This is a hard and bitter truth which many do not wish to acknowledge or accept.
Permit me to end with the following points.
On 3rd of October 2022 Hilary Rodham Clinton, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs (Secretary of State) of the United States of America and a former presidential candidate posted the following on her X handle. She wrote,
“If the Russian leadership would rather not be accused of war crimes they should stop bombing hospitals”.
I urge Mrs. Clinton, the lady that rejoiced when Muammar Ghadaffi was brutally murdered, to refrain from her application of double standards and cowardly and complicit silence when it comes to Gaza and offer the same counsel to the Israeli Government and to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This would go a very long way indeed in helping the situation and redeeming her utterly battered and discredited image.
An Israeli-American activist, Miko Peled, offered the following insight about the mindset of the Israeli war machine. He said, “the Israeli Army’s entire purpose is terrorism”.
Given what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon today can anyone dispute this? Is what he has said not the bitter truth?
Have the events in Gaza not proved that and provided ample evidence to substantiate Peled’s allegation?
And just in case anyone is inclined to dismiss him as being delusional or just another self-hating, liberal American Jew that does not care for Israel they should consider his antecedents and noble lineage.
His grandfather, Avraham Katsnelson, signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
His father, General Mattiyahu Peled, fought in the war of 1948 and 1967 and later condemned the Israeli military for seizing the West Bank, Gaza, the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights.
This is indeed a distinguished family of warriors and achievers. They are men of truth, courage, conscience and character, they are forthright and righteous souls and they are notable heroes who risked their lives for Israel and who never shied away from speaking the truth to her leaders when they got it wrong.
Peled is far more worthy of our attention and respect and needs to be taken far more seriously than pin size, puppet propagandists with a questionable pedigree and a thoroughly uninspiring lineage like little Ben Shapiro.
On his part Major Scot Ritter, a retired US Marine and former Military Intelligence officer offered some laudable and timely counsel and advice. He posted the following on X:
“the United States needs to bring this to an end. An immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the deployment of Turkish peacekeepers to protect the Palestinians from the IDF is a must. The Israelis simply don’t care anymore. They are a nation consumed with bloodlust”.
Ritter has hit the nail on the head. Let us hope President Joe Biden and the Zionist hawks around him will listen.
Finally President Erdoğan of Turkey issued the following warning to the Zionists and the State of Israel. He said,
“I would like to speak very bluntly. Israel is a terrorist state. They consider Hamas to be a terrorist organisation but Hamas is a political party that won the collective vote in Palestine and after they won the election you have seized and usurped their rights. Israel and the US have seized those rights. Two-thirds of the 12,000 people who have been murdered by Israel in Gaza are women and children,” he said. Israel is carrying out the most heinous attack against women and children in all of history. They [Israel] have been speaking about murdering all those people using nuclear weapons so let me call on Benjamin Netanyahu: do you have nuclear weapons or not? Explain this if you have the courage! You are threatening people with atomic bombs, nuclear bombs. It does not matter what you have, you are a goner!”
It appears that the quest to exterminate the Palestinian people will not go unchallenged and cannot be fully implemented without strong resistance and a bloody fight.
Let us hope that Ben Shapiro and his Zionist co-travellers whose intention is to rid the world of the Palestinian people are listening.
A word is enough for the wise.
Sadly despite all “listening” does not appear to be on the horizon given the fact that despite the gathering clouds, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appears to have thrown all caution to the wind and refused to even attempt to hide his bellicose and murderous disposition and genocidal intentions.
He confirmed this two weeks ago when he said, with reference to the attack on Gaza, that the State of Israel was “waging a war against Amalek”.
The import of this utterly chilling, frightful and utterly comment is not lost on many and it is highly instructive.
For those who do not fully appreciate what he means I would suggest that they read the Old Testament of the Holy Bible which tells us that the Jews were ordered by God and therefore have a divine obligation to wipe out and exterminate every man, woman and child that is a descendant of Amalek in their quest to enter and occupy the Promise Land and establish, protect, defend and secure the State of Israel.
Amalek’s descendants were collectively referred to in the Bible as the Amalekites and today they are known as the Palestinians.
Can you put two and two together?
Do we need any more evidence about what the intentions of Israel really are?
Need I say any more?
May God deliver the people of Gaza, the Palestinian people, the Middle East and the entire world from evil and bloodthirsty men, whether they be the animals and terrorists of Hamas, the barbaric hordes of ISIS and Islamic Jihad, the butchers and child killers of the Israeli Defence Force or the fanatical zealots and extremist disciples of the divisive, racist and cancerous philosophy and plague known as Zionism.
•Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, the Sadaukin Shinkafi and the Wakilin Doka Potiskum, is a lawyer, a former Minister of Aviation and a former Minister of Culture and Tourism
The sun is only a backdrop for the inhuman condition, in Kadauri. The heat melts the jelly on the child miners’ necks into liquid necklaces. It’s a furnace out there along the gold belt of Maru local government area (LGA) of Zamfara State. Inside the mine pits, children write their dreams in shiny beads of sweat: the indelible ink of their brow. It’s the only way that their absence from school could mean something.
Scores of out-of-school kids, mostly boys, litter the dusty tract digging for gold. A dirt pan assures a full plate to their starving bellies. Thus they defy the heat, obstinate souls accustomed to searing whipping from the sun.
Of the motley crew, Mubaraq Baballe stands out for the passion he brings to the task. Shouldering aplomb like a steel amour, the 11-year-old feverishly digs the earth and shovels sludge every day, hoping to hit pay-dirt.
Three years after The Nation’s first encounter with him, Baballe still hunts for gold amid the dusty plains of Kadauri. “Sometimes, I travel to Anka with my uncles and cousin to work,” he said.
Every new morn furnishes another fresh haul through the gold fields. The possibility of finding fragments of the precious metal amid earthcrust and mud piles spurs the 11-year-old to resume every day at the mine.
The hope of hitting pay-dirt and earning N500 (less than $1) for his effort is overpowering. It’s a curious thing, however, that the pay has remained stagnant since 2020. Baballe currently earns N700, just a little bit above his earnings when he started out as a child miner three years ago. Sometimes, he gets “lucky” and makes “as much as N1,000 in a day,” he said.
Having dropped out of Class Four at a local madrassah in neighbouring Dan Baza, his needs remain simple: to earn a living from the Kadauri gold fields.
Baballe gives his earnings to his parents “to buy food.” But sometimes, he saves it to buy things for himself, “like a new kaftan, a t-shirt or radio transistor.”
The mineral-rich earth of Zamfara State provides Baballe and several other boys opportunities to make quick cash. It’s a perilous keep, fraught with attacks by armed bandits prowling the region and toxic lead deposits in the soil.
Despite the obvious perils, the dazzle of the Kadauri’s gold belt lures the 11-year-old and his friends to turn up every day, armed with a shovel, a can-do spirit and a dirt pan.
Not even the recent threat by the Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake, to crack down on illegal artisanal miners could deter the underage gold prospectors from their routine.
Alake, on September 3, 2023, issued a 30-day ultimatum to artisanal miners engaged in illegal mining across the country to join cooperatives or find another vocation. “On the expiration of the period, the full weight of the law will fall on anyone seen on a mining site without a determinable status.”
Alake’s threat bears no resonance among the child miners of Kadauri. Baballe, for instance, is wary of “the police and government people” who persistently raid the gold belt to arrest illegal miners but he does not understand the magnitude of his work as an outlaw. Perhaps because he’s only a child.
The child miners’ backstory
A journey through the gold fields manifests like a pilgrimage of sorts; echoes of the child miners unfurl with a rude jolt, like vignettes of the human thirst for survival in a dystopic universe.
Unlike the big, licensed gold prospectors of Zamfara, they do not mine gold for the big bucks. They are not doing it for reverence, glory or meaning.
Haunted by poverty, Baballe and his crew, work the fields for survival. Ultimately, they seek escape from the drudgery and complexities of their inner lives.
Speaking exclusively to The Nation, each boy recounted the vicissitudes that forced him to become a vulnerable actor in Zamfara’s illicit artisanal gold mining chain. Thirteen-year-old Naziru Aliyu revealed that he ventured into the illegal enterprise in order to support his impoverished family. The Junior Secondary School (JSS) 2 student earns as much as N2,000 daily, mining gold in Kadauri’s open fields.
His namesake and much younger crew member, Naziru, equally does it for survival. The eight-year-old wore his yearning like an expensive brocade over his bony frame. Looking severely malnourished, he dug and pounded through rocks, roots and earth-crust with feeble limbs, his slender arms rising and falling mechanically beside his wiry frame. Naziru belched a story that only hunger could reveal.
His shirtless torso revealed the jarring angles of his ribs, their harsh lines shorn of flesh, contracted in sweaty enterprise. Occasionally, he stood and stretched, his gaunt frame towering above his chosen tract.
The earth unfurled about him carelessly cracked with pits, suffering the underage labourer to foray in and out of their gaping caverns. A few metres away, his peers laboured in extreme poses, like dusty silhouettes carved slipshod across Kadauri’s gold belt.
The cool and indiscriminate glare of sunlight desecrates the fields like a tomb, bathing their sullied frames to extort a stream of accidental shadows.
Closer, their hard noises strike one’s face with momentary clarity but the noiseless undertones of their unspoken narratives pitch like unreal zest made in jest.
Child miners quench thirst with muddy water
Life is hard in the gold fields. The fear of sleeping on an empty stomach motivates underage miners, like Baballe, every day. While hunger is unbearable, Baballe finds it even more difficult to deal with thirst.
To soothe his parched throat, the 11-year-old would drink from the stagnant puddle he used to wash gold dust. It seemed too horrid to be true the first time The Nation caught Baballe drinking from the begrimed pond.
That hot Saturday afternoon, the 11-year-old paused from washing his pile of gold dust and picked his way across the craters and mine ponds to a corner of the fields, where he and his crew kept their personal effects.
He whipped out a green plastic cup and dipped it into a puddle with a flurry, filling the cup to its quarter. Then he raised it to his lips and drank copiously.
Afterwards, he tossed the cup and simply resumed foraging for gold amid the minefields. The sparse dialogue of his peers and the clangour of shovels and steel basins against the stony terrain resonated with crushing symbolism. Still, none was as distressing as the imagery of the little boy quenching his thirst with a cup of muddy water.
There is a backstory to each boy’s presence in the Kadauri gold field. The recurrent strain recounts how poverty and hunger render them vulnerable to older associates and paymasters in Zamfara’s illicit network of artisanal miners.
The latter use them as mules and errand boys in an illicit network that cost Nigeria about $2 billion annually and over N353 billion in losses in gold smuggled out of the country between 2016 and 2018, according to the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) audits and reports from international sources.
Economics of using underage miners
In Maru LGA of Zamfara, where the Kadauri gold field is located, there is a ready market for gold mined by minors as older prospectors buy the gold off them, and in turn, sell it to local middlemen and dealers from neighbouring countries who flood the mining sites.
“The little boys can’t get the gold to Gusau. They don’t deal with the big players because they are like termites on the distribution chain. But they are useful termites…I buy it from them. When they hit gold, they sell it to me right at the mining field or they call my number if I am not in town, then I tell them to hold on to it till I come back,” said Mohammed, 34, a gold prospector working of Maru.
The initial buyer, like Mohammed, who lives in the mining village, is often the local representative of a bigger trader, who finances and mandates buyers, sometimes over a number of mining sites in the region.
Hussein Magazu, 51, owns gold processing factories in Anka and Maru local councils, and he runs an informal but extensive operation for which he recruited local boys, minors and adolescents in particular, to supply him gold dust.
At the peak of his operations, he had 37 boys working for him but since the federal government outlawed artisanal mining in the state, and armed bandits struck Bindim village in Maru on November 8, 2016, killing 45 artisanal miners, 11 of Magazu’s boys have been withdrawn by their parents. The bandits, who arrived numbering about 50, cordoned off the entire area before ransacking the mines, demanding gold and other valuables from the miners before hacking them dead.
Magazu rued his losses in the wake of the attack stressing that, “I miss my boys. They are cheaper to manage and control. They listen to instructions and brought me sand regularly to grind at my factories.”
According to him, the child miners are less greedy. “They accept N500, N700, and N1,000. They don’t request more. Some of them double as water vendors in my factories. I pay them an additional N100 or N200 depending on their hard work.”
Further investigations revealed that most of the child miners belonged to farming families that had lost their livelihood in the wake of armed banditry in the state. Left with no means of livelihood, many kids joined their parents to mine for gold illegally.
In Kadauri, Bindim and other parts of Maru, Anka, and Bagega, groups of boys set out to mine for gold across established and dormant gold fields. Banking on street smarts, they prospect for gold as independent miners or at the behest of a local middleman or contractor to whom they supply excavated
sand or gold dust for a stipend.
The boys often supply the sand with little idea about the quantity of gold lodged in the pile. Where they are working for themselves, they take the sand to contractors like Magazu, who process it for them – by grinding and washing it – to extract the gold. Afterwards, they summon their street smarts to negotiate a fair price with the contractor cum owner of the processing plant.
“Many of them do not possess the stamina and expertise to haggle with me hence they often sell the dust to me for a paltry fee of N500 to N1,000,” said Magazu.
Chinese, Africans in Zamfara’s gold smuggling ring
Five years ago, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) seized gold worth about $3.13 million (about N1.13 billion) being allegedly exported to Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) illegally. It named one Abba Ali Yahaya as the brain behind the deal.
Apart from impounding his passport, about €112,000 undeclared by Abba, was also seized for alleged violation of the nation’s Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act. The suspect was caught following a tip-off after he had managed to pass through all the screening machines without being caught.
The contraband was reportedly handed over to the suspect by a syndicate of illegal miners operating in Zamfara State.
One group that has also received a significant amount of attention is Chinese nationals. Critical to their ability to operate are partnerships with local actors who provide the social capital necessary to operate.
Further findings revealed that some regional chiefs and community leaders have working agreements with foreign partners which ‘permit’ the latter to exploit gold deposits in exchange for a percentage of the gold production.
In a bid to curb such illicit deals, the state government repatriated 31 foreigners. The culprits, comprising 11 Chinese and 20 others from Burkina Faso and Mali, were repatriated to their respective countries.
On April 26, 2020, the State Commissioner of Police (CP) Usman Nagogo, led a special task force to mining sites in Nasarawa Burkullu village, where they arrested two Chinese nationals running illegal mining operations. The culprits, identified as Mr. Wang and Mr. Chun, were caught with chemicals necessary for processing gold.
On May 21, 2020, the Brigade Commander, 1 Brigade Nigeria Army, Gusau, Brigadier-General O. M Bello equally led a team, comprising the Army, Police, and the Department of State Services (DSS) to raid illegal mining sites in Anka, Bukkuyum and Gummi LGAs leading to the arrest of 251 illegal miners comprising 250 Nigerians and one Burkinabe.
In February 2022, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Zamfara State Command, arrested 10 suspected illegal miners from Matuzgi village in the Talata Mafara Local Government Area of the State while they were carrying out an illegal operation. Nine bags of raw precious stones were confiscated from the suspects.
On Sunday, September 23, 2023, the Governor of Zamfara, Dauda Lawal, issued a ban on illegal mining activities and ordered law enforcement officials to shoot illegal miners at sight, claiming that such stringent action has become necessary to end the destructive activity and ensure the well-being of the people.
Reacting to the raids, artisanal miners in Maru and Anka LGAs, stressed that there was no way they could stop mining as it was their only means of survival. “What does the government want us to eat? Bandits have sacked us from our farms. They rob us in our homes. Government is unable to protect us and they haven’t offered us alternative means of livelihood. We can’t stop mining. Even people in government are involved. They only send police after us when we venture into their territories or the territories of their cronies,” said Idris Bala, 55, a miner working from Anka.
Corroborating him, his first son, Abubakar, stated that artisanal gold mining was lucrative until the state government officials and traditional rulers established mining companies and invited the Chinese, Burkinabes and Togolese, to take over the industry.
How gold is under-priced, smuggled out of Zamfara
The supply chain flourishes by the sale of gold to a second intermediary, the regional trader. The local trader or contractor, who buys gold from the child miners by decigrams can accumulate between 50 and 100 grams of gold before selling this wholesale to the regional trader.
Often the local dealer will melt the gold, losing around 10 per cent as impurities in order to create batches of many tens of grams, which will earn a higher price when sold. Local buyers are often undeclared when they work in isolation and are generally self-financed.
The gold content is evaluated visually in the field and then measured at home using densitometry, applying a pre-determined formula. Quite often, local traders are sent to the mining sites by the regional trader, who is sure to capture all of the available collected gold, in exchange for a percentage commission on the collected quantities; in some cases, he also provides an advance of the working capital needed to collect the gold.
As a result, the buyer is often declared under the cover of the regional trader. So, if the local buyer purchases the gold at a maximum retail price for the gold content of 93% – 94% of the world price from the miners, the regional trader will buy it wholesale at a price equivalent to 97% – 98% of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) price.
Once the trader cum big player has accumulated a certain quantity of gold, generally many hundreds of grams, he will travel to the capital, Gusau, to trade it at around 99.2% – 99.5% of the LBMA price. The buyer in Gusau subsequently exports the gold abroad as contraband through the country’s porous borders to Niger, Ghana, Togo or the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
A toothless bark?
A lack of compliance with the 30-day ultimatum of the Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake, has forced him to grant another 30-day extension of the ultimatum as he warned illegal miners to join notable mining cooperatives or face the full wrath of the law.
Alake had initially warned that from October, a rejuvenated security regime will become active in the solid minerals sector and the Federal and State governments will also be encouraged to allocate the prosecution of cases against illegal miners to competent courts.
On August 3, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, Dr. Mary Ogbe, raised a similar alarm that illegal mining activities are disrupting the country’s $700 billion industry.
According to her, some of the minerals are often exported raw to Asian and European countries at ridiculous prices without value.
A history of failed regulation
Two years ago, the former Governor of Zamfara, Bello Matawalle, announced a total ban on mining activities in the State and its environs in a bid to curb banditry and restore peace to the state. The decision, he claimed, was informed by intelligence reports suggesting that illegal mining fuels armed banditry in the state.
Hundreds of people have been killed or kidnapped by bandits in Zamfara in the past year, and in the wake of the ban, several miners relocated from Zamfara to less policed hubs of artisanal mining in Niger and Osun States.
In their absence, field leaders contract underage boys, like Baballe, to fill the vacuum created in the artisanal gold mines thus accentuating their predicament as part of the 10.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria – 30 per cent are in the North-West (Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kano) and Niger States in the North Central region.
PAGMDI dead on arrival?
To cushion the huge foreign exchange revenue loss from gold smuggling, the immediate past administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari launched the Presidential Artisanal Gold Mining Development Initiative (PAGMDI), a comprehensive artisanal and small-scale gold mining development programme.
The initiative was designed to address the structural and institutional factors such as rural poverty and difficulties in meeting legal and regulatory requirements that tend to push artisanal gold mining operators deeper into the informal economy.
During the unveiling of the country’s first batch of locally mined gold bars in July 2020, former President Buhari enthused that the gold mining operation would generate over $500 million in revenue annually and diversify the country’s revenue base.
The price of gold had soared at the period, fluctuating between a record $1,988.40 and $2,048 an ounce. Initial forecasts held that the PAGMI initiative could add about $500 million to foreign reserves annually, and contribute $150 million in taxes and $25 million in royalties.
To guarantee the seamless actualisation of set goals, the federal government licensed two refineries to refine gold to the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA).
Under the arrangement, the government was expected to buy directly from small-scale miners at designated hubs in their villages, while the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) buys directly from the state government. This was meant to prevent the locals from selling extracted gold to bandits and other illegal operators. The plan is yet to materialise to the advantage of all identified stakeholders.
What should be done…
Governor Lawal seeks to succeed where his predecessor, Matawalle, failed. But his resort to the use of force can hardly resolve Zamfara’s illegal mining conundrum.
The incumbent governor could work with the Minister of Solid Minerals, Alake, to identify local miners and encourage them to join cooperative societies through which they can earn greater benefits from the state’s mining industry.
Beyond Alake’s ultimatum to illegal miners and Governor Lawal’s order to law enforcers to shoot them at sight, more realistic steps must be taken to address the problem.
The government must restore the miners’ access to the global market, perhaps by buying artisanal-mined gold even on a tax-free, no-questions-asked basis. Responsible sourcing initiatives should also prioritise the improvement of public infrastructure and services in the mining fields.
Small-scale mining sustains millions of people with so much else for governments to worry about, keeping these communities thriving should be the main priority, argued Sara Geenen Assistant professor in Globalisation, International Development and Poverty, University of Antwerp.
But that is in the long run, in the short run, the government must address the perils of child miners prowling the gold fields of Zamfara.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that about one million children work in mines and quarries. However, the actual number is deemed higher as the proportion of child miners in some countries is estimated to be as high as 30 to 50 per cent of the workforce.
In Zamfara, many such children work in extreme conditions in remote areas like Kadauri and other parts of Maru LGA. Children work in ore extraction and assist in drilling. They push carts, clean galleries, and remove water from the mines. They crush stones, haul minerals, pick gemstones, and wash gold.
They descend to the bowels of the earth to crawl through narrow, cramped, and poorly lit makeshift tunnels, where the air is thick with dust and smothering. They constantly risk fatal accidents due to falling rocks, explosions, collapse of mine walls, and the use of equipment designed for adults.
“They do all these without access to essential safety measures and health facilities. It’s a very scary situation. It’s like making them work in a grave. They are denied protection and other necessary safeguards. Many will tell you they are doing it to help their families. Many of their parents, who are also miners, encourage the kids. They even link them with scouts. As things are, we are toying with another health disaster in Zamfara,” warned Bello Matari, a public health worker based in Gusau.
In 2010, Zamfara State was afflicted by the sudden illness of hundreds of children suffering from vomiting, abdominal pains, headaches, seizures and other health conditions. The respective communities had unknowingly dug into a lead-vein while mining gold ore thus exposing themselves to lead poisoning.
While crushing ore rocks, they released lead-polluted dust into the atmosphere and surface waters. Miners returned home to infect their families with contaminated clothes and tools. Approximately 50 per cent of all recorded cases were fatal, leading to the death of over 400 children.
There are fears that the state may suffer yet another disaster, on a similar scale, if the government fails to intervene.
Interviews with child miners in Kadauri revealed that their exposure to injury is high. Abubakar Adamu, 10, sprained his ankle and crashed his groin into a jagged edge of a mine pit after falling into the exposed ditch several months ago. “I missed my steps because it was dark. I couldn’t walk properly for months. And I found it very painful to urinate; every time I did, blood came out with my urine,” he said.
Despite the dangers involved, a lot of kids in Kadauri take to the fields to mine for gold without an exit strategy. The boys are unaware of the magnitude of danger that they flirt with, daily.
Experts warned that the 2010 epidemic may persist in the environment for up to 15 years resulting in long-term health problems including permanent learning and behavioural problems, and brain damage.
But the child miners of Kadauri are oblivious to such dangers. Their struggles blend into the hobbling steps of Zamfara’s brutal re-awakening as the state drifts between its toxic underbelly and the vague promise of a better tomorrow.
The fates of Ibrahim, Yahaya, Aliyu, Naziru and Baballe, however, resonate a tragedy so overpowering that it evokes a torrent of feelings. Beyond that, there is guilt – that the desire for gold is so strong that it sets society, like a bird of prey upon them, to stalk their strides and exploit their hunger pangs.
In their sad, sorry world, they work in teams under exploitative agreements with a local paymaster, often receiving a wage or payment in kind.
For children who hit pay-dirt, they find that there is money to be made from gold dust, however meagre. For those who don’t, dejection pricks their hopes and sinks like claws.
“If I don’t find gold today, I will get lucky tomorrow,” said Baballe in the tenor of a child who understands that despair might be circumvented by stubborn will.
Baballe doesn’t care if death reclines in Kadauri’s gold dust. Every day, he resumes at the mines with theatrical spunk, his wiry limbs digging and shovelling the earth in measured spasms, his frame bent earthward in a necessary performance of hope.
