Until last week, few Nigerians outside the mainstream Pentecostal Christian establishment could claim to have heard of Apostle Suleiman Johnson let alone his Auchi, Edo State -based Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide. Not anymore. Give it to infinite capacity of the nation’s security establishment to mismanage any cause no matter how worthy or well-intentioned, the man has suddenly become an issue – and now hero of sorts to some people – no thanks to last week’s bungled arrest by the Department of State Security Service (DSS). AS it is, what should ordinarily have been a routine invitation extended to a citizen to clarify an alleged felony has suddenly become a big issue now tearing at the nation’s socio-political fabric.
For aside the new low which the embarrassing episode represents for an agency that ordinarily prides itself as the bastion of ruthless efficiency; the rumble it has generated has, to the extent that it has drawn the service into the vortex of the ethno-religious maelstrom currently rocking the foundations of the country, has suddenly thrust it into the centre of the raging inferno.
It is of course the Ekiti Governor, Ayodele Fayose that we must thank not just for daring (yet again) to strip the service of the aura underlying its assumed invincibility but going as far as revealing its majestic impotence like his PDP-brother governor Nyesom Wike did on October 8 last year when he spectacularly fobbed off officials of the Department of State Security when the latter staged a mid-night raid on the residence of Justice Abdullahi Liman of the Federal High Court, Port Harcourt. For while the gubernatorial delinquencies exhibited in the two instances, which although represent a clear affront to the rule of law and the very notion of orderly society has remained unchallenged, it is the continuing emergence of the mutant forms of the same disease that amplifies the problem of a state in free, unarrested, fall.
By now, most Nigerians must have either watched or heard about the Johnson Suleiman video. Needless to state that the seduction to mindless murder is galling as it is offensive to my Christian sensibilities just as it is antithetical to everything that the faith stands for. Never mind the latter-day rationalisations by official of the church which are no more than futile attempts to smoothen the edges of the open and undisguised incitement to felony. What must be alarming to the rational mind is the open license to murder as well as the opportunistic exploitation of the carnage in Southern Kaduna to further stoke embers of violence by a presumably influential cleric.
In the circumstance, the invitation of the cleric by the DSS is certainly justifiable; not so however is the mid-night siege on his hotel room in the Ekiti State capital and the accompanying drama. Indeed, while the Suleiman episode and the brouhaha it has generated merely evinces the tragedy of the state in mortal decline; a state where influential actors seek exceptions from the rules governing the collective, the specious rationalisation by those insisting on making a non-existent distinction between what they consider in the particular instance as the lesser crime of incitement to murder and the actual crime is not only unhelpful but disingenuous.
Isn’t that the reason different provisions and hence punishments exist for different grades of crime?
But then, that is only one half of the picture of the duplicitous state– now best exemplifies in the Southern Kaduna mayhem. For a federal government that has been pathetic in its response to the carnage just as the security agencies have fallen miserably short in confronting the real daemons, the Suleiman episode merely presents a good alibi for inaction. Suleiman therefore, could well be guilty as charged for what is at best a crime of indiscretion – although he is most probably, no more guilty than a certain Nasir el-Rufai who is on record to have handed hefty cash payments to some Fulani herdsmen in appeasement to stop their murderous activities.
Has the DSS requested el-Rufai’s cooperation in identifying the fellows who received the largesse from him? How does one explain why a DSS which continues to live in denial – suddenly elevating the more minor issues like those of Suleiman over and above the weightier issues of murder and mayhem allegedly being daily perpetrated by the bloodthirsty Fulani herdsmen under the very noses of the intelligence community? Is it that the perpetrators are not only invisible but invincible?
By the way, does anyone still remember Saleh Bayeri, the Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association who sensationally told Premium Times that the Agatu bloody conflict of February 2016 was a reprisal attack by his people against the Agatus who he accused of killing, in 2013, a prominent Fulani man – Ardo Madaki? Here are his exact words as reported by Premium Times in March 2016: “This action (the death of Ardo Madaki – that is) reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong. He comes from a very well respected clan and the Agatu sent the Fulani a chilling message with his murder”.
By the way, the Agatu, he claimed, also killed over 300 of his people “but because we don’t have people in government or the media, no one said anything when genocide was being carried out against our people”.
Really?
Does this justify the revenge – the sacking of an entire community and this in a modern state with all the apparatus of law enforcement? Talk about an admission of crime and the motive; would the whiff of crime, even of a mere accessory to mass murder, pass for a lesser crime in the circumstance in which the Agatu massacres took place? Did the DSS ever take Bayeri in for questioning in the face of the grave admission? So why would the supporters of Suleiman not ask for similar exemption?
All of these are of course possible in a state in retreat – a state that has long surrendered the monopoly of arms to a rampaging militia of herdsmen; one that has equally lost its rationale as the guarantor of justice and public order. It is sadly a case of – what you see is what you get! In other words, Messrs Suleiman and Bayeri are merely the obverse sides of the same coin of Acquired Impunity Disorder Syndrome (AIDS) of a wilting state.
Expect more huffing and puffing in the coming days – until another excitable topic breaks – to herald another cycle of talk.
Tag: AWOL
-
When the state is on AWOL
-
Eguma unhappy at AWOL players
Dolphins head coach, Stanley Eguma has frowned at the decision of Victor Alegbe and Hope Fibresima who have both gone on Absence Without Leave (AWOL) despite collecting part of the salaries released recently by the Rivers State Government.
Eguma whose wards have not been firing on all cylinders since the beginning of the season are 18th on the log with 13 points from 15 games.
Speaking with NationSport in a brief chat, Eguma revealed that unavailability of some of his first team players is giving him goose bumps as he has elected to use some players out of their normal positions in a bid to measure up.
He said the management is planning to report Alegbe and Fibresima to the League Management Company(LMC) and the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) about the unwholesome act of the duo who have breached their contract with their truancy.
Eguma has however charged his players to go all the way for the three points when they host Wikki Tourists in a Glo Premier League Week 16 tie as they could not afford to lose more home points.
He noted that Tijani Adamu is another major doubt for the weekend league clash with the player still struggling with an ankle injury.
-
A government on AWOL
Considering that it took its well articulated terms of reference to awaken the somnolent Presidency to the reality that it still ran the show, there might yet be something that the incoming All Progressives Congress administration can still do to help halt the pervasive meltdown under which vital institutions of state have gone prostrate.
As it is, the story is virtually the same of governance in full flight – if you like, retreat. Not the lame duck stuff as one might expect of a government winding down. Indeed, for a country ordinarily under-governed, what is increasingly palpable is a Jonathan administration practically missing on all fronts – what the military call AWOL; the only exception being the rash of opportunistic appointments designed to rile the incoming government.
In the electricity sector, the story is all too familiar of alibis manufactured, traded and recycled the same way financial sector smart alecs continue hawk their sweet poison of derivatives to the hapless public in Jonathan-nurtured laissez-faire environment. Once upon a time, the sector was comatose; today, it is as good as dead. The minister in charge, a world-class scientific mind now adorns the garb of prayer warrior in chase of industry demons. The electricity sector regulator – the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission – has since relapsed into the ‘sleep’ mode in the absence of an industry to regulate; meanwhile, the club of disparate players inelegantly called DISCOs or distribution companies –more aptly rent collectors- are apparently lost in the park after discovering something bigger than the magical pot of fortune promised them post-privatisation – they just couldn’t figure out what to do! Between them, the nation is presently locked in a bind.
Isn’t it said that what you see is what you get? Should anyone still be in wonder as to why the nation is in darkness?
As it is in the power sector, so it is in the petroleum sector. Here the administration’s benumbing incompetence, long laid bare before the world, ordinarily ought not to deserve any attempt at exhumation. Clearly, if the current paralysis of the nation’s socio-economic life occasioned by the dry pumps across the land is any living proof of the astounding lack of imagination of those running the downstream sector, that is only when one fails to reckon with the state-abetted criminality in the upstream sector – the industrial scale theft under which 20 percent of the nation’s crude is said to disappear to some invisible Mafiosi, daily. And this is aside the invisible operations of the prospecting arm of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – the Nigerian Petroleum Development Corporation – known of course only to the shadowy players and their patron saints in the oily business – thanks to the PWC fellows!
How about that for a legacy?
You ask: what happened to the Jonathan magic that was celebrated ‘live’ and in ‘colour’ by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) in the heady days of electioneering? I mean the outlandish claims of achievement in power stabilisation, railway modernisation and road building – that left one wondering if they were talking about another country but Nigeria?
With recriminations going back and forth between the Finance Ministry and the cartel of fuel importers over the bureaucracy-induced crisis, it seems now so easy to imagine that the so-called called ‘Jona’ magic was nothing more than the relentless inflow into the piggy bank. With oil price in the dive and with it the sluggish demand for Nigeria’s sweet crude, the nation would appear wiser to the administration’s claims to superlative performance.
It is however the security sector that stands the administration apart in corporate dereliction. This is a sector in which the concept of the state as holding the monopoly in the use of force has undergone the most comprehensive redefinition by the outgoing presidency. Today, under Jonathan’s new-fangled paradigm, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest navy now finds itself playing second fiddle to yesterday’s pirates on the nation’s exclusive economic zone. In the same vein, nearly a quarter of the nation’s security work is outsourced to a rag-tag army of ill-clad, ill-equipped and certainly ill-trained volunteers called Civilian Joint Task Force in the North-east. Again, under that strange blend of Public-Private-Partnership security model, another quarter has also been outsourced to yesterday’s brigands in the free-for-all bazaar of pipelines protection – and this in a nation with a long heritage of disciplined, cohesive and well-structured military.
Do I exaggerate? Please recall the various accounts of the death of Oluwadimilola Adebimpe Fajana – the 26-year-old lady caught up in the cross-fire between the vandals and the OPC hired by the administration to do the job of policing the pipelines. Today, the much that is known is that she was felled by the guns of operatives of Jona-licensed militia at Arepo– one of the many popular theatres of pipeline vandalism along the Ogun State corridor.
Pity the grieving father, Ojo Babafemi Andrews; he could only moan helplessly to wit that “by the reason of his patronage of people who have no basic training in arms and weaponry in the business of pipeline protection, which is a very dangerous security enterprise which is supposed to fall under the purview of the trained Nigerian security agencies… President Goodluck Jonathan is culpable in the death of Damilola Fajana and that of others by the virtue of his morbid desperation for political power which led him to awarding such senseless contract to OPC in return for political support in Lagos State”.
Case closed.
Now, I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear. Having long given up on my search for the distinction between a lame duck administration and a vengeful, mischief-driven one, I have since accepted the Yoruba philosophical expression – Suru lojo – which roughly means, patience has an end point.
Finally: what’s the idea behind the ostentatious pity-party staged by the President at the weekend? I refer to his Thanksgiving homily where he stated that he, his ministers, advisers and other appointees will be persecuted when they leave office and that they should be ready for that? The problem, I guess, isn’t so much the President’s artful play on the word ‘persecution’ in place of prosecution to describe the fate awaiting his men – which is nonetheless opportunistic, if you ask me; it is his less-than elegant attempt to launder an ignoble legacy. The question is – could anything be wrong with being called to account for one’s stewardship? Why should anyone be afraid?
‘I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear’
-
Who cares?
While the military-induced shift in the elections by six weeks is increasingly looking like a minor part of a long but complex play, one aspect that seems to have escaped attention is the economic, human and institutional dimensions of the unfolding plot. Six weeks, ordinarily is supposed to be nothing in the life of a nation. Indeed, merely by the assurances of the military’s top brass to whom the nation’s chief steward has outsourced his primary function as commander-in-chief, the nation is being offered a dubious respite from the insurgency in the North-east.
Win or lose the war in the North-east, the truth is that the end to our nightmares is nowhere yet in sight. Once the country was described as under-governed, what we have in place at the moment is total abdication. I once described the Jonathan presidency as outsourced only because I was short of words to describe the flight by the Team Leader; today, we neither have a team nor anyone in charge. However, while it seems convenient for our steward of state to abandon state duties to the exigency of tenure renewal, the systematic co-optation of state institutions into the electoral project under his direct supervision would come to the greatest irony of all time. I will return to this issue shortly.
Talking about the poll shift, I guess it is no accident that the support for the measure has been loudest among the beleaguered parasitic throng infesting the presidency. The motivations of the legion that have long mastered the art of making wealth without breaking a sweat should not be hard to understand; the perfidious club would rather keep the flush funds flowing under the regime of unearned wealth, till kingdom come.
Of course, you can hardly say the same of, for instance, a Dangote, whose wealth under the floundering administration continues to dissipate. Only recently, Forbes reported Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, as losing more than $7.8 billion of his fortune in the wake of the latest plunge in the nation’s capital market. His net worth as at November 7, 2014 was put at $21.6 billion. His entire fortune is currently said to be around $17.2 billion! Whereas Forbes puts the negative trend to: “a general uncertainty regarding the 2015 general elections, Central Bank regulatory headwinds, and weak earnings from large cap companies”, I put it to state-induced uncertainty designed to generate a mad scramble for Abuja’s crumbs!
And that is supposed to be one individual’s loss. Can one possibly compute the cost of the postponement to millions of families across the federation? I write here of programmes forced to be put off; meetings that have to rescheduled and the countless other opportunities scuttled – all because Jonathan and his PDP are suddenly allergic to elections? Does anyone care? What about President Jonathan; does he care – at least not when, in his own words, all his campaign expenses are underwritten by the nation’s treasury?
In spite of the dark ominous clouds, I see Divine hands at work. How? I will explain.
Doubtless, the nation is already as fractured as can be along the traditional fault-lines of religion and ethnicity. All across the land – no thanks to the PDP’s mantra of the-end-justify-the-meanness – so palpable has been the curtain of mutual distrust across religious and ethnic lines that everyone now seems to appreciate that it would require an ultra-nationalist to heal the deep wounds inflicted by Jonathan and his men.
You ask me of the good in this? I say it is in the recognition that the nation currently has a big task of retrieving its destiny from the band of opportunistic wayfarers! I consider that as a significant step forward. On those issues, it seems inevitable that the party would burn itself out sooner than later. Having succeeded up to a point in their play of the opportunistic card of religion and ethnicity, the signs from the wearied citizens would seem to suggest that their days of reckoning is here at last!
This is even more so in the economic sphere. Today, the dip in oil prices has since become an alibi for the incompetent administration to explain its glaring failures across the board. Never mind that the plunge in oil prices is barely two months old; how does one explain an economy once deemed as resilient and impregnable like the Titanic succumbing only few weeks after the oil price plunge?
Presently, virtually all the indices on which the administration has hinged its claims to superlative performance have continued to unravel right before our very eyes: not only is the naira doing yoyo, down the road, the industrial and manufacturing sectors are already under intense strains – not from the traditional sources of inclement operating environment, but from the ill-effects of unmanaged or unmanageable exchange rate fluctuations. And just as one would expect that that high exchange rate would drive up costs; the threat of possible cut-back in industrial/manufacturing capacity has since become one that we must worry even in the near term. That threat has become so real and with it the grim likelihood of factory closures and massive lay-offs that the nation can ignore it at great costs.
Trust the administration to choose the difficult time to go AWOL – thereby giving the band of speculators full reign! Guess it’s time to ask – who are those forces fuelling foreign exchange demand? In other words, who are the demanders of forex and to what purpose? A clear answer to the above would obviously reveal a lot that the administration would rather not let Nigerians into. However, it suffices to say that the answer would, at least in part, explain the laissez-faire activities that has left the economy floundering. It is just as well that the administration has suddenly become subdued or less exuberant in its claims of achievement. Guess it’s a measure of the extent to which its inelegantly constructed castle has gone up like the smoke!
Back to the issue of the President’s cooptation of state institutions to his electoral project. By now, Nigerians must be sufficiently embarrassed by the revelations emerging from the farce that the Ekiti gubernatorial election has turned out to be. Of course, we have since heard that the Ekiti template was also deployed in Osun – although with limited success. Today, an Assistant General of Police, Joseph Mbu has been telling all who cared to listen that he is neither answerable to the constitution nor the laws of the country but his taskmasters in Abuja. That for me is the limit of state regression – an supossedly organised society in free fall.
-
3SC declare U-20 goalkeeper AWOL
Shooting Stars have maintained Nigeria U20 goalkeeper Emmanuel Daniel has gone AWOL as he has yet to be cleared by Enugu Rangers.
3SC media officer Jubril Arowolo told MTNFootball.com that Daniel remains their player even though he has been training with Rangers since the close season and has even been registered for the CAF Champions League by the Enugu club.
“Our attention has been drawn to stories and news that refer to Emmanuel Daniel as Rangers goalkeeper. He is not, he remains a 3SC player, and as it is, he has gone AWOL. He has not been cleared, they informed us they need his service but they have not negotiated anything not to talk of paying us,” Arowolo said.
“We don’t want to go into any confrontation with Rangers and that is why we are saying this. We own Emmanuel Daniel, we have his clearance and his licence. He told us he was going to see his family in December and he was paid salary for that month, up till now we have not seen or heard from him. We are advising Rangers not to try to use him because he is our player. We still believe he is coming back.”
Shooting Stars technical and media committee chairman Ade Somefun added: “Emmanuel is our player and as a matter of fact, he went AWOL because he was not properly cleared from 3SC.
“There is no way he can feature in the CAF Champions League. As far as we are concerned, Rangers didn’t go through the proper channel before Emmanuel joined them. We need to sit down and sort out this issue. We don’t want it to be like Sunday Mba’s case as we are ready to listen to them and make things work accordingly.”
Daniel was part of the squad to the recent African ayouth Championship in Algeria, where the Flying Eagles finished third and qualified for the U20 World Cup in Turkey in June.