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Tag: Chibok

  • Chibok girls’ parents take case to UN

    Chibok girls’ parents take case to UN

    Parents of the  200 Chibok  schoolgirls kidnapped last  April by Boko Haram members in Borno State  have taken their case to the United Nations (UN) after losing hope that the federal  government would rescue them.

    A group lobbying for government action on behalf of the parents met with UN Women, the head of the UN representation in Nigeria  and officials of the UN Office for West Africa last month.

    The group has also appealed to UNICEF, campaign spokeswoman Bukola Shonibare said.

    UN officials were not immediately available for comment.

    “If the government cannot take action, we are asking for the UN to come in and help and if they reject, we just don’t know what to do,” Reverend Enoch Mark, leader of the parents, told Reuters. Two of his daughters were kidnapped.

    It is not clear what any UN agency could do without Nigerian government approval.

    More than eight months since the abduction of the girls from Chibok, in Borno State, parents say they are still in the dark about what the government is doing.

    A presidential spokesman said efforts to free them continue, but that details of the missions are too sensitive to publish.

    “The Chibok community is pained, we cannot take this anymore,” Dauda Iliya, spokesman for the Chibok community in Abuja, said at a New Year’s Day rally of parents, adding that they had written to the United Nations to “protest this neglect and nonchalance by the government.”

    President Goodluck Jonathan says the government is trying to free the girls, but a botched rescue mission would endanger them.

    Dozens, possibly hundreds, have been kidnapped since the Chibok attack.

    Two weeks ago, gunmen abducted 172 women and children from Gumsuri, 24 kilometres from Chibok.

  • Letter to Chibok parents

    Letter to Chibok parents

    “…And fear a calamity that may afflict not only those who caused it but also the (innocent) ones who had no hands in its cause. And be warned that Allah’s retribution can be very severe (on evil doers)” Q. 8:25

    Dear Parents of Abducted Chibok Girls,

    Writing this letter to you at this precarious time of your lives has put this writer in a confused dilemma. Ordinarily, a dilemma should provide opportunity for choice be it positively or negatively but a confused dilemma leaves no room for such a choice. In a season like this, one should be felicitating with most of you at this festive period of the Yuletide. But how can one felicitate with people in the predicament of an indelible sorrow?  For almost nine months (since April 14, 2014) you have been agonising sorrowfully over the plight of your abducted dear daughters whose whereabouts still remain unknown today. If it were in Nigeria’s days of sanity, this letter would have been written in red ink to indicate the calamitous mood of the moment.

     But sanity has since taken flight from Nigeria with one of our inherited cultural values (kindness), courtesy of evil politics and audacious corruption with impunity. It is only a matter of personal conscience that this letter is being written to you with sorrowful tears rolling down the cheeks of this writer. Those tears are an evidence of heavy mind encapsulated in implacable agony. Your current fortuitous plight is, no doubt, an unprecedented calamity not for you or your relatives alone but also for the entire country called Nigeria. That calamity was precipitated not just by those agents of evil (called Boko Haram) who callously hold your daughters captive in an unbearable environment but also by those who facilitated the plight through endemic corruption and misrule in the name of governance.

    At the bracket adolescent age of your daughters (generally deemed innocent), those girls had been perceived as today’s dream that would fetch tomorrow’s reality. Each of them had constituted a potent arrow firmly fixed to your bows with hopeful intention to shoot through the iron gate of life. Thus, from the infancy of those girls to their present adolescent age, you (as parents) must have been full of prayers and hopes for their brighter future just as they stand as the footprints for your worthy legacies. In a nutshell, you might have seen each of those girls as your chief asset either in your lifetimes or after your demise or both.

    When hope turns forlorn

    Unfortunately, however, your dreams as well as those of your daughters’ are now being turned into a paroxysm of despair not out of your carelessness or neglect but out of the making of some satanic forces, in our country, who are evidently nonchalant to the plights of others which they covertly created. By that making, those forces have enabled the Lucifer to hijack the destiny of your daughters (albeit temporarily by the grace of God) in a manner never envisaged in Nigeria. Yet those forces are now celebrating with their own children not minding the calamity they have unleashed on the children of some fellow Nigerians, especially your daughters. Ah! THERE IS GOD OOOOO!

    In retrospect

    When your daughters started to write the West African School Certificate Examinations early this year, they were the delight of your hearts as you fervently prayed for their success in those exams.

    Which worthy parent would not do that anyway? The mere writing of that examination did not only heighten your hopes for their greater tomorrow. It also served as an impetus for you to further tighten your belts for their rise to higher pedestals in life. The anticipation was that by July this year, they would have obtained the needed results of those examinations to enable them join thousands of others in seeking admission into higher institutions through the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination.

    But alas! Man proposes and God disposes. Against all thoughts and premonitions, here you are today still waiting anxiously to take a glimpse of your daughters who are now in the gulag of unforeseen machinations of life. It was unimaginable, even after writing one of their examination papers on April 14, 2014 that a monumental misfortune was lurking around the corner to assail them just like that in a country that claims to have a government with a formidable security outfit.

    Incidentally, in the early morning of that same day, a dare devil group allegedly working as an arm of Boko Haram had wrecked a fortuitous havoc in Nyanyan, Abuja, through bomb explosions that claimed 77 innocent lives. That globally condemned barbaric incident has also become a calamitous chapter in the history of our country.

    But who could have imagined that, far away in a remote town of Chibok, in Bornu State, some hundreds of innocent girls had also been earmarked for a devilish abduction by some satanic scoundrels? Some hundreds of other innocent men, women and children have been abducted thereafter.

    Stories and rumours

    Ever since the abduction of your daughters, the story has been changing in contents and in essence depending on the source of the scaring rumours generating it. For instance, we were once told that following their kidnap your daughters were taken straight to a forest called Sambisa, near Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, which is mainly inhabited by dangerous animals, reptiles and poisonous insects. Then we were told that some of those girls were lucky to escape the kidnappers’ dragnet when one out of about 25 vehicles used by the insurgents to convey them broke down. Then we were told that the girls were divided into smaller groups and distributed to different neigbouring countries, such as Cameroon, Chad, Niger Republic and Central African Republic, where they were sold into slavery. Then we were told that some non Muslims amongst those girls were forced to convert to Islam while some had died of snake bites and malaria. Then we were told that some or most of them were daily being raped by the ‘beasts’ who are now criminally keeping them in custody. Then we were told that some or most of them were forcefully married to those criminals illegitimately.

    The stories were as many as the agonising rumours that gave vent to them. What would have been pleasant in those rumours was the fortuitous news of a successful military rescue of those girls as officially announced by Nigerian military spokesman to the delight of all and sundry but which eventually turned out to be a hoax as the same official spokesman later claimed to have been misled. This was followed by another official rumour of the killing of Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, whose fake dead body was displayed on Nigerian television and put on the internet. It also turned out to be a ridiculous hoax, especially when the supposed dead man (Shekau) resurfaced to mock the rumour of his death and labeled the mongers of the rumour blatant liars. This was also followed by another seemingly pleasant rumour of the release of all the girls through an official negotiation brokered by an Australian expert (Stephen Davies). And after a wild jubilation in ecstasy across the land, this also turned out to be another hoax. All these vividly showed the true colour of our central government.

    Meanwhile, following the abduction of your daughters on April 14,

    2014, when the government was expected to promptly embark on rescue

    mission, it was the political train of the ruling power that moved to Kano the following morning (April 15, 2014) to initiate a national campaign for ‘continuity’ (of governance). And for three weeks thereafter, the debate at the corridor of power was on whether or not your daughters were truly missing.

    Agony of parenthood

    Today, you are in as much anguish as your daughters. And thus, most of you have been forced into permanent fasting and sleeplessness as your case is a vivid reminder of a Yoruba adage that says that: “a child is better lost to death than to a clueless abduction”.

    Who could have thought that in this age of technology, when civilisation is almost at its peak, an evil occurrence like Boko Haram designed slavery would rear its ugly head again in Nigeria in our very presence while we remain helpless? Is it not curiously shameful that with a population of about 170 million people only an infinitesimal group of criminal insurgents could render our government so helpless while the lives of our daughters remain dangerously on the line?

    Reactions

    For weeks after the abduction of those girls, this writer could not sleep. My constant thought was based on the imagination that one or two of them could have been my daughters. And it could not be imagined that any sane parent or family who heard of the criminal abduction would sleep or live a normal life for weeks or even months thereafter.

    But incidentally, both the thought and the imagination were discovered to be an error as some people were totally and insensitively indifferent, an indication of heartlessness or insanity on their part.

    Such people who openly described the incident of abduction as a diversionary tactic which they alleged to have been fabricated by certain fellow politicians were rather concerned with the political continuity of the current rot in the country.

    Their show of shame was such that portrays anything different from such continuity programme as criminal. In other words the story of your daughters’ abduction, no matter how painful, and the subsequent public demand for their return were labeled as criminal especially when the children of none of them were involved. It even got to a stage where the campaign for your daughters’ return with the slogan ‘BRING BACK OUR GIRLS’ was mocked and ridiculously countered with a similar slogan coded in a political jargon to boost the propaganda for continuity.

    At a time, the Nigerian press, in collaboration with the ‘Bring back our girls’ campaigners called on Mr. President to pay a sympathy visit to you in order to console and assure you on the determination of the government to rescue your daughters. But the hawks in government would not hear of it. They dissuaded the President from doing that on the argument that it was not the President that caused the calamity. Thus, your daughters’ case is one of a turbulent life on which the Almighty

    Allah had admonished thus:

    “….And We will most certainly try you with fear and hunger, loss of property and lives as well as farm crops.  But give good tidings to the patient ones who when afflicted by a calamity only remember to say ‘we are from Allah and to Allah we shall surely return…..”Q. 2:155-156.

    America for instance

    It will be recalled that when the Western allied forces’ war againstterrorists in Afghanistan was fiercely raging, the United State’s Presidents George Bush Jnr and his successor, Barack Obama, visited the American forces in that country as a demonstration of courage in leadership and as a morale booster to the American troops. And at home in America, they also visited the parents and families of some of those troops who lost their lives in battle. But in the case of Nigeria, such was considered a taboo by the national lotus eaters who are greedily feeding fat at the corridor of power. Rather than doing same here in Nigeria to show care and sympathy, it was you (parents) who were tacitly coerced into paying a visit to Mr. President in his Abuja Presidential palace called ‘Aso Rock’.

    When a country is globally known for these types of insensitivity and injustice with impunity anything including an emergence of the likes of Boko Haram insurgency could be the outcome. That is where the Qur’anic verse quoted at the opening of this article becomes very relevant. Thus the unfortunate case of your daughters’ plight seems to be one of the results of injustice perpetrated in the land by some demagogues who never thought of its consequences.

    Meanwhile, having waited for over eight months for the return of your daughters without hope, some of you (parents) might have given up by accepting your fate and by considering your plight as your own sacrifice to a nation in which you have totally lost trust. But there is nothing too difficult for Allah to achieve. The same God who rescued Prophet Yunus (Jonah) from the belly of a whale after several months can still rescue your daughters miraculously from the satanic enclave of Boko Haram. And we pray that He does so in no distant future. Allah never sleeps nor slumbers and He is ever mindful of any sincere prayer offered to Him. By the grace of Allah, your daughters shall be out of that evil gulag to the disappointment of those who are directly or indirectly linked to that calamity. Just continue to believe that in all these “THERE IS GOD OOOOO!”

  • Yakasai: it’s risky for Jonathan to visit Chibok

    Yakasai: it’s risky for Jonathan to visit Chibok

    An elder statesman and chieftain of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, at the weekend, defended President Goodluck Jonathan for not visiting Chibok after over 200 school girls were abducted by insurgents.

    Yakasai argued that it was too risky for Jonathan to visit the town at the time because of insecurity.

    The abduction led to uproar worldwide with civil right groups and international community calling on the Federal Government to rescue the girls from their abductors.

    Despite the call, Jonathan refused to visit the school where the girls were kidnapped, leading to criticism of his administration.

    But Yakasai, in a popular FRCN Radio Hausa Programme: “Hannu da Yawa,” monitored in Kaduna, said soldiers were the right people to be sent to the town and not the President.

    He said: “Why I think the President’s decision not to visit the area is not bad, it’s because we were all aware of  the deteriorated level of insecurity in that part of the country.

    “We all know it’s too risky for the President to visit Chibok at that time. The President is not a soldier; soldiers are the people that should be sent there.

    “If I was the President and such an incident occur, the right thing for me to do was to send soldiers. And to be frank, our soldiers are doing their best. We are hearing on radio and reading in newspapers how soldiers were being killed, and yet they are doing their best.

    “I don’t know what is happening, the Minister of Defence, Ali Gusau, is a northerner and so also  the National Security Adviser, Inspector General of Police and Chief of Defence Staff.

    “If all these people couldn’t address the problem, how could it be easy for the President to do it?

    “Don’t forget the suicide bombers are now experts. So, what will happen if they ambush the President and something bad happens to him? Do you think his people will accept that? Except if people want the country to return to Niger Delta militants’ era,” he said.

    On the issue of Boko Haram, Yakasai said to end the crisis, serious measures must be taken.

    His words: “Could you imagine today we are talking of female suicide bombers when we all know in history that females are known to be shy and peace-loving. But today, a girl of age 13 was caught with bombs  and some others had detonated their bombs, which killed many people in Kano.”

  • Chibok: Xmas 2014

    hristmas 2013: The Chibok girls, probably poor but happy, celebrated with their proud parents.  If anyone had told the doting parents that one year hence, their girls would be nowhere to be found, they would have dismissed such a thought.  That is the way of humans.

    Christmas 2013: The gods of Aso Rock were eating chicken and turkey and washing them down with choice champagne.  They ate with the double assurance of people given jobs and are doing them — in any case, would do them anytime they were called upon to do so.  They ate and made merry — and why not?

    Christmas 2014: At Chibok, do they even know it is Christmas?  Even if they do, and there is indeed some merriment to mark the occasion, would it not be just the oppressive memories of the last year — when there was laughter in the house, the girls were happy, the parents were loving.  Even the harmattan, dry and biting cold, could not break the glow of parental love and filial joy. Not so, this year: the joy is gone and the hearth is dog-nose cold!   It is the way of despondent and subdued humans.

    Christmas 2014: In Aso Rock, the air of merriment tarries: clinking of glasses, downing of wine, strutting on the dance floor, wolfing down choice victuals, all the works!  Yet, the gods that feast so much, and so unceasingly, have not done what the state feasts them for!  Ah, how blessed is the way of the gods!

    When the Chibok girls crowed Merry Christmas and bawled Happy New Year in 2013, they verily believed — and why not, or aren’t the gods billeted in Aso Rock? — that they were safe and well protected; and that no harm could come to them.  Theirs, however, has been a painful illusion.  When it mattered, the gods failed them.

    But were the gods sorry for this grand failure?  Hardly!  Boko Haram, murderous Islamist kidnappers and murderers, have captured the girls, all 276 of them, though 57 managed to escape, leaving 219 — and so what?  Must that stop the gods in their celestial revelry?

    It was unfortunate; and if Doyin Okupe is to be quoted, it is a pain we must learn to bear.  But should that stop the state from functioning, the government from running, the president from running for election, his camp from campaigning?  Indeed, should it?

    Of course, not!  Who can change the grim decree of the gods — mere mortals?

    Still, as they wine and dine this Christmas at the Abuja seat of power, they must realise that citizens, lost girls, the future flower of our nation and their distraught parents, law-abiding citizens, are in deep mourning.  It is double jeopardy, melancholy at Christmas.  Melancholy is bad enough, any time.  But when it blights Christmas, that season of joy and goodwill, then it is something very devastating.  Yet, that is the state at Chibok.

    So, compatriots, as you enjoy your Christmas, just spare a thought for both victims and the failed gods.  For the victims, pray for the girls’ eventual return, safe and sound.  That grieving parent could be you and the missing girl, your daughter.

    But the failed gods?  Declare: never!  Never again, a band of purposeless and incompetent people, as our leaders!

    That is Hardball’s exhortation this happy season.  Merry Christmas — and a complete sack of failed gods in the New Year!

  • The truth, nothing but the truth

    The truth, nothing but the truth

    If there is any currency that is in short supply in the governance of our country at the moment, it is truth and invariably, trust. Trust that is founded on truth is what ordinary citizens can repose in their government and leaders. The questions therefore are: Why did our government deliberately mislead the entire country and the whole world with that cheery but phantom news of ceasefire and the release of our Chibok Girls? And since then, have their parents who once again were let down, been contacted and offered emotional counselling as a number of them had been hospitalized for hypertension? Does the government realize the extent of the embarrassment that Nigerians now feel before the whole world and what damage they have done to their already eroded social capital? What point was the presidential campaign aide, lavishly reported in the media, making by audaciously telling Nigerians to “move on” because “the President would not wait endlessly for the return of more than 200 school girls abducted mid-April in Chibok?” Move on?

    Hopefully, this campaign team will get to learn that many around the world are not moving on from the travails of the Chibok girls whose only “crime” was that they turned up in school to acquire education. While I do not believe that the president, as a father himself, would ever want to “move on” until he discharges his obligation to our #ChibokGirls, one considers the current jarring silence about their rescue not one bit golden. Citizens’ right to know should compel a speedy and truthful update on the status of efforts to rescue our girls.

    However, there are other pertinent questions: What is really going on in Mubi, Gombe, Potiskum, Yola and all our territories in the North-east? What went wrong with the intelligence arm of our security architecture? Since truth begets truth, our federal government needs to know that more citizens are today traumatized by the daily killings and maiming as well as the abductions of our people and the annexation by the insurgents of some of our national territorial space.

    We are puzzled by the many things which do not add up in our country today and we demand for the TRUTH regarding our counter insurgency strategy. On the loss of territories, a recent analysis puts the land area under Boko Haram control as equivalent to the size of three of our 36 states. How can that be? What exactly is being done to reclaim those territories beyond assurances? On the bombing that killed over 40 school children on the spot and rendered several others injured, what exactly are the authorities doing beyond empty lamentations that go on in parri passu with political jamboree?

    It is indeed noteworthy that Nigerians now lament the elite and governance failures that have robbed our nation of the glory days of our relatively strong military and superb intelligence capabilities. Yet it is only systemic corruption that could render an institution prostrate and unwittingly empower a band of renegades to become some sort of “Goliath army” that now daily terrorizes us in our own land. That also explains the perennial failure of government to deliver basic services to the larger number.

    There is no sobering symbol of this failure than the governance crisis that has reduced Nigeria to a country which cannot at this time safeguard the future of her children who risk being killed whenever they turn up in school within the North-east zone. I recall that between 2006 and 2007, available data revealed how far behind the rest of Nigeria the North-east was on school enrolment, transition and completion; and so we designed and implemented a number of common sense policies and funding interventions to help improve their performance.

    Even at that time, the situation was more terrible for girls. Using our inclusion, gender and equity pillar, we pointed out to parents and their school age children the evidence they could easily relate to around them which reveal the tremendous social and economic mobility that access to education has offered people all over the world. Throughout history, education has been, and remains even now, the best form of equality of opportunity that every society can offer its citizens. Therefore, removing obstacles in the way of those thirsty for knowledge is easily the most important role of government in equalizing opportunity.

    If a country really wishes to close all gaps that manifest in inequalities among different groups and segments, it places education at the centre of development. Unfortunately, when our children show up in schools in Borno, Yobe, Adamawa and now Gombe states to obtain knowledge, they face the risk of being killed, injured or abducted. Have members of our political elite of all hues and colour given sufficient thoughts to the fact that our failure to secure our children amounts to asking them to either forget about education or surrender themselves to be killed or abducted?  We need an answer for this question and the Truth, nothing but the Truth.

    In February, insurgents struck at the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi and killed 59 school boys; nothing happened. Two months later, perhaps seeing how unconcerned our power elite were about their fellow citizens; the insurgents scaled up their operation by abducting 276 girls from their secondary school in Chibok, Borno State. That number is almost five times the number of boys they had earlier killed without consequence in Buni Yadi and although 57 of the girls managed to courageously escape, there are still 219 Chibok girls yet to be accounted for.

    However, the Chibok Girls abduction became a major turning point. This time around, some of our citizens decided that “enough is enough” and that they would act together to compel those with the constitutional responsibility to act on behalf of the girls in distress to do so. Nearly 200 days after, we continue to hold our daily solidarity gatherings at the Unity Fountain. That the assemblage is made up of people from all walks of life, ethnicity, religion; political, economic and social divide is very telling of citizens’ resolve.  Today, these Nigerians are eager to unravel the truth behind the failures that have cost us several thousands of lives only in 2014 alone and that keep our ChibokGirls still captive.

    In February this year, I put the issues clearly before the members of our political class and what I said back then still resonates today: “Terrorists became emboldened by the absence of our political class across the entire spectrum of political leadership who decided to “play their normal politics” with the blood of the poor. The blood soaked land is convulsing…Is it therefore not unconscionable that in the over nearly three years of rising trend of terrorist attacks against whole communities in the central and north eastern states of Nigeria where our kith and kin have regularly been slaughtered in cold blood; the milk of empathy has not yet flowed from our Elders in the Land in the entire political spectrum to suspend ‘transactional politicking’ and build a united front against this newest common enemy?”

    Like James Garfield once said, “the truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable”. For those who ask about what we demand as we stand daily for our 219 daughters, the answer is simple: The Truth, nothing but the Truth! #BringBackOurGirlsNowAndAlive! The Offices of the Citizens are now activated.

     

    • Ezekwesili, former Minister of Education belongs to the BBOG, standing for the Chibok girls

  • ‘Our Girls’;  Chibok retaken?; ‘You Do Not Know Me’: Promote your talents

    ‘Our Girls’;  Chibok retaken?; ‘You Do Not Know Me’: Promote your talents

    Our Girls are still missing since April. And Chibok, the home of many of their anguished parents, is under attack, capture and recapture. The Boko Haram War is a war and not a skirmish and it must be won in Nigeria’s favour with humane handling of refugees and victims. The frequently used retreat to Sambisa and other forests must be cut off to prevent this back and forth battle. I am always amazed at how little I really know about those around me and how little they know about me. We all begin at the starting line of life as children offered opportunities to learn. There we imbibe and interact with the influences that will develop some talents and skills and drop others. We hone the chosen ones into professional skills. Imagine we all start with 10 equal skills. Over time some are suppressed and others are developed. An easy example is singing. Almost everyone except me can sing and sing well. I was excused from my St Gregory’s College entire school choir in 1964. Most of you readers have good voices but you only sing in the shower. That talent, the voice, is one of the most suppressed. These suppressed talents may manifest in hobbies. I am sure you can add your own particular expertise that we know little about.

    Open the box and unleash those skills for pleasure and for lowering your blood pressure. Yes, you may make some money from talents. Talents may decay or remain in the drawer or cupboard only to be discovered and discarded when you are gone. Then they will just be thrown away along with other things you hold dear. Many products of such talents have been burnt in the garden fires to make space for tomorrow.

    I will give you my own example, not as a boast, but as a template to use to do better. ‘You do not know me!’ You think you know me. You judge me based on this column and hearsay. I also judge you, with incomplete information. It is what humans do with their tiny brains. They see, hear judge and jump to damning conclusions. The tongue is the worst weapon on earth as it starts wars requiring more tongues to end the war. The human feels the urgent need to be an authority and to be judgemental without the responsibility of logic. The human jumps to conclusions based on the incomplete world of the ‘here and now and the yesterday’. For the human the ‘I’s have it every time. ‘I am, I was, I think, I know’.

    My template: Over many years I have been favoured with a cherished medical practice which has offered me a wonderful and sometimes stressful opportunity to participate in the lives of many others. In between patients, I have put down ideas as stories in several books for all ages covering poetry, novels and short stories. It has been difficult getting published and once published getting sold has been a nightmare as most publishers seem to have an anti-social policy of non-promotion of writers and another criminal policy of not paying accurate royalties which stand at just 10% of the book cover price. The writer usually writes to be read. The unread writer is dead. To overcome a country lacking a powerful book reading culture, I have been forced under the name ‘You Do Not Know Me’ to put together programme to challenge us all to deliver our talents and hobbies to the wider world.

    I have put together a Children’s Matinee at the Chamber of Commerce on Saturday November 22, at 12noon. This is followed the same day by a short film and sketches performed by professionals based on my writings for presentation at 6pm at the Chamber of Commerce, Victoria Island on Saturday November 22. You are invited.

    In addition I always have a camera when I travel particularly on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and I keep it near me at work. I have taken over 10,000 photographs of situations, flora and fauna. I have shown some to friends to break the boredom of doing nothing mentally challenging or constructive for hours at parties. Rather than go quietly into the night, I decided to show them at a photo exhibition. I selected 70 photographs from my collection and ‘doctored’ them on the computer for a PhotoArt Exhibition at Didi Museum in Victoria Island, Lagos closing tomorrow Thursday November 19, at 6pm. You are invited.

    The message above is not really about whether you come to my shows. It is to irritate you enough to outdo what I have done under the name ‘You Do Not Know Me’. Start your self-examination, re-examine, and reinvent yourself as someone arising from your hobbies. Do not allow your talents and hobbies to remain in a drawer of cupboard. Impress your children, your office colleagues with any of a hundred other talents. Others do it. When we attend international conferences, there is an evening for all the professionals to showcase talents. It is fun to see a distinguished professor of surgery or philosophy or economics sing, recite poetry, juggle plates or play the trumpet. Nigerians spend so much time at parties it makes sense for party organisers to include an open microphone segment for guests to show their talents. Having such outlets is of personal psychological value and promotes self-esteem and may be of financial value.

     

  • Hunters ahoy!

    Were Hardball to be nasty and maybe a tad mischievous, he would wink that the military’s loudly-announced recapture of Chibok (Chibok, of the captured school girls, the nemesis of the Jonathan presidency!) was the government’s answer to local hunters’ reported liberation of Mubi and Maiha, two besieged towns in Adamawa.

    So, what local hunters can do, the military can do better, right?

    No, that is no joke. And it is certainly, no flippancy, because the security of a country is serious business.

    It is just a grave pointer to the precarious state of the Nigerian state, when basic security is the issue.

    But to fully understand the matter, it is back to the very beginning of the state: the Social Contract.

    By the Social Contract, the people in their sense of self-preservation, ceded some of their rights to a central Leviathan (read government) which, in exchange, would secure them; and take them out of Hobbes’s state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish and short.

    In essence, therefore, the basis of any state, let alone of the modern state with all its panoply and sophistication, is security.  So, any state that cannot secure any part of its territory is no state; or, if you prefer the tragic process, is a failing state.

    So, some parts of Nigeria, particularly the Northeast, where Boko Haram captures even garrisoned towns at whim, is technically close to a failing state. That was the illogic that, in the first instance, threw up the brave local farmers who, perhaps fed up with the paralysed state of things, decided to call the Islamists’ bluff.

    Still, even with its short-term glory and romanticism, hunters coming to the rescue of a state with a standing army is long-term bad news.  Boko Haram is today’s enemy, which must be defeated by all means.  But watch it: today’s patriotic hunters could be tomorrow’s hated guild of insurrection, thrown up to challenge the might of the state.

    How did Boko Haram and even the Niger Delta insurgents emerge?  Boko Haram cadres were convenient tools, for politicians to crush local opponents, just as the Niger Delta insurgents were armed goons to muscle opponents, maim and kill for their political masters and help to fiddle the vote.

    But then came a crisis of unmet promises and expectations, which made an armed band, not disarmed after elections, resort to violent self-help!  Welcome, the pristine Boko Haram!  Welcome, Niger Delta militants!   Goodbye, peace and security in Nigeria!

    But, if local farmers were to come to a tragic epiphany: that there is no mystique behind the standing army of the state, any more than ordinary hunters vanquishing Boko Haram where the army could not?

    What if, they think, in Fela-speak: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am?  What, after all the noise of war, these hunting braves are flush with a me-too syndrome, and decide to create their own security nuisance? Scary, uh?

    The emergence of the hunters just shows how parlous Nigeria’s security has become.  So, the distracted Jonathan Presidency had better handle the matter with tact and extreme introspection.

    Else, Boko Haram’s nemesis today may well be the fundament of tomorrow’s fresh security meltdown.

     

  • Troops recapture Chibok, says DHQ

    Barely 48 hours after the seizure of Chibok, the Defence Headquarters on Sunday said the town has been recaptured by troops from the insurgents.
    It also claimed the troops were also pursuing fleeing and wounded terrorists.
    The DHQ made the clarification in a terse statement on its website against the backdrop of the counter-insurgency measure put in place at the weekend in Chibok by the military.
    The statement said: “Terrorists who attacked Chibok town early yesterday have been effectively flushed out. Subsequent mopping up is still ongoing
    “Troops continue pursuit of fleeing terrorists and arrest of the wounded. Normalcy is restored. Chibok is secured.”

  • Chibok under Boko Haram state of emergency, not FG’s, says community

    Chibok under Boko Haram state of emergency, not FG’s, says community

    Members of the Chibok community have said with the turn of event, their community and the whole of Borno State have been placed under a state of emergency by the Boko Haram sect and not the federal government.

    They said that they do not see how the federal government can claim to be in control of the state and have it under a state of emergency when the insurgents continue to prove to the people that they are more powerful than the federal government.

    According to an elder from Chibok, Ayuba Alamson, the community is tired of believing in the government and have handed their situation to God because He alone can deliver them from all their pains and suffering.

    He stated this yesterday, in a telephone conversation with The Nation, where he said that only God can save them since the president that promised to protect them when they visited him has failed in his promise.

    According to him, “If they can capture this amount of communities in Borno State that is under the state of emergency, they are simply telling us that they are more powerful than the federal governmentý.

    “As long as we can see, it is Boko Haram and not the federal government that have placed us on a state of emergency right now which is quite unfortunate.

    “With the look of things right now, we can now only depend on God and ask him to come and deliver us, that is all I can sayý, for long, we had been crying and asking the government for protection but they have been unable to do anything. We are completely frustrated, we have been neglected for long and I pray God, the owner of life will do something because with him all things are possible, that is our only hope now.

    “We are now leaving our faith to God because we are tired of complaining to a government that ignores our cries.”

    He also said, “Ever since the kidnap of our daughters, we have been living in fear, after the event many of us migrated to Maiduguri, Mubi and other parts around but most of our people returned back to Chibok after Mubi fell since at that time Chibok was relatively safe.

    “Some tried to return to their normal life of farming and some people have even begun harvesting their hard worký but now, Boko Haram returned and everybody fled into bushes and caves, some might have died in the process, some may be haunted by wild animals, some might die of hypertension.”

     

     

     

    “Now all of us from Chibok are frustrated, Boko Haram had already kidnapped our girls for long and have killed some, we expected the government to give us the protection it promised us when we visited Mr. President but now they have allowed Boko Haram to come back and capture the whole area.”

  • Boko Haram attack Chibok again, casualty uncertain

    Boko Haram attack Chibok again, casualty uncertain

    The grief in  Chibok community over the abduction of over 200 girls since April  was on Friday compounded with yet another reported attack by the suspected Boko Haram terrorists.

    The insurgents were believed to have been fleeing from Mubi and Maiha after being displaced  by the combined fire power  of local hunters and the Nigerian Army.

    It is not clear how many people are affected from the latest attack but reports indicate that many residents have run out of the town for fear being attacked.

    Mr. Apogu Afaramai, one of the residents who escaped to the bush narrated how he took to his heels as the insurgents stormed the town at about 10.00pm Thursday  night. He was however not sure of the casualties.

    “As I am speaking to you now I am in the bush moving towards Biu town. Though I don’t know whether they killed anybody or not because when we heard gunshot we just fled the area and there was no network service,” he narrated.

    Another resident who identified himself as Suleiman disclosed that the insurgents arrived the town and started shooting sporadically to scare of everyone in the city who were about to sleep.

    ” We were about sleeping when we started hearing sound of ceaseless gunshots and shouts of Allah is great in Arabic. The shooting was so intense. I cant even explain how I escaped from that village.”

    The  Senator representing the area, Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume confirmed the latest  incident to newsmen but was equally not sure of the number of casualties.

    “Yes I was told that Boko Haram terrorists attacked Chibok town but I cannot tell whether there is casualty or not, as we are yet to receive call from those in Chibok since the insurgents have burnt down the telecom- masts in the town,” Sen. Ndume said.