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Tag: darkness

  • We won’t fade into darkness

    Shock was the first feeling I had when I read ‘Abundance of Yellow Paper’ the story from which JT Benson’s collection of short stories ‘We won’t fade into darkness’ got its title. I only began reading the book from the beginning after reading the last story. I have not read anything like it before. The story was my introduction to speculative fiction. The closest I have been to speculative fiction is magical realism.

    Unlike anything I had read, almost everything in the collection is set in the future. The creative imaginations in this book, with thirteen stories, tell us about an unusual abusive father, a world where males are going extinct and drastic methods are employed to ensure continuity of the Nigerian race.

    Things fall Apart becomes a banned book in a Nigeria where the colonial masters never left and we get introduced to Nigerium, a gaseous element which poisons air, destroys reproductive organs and makes people insane. You need to read ‘I Can’t Breathe’ to get this timely warning on how we treat our environment.

    Environmental pollution, technology, futurism and extinction are the major themes in this collection, which predicts what Nigeria will likely become. It is a scary take on our likely tomorrow.

    In ‘Jidenna’, men are forced to impregnate women who are expected to give birth only to boys. Girls are killed when born because there are too many women in the land.

    To enjoy this book, you need to reset your brain; forget old rules and be open to new boundaries. Only then can you appreciate the art in this book and only then can you give TJ Benson his due! Let me also mention that the language is also good.

     

  • Paying for darkness

    Sir: We, the residents of Ukwu-Oji Quarters in Ogwashi-Ukwu Town in Delta State are appealing to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission and the Consumer Protection Council to come to our aid because we hardly get electricity supply yet the Benin Electricity Distribution Company keeps bringing estimated bills of power supply that we did not consume and expecting us to pay for them. We have brought to their attention severally that the transformer that powers the area is faulty as it always explodes every time they supply electricity. We have cause to believe that the transformer is overloaded because it is an old transformer that was carrying a few houses before new houses started springing up in the area.  We suggested that BEDC gets additional transformer for the area but all appeals fell on deaf ears.

    We are appealing that you intervene because we cannot continue paying for estimated bills for power supply not consumed. We are writing to notify you of these otherwise we would have mobilized the youths to protest against this wickedness. We cannot continue paying for darkness.

     

    • Feyisetan Akeeb Kareem,

    Ogwashi-Ukwu, Aniocha South, Delta State.

  • Ibadan: Darkness has enveloped our world

    Ibadan: Darkness has enveloped our world

    I have lived virtually all my life in Ibadan and Lagos and whatever affects these two cities affects me. I remember when Ibadan was preferred over Lagos because of its space, serenity and virtual absence of anti-social activities that tended to mar the social life of Lagos. Ibadan was the capital of the Western Region which in all respects operated as an autonomous, if not outrightly independent country with its own coat of arms, constitution and external diplomatic representation in form of Agent-General in London up to the year of independence in 1960. Lagos at that time was the federal capital which the Action Group party, the party in government in the West, claimed was part of Western Region but which the federal government asserted was separate. The Yorubas of Lagos because of politics and federal money and the crumbs from the federal masters’ dining table sang the song of Lagos separateness. Since then, Lagos has always had identity crisis of whether it wants to be regarded along with the rest of Yorubaland as one and indivisible whole or as a separate entity. The debate is now academic because the old song of the Action Group “Lagos belongs to that West, Lagos belong to the West, awon oponu alai lero won ni gedegbe Leko wa; Lagos belongs to the West” has become a reality. Never mind the rear-guard sentiments of my friend the Oba of Lagos that Lagos is not part of Yorubaland because Lagos royalty traces its origin to Benin. First of all, the origin of a dynasty is not the same is that of the people. English people are not Germans even though their present dynasty comes from Hanover in Germany. The Bini people are not Yoruba in spite of their dynasty coming from Ile Ife. Furthermore, the Bini royal influence in Lagos is a reflection of the Ife- Bini relations. The territorial extent of the obas of Lagos on the Island was hemmed in by the pre-existing Awori kingdoms all around the same territory occupied by the Oba of Lagos. Permit my digression.

    Now to Ibadan.

    I have no comment on the tussle between the Olubadan and his son, the governor of Oyo State, Abiola Ajimobi. In any case the case is in court so it is sub judice. I want to applaud the tremendous efforts of the governor to improve the road infrastructure of the city and the state as a whole even though there is much to be done. There is no doubt that the governor would have done better if he has had the kind of resources available to other much better endowed states. On this point, I blame the Oyo administration for not increasing its internally generated revenues. The population base of the state is very large with cities like Ibadan, Ogbomosho, Oyo, Iseyin and many of the towns in Oke Ogun. Population is a critical factor of power of any state and if well mobilized can be decisive in its economic development. With fair and equitable taxation covering the whole state, Oyo State should be able to generate enough funds to run the state on modern lines. The state can borrow a leaf from Lagos State and begin to levy land use charge from a range of N100,000  to N5000 annually. People will naturally grumble but when they see what their money is being used for, they would calm down. This levy can be restricted to the towns and commercial and industrial houses as well as educational institutions to begin with. Later it can be extended to cover the entire state so that the people can be made to own their government. The present situation in which money comes from Abuja is not good for citizenship development and is largely responsible for leadership corruption all over the country.

    Sometimes last week, I went out at 6 pm in the evening and returned at 8 pm driving from Molete to Bodija. I normally don’t go out after 6 pm. I was shocked by the fact that there was not a single street light along the roads. I was told this is the same all over Ibadan. It was very depressing and distressing. It was as if one were back to the 19th century. I discussed this with a few friends and I was told that why would there be light on the streets when there is no light in people’s homes. Well, there is a point in that argument. But lighting the streets is a security strategy apart from being a matter of aesthetics.  It is also not divine in both Christianity and Islam to live in darkness. God said we should let our light so shine so that people may glorify our father in heaven. The first statement of God at creation is let there be light. It is not good enough for a city of five million people to be in pitch darkness in the 21st century. A city that used to pride its institutions as “first in Africa” should not be in darkness. Are we now first in Africa in going about like blind men in total darkness in peace time?

    We must have street lights in Ibadan. How can Yorubas watch the biggest town in Yorubaland descend to this abyss of underdevelopment? This is not just acceptable. The governor of Oyo State should send somebody to China or contact our embassy there to visit the best solar energy company with good and demonstrated record of having successfully lit up cities in China and other parts of the world with solar power and invite such a company to come and visit Ibadan with the purpose of picking up a contract to light up Ibadan. China happens to be the leading country in this regard. We should bypass the local companies who have serially failed in executing solar energy contracts in Lagos and other cities and institutions all over Nigeria. This present gloomy darkness in Ibadan must be removed. When successfully tackled, the campaign must move to Oyo and Ogbomosho. Electric lighting of urban Nigeria is not only a matter of beautification and necessity, but a matter of security and safety.

    If all our universities ‘ streets and those of other institutions of higher education and even those of secondary schools were lit, the incidence of cultism and kidnapping will be greatly reduced. The Yorubas say “oru komeni owo” meaning darkness provide cover for all kinds of nefarious activities to be committed. One of the cheapest ways to secure a city is to light it up. This is why modern cities all over the world spend resources on urban lighting. In fact in modern cities,night does not mean darkness any more. Night fall is no hindrance to production and productivity. One of the reasons for our economic backwardness is the lack of electricity which in Nigeria unfortunately manifests in unlit or poorly lit streets. But solar energy, if appropriately deployed, constitutes a relatively cheap solution to this embarrassing urban problem. The Ibadan situation was first highlighted in Bola Ige’ s novel “ The Kaduna boy “ in which he reflected on the lack of streets light in Ibadan in contrast to Kaduna where he grew up in the 1930s. That’s almost 80 years ago. His grand children should not be afflicted with the same problem in 2018. It is my hope that Abiola Ajimobi will crown his efforts as not only a builder of roads and institutions but also as the governor who lit up Ibadan and brought the city to the 21st century.

  • Heart of darkness

    Heart of darkness

    When I visited Bayelsa State recently, the sense of home hit me as an original of the Niger Delta. As I traversed lands, saw creeks and peeped through forest barks, I sank into a state of nostalgia. The term “my land,” the word “legitimacy,” the phrase “resource control” and the epithet “state rights” all percolated me like water through the sieves of the heart.

    My feeling deepened when I witnessed the ground breaking of a refinery, the first of such in the state and that region in a generation. Whole swaths of swamp land were being translated, by cash, technology and human brawn, into a manufacturer’s hub of refined oil and power.

    As I entered the premises, I recalled what my late father told me many years ago. ‘’Oti,” that was how he addressed me, “the last time I went to where I was born, I pointed to it from hard ground. It is now water. Thanks to government greed, neglect and bigger thanks to the destruction by the oil companies.” His face was a network of furrows and his lip at its verbal tether. No more to say.

    The dozy village on the outskirts of Yenagoa drew some of the mainstays of the oil industry, including former president Olusegun Obasanjo. The Owu chief’s soulful dance on stage was an eerie reminder of his famous former dance. The stellar percussions came from an internationally acclaimed child band from Akwa Ibom. This time, thankfully, no letter of explosive proportion was unleased from his undercroft of rage. For that region, rage is no stranger. For irony, Baba’s dance in Bayelsa lacked the militant gyrations that preceded his epistolary umbrage to the president.

    But the speech that stirred the crowd came from the chief host, Governor Seriake Dickson. The walking stick twirling, heft of a figure, was for a space of 30 minutes, looking more like a spokesman for the Niger Delta, a tongue for oil for oil producers, for resource control, for legitimacy. He spoke not with the register of the creeks but indignant polish. But both creek renegades and city conformists cheered.

    No one could deny he said the truth when he thanked the President for granting the CEO of Azikel Group, Eruani Godbless, for installing the refinery. No one can deny, too, his truth when he questioned why licences were being given to install refineries “thousands of miles away” from where it is located. He lamented oil blocks given to persons who did not live there, feel the people’s entrails, thumb the pulse of their poverty, deprivation and dreams.

    No one could boo when he said oil majors were drawing wealth from beneath their earths but enjoying them in far-flung areas, in lavish life style while those who owned it only sniffed it, saw it, cringed at its environmental carnage, diseases and privations. In a similar interview with Governor Ifeanyi Okowa for my television show on TVC running on Saturday morning, the Delta State governor spoke on the decline of Warri and how the big companies, including Shell and Agip have packed up to Lagos and other safe havens. They only come to the place to tap oil and leave, their taxes are almost pittances. Agip, for instance, does half its business in Bayelsa but has no significant office there. This is selfish, cynical primitivity in the 21st century.

    The oil majors are a leech on us. As a native, I weep for Nigeria, and condemn all governments that we have had for treating the people as lost causes while they lust like carnivores for our inheritance.

    Said Dickson: “I do not know the business case that justifies the construction of expensive wells, expensive pipelines, crisscrossing rivers, creeks, rivulets and oceans from Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta, Edo, Ondo and Akwa Ibom down to several areas. I know but I don’t want to mention names. I am told that there are refineries being conceived and being built in Niger Republic.” Imagine: from Niger Delta to Niger Republic. Not a republican conscience, that move!

    This is the story of legitimacy. As Dickson noted, it is not about exclusive ownership of the oil resources. Others must be welcome to enjoy the wealth anywhere in a federating unit. But the locals must get the pride of place. This is not the case when the majority of the valued workers in the oil firms are not from the Niger Delta. They make them welders, cleaners, labourers, an act of contemptuous tokenism.

    Oil blocks go to those who have never moulded a block in the region. They see the Niger Delta like what the Jamaican writer John Hearne describes in his famous short story, Lost Country. Niger Delta is the lost country, where those who go and lust for gold but not the people’s good. It is where people go and never survive except those who control labour.

    Oil blocks put the region on the chopping block.

    If the advocates of the herdsmen’s rights to ancestral routes want to make their case, they should realise, as the Bayelsa State governor says, that “what you call an oil block is a piece of our ancestral property carved out by surveyors that you are giving away at our expense.”

    Dickson marked his six years in office showcasing some of his doings like the revolutionary Ijaw Academy, the diagnostic centre, boarding schools, roads and bridges, sprawling fish farms, all need resources to raise his people from the backwaters. They need to use their resources while they have them.

    Niger Delta is now Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Mr. Kurtz is the white man who represents the western, white interlopers, just like the herdsmen of rapine. The oil majors and their official collaborators come for the resources, while the inhabitants are dismissed as howling, dirty, ugly savages who should work for their leases and pleasure. I saw this when I visited the Niger Delta as a reporter for the African Concord, before insurgency blasted the nation. Gulf Oil, now Chevron in Arunton, was like a western suburb with electricity, pipe-borne water, television and other luxuries. The village beside them belonged to the middle ages, racked to a rump from exploitation. The youth had no jobs. The girls were whores for the white man. I wept, as I had to pass the night in a hut.

    The story of the 21st century has been about bread and blood. Those who do not belong to my blood line should not have bread. That is the savage reality of our century, and it has thrown up Trump in the United States and herdsmen in Nigeria. Both are savages who exaggerate human divisions instead of addressing fair play and justice.

  • Kaduna Darkness Distribution Company?

    SIR: Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company has virtually become a darkness distribution company. It is now darkness all the way both at home and the office. Any visitor to Turaki Ali House, where my office is located, would marvel at the number of generators littering the premises. KEDC power supply is now on stand-by instead of the other way round. Most times, their light will not blink at all throughout the day. Meanwhile, payment for light is built into the service charge which tenants must pay. As for my home, I am happy I have prepaid meter which means I pay for light as I use.

    It is not surprising that the distribution companies are reluctant to give customers prepaid meters. They gain from estimated billings for darkness supplied. NERC has failed in its responsibility of ensuring that prepaid meters are installed for customers. We appear to have reached the stage of every man to himself in so far as power issue is concerned.

    How long can we continue like this? From the way things are now, is it not necessary to revisit the entire sale of the power sector? Is the excuse of the minister of power that reviewing the process will discourage other investors still a tenable one?

    Have we really had any genuine investor since the sale of federal government assets began? I think not, going by various inquiries and reports showing that instead of investing, buyers of privatized assets rather strip or cannibalize same. We deserve better than what we are being fed by the buyers of the various power assets who are not ready or able to invest in order to grow the sector. We need freedom from their bondage. The federal government should act now.

     

    • Bapakaye I. Dibi, Esq.,

    Port Harcourt.

  • NPFL: pitch darkness

    It’s one of those days that Hardball is hobbled by headline. For a long moment, even hours, you just cannot put a handle on your title. Sometimes every bit of the piece may have taken their natural sequence and fallen into place but you still do not have a suitable head. Imagine having a headless body in your hands!

    But what you see above (NPFL: pitch dark) happens to be a passable alternative after toying with about half a dozen others. Of course NPFL stands for Nigeria Professional Football League; meaning top football as we know it in Nigeria today. Though there are other lower rung leagues, they may be said to be inconsequential compared to the NPFL which is the equivalent of the English Professional Football League, EPL.

    Now, the above title has been triggered by the recent retrogression of the Nigeria’s premier football league since the beginning of the current season. The local football managed by the League Management Company, LMC, has actually seen some modest improvement with the coming of the LMC in the last five years or so. But the modest gains are now being eroded gradually.

    For instance, since the beginning of the current season (which seems interminable and winding), football matches have disappeared from television as Supersports (the South African cable network) which aired it suddenly stopped. And there is no official reason till date. Why our boastful Nigeria Television Authority, NTA (Africa’s largest network) cannot air at least some local league matches, must be a technical mystery.

    But the story is that while many African countries’ premier league are viewed live across the continent, Nigeria, the giant of Africa can be said to be playing football in the dark. This explains the title above, “Pitch dark”. NPFL must be among the very few major national leagues in the entire world today not aired on television; if not live, at least recorded. It’s so, so primitive.

    The straight analogy is playing football in the dark. And the dark result is that the league is fast becoming comical, if not farcical in which teams commit criminality on home turfs in the bid to win at all cost.

    Here is a sad checklist: hardly any away victories; referees toy with regulation time; probably more penalties are awarded here than in any other league; abuse of the offside rule and stopping of matches abruptly to stop a goal-bound move. A general criminal abuse of discretion by obviously compromised referees.

    The stench now stinks to the heavens that even LMC officials hold their noses. Some referees were axed recently. But that’s silly solution to say it nicely; let’s stop playing football in the dark. Simple!

  • It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness

    Talk about crying more than the Bereaved!

    That is a Chinese proverb as the title.  And the Americans have just their way ofsaying it: When the Going gets Tough, the Tough get Going.  This saying seems to be intrinsic in the heart of the average Nigerian, because even foreigners here cannot but remark how up and doing we can be in this nation.

    I once read an article in a foreign publication written by a former U.S envoy here.  She had said, among other things that there is no social security system in Nigeria, and so there, if you don’t fend for yourself, you would die.  Lagos never accepted a Lazy man is a given.

    With the economy not sound, and with the ever swelling army of unemployed youths, we just have to get going in these parts.

    But there is one created job I find really fascinating; it goes by the name of Cry – Die (Pronounced just like the Nigerian Cry-Cry Baby, replace the second Cry with Die!).

    Well, these are professional mourners, hired to cry at funeral ceremonies.  These mourners have been around for a long time, but it is now organized into a sort of cottage industry, end one need not make discreet enquiries any longer for their services.  You simply ask for the Cry-Dies; they have more or less become official; if undocumented, today!

    Largely in northern Cross River, and all around the states, the profession used to be done like a small gender-based industry (for women) – but trust the men to zoom in, and it is now a mixed caste that is regularly available.  What usually happens at many funerals is that the chief mourner and family members, get very busy receiving the Governor, his encourage and any other dignitary, during funerals.  Too busy to cry.  And so the work falls to these cry-dies.  At an instinctively chosen point during proceedings, they commence a moan, then a sustained cry, and then dramatically, they start hitting themselves and jumping while crying, mourning and wailing.  All the while, they would be lamenting the great loss of the ‘loved’ one who just passed away.  For them, the harder their wail, the better the pay…  Talk about crying more than the Bereaved!

    Sometimes though, in an attempt to give value for money, they end up overdoing it all and over-mourning.

    There was this burial where the cry-dies were hired to perform.

    Wailing the mourning, they launched into a howling dirge about the loss of the kind woman.  Who had passed away when people needed her most.And how kind she was.And how painful the loss.  And how much needed she was at this time…

    The organizers (real mourners!)came over to where the cry-dies were clutching themselves and wailing and in an angry whisper they said,  “the person who died that you are mourning is a MAN!!”.

  • IE: Billing darkness as winning strategy

    Have you seen the Okota district head office of Ikeja Electric (IE) on Okota Road, lately?  It reminds you of that old song: “She’s beautiful, she’s lovely, she takes your breath away …!”

    Meeehnnn, IE is totally rebranded out there!  It glows, just as its electricity market is swamped in total darkness!  Simply intimidating!

    Indeed, that intimidation reminds you of good — well, more of bad — old Poke Tolo, the fictional anti-hero of James Hadley Chase’s novel, Want to Stay Alive?  Remember that fella?  That’s right — he who declared he had found the formula, fear, to prise the wallet of the rich!

    Well, as IE Okota is rebranding and preening and is bright and beautiful, its customers are progressively dull and grumpy, wallowing in pit darkness.

    But like the fictive Poke Toholo and his rich-and-the-spoilt victims, the very real life IE has probably patented a fear-driven primer, on how a DISCO (electricity distribution company) can mint a fortune drowning its customers in darkness, while at the same time threatening them with disconnection.

    In the Okota neighbourhood, IE has developed a grim routine. There would be a total blackout for days. Then, as if jerking awake, light would come streaming, for hours on end.

    At luckier seasons, it would be on for a whole day. Or even for a whole night, near uninterrupted, long enough for the refrigerators to buzz and the air conditioners to hum; and for the denizens to remember that alas, they were still residents of some 21st century city, where electricity should be routine; and not some antediluvian jungle, where it was alien.

    By chance or design, however, this “harvest” time always comes, when the all-mighty IE is readying to distribute new bills, bills not based on any metering but on the whims and caprices of its billing merchants.

    But just when the customers were conditioning themselves to their newfound fortune, the disconnecting gang came storming!

    Based on light for a few days, they insist you paid for the darkness all month long — or else!  It is the IE equivalent of the Poke Toholo fear theory!  Meanwhile, after all the excitement, status quo ante-bellum resumed, till another harvest time of rogue electricity and forced payment for darkness!

    The joker for the near-brazen fraud would appear IE’s apparent hesitation to supply most of its customers in the neighbourhood pre-paid electric meters.  More than one year ago, the IE managing director came visiting The Nation.  His pledge was clear: in the next two years, most of its customers would have pre-paid meters, free of charge, except those who didn’t want to await their turn.  Even then, those category of clients would eventually be reimbursed, one way or another.

    For a majority in this neighbourhood, that has not happened.  But wait, why should it?  In Achebe-speak: do you spew out nuts ground for you by benevolent spirits?

    Could IE then be hedging on pre-paid meters, because the pivot of its winning billing-for-darkness strategy depends on its criminally padded billing-by-estimates?

    That sounds too nihilistic to be believed.  Still, Power Minister, Babatunde Fashola, had better warn these smart-alecky DISCOs to play by the rules, before the malevolent spirits of inflamed customers confront their disconnection gangs in the streets!

  • Before darkness falls

    Before darkness falls

    Whatever anyone may say of the events of the past 96 hours as touching the “invasion” or if as some say, midnight “abduction” of judges from their abodes by functionaries of the Department of State Security (DSS), it is apparent that a new but fearsome vista has been opened in Buhari administration’s war on corruption. For while it is not necessarily the case that judges are immune from prosecution any more than their abodes are deemed inviolate by any written code, it was at least given that nothing be done to remove from the aura and prestige that their office confers. Until last Saturday.

    With Saturday’s development, and going by threats by the DSS to bring in more judges for questioning for allegedly violating their judicial oaths in the coming days, that last bastion of orderly society seems not only set to be stripped of its remaining aura and prestige for good, the notion of its famed independence under the rule of law would appear set for a complete redefinition.

    That seven justices – two of who sit on the apex court – were hauled before the DSS on suspicion of corruption with many more said to be on the watch list must represent the lowest point ever for the nation’s judiciary. As if the reports of learned justices stashing troves of cash in multiple currencies in their bedrooms which have inundated the cyberspace days after raid are sufficient proof of guilt, expect no ending to the savaging of the bench as the changers renew the offensive in PMB’s lone war! Where all of these would lead for a nation described as fantastically corrupt is anyone’s guess.

    To be sure, this would not the first time judges would be accused of corruption. The charge of corruption has been in the air as long as anyone would care to remember.  The late Justice of the Supreme Court, Kayode Eso, it was who gave us the phrase “billionaire judges” to describe the cult of perverts in the temple of justice in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. Itse Sagay, law professor and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, would rue several years on that “The number of rogue judges who have completely gone out of line with the rules and ethics of the profession has increased tremendously.” As if today’s soulless, contradictory and oftentimes perverse judgements are not enough proof of the general decadence in the judicial institution, we now have daily occurrences of judges openly hawking ‘justice’ as market women would their wares on the busy highways!  

    However, what happened to the judges went a tad beyond what is conceivable in constitutional environment. It is, as my colleague Kunle Abimbola with whom I share this page is wont to describe, as the Buhari administration’s serial unforced errors –something that can only be explained by the antics of an administration consumed by messianic complex. The problem, it has been said, is the administration’s dangerous assumption that its indignation over perceived infractions should not only override the provisions of our laws and statutes but the very niceties of process that makes the law a beauty to behold.  This is where the ardent supporters of the administration particularly of its anti-corruption war must find it frustrating to see the administration descend from arbitrariness to crude self-help even when the law so clearly set out the rules.

    Understandably, not everyone agrees that the methods are reprehensible. Trust our ever vibrant brigade of netizens to be hyperactive at a time like this. Our neighbor next door, Ghana, we are told, rounded up a group of 34 judges out of which 20 were axed barely a year ago. Again, we are told of the celebrated case in Philadelphia, United States in January 2013 during which nine traffic court judges were arrested in one fell swoop to face charges for crimes bordering on conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, perjury, making false statements to the FBI etc.

    While I do not disagree that the methods were drastic in the two circumstances, the problem as we see all too often is the penchant by our investigating agencies to undermine supposedly good causes with methods that are as sloppy as they are aberrant. Today, if Nigerians appear to be less bothered about the discovery of US$319,475 in the wardrobe of a serving judge than they are of the act of bringing in a judge suspected of breaking the law for questioning, part of the explanation must be found in the security agencies’ tradition of pronouncing conviction before the rigours of a trial!

    To the extent that judges neither enjoy immunity from arrest nor from prosecution, nothing that the DSS did could, strictly speaking, be said to be out of order. As for the other details surrounding the events – such as whether the DSS has a good case to invite the judges for questioning or the question of whether the agency possessed a valid search warrant for the ‘invasion’, or whether it could not have gone ahead in a more civil, less obtrusive manner – those are matters of opinions and conjectures. The point being made here is that process has become everything in a world where transparency rules. It is the reason Nigerians openly voice out their concerns about the methods being adopted in the prosecution of the anti-corruption war particularly the growing disdain for the rules. I guess part of the aversion for the rules would explain why DSS as against the EFCC is leading the onslaught.

    Having said that, we must of course come to the fundamental point of admitting that we have a terrible malignancy in our hands. It is as simple as saying that the Nigerian bench and the bar are both diseased. Between a bar whose leading lights in trading technicalities would rather upend justice for the lucre and a bench where mammon rules, it’s hard to imagine anything more toxic to the society. The tragedy is that the legal practitioners’ body – the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) not only prefers to live in denial, it pretends that things can continue like this.

    “We condemn the raids in the strongest possible terms,” said its President, Abubakar Mahmoud in his reaction to the judges’ arrest.  “We are in a democratic society and we cannot accept a situation where armed, masked SSS operatives invade homes of the justices of the Supreme Court and judges of our high courts… This is a ploy by the executive to intimidate the judiciary and we will not accept it. The NBA will not accept it. I want to emphasise again that we’re not under military rule and we cannot accept this Gestapo style of operations.”

    Well said –I guess.

    If we disregard the fatuous nonsense which deigns to suggest we chase the fox before returning to give the errant chicks a good hiding, the indignation from an NBA that has become, quite frankly an enabler of judicial perversion can only be described as hollow – pure hot gas.

    Let the heavens fall – if it must. But then, let the dwellers of the cathedral know that there can be no such thing as a hiding place for anyone.

  • Erosion throws estate residents into darkness

    Erosion throws estate residents into darkness

    Residents of Shagari Estate, Mosan-Okunola Local Council Development Area, Lagos, have been thrown into darkness as the base of some electric poles in the area have been eroded.

    Investigation by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reveals that the Ikeja Electric Distribution Company (IKEDC) had switched off electric supply to the area to avert impending danger.

    This is because the basement of one of the poles carrying 33KVA electric lines has been greatly eroded.

    Mr Olufemi Ojo, the Community Development Association (CDA) Chairman in the area, told NAN that the problem had been on for a long time.

    Ojo said that the case had been reported to the Sole Administrator of the LCDA, Mr Rotimi Ogunwuyi, and other relevant government agencies, but that nothing was done to remedy the situation.

    According to him, continuous rainfall for the past two weeks has further weakened the concrete base.

    He said that emergency agencies had also visited the site to evaluate the problem and proffer solution.

    “From investigations, the problem was caused by blockage of the canal by illegal structures in the area. There are also houses built even under the high electric tension.

    “LASEMA told us in confidence that the repair will be done holistically and some houses would be demolished,’’ Ojo told NAN.

    The LCDA administrator, Ogunwuyi urged the Ikeja Electric Distribution Company to urgently repair a collapsing pole at the Shagari Estate, before wreaking havoc.

    He told NAN that the situation constituted threat to the lives and property of residents in the areas.

    Ogunwuyi said the pole, located at Zone A, AB Street, Shagari Federal Low Cost Hosing Estate, on Ipaja road, had slipped out of its basement and could fall any moment soon.

    He said the problem was caused by erosion which is eating up the base of the pole.

    Ogunwuyi said erosion has been eating the base for close to five years and that the council had been reported the matter to appropriate authorities.

    According to him, there is nothing the State Government could do until the IKEDC is ready to repair the pole base.

    “I have spoken with an official of the IKEDC in the area, who also claimed to have reported to the head office at Ikeja. I have also notified the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) and its officials had come to inspect the erosion devastated site. Any rainfall may cause serious disaster in the area,’’ he said.

    Ogunwuyi noted that it would be a great disaster if nothing was done in time to avert the impending danger.

    The administrator said he had advised occupants of the nearby houses to vacate the site in order to avert endangering their lives.

    Meanwhile, an official of the IKEDC, Gowon Estate branch in the area said that efforts were in top gear to ensure that the problem was fixed.

    ýThe official, who pleaded anonymity, however told NAN that the matter had been reported to IKEDC headquarters in Ikeja.

    “We will swing into action as soon as the needed equipment and facilities to remedy the situation are available.

    “However, the head office is in a better position to say the level of preparation,’’ he said.