Corruption has been one of the biggest banes of progress in Nigeria, leading many – through the decades – to privatise public assets to the detriment of the welfare of larger sections of the populace. This phenomenon that has afflicted many actors across the private and governmental sectors of the country, has more so gathered huge traction in the dawn of the Fourth Republic, since 1999.

The cost of corruption through earlier periods till the present has seen to the massive deterioration of public services and infrastructure, large-scale immiseration and lack, taking many down the Hobbesian lane in which life has been short, nasty and brutish.

If – according to informed estimates – over $400 billion has been lost to corruption in the oil and gas sector alone since Independence, then it is easy to extrapolate that cumulatively, this must have risen to the loss of a few trillions of dollars in the federal civil service – through the years – as a result of the pernicious activities of all sorts of public officials.

Naturally, since corruption has evolved an alternative wealth and power structure, it has equally acquired the capacity to fight back those seeking to tame or control it. Yet, with the present fiscal out-turn of the country, in which governments at all levels, and especially at the federal level, are struggling to meet their obligations to citizens, it is more than high time that we kill corruption in Nigeria, or corruption will completely kill our country. Hence, the need for purposeful reforms across governments and its key institutions.

At that, those finding themselves at the driver’s seat of reforms are unique targets of the various cabals that have taken over the public system in expansive endeavours to privatise public resources and income. These cabals and the actors who run them take on reformers and wage war against them in highly attritive manners that seek to destroy their integrity and pooh-pooh their characters, while drawing huge question marks over their senses of honour and uprightness.

Awareness of such antics makes one quite unusually sensitive to the situation of Mrs Moremi Onijala, whose unusual forthrightness one has had the good fortune of observing and admiring from a distance over the past decade, and who has recently become subject to a very vicious and apparently coordinated attack in her present station. This made me seek out a private understanding of some of the allegations being levelled to render what is most certainly her good work in the Ministry of Interior, where she is currently serving, to nought.

From the poisonous brew that has been concocted by a group – naming its cohort as Femi Adewale, Jimoh Abdukarim Sule, and Ikenna Maurice – surely pseudonyms raised to mask their cowardice and real intentions – it addressed a petition to the Honourable Minister of Federal Ministry of Finance on some contrived infractions that can barely stand the torch of scrutiny.

This malicious assemblage strung together and staged a series of convoluting allegations, having suspect truth-value, as would be subsequently deconstructed. The claims range from the attribution of a single-handed creation of a department within the Ministry of Interior, which was ‘re-designed’ in the image of the accused – Mrs Onijala, and staffed with a deputy director of her choosing and rogue consultants, in order to perpetrate fraud.

Also, that the operations of the Department of Citizenship and Business that she heads in the Interior Ministry have been wilfully subjected to endless delays in the effort to stake for illicit pecuniary gains, and that the meddling of the department in the monitoring and approval of Expatriate Quota Positions (EQPs) once made the former Comptroller General of Immigrations to petition such incursions into his exclusive powers. Moreover, that the delays in the approvals of EQPs and business permits equally made Dr Jumoke Oduwole, a Special Adviser in the office the Vice President and Secretary of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC), to query the Interior Ministry, Mrs Onijala, and her department.

First, as I perceive and understand it, in order to create a clear context for much of what would follow, it is worthy to note that the Department of Citizenship and Business (DCB) is possibly the main cash cow of the Interior Ministry, and in the past three years, since the start of the reform efforts that brought in Mrs Onijala, as set against 2018, the revenue profile of the Department has grown in significant leaps. Now comprising a three-tier structure, in the Citizenship Division of the DCB, as against the measly close to N120 million that was earned in 2018, there was a major upsurge to almost N493 million in 2019, to over N477 million in 2020, and to about N667 million in 2021.

In like manner, as against the N125 million made in 2018 in the Business Division of the Department, N643 million was made in 2019, N406 million in 2020, and almost N337 million in 2021. And from January to April alone this year, the newer Inspection division that has just started operations has made almost N43 million. These are colossal amounts of money that have never come into the government treasury – not because there were never such major revenue inflows, but due to the fact that these sums were made to rather flow into the private pockets of officials. Systems have now been put in place to block the illicit direction of these flows into the rightful place, permanently; hence the angry attacks of the reform efforts and actors that are now being witnessed – which would escalate, if not quickly contained.

Cutting to the chase of the wicked allegations that have currently been spun, it could be considered as quite cruel to claim that a Director in a Ministry could singularly create and staff what is construed as a self-serving a division – the Enforcement, Investigation and Inspection Unit – within the federal civil service. Such is an impossibility, which is only and strictly within the remit of those who are statutorily empowered to do such. The fact is that the Unit was established by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), in acting upon the request of the Ministry of Interior in 2021. This was in order to implement reforms in the administration of EQPs and business permits and the licensing of places of worship, etc., which had been subject to abuse and racketeering. Prior to then, there had been many petitions of the untoward activities going on around these approvals from such bodies as the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the National Assembly.

And, more so, the Inspection Unit was created, endorsed and supported by stakeholders during the National Stakeholders Conferences on EQPs in April 2021 and the Conference of the Conduct of Statutory Marriage in May 2021.

It is well known that a dangerous cabal exists around the Ministry of Interior – comprising of some members who were identified and removed from the Ministry, working together with some still serving and retired personnel of the Immigration service – who have benefitted tremendously from fraudulent activities involving EQPs, business permits, etc. With the implementation of reforms around these business and fiscal instruments of government, this cabal has been relentless in sponsoring attacks on Mrs Onijala – the driver of reforms – as pushback to the regime of accountability instituted by the Unit, making things no longer business as usual, and diverting the huge funds that the country had been haemorrhaging back into legitimate coffers of government.

An associated allegation to the foregoing has been the claim that there has been a deliberate refusal to process and forward applications for business permits and EQPs until there is “robust’’ gratification made to facilitate things by frustrated and embittered applicants. Actually, it is the other way round as the accuser is now being accused. Its is a known fact in the Department of Citizenship and Business/Ministry of Interior that the refusal of Mrs Onijala to be bribed in order to overlook the unrelenting cache of fake documentation being brought forward in order to secure business permits and EQPs, is what has led to the distortive petition and its array of dubious allegations. Hence, corruption is fighting back, since it is no longer business as usual, and illicit income streams are being drained out.

In relation to the issuance of business permits and EQPs, as observed, there is no doubt that much of the delays encountered in the system are due to inexorable activities of crooks and corrupt people, who habitually seek to game the system through the submission of fake documentation. This couples with the untimely submission of required supportive documents and the lack of timely responses to queries to applications. One could however admit that a few technical glitches in the automated processing system, which the partner in charge, Messrs. Anchor Dataware Solutions (ADS), tries to respond to as quickly as possible is another source of delay, even if not a core issue. In addition, submitted documents for the processing of business permits and expatriate quotas are not able to be immediately authenticated because the eCitiBiz platform used does not have document-readable software for this. I agree that this is a concern that the Unit would have to look into and quickly resolve.

There is the allegation that Mrs Onijala as the Director of Citizenship and Business ‘re-designed’ the Department in her own image for pecuniary gains, that she put herself in competition with the Ministry of Interior as such, and selected her own staff with ‘stealth’, whilst employing some rogue consultants.

These – as one found out – are quite absurd allegations, as there has never been any external consultant hired to select staff for the department or to carry out the duties of civil servants in the department. Hence, the burden then becomes that of those making the allegations to supply the proof to back up their claims in this regard. It has also been revealed that the Deputy Director of the Department, Mr Adesina, said to have been brought in by Mrs Onijala from the Finance Ministry in 2021, was actually deployed to the Ministry of Interior from the Ministry of Police Affairs in 2021, and not the Ministry of Finance, where he had served much earlier until 2009.

In terms of the complaint of the former Comptroller-General of the National Immigration Service, as laid out in the petition, that the Enforcement, Investigation and Inspection Unit was eroding his exclusive powers of control over Expatriate Quota Positions, the erstwhile CG had sought anchors for this in legislation, including the Immigration Act, 2015 and the Immigration Regulations, 2017.

However, it is equally evident from the legislation appealed to, in Section 3 of the Immigration Act, and Section 12 of the Immigration Regulations, and the Ministers’ Statutory Powers and Duties (Miscellaneous Act of 1958), that citizenship integrity and internal security in the country are vested in the Minister of Interior, who is responsible for policy formulation and execution with relation to the granting of expatriate quotas in the country. The Minister is also vested with the powers to review, amend or cancel any EQP. More so, the CG of Immigrations and his office derive their authority from powers delegated to them by the Minister, hence the Minister can also order – similarly – the NIS to liaise with the Unit in carrying out his directives.

That stated, nevertheless, much of the present complaints about the Unit and the DCB can be seen as due to the fact that many prefer the old ways of conducting government business, which enable officials to assist in facilitating fake approvals for clients and thereby profiting hugely from these at the expense of government and its revenue accruals.

In reiterating an earlier point, as observed, a number of the delays experienced in the processing of EQPs, business permits and cognate licences could be associated with pressing tasks as the development of new policies and the implementation of projects, such as the National Action Plan on Statelessness. This could slow down the requirement of appending the physical signature of the DCB to each page of manually typed approval letters. In view of this, the automatic download of approval letters and business permits are close to conclusion, and this will go live this April 2022.

Moreover, it has been noted that the delays in responses from the Department has also been due to the insufficiency of power supply, which is more of a general challenge affecting the entire country. This is in addition to the shortage of staff, which became more pronounced during the high point of the COVID-19 pandemic (which fortunately has been addressed by the HCSF through the posting of staff who are currently undergoing training to carry out technical functions).

It is claimed by the naysayers that the so-called delays caused by the DCB has impacted the flow of foreign direct investments into the country negatively.  However, the truth of the matter is that since resuming at the post, it has been found out that the DCB introduced some innovations – with the permission of the Minister of Interior and the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry – to enhance the workflow in the department, such as trainings on the laws undergirding the administration of expatriate quotas, business permit requirements, alongside those related to statutory marriages. Also the organogram of the department was re-designed, including the process workflow, to reduce the interface with clients, while a revised handbook on Expatriate Quota Administration in Nigeria was finalised, in addition to bringing the Guidelines on Citizenship and Statutory Marriage up to date with international best practices.

It is on record that Mrs Onijala worked with the Attorney General Federation on the Amended Legal Notices on Statutory Marriages, awaiting the approval of the president, which have conferred local governments with the authority to conduct statutory marriages, following compliance with the requirements of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. She also identified new revenue streams, including an upward review of fees on Business and Citizenship services, in line with current realities.

While it is unfortunate that a lot of the delays are attributed to the DCB, the facts remain that all applications are processed from the Briefing officers to the DCB, the PS and the HMI. Delays could possibly arise from any point in the chain. Consequently, the technology involved in processing applications is now being reviewed so that any point where fake documentation is seen and a query is raised about this to the organisation involved, the clock on that application will be paused till the appropriate document is uploaded on the platform.

There is equally the malicious claim that the DCB had deliberately refused to forward the application of M.D & Co Mega Business Limited to the Honourable Minister of Interior for approval, which had led to a petition by the firm. And that the sum of N150,000 was collected by the DCB from the company, through Doychris, for the preparation of a feasibility report.

As clarified, the facts involved in this matter have been that the said company’s application was actually withheld due to the submission of a fake Certificate of Capital Importation, and the non-submission of a feasibility report, among other problems. Hence, the company was advised to seek experts to help it draft its feasibility report and the completion of its documentation. As such, on the request of its lawyer for assistance with references, he had been given a list of briefing officers versed in helping with these documents.

While the lawyer of the applicant contacted and got a consultant to help it on its own, none of the process or payment went through the Ministry, any of its staff, nor the Director of Citizenship and Business, and its acceptable feasibility report was approved by the Minister on December 14, 2021. Thereafter, the representative of the company, one Barrister Peter Oluwashola had retracted the petition and written a letter of unreserved apology to the Ministry on March 3.

It has been emphasised that the DCB has nothing to do with the preparation of documents of applicants, even as a strict guideline has been put in place to ensure that complete and proper documentation that are genuine are the only ones accepted. And, that the technical partners to the Unit would update the software on the platform utilised in accepting applications to ensure that timelines only apply when applications are complete.

Saliently, the truth involved in the purported query of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) to the Interior Ministry has been established. In as much as the said delays from the Department of Citizenship and Business is claimed to have had converse effects on the ease of doing business in the country, the allegations involved have been taken apart and proven to be false. The Ministry of Interior has also forwarded written responses on the issue to the Presidency.

Issuing from the foregoing, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation had set up a meeting between the Permanent Secretary of the Interior Ministry and his team, and Dr Jumoke Oduwole of the PEBEC and her team. There were also a slew of meetings held between the Ministry of Interior’s Reform Champion Team and the Ease of Business Environment Secretariat (EBES), and the technical teams of the Ministry and PEPBEC/EBES.

The outcomes of all the meetings have been deemed as satisfactory to all the parties involved and have led to the establishment of a joint audit team to continue the work on enhancing the efficiency in the delivery of services. These outcomes have equally led to the positive review and correction of erstwhile records on performance of the Ministry, which is revealed in the 7th National Action Plan (NAP 7.0) Mid – Term Report for Business Permit and Expatriate Quota.

After the initial experience of concern and shock at the fairly elaborate attempt to tar one of the heroines of public service in Nigeria, and the painstaking effort in seeking the truth and deconstructing much of these spurious allegations, I came to the hard realisation of how corruption has become a fairly formidable institution in Nigeria. Yet, we can ill afford the business of the country to continue as usual, as determined by different cabals, who have garnered humungous resources to destroy reform endeavours.

Hence, more hands need to come on deck, very urgently, to become champions of the anti-corruption struggle, if Nigeria will ever survive its on-going fiscal crisis, and would not experience untimely demise in the vice-grip of the menace of corruption.

Adaeze Nwolise wrote from Abuja.

Pastor Tunde Bakare of The Citadel Global Community Church recently spoke through his hat while preaching a sermon. He told his congregation that, during the January 15, 1966 military action that toppled the First Republic, the soldiers that took Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa removed his turban, poured wine on his head and force-fed him with the alcohol. For abominating him, Balewa, just before he was shot, pronounced a cause on Ndigbo, to the effect that no one from the ethnic group will ever rule Nigeria. Mr Bakare’s story, fanciful as it sounds, is a pack of lies. This article, therefore, is to educate Mr Bakare and others of his misguided persuasion about the truth, of which Jesus, the Christ, said in John 8: 32: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

On the mundane level, no one removed any turban from Sir Abubakar’s head. The turban is a headdress. Soldiers invaded the Prime Minister’s official residence at around 3a.m., when the man was in bed. Did he sleep turbaned? Do people sleep in their headdresses? Apart from that picture in which presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari appeared in suit and tie, wearing a wan smile and looking almost comical with his receding hairline, there hardly is another photograph of the man in which a cap does not adorn his head. Would his traditional fondness for full dressing gear ever mean that he goes to bed in a hat? Do women sleep with all those accessories they routinely assemble on their heads for public events? Tafawa Balewa’s turban was not removed because he wasn’t wearing one when his adversaries closed in on him.

Muslims are by injunction forbidden to consume alcoholic beverages. The story that the prime minister was bathed in wine and inebriated with it is aimed at sustaining the opprobrium first established by revisionists in 1966. Also, his recovered body showed clearly that he hadn’t been shot. The lies spewed by Mr Bakare have one source. They always had a single objective: the monopoly of political power by the geo-political North. There are many such lies still enjoying vibrancy in the country. Three of them should suffice for our argument. One, when General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s regime was toppled, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, who succeeded him, was going to sunder the country by announcing the Republic of Northern Nigeria, for the simple reason that political power had left the region. Gowon is still denying this fact, despite incontrovertible evidence to its certitude. (See the document marked CAB/128/41 at the British Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, London. It contains the minutes of the British Cabinet meeting of August 2, 1966 that was declassified after a 30-year moratorium. It incontrovertibly shows Gowon’s secessionist tendency after they assassinated General Aguiyi-Ironsi). Two, Gowon said in his maiden speech as head of state that there was no basis for Nigerian unity. He denies this statement till date. As a matter of fact, his government disingenuously published a misleading version of his speech, claiming that he had only discounted national unity in a unitary dispensation. But, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Gowon’s broadcast live, and the transcript is forever available. It has Gowon saying, “Suffice it to say that putting all considerations to the test, political, economic as well as social, the basis of unity is not there…” Three, Nigeria’s military leaders met in Aburi, Ghana, on January 4 and 5, 1967, for a conference to avert the contingency of civil war. They reached an agreement. Back in Nigeria, Gowon reneged on the agreement, an infamy he denies to this day, even though the Aburi proceedings were audio-recorded from start to finish. Had the agreement been implemented, the civil war might well have never occurred.

The military action of January 1966 was called and is still called an Igbo coup. How could a putsch intended to install the Yoruba, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, as prime minister be an Igbo coup? Here’s Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu: “Neither myself nor any other lads was in the least interested in governing the country. We were soldiers and not politicians. We had earmarked from the list known to every soldier in this operation who would be what. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was, for example, to be released from jail immediately and to be made the Executive President of Nigeria.” See West Africa magazine of July 29, 1967, page 981. And here’s Major Adewale Ademoyega: “At the end of the first week of January, Major Anuforo and I arranged to meet Captain Udeaja, a young engineering graduate from the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, UK. We met in Major Chukwuka’s house at the Ikeja Cantonment but Chukwuka himself was not there. Having briefed Udeaja generally and got his consent, we gave him his task. He was to fly a special plane provided for the purpose to Calabar on the morning of D-Day, to effect the release of Chief Awolowo and bring him to Lagos on the plane. We had already arranged for a plane of the Nigeria Air Force to be made available that morning. This was done through Major Nzegwu (not Nzeogwu) of the Air Force.” See Adewale Ademoyega: Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup, Evans Brothers Limited, Ibadan, 1981; pp 68-69.

The Nzeogwu and Ademoyega stories were corroborated by no less a person than Chief Awolowo, thus: “It was learnt after the January coup that the authors had planned to release me from Calabar, fly me to Lagos, and install me as Head of State whether I liked it or not. If I refused the offer, they were prepared to govern in my name until I was persuaded to accept the offer. The authors of the coup had no plan to govern the country under a military administration.” See Obafemi Awolowo, My March Through Prison, Macmillan, Nigeria Publishers Limited, Ilupeju Lagos, 1985; page 297.

In spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the myth of the Igbo coup has been sustained to this day. According to Ademoyega, the innermost circle of the coup plot was composed of three Majors: Adewale Ademoyega from Ode Remo in today’s Ogun State, a History graduate of the University of London; Emmanuel Ifeajuna from Onitsha, a University of Ibadan Science graduate; and Chukwuma Nzeogwu from Okpanam, a town bordering Asaba in present day Delta State. Besides these facts, there were 50 Majors in the Nigerian Army on the morning of the coup; 24 of them were Igbo. About 20 of these knew nothing of the coup and never participated in its execution. The coup cost the life of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe, the Quarter-Master General of the Nigerian Army. Chinyelu Unegbe was Igbo from Ozubulu in today’s Anambra State. General Aguiyi-Ironsi put down the coup; he was Igbo from Umuana Ndume in Umuhia in the present Abia State. These facts have never constituted extenuating circumstances. The coup must forever be labelled an Igbo coup, a lie from the pit of hell that continues to be used as a basis for the sporadic massacring of Ndigbo and their consignment to fourth-class citizenship in their own country.

All these lies are the reason Nigeria is a failed state. And unless these lies and countless others are finally and permanently abrogated, Nigeria’s chances of resurrection are unequivocally non-existent. In a sense, Pastor Bakare is a tool in the hands of forces he scarcely recognises. The fibs he told his church members were as old as 1966. The precursors are from the top echelons of Northern Nigerian hegemony, but their lies first surfaced in book form when the Hudahuda Publishing Company of Zaria published John M. Paden’s Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto in 1986. This is Professor Omo Omoruyi in The Tale of June 12: The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993) (Press Alliance Network Limited; 1999.): “President Babangida ruled out any Yoruba person if Chief Abiola who had been with the military and the North in various capacities could not win the support of the ethno-military clique. He ruled out the Igbo on the argument that the country and definitely the North would not buy an Igbo then or in the near future. More seriously, he argued that the Yoruba and the Igbo did not have strong representation in the Armed Forces to provide them with the kind of protection they would need. This is still at the heart of democratisation today” (page 253).

Professor Omoruyi, who was the Director-General of the Centre for Democratic Studies and, more importantly, Babangida’s closest confidant, sought clarification from the military president. “This was when (General Babangida) called my attention to the feeling in the North about an Igbo as President. He thought that it would violate the curse placed on the Igbo by the late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa before he was executed on January 15, 1966. Sir Abubakar was quoted to have said: ‘I know you are going to kill me; you will never get a Prime Minister like me. The Igbo will suffer for twenty-five years.’” (Page 262.)

Now, under Pastor Bakare, the consummate wielder of the microphone, the falsehoods got added embellishment. The curse preventing any Igbo from becoming president over a period of 25 years assumed eternal dimensions. The snippety nonsense of turban and wine got thrown in. No one seemed to underscore the impotence of the curse by General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, being Balewa’s immediate successor. I reacted thus to this story in Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics (Press Alliance, 1999; and Eminent Biographies, 2019): “The story that was put out claimed that Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa ‘cursed’ the Igbo, saying they will not rule Nigeria for 25 years. By the time Babangida used this fiction to discount an Igbo President in 1993, 27 years had elapsed since Sir Abubakar died. Yet, the “curse” was still potent. Babangida himself had no qualms marrying into a “cursed” ethnic group and raising four children who by extension must be half cursed. The main point here is that, apart from Sir Abubakar’s lack of locus standi to curse the Igbo, (how many million curses will the thousands of Igbo victims of the 1966 pogrom utter?), the story is patently false. Its authors lacked authenticity because their story was bereft of citation and attribution. The most detailed account of the interrogation of those that carried out the coup of January 1966 was released by the regime of General Yakubu Gowon. The details also appear in Crisis And Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 1971) by A. H. M Kirk-Greene. Nowhere is there anything about any curse. No authority ever corroborated the story. Yet this fiction is what the Clique has held on to in the protracted subjugation of Ndigbo. That was why Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, a principled officer and gentleman, was ignominiously removed as Chief of General Staff within months of his appointment. That was why Ndigbo led the formation of the PDP and gave it their all, only for the currently acclaimed Igbo leader, Dr Alex Ekwueme, to be given a short shrift.” (pp 242-243.)

According to Omo Omoruyi, Chief M. K. O. Abiola’s presidential election victory was nullified because it was not backed by what he called the Ethno-Military Clique of Northern Nigeria. General Babangida posited in 1993 that, “the Yoruba and the Igbo did not have strong representation in the Armed Forces to provide them with the kind of protection they would need.” Yoruba and Igbo representation in the military today are for more minuscular than ever before, due to the conscious and deliberate nepotistic policy of the man at the helm today. Besides, no one has bothered to decipher the Caliphate’s thinking on 2023. Perhaps the assumption is that its deafening silence is symptomatic of non-alignment? How could this be when Sultan Dasuki was one of the prime forces against Chief Abiola’s presidential election? All these point to the fact that, in the ultimate, even the Jagaban would discover that he washed his hands and cracked a nut for an errant fowl to carry the seed away. At that point only would the incalculable harm done to Yoruba and Southern interests by the forward-looking politics of Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu become ever so clear.

To return to phantom curses and negative repercussions! Pastor Bakare needs to ask himself this fundamental question: Why is the curse for bad behaviour unidirectional? A sensible answer to that question may assist him in coming to terms with a myriad of other questions. Those who killed General Aguiyi-Ironsi in July 1966 have the longest streets in Abuja named after them. Apart from Aguiyi-Ironsi, they also killed countless other officers, including Lieutenant Colonels Israel Okoro, Gabriel Okonweze and Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, and Majors Nzegwu, Emelifonwu, Nnamani, Ihedigbo, Obienu, Ekanem, P. C. Obi, Isong, Ogunro; and 11 Captains, and 13 Lieutenants, and 128 NCOs and other ranks. They went ahead with a pogrom that cost 50,000 lives of Eastern Nigerians, mostly Ndigbo. Why have the perpetrators of the nsoani never been visited by a curse? Nigeria has five functional international airports. Two of them are named after the mass murderers of July, August, September and October 1966.

They claimed that wine was poured on Tafawa Balewa, and that alcohol was forced down his throat. Compare it to the following: “Thirdly, the evidence disclosed that it was not merely a case of Northerners descending on Easterners and shooting, matcheting and clubbing them to death. They embarked on various methods of torture and humiliation. One method was described by the 72nd witness – Dick Iwebi. This punishment is one of the most dreadful ways of crucifying a person. A heavy rod is tied across the back of the chest of the victim with the hands stretched and secured firmly on the rod. While the victim may still be standing on his legs, he is as helpless as a man nailed to a cross. In this position they then proceed to torture the victim by plucking his eyes, cutting his tongue and cutting his testicles.” See The Report of the Justice G. C. M Onyiuke Tribunal on the Massacre of Ndigbo in 1966, Tollbrook Publishers Limited, Ikeja Lagos, pp 125-126. Dear Pastor Bakare, who got cursed for this atrocity?

The thoughtful must ask what informed Pastor Bakare’s timing for his peculiar sermon. But the answer is all too obvious. The presidential election is next year and people who should only be seen and never heard are bursting eardrums hectoring all-comers for an Igbo president of Nigeria. It is important that their agitation is shot down before it gets a chance of taking off and actually flying. Of course, anti-Igbo propaganda was never a spontaneous thing. Its real name is INSIDOUS. To exemplify: In 1954, Emmanuel Ifeajuna won the gold medal in the High Jump event of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Vancouver, Canada. Ifeajuna was not just the first Nigerian, but also the first Black African to win an international sports event. Back here in Nigeria, those that must never be cursed set up a national Sports Hall of Fame, which, to this day, does not include Ifeajuna’s name. Those who recall that Chioma Ajunwa is the first Nigerian to win an Olympic gold (in the long jump in Atlanta 1996) must go check out “their” sports “Hall of Fame”. Chances are that her name is not there. Not because she committed any offence but because of “from where she from come from”! Yes, it is a capital offence to come from the Igbo country. In 1995, Gideon Akaluka, a young Igbo trader based in Kano was accused of desecrating the Koran. He was locked up. But an organised mob broke into his Police cell, dragged him out, beheaded him and danced through Kano metropolis with his bodiless head. Does Bakare know that not one person was cursed for this atrocity?

The injustice against Ndigbo is pervasive. Take the National Honours. Every head of every hamlet in the far North is an MFR or an OFR or a CFR or a CON or a GCON. Not so for Ndigbo. That is why a personage like Eze (Professor) Green Onyekaba Nwankwo, a distinguished traditional ruler, an accomplished academic who set up the Department of Finance at the University of Lagos, a former Executive Director in charge of banking and monetary policy in the Central Bank of Nigeria and the author of over 20 books has only the MON – the least of all the honours Nigeria can offer. The iniquity is most eloquent in the military. Unless they are in the Education Corps or the Medical Corps or the Physical Training Corps, hardly any Igbo gets promoted above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Those of us campaigning for an Igbo president of Nigeria are looking at more than the spectacle of a politician from the ethnic group enjoying the tenancy of Aso Rock. That is too simple. We are demanding equal rights. We are saying that a country indexed on lies already collapsed before it got the chance to take a first step to nationhood. An Igbo president is supposed to be the antidote to nearly 60 years of a people’s subjugation. People have no business forgetting that there is a distinction between being a slave and being enslaved. Ndigbo are no slaves. That was why in 1803, 75 of them rebelled at Dunbar Creek in Georgia, USA, took control of the slave ship carrying them, drowned their captors and chose to walk into the ocean rather than be slaves to white slave masters. That was why, between 1791 and 1804, they rebelled and overthrew the French regime in Haiti to establish an independent country founded and governed by ex-slaves. That is why the Igbo, indigenous to their current geographical space for millennia, find intolerable their insolent subjugation by recent migrants from the Fouta Djalon whose numbers no credible census has put at more than 5 per cent of the Nigerian population.

The systematic enslavement of Ndigbo in what is supposed to be their own country has got to be terminated. The epic Igbo struggle has taken various forms and will continue to do so. A prime example is their attempt at secession in the 1960s. Britain, and a genocidal war in which, “Starvation is a legitimate instrument of warfare” thwarted them. Back inside Nigeria, they are compelled to permanently stand back and keep bloody quiet forever. For any sigh, groan or moan of theirs, goons, troops, the Police and paramilitary contingents are deployed with extreme prejudice and excessive numbers against them. They are called terrorists, while those that have stopped Kaduna State and wiped out innocent thousands in many parts of the country are termed bandits and treated with kid gloves. They have been branded “a spot in a circle,” a military euphemism underscoring their unenviable situation as targets for continued massacring.

There is news for the liars and the killers. Nigeria is unsustainable on the diet of lies and more lies. It is true that those who laid into Ndigbo in the 1960s and killed them in the tens of thousands got rewarded with high political offices and oil blocks and whatnot. But the kill-and-go ship of Ndigbo finally steamed into turbulent waters. Although census exercises in Nigeria are a huge joke, there are at least 40 million Ndigbo in Nigeria today. Nobody and no country can manufacture enough weapons to wipe them off the face of the country. Even in the extremely unlikely event of all Igbo in Nigeria getting killed, there are millions of them abroad today. From their number, at least a thousand will eventually pay a visit to the mother country, these question pouring from their flaming tongues: “Why did you slay my mother? Why did you massacre my father? Why did you annihilate my sister? Why did you exterminate my brother?”

For all of the above, and especially at the lectern, the microphone should never be a justification for verbal diarrhoea. So, Mr Preacher Bakare, the next time the sound of your voice is amplified by the electronics of public address systems, you must endeavour to annexe some circumspection. On disseminating the falsehoods of those who claim the right to perpetually sit and fart on all our heads, you must do two things: DESIST and CEASE!

Chuks Iloegbunam is the author of The Case for an Igbo President of Nigeria.

A single thread links the duo of Dino Melaye, the former senator representing Kogi West in the federal parliament and the Shakespearean tragic character, Cinna the Poet – their individual resort to metaphysics to explain their predicaments and where they stood. While Cinna never lived to tell the story, Melaye, dubbed an infantile-mind-trapped-in-an-adult-body by several – apologies to Farooq Kperogi – may by now have gone into the studio to wax yet another of his sickening paediatric comic skits.

Rome had been enveloped in violent disorder and utter chaos in the thick of the assassination of Julius Caesar, its fallen emperor. It was also a time in which nobody was safe. It was then that Cinna the Poet chose to pay his final obeisance to Caesar by attending his funeral. On his way to the venue, a riotous audience of Roman plebeians had accosted him, demanding to know what he was about and why he dared to go out at such a time of national emergency.

Last week, like Cinna the Poet, Melaye also chose to pay his own obeisance to the serial presidential contestant, Atiku Abubakar. Similar to Rome after the murder of Caesar, Melaye’s Nigeria has fallen into political disorder, uncertainty and utter chaos. According to Melaye at a press conference last week, he and his God-knows-who god were engaged in a rapturous telephone exchange on the presidential candidacy of Abubakar. Amidst banters between him and his god, he said, this god revealed to him that Abubakar would be Nigeria’s next president.

“I want to state unequivocally that many of us, when we call on God, God doesn’t give us missed calls. When we call Him, He picks up our call. And He called me and he said, ‘Dino,’ I said, ‘yes my Lord.’ He called the second time again, I said, ‘yes my Lord.’ He called the third time, and he said: ‘Atiku would be the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’”, said the ex-senator known more for his fawning infantilism on social media than any serious mental rigour.

Like Melaye, upon being accosted by the blood-lusting crowd, Cinna fled into the inaccessible world of metaphysics to explain his predicament: “I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar, And things unluckily charge my fantasy. I have no will to wander forth of doors, Yet something leads me forth,” he had said.

Then the angry plebeians asked for his name. “Truly, my name is Cinna,” he said, to which one of them, taking the poet to be one of the similarly named conspirators who killed Caesar, and like one who had just discovered an odd object fallen from Uranus, charged at the others, “Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator!” Even when Cinna sought to make a clarification by feebly shouting, “I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!”, it was futile to rescue him from hot death as the mob shouted, “Tear him for his bad verses! It is no matter. His name is Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.”

By the way, give it to him, Melaye’s reply to Ayo Fayose’s vacuous claim that by knowing the geography of amala joints in Nigeria, he is fit to be Nigeria’s president, is so very apt. How can a man be as empty as to reduce Nigeria’s leadership, the burdens of security and the economy that assail the country, to the understanding of the contours of the stomach?

The conspiracy theory then continues. Who is the Northerner who has some appeal to the Southern electorate today, whose political charisma can confer legitimacy on the massive votes that the North would cast at the 2023 polls? Atiku Abubakar fits the bill. His huge baggage of corruption notwithstanding, Abubakar has a pan-Nigerian appeal and doesn’t look like one who would enfold Nigeria into the North, as Muhammadu Buhari has done.

Conspiracy theories surrounding the 2023 elections are becoming as luscious as the tree planted by the rivers of water. They are complex and complicated. When broken to their granular form, however, the theories suggest that Melaye’s god is supervising a clandestine machination, to wit, involving the collapsing of political party affiliations for a larger regional interest, all in the bid to foist an Atiku Abubakar presidency on the rest of Nigeria. A caveat, though: Conspiracy theories are allegations of conspiracy that may or may not be true.

Today, what remains of Northern Nigeria is a mere shell, sucked of its oyster. Yesterday, it was reported that the United Nations said that people now eat grass to survive in the North-East. In a 2020 event marking the 60th birthday of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, former Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, had said that nine states in the North were responsible for 50 per cent of the entire malnutrition burden in Nigeria. This is outside the burdens of drugs, the Almajiri and Boko Haram afflictions that have become an albatross in the region. Eighty seven per cent of Nigeria’s total poverty index, said the former CBN governor, is in the North, while millions of northern children are out of school. The distressing statistics must have since skyrocketed as the putrid sore of Buhari reaches for the tip of its decadence.

Apart from building a billionaire cabal, members of which daily survive by sucking the nectar of national contracts and insider trading of forex, with Godwin Emefiele providing a convenient abetment for them, Buhari’s presidency has rendered the North a hopelessly defoliated territory, deforested of any human habitational excitement. Today, many of those Northern big-men with flowing babanriga are totally empty and lean on inner joy as they cannot go to their home states or towns. Indiscriminate violence, banditry and kidnapping have taken the shine off the once flourishing North, making it one of the most volatile regions of the world to inhabit. Kaduna, a once flourishing city, has lost its innocence as well. Today, it is home to unconscionable bloodshed by terrorists. All these leave the Federal Capital City, Abuja, as well as its succulence and sweet juice as the only goldmine left for the North. It is also the only geographical environment left where an average Northerner can strut in, with a potentate-like, territorial air of ownership. All these will, however, be threatened by a Southern presidency, according to a conspiracy theory bandied by some Northern elements.

More importantly, the injustice and gross nepotism that Muhammadu Buhari has inflicted on Nigeria in his seven years of macabre rule is such that a North out of power, post-2023, is one akin to a man with a suicide rope fastened to his neck. With a Southern president, will Abuja now become an ngbati ngbati or yanminrin enclave? So where does the Northerner lay claim to? If you go to virtually all government offices in Abuja today, you would think you were in a Hausa Republic, or right inside a market in Tsafe, Zamfara State. The cacophonic speaking of Hausa as the lingua franca of officialdom in those offices will make you sniff the reek of Northern dominance of Nigerian federal offices. Buhari has filled virtually all federal offices with Northern Nigerians, so much that all other regions have become bystanders in their own country.

Bearing in mind the above equation, consenting to be out of power post-2023 will appear like self-immolation to the North. Buhari’s bigotry and nepotism having totally and successfully destroyed the fabric of Nigeria’s pretence to federal character, and no Southern successor of his can ever administer Nigeria as a Nigerian president any longer. In the worst case, such a president would clean the Augean stable and return Nigeria to its tabula rasa state. Head or tail, a Northern Nigeria that has become a frightening spectacle of gross underdevelopment can never compete in a reset mode Nigeria. The North thus needs a Northern Nigerian continuation in power to detoxify the toxins and pollutants that Buhari is leaving in the national space.

The conspiracy theory then continues. Who is the Northerner who has some appeal to the Southern electorate today, whose political charisma can confer legitimacy on the massive votes that the North would cast at the 2023 polls? Atiku Abubakar fits the bill. His huge baggage of corruption notwithstanding, Abubakar has a pan-Nigerian appeal and doesn’t look like one who would enfold Nigeria into the North, as Muhammadu Buhari has done. In the bid to perpetuate the North in power for another eight years, Buhari, with a robust pedigree of ethnic bigotry, would only be too glad to walk his renowned route. His only allotted role in this drama is simple: Frustrate worthy APC Southern candidates from the political fray and emboss presidential imprimatur on a Southern lackey as the party’s flag-bearer, so goes the conspiracy theory.

A Yemi Osinbajo or Bola Tinubu on the ballot will upset the Northern apple cart, thereby disassembling a carefully arranged, seemingly foolproof Northern political chicanery. Already, Tinubu must have realised that with Buhari, the waters of bigotry run deeper than any allegiance or fidelity to gratitude of how he helped him become president. No one should need to tell Tinubu that Buhari’s train of bigotry has taken the wind off the sail of his presidential ambition in the APC. Now, there are rumours that the Landlord of Lagos is pitching his tent with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the old, abandoned warhorse. Adamu Abdullahi, a known Northern irredentist in possession of a more incendiary bigotry than Buhari, was carefully recruited as a worthy undertaker for this Northern cause, so says this conspiracy theory.

Iyorchia Ayu, PDP’s National Chairman, disdaining the temerity of Nyesom Wike to seek to be Nigerian president, will deliver a man to whom he is a dotting sidekick, Atiku Abubakar, as PDP’s flag-bearer, without batting an eyelid. With either of two renowned Northern lickspittles, Godwin Emefiele and Rotimi Amaechi, who just declared for the presidency yesterday – both with arguable Igbo ancestry – on the ballot, the South would be too cross and indescribably riled at the Buhari insolence that its excessively miffed electorates would think they were shooting Buhari in the foot by casting their votes for Abubakar. What can cause a deviation from this conspiracy theory permutation will be a Buhari’s support for a stronger Southerner, a Kayode Fayemi, for instance. A Fayemi, with no baggage or national scandal, can rearrange the equation.

When the Osinbajo group fools fellow travelers in their doomed presidential boat that Buhari has picked him as successor, they evoke a guffaw from pundits. The only analogy that can defeat this robust lie is that of a houseboy who, for seven years, the master had denied the opportunity of sleeping in the main house. Once when the master travelled and handed the home key to him, on his return the master complained bitterly that the houseboy had soiled his bedspread, and since then he cast him further away from his vicinity. Now, the master is leaving for another home and the houseboy grandstands that the master has promised to hand over the house key to him!

Osinbajo, perhaps the most brilliant person in the Buhari government and a natural successor to him in a clime where excellence is wired into the architecture and requirements of leadership, has been a stranger in the Buhari government. He has also been uncannily profiled within the Villa by Buharists, as possessing an insatiable appetite. His dirt-embossed dossier is alleged to have been kept jealously in the cabal’s closet as an arsenal, even as the cabal withdrew from him the juice accruable to his presidential portfolio. It is thus laughable when Osinbajo apologists spin the incorrigible yarn that a vindictive Buhari, with active connivance of his Fulani advisors, would willingly incense the god of power by handing over power to an Osinbajo who still nurses the aching sore emanating from his Buhari stab.

In 2014, ex-Osun State governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, made an allegorical construct descriptive of the colour of injustice and cheating. He called it iyanje obinde – the injustice against Obinde. While explaining the Osun People Democratic Party (PDP)’s injustice of allotting political positions only to alumni of the Bola Ige murder school, chief of whom was Iyiola Omisore, Oyinlola had propounded this Obinde injustice thesis. It runs thus: Mrs Obinde’s husband had died suddenly and his family decided to pawn her, to be able to generate enough money for his burial. What ultimate marginalisation and cheating could rival this!

What the South does not know is that, when it comes to power, the North coalesces its fractious contours within the twinkle of an eye. When it does this, immediately, ancient internal recriminations and earlier political disaffections no longer matter. Religion is the only index it cannot compromise. The North did this in 2015 by massively queuing behind a Buhari it had hitherto serially rejected at the polls.

Apart from Obinde, another allegory which synchronises with the fate of the South, according to that conspiracy theory, is the societal injustice meted on the African pied hornbill bird called atiala or atioro. In the words of a Yoruba aphorism, which frowns at systemic cheating, it wonders why elders of a village would shave the head of the vulture (igun), and that of the ground horn bill bird which Yoruba call akalamagbo, but when it comes to the turn of the atiala/atioro to be shaved, the same elders will now claim that the razor with which it was to weed off the bushy scalp had lost its grits. This is a cunning that the conspiracy theory alleges that the North is flaunting against the South in the months leading to the 2023 elections. According to the theorists, by the time the South wakes up, it will be morning yet on creation day. By then, the only alternative left for the progenies of Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Eyo Ita will be barren gripes against another Northern iyanje obinde.

By then, the small god of Dino Melaye would have become our God.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.

As preparation for the much awaited 2023 general elections picks up pace, it has become a turbulent time for politics in Nigeria.

President Muhammadu Buhari signed the Electoral Bill into law on February 25 after a failed attempt to install an APC faithful, Lauretta Onochie, as one of the commissioners of the electoral body, INEC, paving the way for presidential and governorship elections on February 25 and March 11, 2023 respectively. Going by the timetable for the elections, political parties are expected to elect their flagship candidates by June 3 this year.

Less than one year to the 2023 presidential election, intense political activities have commenced. The political landscape has become home to many promises and issues ranging from the good, the bad and the ugly by political candidates and/or parties all in a bid to outsmart the other. This has had the net effect of charging the political atmosphere of the country.

Interestingly, the election will take place amidst devastating levels of insecurity, a deteriorating economic situation, endemic corruption, increased poverty levels and a growing discontentment with the government – all issues that the present administration promised to end in 2015 but has largely failed to deliver.

For many Nigerians, therefore, the 2023 polls present an important opportunity for a change in trajectory, owing to the aimless drift of the Nigerian state under the Muhammadu Buhari administration. Fortunately, provisions in the new Electoral Act such as digital platforms for recording and transmission of votes provide some hope about the credibility and transparency of the elections.

The high stakes surrounding the 2023 elections is evident in the caliber of political cabals vying for the position of the nation’s presidency against the backdrop of complex economic, political and security challenges which they all claim to have a lasting solution for.

Notwithstanding that there are 18 political parties currently authorized to operate in Nigeria, after INEC deregistered 75 parties for breaching regulations that govern their operations in February 2021, most attention is on the candidates of the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the major opposition, People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Given their dominance of the political space, it is from the two parties that Nigeria’s next president will likely emerge from.

Gauging by current happenings in the polity, the rallying cry which forms the PDP’s overarching objective for the 2023 elections is: win the presidency in 2023 or face inevitable death. For the APC on the other hand, it is: retain the presidency or die. In the light of this, many party members have presented themselves as viable flagbearers, if the party is to achieve this objective.

Former Lagos State Governor, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Ebonyi State Governor, Dave Umahi, Senator Rochas Okorocha, Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello and Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi have declared their intention to vie for the APC presidential ticket. While Vice President, Yemi Osibanjo informed APC governors of his intention to run yesterday and will make it official today, Central Bank Governor, Godwin Emefiele is rumoured to have presidential ambition in the party but have yet to declare his intention.

From the PDP camp, there are: Governor of Sokoto State, Aminu Tambuwal; Newspaper publisher, Dele Momodu; Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike; former governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi; Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Udom Emmanuel. Others are: former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar; former Senate President, Bukola Saraki; former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Anyim Pius Anyim and the Governor of Bauchi State, Bala Mohammed, as well as a female aspirant, Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies.

At this critical moment of economic doom and gloom and state of anomy, all candidates of both political parties have in the last couple of weeks, been making a lot of promises to the electorates to persuade them as to why they remain the best alternative in addressing the myriads of challenges currently buffeting the country.

In their quest to covet the nation’s most exalted seat, the aspirants and their cronies are not leaving any stone unturned. Existing and potential political office holders have started returning to the electorates with several enticing and juicy “empowerments” to gain popularity and ensure they get the needed support to boost their chances of emerging victorious at the polls.

To say the least, the romance between the politicians and the hoi polloi intensifies with each passing day. Typical of periods preceding an election year, there is a high amount of transfer and flow of public funds, mostly from a region of higher financial temperature to a region of lower financial temperature. That is to say, large amounts of money is being brandished by aspiring political candidates to the masses in varying forms, most of which are intended to woo the electorates to their favour.

That is not all, political players who control large amounts of wealth and influence are currently using religion to canvass support as well as dissuade the electorates from voting for a particular candidate or party. Some clerics have turned the church/mosque into a campaign arena for a candidate or political party because of a promised financial inducement.

To reiterate, the political landscape has become quite turbulent. However, with the commencement of campaigns on 28th September, the waters will get even more muddy.

Ezinwanne writes from Abuja via ezinwanne.dominion@gmail.com

Nigeria’s response to the onset of murder   ous mass violence has evolved through phases of co-optation, brutal reprisal, appeasement, and state incapacity. The two options that have never quite been attempted with conviction are effective accountability and civic inclusion. Through phases of anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism and, now, interminable and metastasizing counter-insurgencies, the country has found itself mired in chronic mass violence as the only language of political dialogue. With many reluctant to acknowledge how the country quite ended up in this denouement, it is important to look back briefly in order to look forward.

Outlawry in post-colonial Nigeria has a long and tawdry history. Stephen Ellis, who spent a lifetime researching and analysing this in some detail, recounted in his final book, This Present Darkness: A History of Organised Crime in Nigeria, when the spike started: “Shortly before the civil war, when government broke down in some parts of the Western Region and there was a blurred line between political violence, crime, and organised insurgency.” Many would argue that Nigeria has been one long insurgency since then in what has been – on close inspection – a long war against the logical consequences of chronic leadership failure.

The post-war continuation of the error that we can shoot our way out of this failure of both leadership and national inclusion can be traced back to the public executions by firing squad of armed robbers, which began at the former Bar Beach in Lagos on April 26, 1971. The spike in armed robbery in Nigeria coincided with the mismanagement by the Yakubu Gowon regime of demobilisation in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War. With neither preparation for post-military life nor skills to survive in the rough and tumble of civilian existence after the war, the tens of thousands of hurriedly demobilised men found alternative uses for their arms and skills, often not in the most civil way possible. Public execution did not end armed robbery. If anything, violent robbery escalated in both frequency and brutality.

The onset of presidential politics in 1979 did not just make civilians of soldiers, it also made civilians of armed robbers, who provided the violent brawn to complement the political brains of politicians in savage electoral brigandage. The numbers confectioned by this criminal tag-team, as acknowledged by the Bolarinwa Babalakin Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Federal Electoral Commission (otherwise known as FEDECO), often received judicial benediction from election tribunals. Senior police officers, including former Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Adewusi and former Police Commissioner in the old Anambra State, Bishop Eyitene, both now sadly late, compiled infamous records of electoral joint enterprise with these merchants of violence.

With the return of the military to government in 1983, we had a gradual escalation of violence to the point where, by the mid-1990s, the regime of General Sani Abacha fully deployed criminal gangs and networks against peaceful civic advocacy in the Niger Delta. In institutions of tertiary education, vice-chancellors in various universities and rectors of polytechnics did the same. By the time the country returned to civil rule in 1999, the politicians were happy to resume their marriage with violence and its unlicensed suppliers. This time, as former senator Shehu Sani recalls in the title of his book, in addition to using them to rig elections, they were also freely deployed as tools of political assassination.

The Galtimari Report recommended that the government should “beam their searchlight on some politicians who sponsored, funded and used the militia groups that later metamorphosed into Boko Haram and bring them to justice.” In its White Paper issued in May 2012 on the report, the Federal Government accepted this recommendation and directed the National Security Adviser to co-ordinate compliance. One decade later, nothing has come of this recommendation.

Instead, what followed has been a descent into sovereign abdication followed by capitulation. Three years later, in 2015, the crisis in north-east Nigeria had become a source of earnings not merely for elements in the security services but also for mercenaries imported by government and paid with public funds. This, notwithstanding that Nigeria was one of the prime movers behind the Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa adopted in 1977, which criminalises mercenarism and renders liable to punishment all persons involved in it.

Prof Odinkalu, a lawyer and teacher, can be reached via chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

Nasir El-Rufai is certainly an enigma of dramatic proportion. He is a man of several dimensions. I once grabbed a copy of his book in search of his personality but couldn’t make it all through it, not because it was not readable (I still have it in my library) but because it was all about aggrandisement.

I was not alone; excerpts from it by the media and all who know him much more, including former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, eloquently bear testimony of his self glorification. The title of the book itself was some amusing braggadocio that he was not cut out for public service because he is a non-conformist who would do what he considered right without the clogs of bureaucracy.

The Bureau of Public Enterprises and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory provided the platform on which he did the personal evaluation of his performance.

As the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory he ostensibly embarked on the process of re-enacting the masterplan of the nation’s new capital. Most Nigerians were really neither here nor there about the motive behind it.

He was initially praised by those who felt there must be someone who should return us to order and decency, while others, already bewitched by the Nigerian mind-set of nothing goes for nothing, merely ignored him, assured that the hullabaloo had a hidden agenda.

At the end of his ministerial theatrics, the exercise all turned out to be mere massive demolition of property which some people believed were targeted against those already dominating Abuja space as if it were their Lagos. The noise of aesthetic splendour which was the advertised motive paled into insignificance.

A well trained and educated personality from the Northern elite Barewa College through Georgetown University and Harvard, Nasir Ahmed el-Rufai has all it takes, in terms of education and exposure to make the difference in public service. Yet he is one Nigerian elite most unable to wean himself from his ethnic sentiments which completely becloud him and remain the bane of his performance.

Originally from Daudawa, a Fulani enclave of the present Katsina State, Nasir got stuck with the notion of Fulani supremacy and inexorably the champion of their cause. When terrorism by Fulani herdsmen genre was just rearing its horrendous heads, Rufai, in 2012, not only adopted a permissive approach of the lawlessness, he emboldened the boys by warning that whoever killed a Fulani had just taken an IOU for which he would pay in the fullness of time no matter how long it took.

As if that was the imprimatur of their popular elite they badly needed, the boys went on rampage decapitating, raping and ultimately killing several people, particularly the indigenous communities which were evidently marked for extermination.

Most of the victims were cowed by the notion that the Fulani would always come back for vengeance that submitted to the prevailing situation. Some who couldn’t take the nonsense from the herdsmen, fought back, particularly the people and communities of the Middle Belt, in order to take their destiny in their own hands.

Obviously, Nasir was unhappy with what happened to his mercenaries. His election in 2015 as governor of Kaduna State provided the opportunity to pacify the herdsmen declared as the fourth most deadly terrorist gang in the world. Soon after his inauguration as governor, one of Rufai’s urgent and most pressing assignments was to trace these mercenaries to their various countries of origin, paying them huge amounts of money, so much he would not publicly announce it.

It must be emphasised that El-Rufai who just recently insisted that he or his government would not be part of any arrangement of paying ransom to kidnappers was the first to make payment for appeasement of terrorists an official act of government.

Justifying his actions while speaking to journalists as reported in the media on December 3, 2016, within six months of his inauguration, the governor of Kaduna State said extensively:

“For Southern Kaduna, we didn’t understand what was going on and we decided to set up a committee under Gen. Martin Luther Agwai (retd) to find out what was going on there”.

“What was established was that the root of the problem has a history starting from the 2011 post-election violence. Fulani herdsmen from across Africa bring their cattle down towards Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria. The moment the rains start around March, April, they start moving them up to go back to their various communities and countries”.

“Unfortunately, it was when they were moving up with their cattle across Southern Kaduna that the elections of 2011 took place and the crisis trapped some of them”.

“Some of them were from Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal. Fulanis are in 14 African countries and they traverse this country with the cattle. So many of these people were killed, cattle lost and they organised themselves and came back to revenge.

So a lot of what was happening in Southern Kaduna was actually from outside Nigeria. We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger Republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing”.

“In most of the communities, once that appeal was made to them, they said they have forgiven. There are one or two that asked for monetary compensation. They said they have forgiven the death of human beings, but want compensation for cattle. We said no problem, and we paid some”.

“As recently as two weeks ago, the team went to Niger Republic to attend one Fulani gathering that they hold every year with a message from me. We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger Republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing”.

No one is against government assuaging the loss of citizens in circumstances where they are victims of either government actions like compulsory acquisition of land or some emergencies caused by natural disasters. But when it is an issue of communal conflict, political actors need to be even handed if nepotistic meanings would not be read to such demonstrated gestures. For instance, we were never told what government did to the Nigerian citizens whose communities were invaded by these foreign mercenaries.

The point being made ultimately is that the threat by Governor El-Rufai of Kaduna State last week that he and his fellow governors would invite foreign mercenaries to stem the tide of insecurity in the face of the manifest incapacity of the Federal Government to save lives and property, is a vituperation of a frustrated elite. In other words, the sour grapes that El-Rufai and others who think like him planted have fully grown and his bite thereof is setting their teeth beyond the edge.

So much have been speculated that the terrorist-herdsmen rampaging and ravaging our territory were invited from several parts of West Africa to make Nigeria ungovernable should former President Goodluck Jonathan win the 2015 general elections. Does anyone still wonder how a governor would just be leaving a meeting with the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces only to make such a mutinous comment, evidently disparaging the Nigerian military once reputed to be the major peace-enforcer of the entire West African sub-region.

There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian military and security forces which remain among the best trained in the world and which had held their heads high in international operations. The Buhari administration simply has castrated our tigers to make it possible for barking dogs to make mince meat of our people.

Not even in countries where full international war is on-going is life so cheap as we have under this administration. The terrorists are, of course, neither invisible nor invincible. The Federal Government knows the whereabouts of these enemies of our people who are obviously enjoying some form of immunity.

If the President is in doubt of the capacity of the Nigerian people to rid this country of terrorism, let him accede to restructuring so that the constituent states of the Nigerian federation may have their own Police for internal security within their areas of jurisdiction. The Buhari government has obviously run out of ideas in all spheres of political and public administration.

The solution to insecurity is not such empty threat by a toothless Chief Security Officer. The solution is in restructuring with each state or region having its own Police with constitutional provisions allowing them to bear arms commensurate with, if not higher than, the fire power of the enemies.

Only such reality of balance of terror in every cranny of the country which is possible with adherence to true federalism would deter these mercenaries and send them to their country of origin. Nigeria, we hail thee.

Ebiseni is Secretary General, Afenifere.

HUSBAND. Father. Lawyer. Pastor. Professor. SAN. Politician and Vice President – the titles on the hoary head of Buroda Yęmi Osinbajo are heavy. May thou continue to mount up with wings like the Super Eagles.

The deer doesn’t complain, though the antlers on its head are forky and hulking; it carries them, all the same. Though Adépèlé suffers from hyperdontia, he doesn’t complain about his crowded teeth; he grinds food with them, all the same. And the cow – horns, hoofs and headaches – never complains, it moos and milks, all the same. Vice President Osinbajo is not complaining, for the Lord is good, all the time.

Nobody kills the dog for barking. No one kills the ram for butting. Let nobody attack Dolapo’s husband for standing with Jenera Muhammadu Buhari, though innocent blood spurts from bandits’ bullets, and kidnappers’ bank accounts bespeaks of APC incompetence. Let the dead bury their dead is the new song in town though 714 soldiers were killed in 18 months. Praise be the name of the lord because no amount of killings can stop the 2023 elections.

Warming up to continue the bleeding of the national treasury after a change of government in 2023, some APC members, e-rats and apologists are today saying, “Baba Fiyinfoluwa has no constitutional powers to effect any desired change now because he’s only an auxiliary. When he becomes President, he will clean the Augean stable.” Nigerians, please, don’t forget the words of Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe alias 4:30, who says in the New Masquerade sitcom, “Fa, fa, fa, F-O-U-L!”

Yes, the North-favouring 1999 Constitution gives all powers to the President, Jenera Buhari, but it proffers no cure for his intellectual impotence. Therefore, it’s proper for Buroda Yemi to want to stay back in Aso Rock for another eight years in order to break the yoke inflicted on Nigeria by Buhari for eight years. Never mind the fact that ègbón Yemi had spent eight years in Lagos as commissioner for justice and attorney general under his former godfather, the bullion van owner at Bourdillon, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, when Jagaban’s word was law, and crumbs fell off his table. 8 + 8 + 8 = executive service to humanity. It’s not 24. Moreover, a thousand years is like a day in the sight of the lord. Today, Buhari is the ultimate, the law; the train will move when power swings tomorrow.

The grandson-in-law to Chief Obafemi Awolowo is a noble man. It’s not easy to put self forward in the service of an ungrateful nation. It’s not easy living with the endless deaths and destruction ravaging the country. It’s not easy to carry the burden of Nigeria on the head like a cow carries its horns while one’s children school in expensive universities in the UK snow. It’s not easy nodding gently to the ‘ao m’erin j’oba’ tune from the drums of sycophants, leading the elephant to the holey, leglesss throne. E no easy, but let somebody shout halleluyah!

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, sayeth the Lord God of Host. This is why buroda Leke is biding his time, and waiting upon the lord to lead the way to Aso Rock, the place of plenty and pleasure.

I was looking for an answer for those saying Baba Kanyisola is helpless in the face of Buhari’s ineptitude when I saw a page torn out from the Holy Book. I saw it on the floor in Abuja, trampled upon. Please, don’t ask me who tore it, you know who did. It’s the Mark 6:11 admonition of Jesus Christ, which says, “If anyone will not WELCOME you or LISTEN to you, shake the dust off your feet when you LEAVE that place, as a testimony against them.” So, Baba Damilola has a choice to resign, and keep his name and integrity unblemished, infers the Holy Bible.

In John 11:35, “Jesus wept!’ Even the sit-down comedienne of the clueless Jonathanian era, Patience Jonathan, wept! I can hear her voice, “Prinspal, na only you waka come?…Will you keep kwayet? Chai! Chai! Di blood you people are sharing, dia ris God o, dia ris God ooo, dia ris God ooooo! (weeps)” But Osinbajo shouldn’t shed crocodile tears, he’s the biblical serpent; very wise, he’s the biblical dove; very innocent. May the lord continue to bless thee, Mr VP.

I predict, in the 419 days remaining for President Muhammadu Buhari to vacate Aso Rock, and return to wherever he came from, Buroda Yemi will aspire to lead Nigeria, and continue the legacy of ruins Buhari and the All Progressives Congress have bequeathed to Nigeria.

Worried by the stupidity of planting corn, and expecting to reap yam, Paul, the greatest of the apostles, asks, “So, shall we then continue in sin that grace may abound?” Paul himself answers his poser, “God forbid.” I ask, shall Nigeria, in 2023, re-elect the same politicians who have been wrecking the country since 1999, and pray that grace may abound? God forbid!

Since 1999 till date, instead of pouring new wine in new wineskins, old wine has been recycled in old wineskins. Therefore, nothing has changed except serpents shedding their skins in continuous renewal to strike again and again.

I stand on the Rock of Ages, and urge the ignorant and the myopic bearers of falsehood seeing a new Nigeria in an Osinbajo presidency to turn their eye to the Book of Mark 2:21. It says, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse.”

For dialectical purposes, let’s even assume Osinbajo is the saintliest of saints, I urge we consider the words of Prophet Amos, who asks in the Holy Bible, “Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?”

Since his shameful fall from power in 1993, disgraced evil genius, Ibrahim Babangida, still pulls political strings. The same goes for Delta ruthless robber, James Onanefe Ibori, and his Edo ex-counterpart, Lucky De Thief Igbinedion, who both remain factors in Niger Delta politics, despite being convicted for looting public treasury.

Where is thy common sense, ye compatriots! Can ye continuously vote for treasury looters who mortgage your future and the future of your unborn generations that grace may abound?

Now, if IBB, Ibori, Igbinedion etc still have hold on power till today, who says Osinbajo can break away from Pantami, the Boko Haram apologist, and owner of a laughable PhD, or do away with Malami, the worst Minister of Justice and Attorney General since creation, and other dyed-in-the-wool Buhari elements?

I have some questions for Pastor Yemi. And I want him to answer them with his church mind. What did you say to Buhari who approved a $1m donation to Afghanistan, a Taliban state that doesn’t respect democracy, women and human rights? Why was this donation, done through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, not made public? Is the $1m meant to support global terrorism being waged by Afghanistan? Why make such a senseless donation when Nigerian universities are shut due to lack of funding? Why donate money to Afghanistan, whose GDP is far higher than Nigeria’s? No bi juju bi dat?

I have more questions, Mr Man of God. How many similar donations have been made in the past to the OIC, which is the second-largest inter-governmental organisation after the United Nations? Does this donation not give teeth to the suspicion that the Buhari regime has an Islamisation agenda? Buroda Yemi de SAN, what business does Nigeria, a secular state, have being a member of OIC? If not for the public acknowledgment of the donation by the Secretary-General the OIC, Hissein Taha, Nigeria’s prodigal rulers wouldn’t have mentioned the donation to Nigerians.

To be concluded