Hate speech and fake news appear to be the exclusive preserve of religious and political leaders. This class can spread poison in statements, commentaries and homilies without any check. They can stoke religious animosity and drive the wedge of hate deeper without being held accountable for their actions. Alas! When Nigerians enduring government’s malfeasance tweet or post their frustrations in parlances that the leadership finds unsavoury or they protest against obvious maladministration, they are magicked away like in the case of Abubakar Idris, a critic, better known as ‘Dadiyata’ who has been missing without a trace for eight months. Or…
Author: Frederick Nwabufo
Nigeria is an impoverished country. In fact, the country has never been rich – in the economic sense of the word. The assumptions of wealth have always been hyphenated to the abundance of crude oil and other natural resources. But these alone do not make the country rich. As a matter of fact, the exploitation and expropriation of these resources by the thieving elite have only made the country poorer – and of course, the poverty capital of the world. The price of crude oil has come under immense shock. The US WTI (West Texas Intermediate) crude price entered negative…
He played in the background so well. Abba Kyari was the mystery of the presidential villa. Unobtrusive and self-effacing, yet his influence was palpable beyond the cloistered Aso villa. He understood his job as the president’s right-hand man and never did he outshine the master. He capered as the unseen but dutiful connoisseur of the throne; greatly misunderstood, uncelebrated, but feared. In August 2015, Kyari was appointed as President Muhammadu Buhari’s chief of staff. There was minuscule information on this figure at the time – basically because there were no records of him featuring prominently in any government in the…
The conundrum: Do we sustain the lockdown to contain coronavirus and risk the upsurge of insecurity and citizens’ unrest or do we lift the restrictions and find other means of controlling the spread of COVID-19? For a country like Nigeria with complexities and deprecable socio-economic indices, imposing restrictions on movement for an extended period of time — asphyxiating the economy and pauperising small businesses – is Siberian. As it is, we cannot afford an extended lockdown! Lockdown measures are not sustainable. As a matter of fact, some countries affected by a coronavirus in Europe are beginning to realise that imposing…
In Nigeria, to infract the law and escape retribution, be a cleric or a politician under the sanctuary of the government of the day. Pastors and imams emanate and fecundate fake news and hate speech without scruples because of some seeming ‘’self-immunity’’ effectuated by the sensitivity of religion here. Clerics in the country defy the law unabashedly and with unrestrained arrogance. And when there is an attempt to hold them to account the refrain becomes ‘’our religion is under attack’’ by unbelievers. On March 22, 2020, David Oyedepo, founder of Living Faith Church, better known as ‘’Winners’ Chapel’’, held services…
Subterfuge. Propaganda. Lies. All have a date with the truth. The truth is inexorable; it will always extinguish lies and propaganda. Nigeria’s ‘’successes’’ in the war against Boko Haram have been largely propaganda. Since 2015, when the Buhari administration declared the insurgents a conquered group, the combat campaign has been oxygenated by lies and half-truths. In March 2020, about 70 soldiers, including a major and three officers, were killed in an ambush by Boko Haram insurgents. The troops, on operation Ayiso Tamonuma, plodded into an ambush as they trudged into Goniri area in Yobe, and were trounced by the insurgents…
Dear Abba Kyari, chief of staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, I have not come to gloat over your affliction by coronavirus (COVID-19); I have come to sympathise with you and to wish you strength as you pull through this deadly infection. But I will not express my sympathies without some censuring. Really, I believe coronavirus is an inevitable doom. It has been suggested by some health experts that the disease could spread to as much as 60 percent of the world’s population – if it spirals out of control. ‘’The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s…
Coronavirus (COVID-19), an exorable doom, threatens life on the planet. It is exorable because it is conquerable. This explains why world leaders are taking the charge to combat this ominous apocalypse. It is a time for leadership from the fore-end; a time when citizens must hear their leaders speak to them; see them take action, making assurances and fulfilling those promises. The counsel, consolation and firm statement of a leader is imperative at this moment. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, prime minister, despite being in self-isolation and his wife battling the virus after contracting it at a conference in the UK,…
Northern Nigeria is prostrate. It is the axis of uglies – banditry, insurgency, kidnapping, diseases, ignorance, and drug abuse. Alas! The region’s elite are aware of the problems but look away because the disequilibrious status quo sustains them. What is petrifying, however, is that they maul and clobber at anyone who spits the truth in their faces. I think this is the mortal sin of Muhammad Sanusi II, the emir of Kano – beyond his politics with Abdullahi Ganduje, governor of Kano. But wait! The World Bank says 87 per cent of Nigeria’s poor are in the north. And that…
I think solidarising in the struggle is more rancour-proof than banding in victory. In 2013, the PDP galloped from one crisis to another until it imploded and lost power at the centre in 2015. The APC appears to be toeing the same path. Since the party cruised to power, it has been embroiled in tremulous wrangling. To say the obvious, the APC was never a party – in the real sense of the word – but a special purpose vehicle to grab power. To put it lucidly, it is just a club of disparate people desperate for power. The parties…
On December 14, 2016, the senate asked Babachir Lawal, secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), to immediately resign from office. This followed the recommendation of its ad hoc committee on the humanitarian crisis in the north-east, which had investigated the management of funds for internally displaced persons in the region by the Presidential Initiative on the North-East (PINE). PINE at the time was under the SGF. But on January 17, President Muhammadu Buhari wrote to the Senate, saying he would not sack Lawal because he was not given a fair hearing. The president dilly-dallied and shilly-shallied over the…
As I said in a column in June 2019, security is everybody’s business. No individual, group, institution or organisation is nugatory in matters of security. All efforts are needed and all hands must be forged into one fist in the pursuit of peace. In fact, it imperils security if any stakeholder to the peace is “quarantined” and stereotyped. I believe, there will be more gains in the effort to wrestle down banditry and kidnapping if the people, who can prevail on, apprehend or sway these outlaws are involved in the “sumo”. It is the reason I am strained by the…
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is as flawed as Ibrahim Magu, its acting chairman, who has revised the agency to a personality cult. The foibles and defects of Magu are no longer distinguishable from the character of this once illustrious institution. Where Magu falters, the EFCC stumbles. No doubt, a scathing detraction to professionalism in Nigeria is the customization of public offices. Institutions are built around personalities rather than on rules, laws, and services. This in itself is corruption. In August 2019, the EFCC Twitter handle @officialEFCC tweeted a photo of some top staff of the agency tagging…
My theory. Boko Haram is an enterprise. The wheel of the war must be kept spinning for the profiteers and racketeers of blood. The insurgency has raged on for more than a decade. And when it appears the vestiges of the insurgents are finally being erased, they rise again like the phoenix from the ashes – to become stronger, more coordinated and more ubiquitous. It is a grand delusion to assume that the machinations of these deviants do not have insider abutment. About 1,400 Boko Haram suspects have been released since the launch of Operation Safe Corridor in 2016. This…
A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) put the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria to 13.5 million – as of 2018. An unimpressive mass of this number comes from Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, and other northern states. In December 2019, Jigawa state government announced it would open a bidding process for the construction of 95 mosques across the state. This is a state with over 800,000 out-of-school children, According to a survey by the Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria (ESSPIN), there are more than 800,000 out-of-school children between the age of three and…
The scale of bandit enterprise is much more petrifying with the incursive attacks of criminal gangs in the federal capital territory (FCT) – the province from where President Muhammadu Buhari presides over the country. Also, the FCT is the headquarters of the police, army, navy, air force, DSS, NIA, and defense ministry. It hosts all federal ministries and the other two arms of government. Unarguably, the incidents of banditry and kidnapping in the nation’s capital ring aloud the complete collapse of security in the country. Really, it is mortifying that despite the stationing of all security apparatuses in the area,…
In December 2018, Boko Haram insurgents pulled a blitzkrieg on military formations in Baga, Borno state, sacking the headquarters of the multinational joint task force and taking over the place (briefly). The group steadied its onslaughts on military formations, killing many soldiers, weeks after. At least, 18 soldiers were killed in an ambush on Maiduguri road on December 26, 2018, in one of Boko Haram’s mortal offensives. The group also persisted in inflicting attritive damages on the civilian population in the north-east. The killings and destruction never let up; in fact, they had taken an upward trajectory since the current…
In my column article of January 6 – a riposte to Isa Funtua’s prejudiced utterance on the Igbo — I wrote: ‘’Funtua’s statement reeks of corpulent arrogance, bigotry and an acute sense of entitlement. It reinforces the stereotype that his section of the country bullies any region that does not kiss the ring of the caliphate.’’ I was not surprised that Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) reacted hysterically to the piece because the beneficiaries of the disequilibrium status quo will always seek to maintain it. It is common knowledge that swathes of territories in the north have been overrun by bandits.…
I have been married for about nine years now. My experience in my nearly a decade of being grafted to another being has taught me to maintain the sacrality of my union. No interloper allowed, even at times when the tempting thing to do is to succumb to the emotion of letting in an outsider. I have come to understand that not all those who come to grief with you or provide you with a shoulder to recline on at your time of vulnerability are really ‘’grieving with you’’. Most will exploit your low point to arrogate to themselves some…
Permit me to indulge in this end-of-the-year humbug. I have read some prophecies for the year 2020 by men who arrogate to themselves the title ‘’man of God’’. Well, since I am not born of Satan, I believe I am a craft of that supreme intelligent being. But let me say upfront, the ‘’spirit’’ which dwells in me is not the same as that which resides in these ‘’men of God’’. So, please indulge me if my prophecies go in a different tangent. First, I have studied the 2020 prophecies of Primate Elijah Ayodele, founder of INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church,…
I never thought President Buhari cared about posterity or how he would be evaluated when he leaves office because his actions now betray any reflection on the future. I also never thought he was a ‘’philosopher president’’ who ponders and asks ‘’why’’; again, because his actions have been that of a sciolist. So, my perturbation here is provoked by his statement at a meeting with some residents of Abuja on December 25 where he said: ‘‘I swore to hold this office in accordance with the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and God willing, I will follow the system…
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is one person who has felt the sting of the avarice of the national assembly. At different points, he described the institution in blackened terms. Though the former president may hold a provincial grudge against the legislature for ‘’obvious reasons’’ – the botched third-term agenda — the institution is just as he has daubed it. On November 26, 2014, at the book launch of the late Justice Mustapha Akanbi in Abuja, Obasanjo evoked pejoratives on the national assembly. He said it was an ‘’assembly of thieves and looters’’. He airbrushed the iniquities of the legislature with…
Jane Appleton Pierce, the wife of Franklin Pierce, 14th president of the United States, is perhaps, most remembered as the ‘’calamity first lady’’. She spent her years working against the political ambition of her husband. And when he eventually became president she still did not let up. Is Aisha Buhari ‘’calamity first lady’’? Really, I ask because she appears to reveal all the dirty and soiled undergarments of the villa to the chagrin of President Muhammadu Buhari. In October, in the heat of the controversy effectuated by an interview granted by Fatima Mamman Daura, daughter of the ‘’cabal honcho’’ to…
On June 12, 2018, Joshua Dariye, former Plateau state governor and senator, huddled in the dock awaiting the verdict of fate for pilfering N1.6 billion public funds at a high court of the federal capital territory (FCT). Dariye was lachrymal, wiping hot tears from his eyes. Before the senator was handed a 14-year jail sentence by Adebukola Banjoko, the presiding judge, he begged for mercy – a luxury he did not accord to the people of Plateau who endured his troubled administration. He was found guilty of 14 counts out of the 23 preferred against him by the Economic and…
On December 12, 2013, I woke up to Olusegun Obasanjo’s ‘Before it is too late’; a caustic letter to former President Goodluck Jonathan. In the 18-page missive, Ebora Owu diced Jonathan like a sushi chef. Obasanjo delineated 10 reasons he chose to drag Jonathan before the public square for some good spanking. He said the former president ‘’must move away from advertently or inadvertently dividing the country along weak seams of north-south and Christian-Muslim’’, and that ‘’nothing should be done to allow the country to degenerate into economic dormancy, stagnation or retrogression’’. He also said, ‘’some of our international friends…
The 2007 general election conducted by INEC under the supervision of Maurice Iwu is, perhaps, one of the most fraudulent in Nigeria’s electoral history. Human Rights Watch said this about that election: ‘’Instead of guaranteeing citizens’ basic right to vote freely, Nigerian government and electoral officials actively colluded in the fraud and violence that marred the presidential polls.’’ Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the beneficiary of the electoral sleaze, even admitted that the exercise was a travesty. Really, the electoral process evolved from a ‘’garrison exercise’’ with the conduct of one of the freest and fairest elections in 2015 by INEC under…
The senate marshalled by Ahmad Lawan has been convincing in confirming the stereotypes and assumptions about the institution. In July, I wrote about Lawan’s obsequiousness and desperation to please President Buhari whom he described as his ‘’close friend’’. I say again, Lawan has been dutiful in his obligation of inking ‘’rubber-stamp’’ on the senate. Soon after he became senate president, he assumed the ‘’role of unofficial spokesman’’ of Buhari and saddled himself with ‘’interpreting maladies’’. And as a matter of fact, he has not relented in rising to the occasion as an ‘’interpreter of inefficiencies’’. Though he once vowed he…
‘’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’’ – Jesus Christ in Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:39). I am not a pastor. In fact, I do not subscribe to the wedges and hedges of religion, but there is, no doubt, wisdom in the teachings of Anobi Isa. The point here is simple, ‘’turn the other check’’ even when you are persecuted. If I may add, this teaching is cardinally about being meek. And what does Jesus say about the meek. He says,…
I do not know much about sports, but I know what good sportsmanship is. Diego Maradona, the Argentine football shaman, was a great player, but he is not celebrated as much as Pele of Brazil. One fatal flaw detracts from Maradona’s genius – hubris. Maradona is known to be a sore loser. He curses, barks and brawls in defeat. As a matter of fact, his ‘’legend’’ is stymied by his repulsive foibles and deportment. Politics is like football. It is a game. One side wins and the other side loses. It should not have to be a hara-kiri – ‘’it…
I once wrote: ‘’There is no morality in global politics. It is eat or be eaten. The nucleus of international relations, beyond the niceties of diplomacy, is interest. Substantially, foreign relations are a trade of interests. Nothing is given for nothing. Every country seeks its own even in the extension of charity to another country.’’ What is Russia’s interest in Nigeria – Africa? Well, the interest of outsiders in Africa has always been the same – to plunder the continent. It is the same as that of the conveners of the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, who arrogantly arrogated to themselves…
