FLICKERS By Festus Adedayo

Not minding that bloodshed had already drenched the Nigerian state in recent times, (Boko Haram, ritual killings, etc) seeing another tranche of innocent blood flow inside the St. Philips Catholic Church,

Ozubulu, Anambra State last Sunday, evoked tears from the eyes of Nigerians. In a country which plays tombola with statistics, the initial conflicting figures of the massacred didn’t baffle. But why a lone gunman in army uniform would forcefully drag worshippers to meet their God that prematurely is yet a topic for discussion. Death toll was put at 13 worshippers and 40 injured. Most dominant of reasons for the massacre was said to be an intra-kinsmen gang war. Aloysius Ikegwuonu, also known as Bishop, a South African-based narcotics dealer, had allegedly stepped on the toes of fellow barons who stormed Ozubulu in his search that Sunday.

At the risk of preempting police ultimate submission, the Ozubulu bloodshed bears the imprimatur of a Nigerian cult/gang killing with its graffiti of mindless bloodshed. Nigerian, because anyone who has witnessed or read of mafia killing, especially Italian Mafia,, knows that the Mafia doesn’t joke with precision. The Mafia tries to convince all that it has honour. While not exonerating such hate killings, gang killers elsewhere respect the unwritten code that imprecision is cowardice. Why a supposed gang killer would indiscriminately kill people not directly associated with his revenge ambition can only be an emblem of Nigerian collapsed values where honour has taken the back seat.

The greatest lesson from the Ozubulu massacre can be taken from the lecture delivered by highly cerebral University of Ibadan professor, Ayobami Ojebode, at an Oyo State Information Summit during the week. While speaking on the topic, Language As Weapon of War and Peace, Ojebode had given an allegory of a rat which, confronted by the threat of a mouse-trap which it saw set inside the bush, had frantically begged an assemblage of stakeholders like cow, dog and goat for communal intervention to abate the threat. He was denounced for externalizing his internal problem since mouse traps were meant to kill mice. However, each of them eventually met its waterloo as they were all sacrificed in the impending inferno connected to the trap. Its variant is a quotation from Martin Niemöller, a prominent Protestant pastor and vitriolic foe of Third Reich’s Adolf Hitler, which says “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist; Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Ozubulu is a metaphor for events which happen at the communal, state and national levels. Until the contrary is proven, this writer chooses to go with the dominant thesis that the 36-year old Bishop is a drug baron and the killing of worshippers, including his father, inside the church he built, is consistent with reprisal killings in the Nigerian underworld. Such phenomenon of young persons suddenly coming by stupendous money after a few years of leaving the shores of Nigeria and the community shamelessly abetting them by its unquestioning silence, transcends ethnic barriers. If we look through our neighborhoods, the Bishops, metaphor for young men with questionable wealth whom we worship unquestionably, litter everywhere. They are armed robbers, kidnappers, fraudsters and all manner of nocturne businessmen and women. I stand to be corrected, there is nowhere in the world where the kind of stupendous cash that is associated with Bishop – building churches, hospitals and frittering money away like a drunken sailor –  is plucked that seamlessly from the tree. I am also not aware of any licit money that can be made anywhere in the world which its maker fritters aimlessly as Bishop was said to have done in Ozubulu.

Now, the question is, how many of the receivers of the largesse from Bishop bothered to query his source of wealth? What did the Ozubulu community do to ask him for the source of his wealth? What effort did the church make to sieve the funds with which the South African “businessman” built cathedrals for his community? How much of the drug money did the church collect from this suddenly wealthy son of the community? Were there kinsmen of Bishop who suspected that the money might not be pure after all but elected to keep silent, believing speaking out was not their business? Could such persons have partaken of the tragedy in the cathedral last Sunday, directly or vicariously?

At the national level, such decision to play the ostrich is everywhere. When you speak up, some even think you are too flippant. A few years ago, some beans sellers in Ibadan travelling up north to negotiate their merchandize were reportedly hacked to death by Boko Haram insurgents. How could anyone, in their wildest imagination, believe that the so-called North West’s affliction of insurgency could someday afflict traders from a part of Nigeria so remote to this malady like Ibadan? How many Southern Nigerian soldiers have been hacked to death by the insurgents? So, why don’t we collectively address our problems and stop unnecessary silence? Yoruba forefathers, apparently foreseeing the danger of bottling up comments that may lead to societal redemption, said that if your neighbor is consuming dangerous concoctions and you withhold your rebuke, when he begins to writhe in pain in the night from his consumption, you will partake of the unease through his discomforting cries. Let us speak up about ills that litter our society.
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That Buhari must go?

The illness of President Muhammadu Buhari and his subsequent search for healing In the United Kingdom struck again during the week. A group suddenly came up with placards in Abuja urging him to tender his letter of resignation. Members of the group were tear-gassed from matching to the Aso Villa. The next day, another group sprung up which claimed to be supporting the ailing president.

While conceding that the 1999 constitution is silent on the number of months or days it would take the nation to determine the fate of a president who vacates office and transmits power to his vice, methinks the highly-touted integrity of President Buhari should bail Nigeria out of this shameful bind she found herself. Asking Buhari to vacate power now would make no difference from Buhari himself who, at the peak of his Katsina kinsman, Umaru Yar’Adua’s ill-health, unfeelingly asked him to relinquish power. But, by holding on to power, in spite of his health, and not asking that he willingly be allowed to stop this nightmare, Buhari is unwittingly claiming to be the only Messiah who can rescue Nigeria from its crisis. That’s a precursor to personal and dictatorial rule.

The question of whether to throw in the towel now or keep the reins of power in his frail and sickly hands, even till the eve of his prescribed handover date in 2019, is to me a moral question and not a legal one. How would over 180 million people’s fates be hung in the balance due to the existential health failings of a single man? The framers of the constitution assumed that two persons would sit at the Nigerian government’s driver’s seat and that when one, through a health challenge, takes leave of power, it would be for a short while. If Yemi Osinbajo takes ill now and has to leave the country, who then seats at the driver’s seat? But, that is assuming that the president is currently in a state where he understands his environment and is not being remote-controlled by selfish minders. Again, at moments like this, we are revealed to ourselves as some primitive power mongers who lack the sophistication and finesse of our colonizers.
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Footsteps of Isioma

The Oyo State Ministry of Information and Culture held an Information Summit during the past week. Though its theme was information management in government, the summit ended up speaking to society itself. For instance, users of language were told in unmistakable terms that they must exercise caution in the deployment of their trade. Thisday’s Miss Isioma Daniel, whose November 2002 reckless usage of words as the nation awaited Nigeria’s hosting of the Miss World Pageant, led to the death of about 200 persons in Kaduna, was used as an example. At the end of the summit, participants went home persuaded to be careful in stoking the embers of hatred. Kudos must go to the ministry, organizers of the summit, its helmsman, Toye Arulogun and the workaholic Tunde Muraina who effectively held the engine room of the event.
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Why are we so blest?

Senate President Bukola Saraki, during the week, showed the gate to 98 of his aides. Unconfirmed sources said he had 300 of such. Dressing the sack in what sounded like badinage, his office had said that it was a “staff review” to ensure efficiency and that he inherited that huge number. Now, perhaps we should thank the Kwara politician for ‘helping us’ by reducing the unwieldy number of aides who worked under him? The truth however is that, this is a sickness that afflicts the Nigerian practice of the presidential system of government. When added to our system of cronyism and tendency to see government as belonging to everyone and no one in particular, no one can be bothered that such a beehive of persons loaf around a man of power daily. The tragedy is that, many of them don’t do anything. To know how tragic this revelation is, imagine what number works in the presidency, with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, their deputies and governors of the states. Can anyone of them employ such a swarm of loafers in his private business? While considering this sickening issue, you will be prompted to ask, like Ayi Kwei Armah, why are we so blest?
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Human flesh

Two gory events were recorded in Lagos during the week. They were alleged dens of ritual murderers which residents of some Lagos suburbs, specifically the Lagos/Abeokuta expressway, unraveled. Almost periodically, revelations like this are made in parts of Nigeria which were in turn turned into media spectacles.

Many reasons have been given for such maniacal tendency of man to skewer his fellow man’s flesh that senselessly, likes mutton. While some say it is our inability to divorce ourselves from the cannibalistic nature of our pre-historic ancestors, some say that the resort to such acts is always rampant during the hopelessness of war when parents willingly agree to roast their children for dinner due to acute starvation and hunger. It is the same logic which behind a revelation from the military command last week that parents were donating their children for suicide bombing.

This writer is personally of the opinion that the mindless pints of innocent blood shed daily by our compatriots is responsible for the darkness that envelopes our land. Look at it from whichever angle you may, this land is a land of nocturne and every one of us is just waddling through like blind men and women.

The moment a man lifts up a machete or any other instrument and does what he does to lesser animals, he loses the qualification of sanity or humanity and it would be a misnomer to classify such as belonging to the community of Homo sapiens. Anyway, a government that makes life this hopeless for people to live, which puts this level of gulf between the haves and have-nots has lost any moral right to demand sanity.
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Trips to Rwanda

By the time we get to the denouement of this emerging grisly drama in Nigeria, we may lament that we ought to have cross-checked with history. The Rwandan genocide began this way, with hate-laced words flowing in the air. Hutus and Tutsis freely called each other cockroaches, snakes and deepened narratives of bile. By the time the war began which claimed over 800,000 people in a few weeks, it was too late to stop one of the most gruesome genocides in human history.

The hate video being circulated in the North and which is at present viral on the social media, bears every similarity to Rwandan. If the fire of hate breaks, Nigerians are so interwoven that no one can predict its extent.

We should ask Acting President Yemi Osinbajo what is the outcome of the various meetings he held with leaders of thought in the country recently? Peaceful coexistence is not got via oratory on the rostrum. Arresting authors of that hate video and getting Nnamdi Kanu undergo psychiatric test for his absolutely senseless and inciting words would demonstrate that Nigeria has sworn not to go the way of Rwanda.
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Idi Amin the youth

Young Nigerians who call for generational shift would soon find out that when the time to mount the rostrum comes, typologies to be deployed to strengthen their arguments would be very far between. The typology of Yahaya Bello, the governor of Kogi State for example, ought to be a powerful imagery for every locality. But, if you use Kogi under this governor in his early 40s as an example of the wonders the youth can wrought, that argument is dead on arrival.

Recently, Bello unilaterally sacked the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) of the Kogi State University. He has also elected not to pay salaries and is reputed to have fallen in love with Idi Amin Dada of Uganda in his perception of power. Proscribing ASUU, to me, refreshes the huge image of Dada wagging his monstrous fat to the office of the Governor of the Ugandan Central Bank and asking him to mint cash for his spending. Side by side his kinsman, Dino Melaye, whose youthful exuberance fouls up the Nigerian National Assembly, you would realize that for proponents of geriatrics’ vacation of power to the youth, now otherwise known as Not too Young to Rule, a brick-wall is yet here.