Nigeria: The Poor Shall Not Die!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Delta State born gospel singer, Harold Ikuku, re­leased a popular album that was the rave of the moment in the tough and horri­ble years that the 1990s were. The song’s motif is “I shall not die”. Although a gospel song, it reso­nated with both Christians and non-Christians as a result of its affirmative message of survival in the face of brutal economic and psychological assault on the citizenry. 

It was this song that a man sang with so much gusto on hearing of the new pump price of petrol about three weeks ago, the second of such astronomical increase within two months of the present regime. When Presi­dent Bola Tinubu said, in his in­augural speech, that petroleum subsidy was gone, his handlers must have thought that it was a masterstroke in view of the fact that petrol subsidy had become an albatross for the Nigerian polity. 

Mocking Jesus And The Poor As We Celebrate

By Banji Ojewale 

In Nigeria’s Northern State of Gombe, a crowd of excited citizens at a motor park clusters around a bus revving to take them to a holiday destination for Christmas and New Year celebrations. But a female Jihadist bomber thinks otherwise. Feigning to be passenger, she sneaks into their midst and detonates the lethal luggage on her body. She is blown into a thousand and one pieces. Scores of others suffer the same fate. Those who don’t die instantly, will die slowly, maimed, scarred and glued to gory memories of anguish for life. Are they luckier than those who experience prompt dispatch to the great beyond?

(pix:tvcnews)

Same scene in Bauchi: at the town‘s busy central market, an explosion rocks the shops and sheds, sparking an inferno that kills many of those shopping for Christmas and New Year. Health personnel race the wounded and the dead away in ambulances to medical centers and mortuaries. Global news agency, Reuters, tells the world “there are unknown numbers of casualties” in the tragedy.