Deaths And Blood Rituals For Bulaba Balablu Christmas

 By Ugo Onuoha

‘It will get worse before it gets worse’. That was the title of my article published here and in other newspapers on November 21, 2023, six months after Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, assumed office, and started his incoherent economic policies and programmes. The chicken is coming home to roost but it’s doing so at the cost of limbs, livelihoods and lives of the majority of Nigerians who are at the receiving end.

Everyday we wake up to news of tragedies, especially of avoidable accidents, miseries and needless deaths. Tragedies now straddle the land – at home, school, market, highway, sea/river, farm, stream, bush path. Everywhere, really.

There are no safe places in our country anymore. Nigerian lives no longer matter. Generator fumes wipe out families in their sleep. Kidnappers are no longer content with snatching travellers on the highways; they now pluck them from their homes, and kids from their schools, playgrounds, and classrooms.

Terrorists, bandits, and sectarian insurgents who for political correctness were christened herdsmen invade farmlands and rape women and girls, slaughter men and occupy  farms. Markets routinely go up in flames, many of them suspected to be acts of sabotage designed to cause economic disempowerment of a section of the country. Panels of inquiry follow such incidents but the results usually come to nought. There’s no life for a vast majority of Nigerians, and where there is, it is cheap.

When we wrote on November 21, last year that things will only get worse in this country we had no inkling it will be this bad. We had wished that we will not be vindicated because the consequences will be dire. The reality today is that Nigeria is in a dire straits. But the truth is that in spite of the acute poverty gripping Nigerians right now, the prognosis is that the future, at least the near future, is not looking good.

If truth be told the future for many Nigerians is foreboding. What we wrote 13 months ago could have been written today and they will not be widely off the mark. The first three paragraphs of that entry unedited read: “Nigeria is in the intensive care unit and its caregivers appear not to be perturbed. No. They are actually engaged but not in attending to a gravely ill patient. They make platitudes on the delivery of their promises but commit to attending to their hedonistic desires and pleasures.

“It is 146 days (as at November 21, 2023) since another set of rulers took the reins of power in Abuja. But not for one day have Nigerians heaved a sigh of relief. It has been like the reign of the Biblical rebellious Absalom in one part of the divided Kingdom of Israel. Absalom had told his subjects that whilst his father King David chastised them with the whip, he would do the same with the scorpion. Under former President, Maj.Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria suffered afflictions of unimaginable proportions. Indeed as that clueless regime that was bereft of imagination and humaneness was winding down, the common refrain from Nigerians was: Never Again. Many citizens believed that no future administration in Nigeria will be worse than Buhari’s in terms of abuse of power, impunity, desecration of democratic ethos, insensitivity to the country’s diversity, disregard for the suffering of citizens and intolerance of critical and opposing views. Obviously, we were mistaken”.

The extant regime which we wrote about when it was six months old in November last year will be 20 months in office by next month, January 2025. Loyalists and choristers of ‘on your mandate we shall stand…” will still fly off-the-handle to insist that it is still too early to assess the capacity of the regime with a four-year mandate. We will grudgingly concede that they may be right. However, the challenge is that there are virtually no indications that the needles for economic recovery and good governance are moving in the right direction, even if slowly.

 The experience is that of deterioration in the living standards of many, crisis in the cost of living, runaway inflation with food inflation about 40%, imported inflation caused by the country’s overwhelming dependence on imports and the poor exchange rate. The prediction is that many of these indicators will continue to head south for the foreseeable future. The consequences of forlorn hope which has trumped Tinubu’s ill-fitting  mantra of Renewed Hope are beginning to increase in their effects. You don’t need to listen to hear the groans of the people. You don’t need to be sensitive to feel the despondency of citizens. The sound of hopelessness is loud and clear. Nigerians are buffeted and the country could just be sitting on a keg of gunpowder. But do our rulers know about this clear and present danger? I doubt it otherwise they won’t still be behaving like Nero who serenaded himself with the wafting sounds and melodies from his flute while Rome burnt.

If they know that the folks are hurting they probably will not continue their hedonistic indulgences by parcelling significant portions of the 2025 national budget to themselves. As in the budget of this year, hefty sums in billions have been carved out in next year’s appropriation bill to buy sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for themselves, their consorts, cronies, and their acolytes; renovate mansions, residences and offices; procure cooking utensils and cutleries; provide fittings, fixtures and furnishings; pay for offshore frivolous junkets and carousing; gorge themselves on foods and drinks at banquets; organize trainings at home and abroad where nothing useful are learned; set up additional ministries, departments and agencies that fail even before they take – off; and, sundry things that suit their fancies.

Almost N50 trillion is said to be the size of the proposed 2025 budget. But by this time next year Nigeria will at best still be stagnant, and at worst deteriorated further in the global misery index. By the way, the current budget is said to have its implementation extended up till June 2025. So by the time next year’s budget is rubber-stamped by the national assembly, say in February or March, the two budgets will be running side-by-side. Multiple budgets make accountability by the government difficult but it has remained the preferred option for this regime since its inception. It ran multiple budgets in 2023. It is doing the same in 2024. It will do so in 2025. When you want to evade accountability, muddle the budget, and distort the conventional January -December budget cycle. Play ‘smart’ and pretend that nobody will understand the game. But Nigerians are no fools.

We are in the season of Christmas and New Year celebrations. But the aroma of the season is not in the air. In its place we have the smell of death. Nigerians are not amused. Ordinarily, Christmas should be a season of celebrations and reflections symbolising light, hope, and redemption. It’s a period when people, especially Christians demonstrate love, kindness, and generosity towards others. It’s a time for family reunion, boost in retail sales and businesses as well as travels and tourism, and vacations. It’s also a period when many people engage in charitable giving, donating to causes and organisations that support the vulnerable and those in need. 

Christmas is a time for renewal and new beginnings. It offers the opportunity to reflect on past experiences and to look forward to the future. But under Tinubu Christmas has added a new, depressing and morbid dimension – death in dozens. Gloom has overtaken excitement. Mourning has replaced celebration. Hopelessness has displaced hope. It’s renewed anguish for renewed hope. Death has taken the place of life. For Christians December is a celebration of life, the birth of Jesus Christ. But Christmas of 2024 looks more like Easter when Christ was crucified. This Christmas is a season of mourning – mourning in scores.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day but many homes will be mourning, wearing sac clothes. The week before this Christmas may go down in history as the period the most tragedies were recorded in Nigeria with scores of avoidable deaths through stampede caused essentially by grinding poverty. In a space of one week about 35 persons, mostly children, were killed in Ibadan, Oyo state in a supposed fun fair. In reality, it was not a fun fair. It was a hunting ground for food and sundry gifts for starving kids and their parents or guardians.

A stampede ensued and the children trampled under the foot. There was no assurance that the children who turned up in their numbers, far more than the capacity the organisers could handle, had any food in their stomachs, and the energy to survive the push and the shove. So they died because this country eats its children. Arrests have been made. Probe has been ordered. Commiserations have been offered. Those are standard fairs. As we wrote this last Sunday, the Ibadan deaths have receded from the news headlines. The authorities are still probing the devastating blast that wrecked the same Ibadan about the middle of this year. As we say here, that probe has ‘entered voicemail’. There’s no reason to believe that the same will not happen to the deaths of the kids.

Soon after Ibadan tragedies struck in Abuja in the federal capital territory at a Roman Catholic church. Eleven persons were reportedly killed in yet another stampede. The church has a tradition of giving alms to its neighbours and other less privileged people in the community and beyond. The charity is not limited to its members nor to Christians. The church has done this in the past without any incidents. Until this year. The venue was besieged, and in the process of distributing the alms, a stampede ensued and almost a dozen people were killed. 

About 350 km from the Abuja church, another harvest of deaths took place. This time in Okija in Anambra state. Obijackson Foundation founded by billionaire Ernest Obiejesi, was conducting its annual gifting of bags of rice and other food items to the needy when tragedy through yet another stampede struck. The death toll was officially put at 21. They were mostly women and expectant mothers. A mother of Nigerian extraction who is abroad wept uncontrollably when her son showed her the video of the incident. She lamented that it had to be mothers because they were searching for where the next meal for their children would come from. She reportedly would not eat for the rest of that day. So in the week before Christmas about 70 Nigerians died because of poverty inflicted on them by their own rulers.

Already the search for scapegoats for these avalanche of deaths has started. Some persons, especially regime choristers, are pointing accusing fingers at the organisers of these events for failure to put in place mechanisms for crowd control. They may have a point. But they conveniently forget that some of these charities have been going on for years with no incident. Could it then be possible that the misery and poverty and hopelessness inflicted on Nigerians are the reasons for the desperation that led to the stampedes in Abuja (north), Ibadan (west), and Okija (east)? Governments at all levels are culpable for the harvest of deaths.

But the federal government whose misguided macro economic policies have pauperised the majority of Nigerians takes the lion’s share. The policies of this regime have turned once proud and otherwise hard working Nigerians into beggars and hunters of palliatives. The federal government has ordered that the tragedies be probed. What’s there to probe? The reason for what happened is in plain sight – hunger and starvation occasioned by government policies have driven people to the edge. In Okija, for instance, people were not deterred by the deaths. A video showed that people still stayed on for the bags of rice even after the confirmation that 21 persons from amongst them had died. That was the level of desperation. Nobody was scared that the next stampede could claim their own lives.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Police are at it. They said that they are minded to prosecute the charities and persons in whose events the tragedies happened for being negligent in crowd control. They can go ahead as long as they bear in mind that the first to be indicted should be the federal government which has breached a crucial provision in the Constitution which says that the primary duty of the government is to ensure the welfare and security of Nigerians. Has it lived up to it? The police should also know that after indicting the organisers, getting the courts to proscribe the charities, and jailing their operatives, others may begin to shun the act of giving. The emergent hungry and angry people will be recruiting grounds for criminals. It will be a vicious cycle. Is that where we want to be at this time in our country?

*Onuoha is a commentator on public issues