Only The Dead Protest In Nigeria

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

Protests may be no pills for the dying, but in Nigeria, they pilfer the dead, or at least, their dainties.

On August 1, Nigeria erupted in protests. The protests which pinched many states of the country hard, some harder than others, were over bread, but quickly bared deep-lying issues, braiding together knots of anger and despair over the state of the country.

Nigeria’s Convocation Of Clowns

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

Nigeria is currently entertaining a conversation over whether it is a country of clowns. The conversation was ignited by Kashim Shettima, Nigeria’s Vice President. At an event in Abuja, Shettima described Nigerians celebrating the free fall of the Naira against the dollar as clowns. Particularly, Shettima chided them for their celebrations on microblogging site X.

*Shettima and Tinubu and their wives 

Clowns imply a circus, and the use of the word by Shettima evokes memories of a 2018 interview of then President Muhammadu Buhari when he described Nigerian youths as lazy.

The Terrible Injustice Of Mob Justice

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

Nigeria’s seemingly unstoppable guillotine of mob justice has claimed yet another victim  with the brutal killing of Mr. Fwinbe Thomas Gofwan by a mob in Jos for stealing a car he owned, by all accounts. In Nigeria, the mob that has shown itself lurking and lethal in Sokoto State, the Federal Capital Territory, as well as Delta State usually moves with such lightning ferocity whenever there is a sacrifice to be made.

In May 2022, Deborah Samuel, a student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, had life brutally snuffed out of her by a mob in the state over a WhatsApp audio message. More than a year later, the police is yet to bring the culprits to book. History was to repeat itself in Sokoto State in June 2023 when Usman Buda, a butcher, was lynched by a mob over allegations of blasphemy, to further present Sokoto as the state where people are freely killed by feral mobs.

Nigeria: The Saboteurs Of A Sinking Ship

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

If Nigerian politics had a single currency, language, sign language, or definition, it would be money. But very close to it would be the concepts of betrayal and opportunism.

To preclude political opportunism and fry the chances of its elite practitioners in Nigeria, the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria makes salubrious provisions to arrest the vice of cross-carpeting. However, with many of the politicians who have engaged in it over the years getting away with it, it appears that judicial interpretation and enforcement have failed to stop the scourge.

The Monster Of Child Marriage

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

In the appalling arrangement of child marriage across Nigeria and the world, those who marry children are as guilty as those who marry off children in what is a grand but grievous theft.

All those who get involved, including all those who consent either by their silence or compliance, are thieves of the worst kind. From girls barely off their mothers’ breast, they steal a childhood, a girlhood, and more damningly, a future.

In the place of innocence, they sow iniquity, and from bodies unblemished by the complications of adulthood, they force out anguished lives. In Nigeria, as in many other countries around the world that have failed to reconcile equity and equality, being a woman is a never-ending battle.

Nasir El-Rufai, Nigeria And The Killer-Herdsmen

By Kenechukwu Obiezu

The concerned citizens who have over the years painfully followed the bloody mindless Kaduna State were hit with another sucker punch the other day: The Governor of Kaduna State and its Chief Security Officer, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai declared that he had paid Fulani herdsmen money to stop their attacks on long-suffering indigenes of Kaduna State, especially the Christian-dominated area of southern Kaduna.

Given his eccentricities and insatiable thirst for controversy, those who have followed his colourful political career from when he held the office of the Honourable Minister, FCT during which time countless buildings fell and countless families were rendered homeless controversially, to implement the Abuja Master Plan, to his current stint as Governor of Kaduna State, have never been starved of drama and unpredictability. His most ardent supporters and even many neutrals posit that the face of Abuja as it is today can be chalked up to the courage and determination of El-Rufai who allegedly tore down a house belonging to his father-in-law to give way to the Abuja Master Plan. Many would also argue that Kaduna State today is being set on a path of irreversible development. Razor-blunt and confrontational, since he assumed the highest office in the state.

To put it in proper perspective, the orgy of blood-letting which has enveloped Kaduna State for years now did not start with El Rufai. Years of internecine crises between the predominantly Christian Southern Kaduna area and the predominantly Muslim central and northern parts of the state have reduced one of Nigeria's most iconic states to a valley flowing with blood. When the Islamic Movement of Nigeria blindly charged into a confrontation with men of the Nigerian Army obviously lacking in professional restraint and were mercilessly massacred in Zaria, Kaduna State added another trophy to its bulging cabinet of mindless killings. A judicial commission of Inquiry was set up by El-Rufai and though the IMN never appeared as the condition it demanded for its appearance which was that its incarcerated leader, Ibraheem El- Zakzaky be released was never met, the Commission duly concluded its work within time and in its findings trenchantly indicted both the members of the IMN and the Nigerian Army for the bloodbath.

Since then, the IMN controversy has raged with its boiling point being Kaduna. When El Rufai introduced an executive bill which he posited was to ‘protect Kaduna State from extremism and hate speech,’ a cry of alarm issued from the throats of those who argued that there was more to the bill than met the eye in a state that has historically been a cauldron of religious tension.

It was against this background that the recent revelation by El Rufai that he had ladled out undisclosed sums of money to criminal herdsmen to placate them and stem their killings has drawn more than a little flak from Nigerians. Nigeria has officially been in recession for a while now and even those whose financial cocoons are the hardest have found themselves pricked even if only lightly by the austerity measures and seeming economic incompetency of a Federal Government which is looking more directionless by the day. Nigeria`s poor, of which ordinary families make up vast swaths have been desperately hit with many unable to maintain supply of the basic necessities of life ad many others losing their lives and livelihoods to the myriad negative effects of economic difficulties. From whence then, it must be asked, did El Rufai draw his ‘ingenious’ precedent of placating killer-herdsmen with money which seems in short supply in the Nigeria of today?

The Mindless Slaughter Of Innocent Nigerians

By Kenechukwu Obiezu

Renowned international human rights watchdog, Amnesty International’s recently released a report damningly found that Nigeria’s security agencies had systematically and extra-judicially gunned down one hundred and fifty members of the Indigenous  People of Biafra (IPOB), whose leader remains incarcerated,  in defiance of multiple orders for his bail by national and international courts, and by a government which  poorly continues to disguise its monumental discomfort with  the rule of law.

Nigeria’s   descent into a land of many and geographically-diverse killing fields has been steady decades now. President after President beginning with Olusegun Obasanjo under who  security agencies fell on Choba, Rivers State and Zaki Biam in Benue State, to the current administration which let loose security agencies in Anambra State, Kaduna State and in other states to crush supposed secession attempts by the IPOB and an alleged terrorist group in the  IMN, have cited threats to the national security and sovereign integrity of the country to justify repeated  ruthless deployment of force  done with scant regards to human rights, the rule of law and the rules of engagement.

Most gullible and impressionable  Nigerians increasingly afraid for their lives and security in a country of mounting insecurity and scandalous corruption have allowed themselves to be swayed by the government’s well–prepared propaganda and party lines into believing that all those whose blood have flowed were indeed terrorists whose places in the supposedly sane society of Nigeria had become untenable and highly dangerous. Add the rampaging killings by the terrorist Boko Haram sect and criminal Fulani herdsmen to the equation plus the government’s anemic and even comedic response and reaction thereto and you have a witch’s brew of mindless slaughter of innocent Nigerians.  President Muhammadu Buhari has   done little to help calm the frazzled nerves of   Nigerians and international human rights monitors who have remained alarmed at the killing sprees of security agencies in Nigeria.

Indeed, some of his  comments  issued in defiance to groups alleging marginalization  have, a posteriori,  been interpreted by overzealous security agencies as war cries rising from the highest office of the land against those who seek to tear asunder Nigeria’s internal security and render the giant of Africa ‘the Afghanistan of Africa.’  The results are bloody and scrawled in red.

From the beginning of time, most human societies have affirmed directly and indirectly the sanctity of human life. Even those who believed and propounded killings and human sacrifices in satisfaction of religious and sundry obligations   saw differently with time.
The United Nations Charter   which is the  foundational charter of  the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization, was  signed in San Francisco, United States, on  June 26,1945 by 50 of the 51 original member countries. Nigeria later appended its signature and became a member.