THOUGHTS ON THE INDICTMENT OF THE NIGERIAN ARMY FOR THE ZARIA MASSACRE

By Pius Adesanmi

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Not content with opening fire on members of the Shi'a Muslim group they said blocked the route of General Buratai their boss - yes, I saw that video and I still do not see anything that tear gas could not have solved in the circumstance - the Nigerian Army did a follow-up with an early-morning raid on the civilian enclave of the group. By the time they were done, at least 347 innocent civilians including women and children had been wasted in their sleep.

The gruesomeness of this 21st-century crime against humanity was perhaps only equalled by the inhuman gruesomeness of the public acclamation which greeted the act. It was as if Buratai and his goons had entranced the very civilians whose humanity they violated on a massive national scale. It was worse than mass hypnosis. National hysteria married national orgy in lionizing Buratai as hero.

The Army did not even have to lift a finger to justify or rationalize the sorrow, tears, and blood they visited on innocent civilians in their sleep in Zaria. Psychologically-damaged civilians did an excellent job of brutalizing and victimizing fellow civilians who had been murdered. How dare they stand in the way of an Army General? Nonsense! Some claimed that Buratai even tried. Others claimed that Buratai even exercised restraint. Ok, if you say that killing those who blocked his path was justified, what about the follow-up massacre? Nothing doing. Nigerians wanted a hero in Buratai and 347 innocent lives was not too much a foundation to lay for the hero-making edifice!

I felt so alone - especially on Facebook. I felt so alone with two other outcasts - Ike DanfoDriver Mbachu and Obinna Aligwekwe. These two Igbo gentlemen and I screamed and screamed and screamed. We felt like we were the only ones mourning the Hausa-Fulani dead in an ocean of voices lionizing Buratai. We called for Buratai's head. We suffered vilification. For the three of us, it was the first time we suffered dismissal as "wailers" by career Buharists. I mentioned the ethnicity of these two great Nigerian patriots because when they subsequently raised their voices against the same Army for mopping up innocent Igbo civilian protesters in the east, some of the idiots who justified the massacre in Zaria labelled them tribalists for speaking up against the massacre of their own Igbo kinsmen!

Now a panel has indicted the Army for the Zaria massacre. Specifically, the panel indicted Major General Adeniyi Oyebade, the General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army's Ist Division. He it was who authorized the operation which led to the massacre of the 347 civilians. This is a good start but I'm afraid it does not go far enough. General Buratai also bears responsibility. Luckily for him, he is an astute saver and has enough financial muscle to hire the best lawyers should this case grind slowly through years all the way to the Hague as I expect and hope it will.

President Buhari has been self-destructing especially on the integrity front lately by somehow deceiving himself that silence is the first instrument of statecraft. I expect him to greet this with silence as he has done so many other issues. I expect him not to act on Buratai. I expect him not to even talk to us. After all, the insufferably arrogant Femi Adesina has finally told us, the school pupils he often scolds, that we have no right to expect our elected President to talk to us regularly.

Beyond the Army and our self-destructing President, this episode is an occasion for sober reflection. This episode is an occasion for national self teaching. If you were one of the hordes who joined the Buratai lionization bandwagon, don't worry. Don't be too harsh on yourself. We suffered more than three decades of military brutalization (I almost wrote buratailization) in this country. We have only had democracy since 1999. It will take more than two decades for you to gain the civic instinct to automatically recoil at the presence of military uniforms in civilian spaces.

You just need to keep working at it. Every time you wake up in the morning, tell yourself that military uniforms have no place in civilian spaces. Tell yourself that soldiers have no powers of arrest. Only the police have such powers. Tell yourself that soldiers are in violation of the rules whenever you see them frog jumping civilians in Ojuelegba or Oshodi. Work on yourself to stop clapping and hailing when they beat and mow down fellow civilians.

We need to collectively construct a national psyche which is hostile to the very idea of soldiers in our civic and civilian spaces of agency. They are not supposed to be there, let alone beat and shoot you there.

Also, it is good that the Zaria massacre has been investigated by a panel set up by Kaduna. It should be clear that the Federal government will set up no panel to investigate the civilian massacres during IPOB protests in the east. Consequently, do they have governors in the southeast? Are these governors efulefus? If they are not efulefus, who are they expecting will come and set up a panel to investigate the murder of their own civilians? Pius Adesanmi? Shior. You should at least come together to do it at the symbolic level.

The same applies to Gabriel Ortom and all the state Governors whose people have been murdered by herdsmen. If you set up panels to at least symbolically defy the President's shameful silence on these critical fronts, the findings of such panels may be actionable in the future. An administration hostile to silence may pick them up and act. You owe it to that future to at least do your basic home work today.

WHO IS A FANATIC?

The one who slaughters people in the name of Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, El?

Yes!

The one who holds that his own brand of religion is the only one worth the name and that other religions and persuasions are either inferior or outright evil?

Yes!

The one who believes that all homosexuals and bisexuals and transsexuals and all-kinds-of-sexuals belong to hell and should be helped to get to hell quickly by any murder means available?

Yes!

The one who believes that he owes his God a duty to fight the latter's battles for Him and to destroy others in the process?

Yes!

The one who believes that his interpretation of truth is the only interpretation there is and that everything else is just another shade of falsehood?

Yes!

The one who is intolerant of dissenting opinion?

Yes!

The one who believes that Arsenal must win their match or we will not hia word?

Yes!

There is a fanatic in every man. Alas, there is no man in any fanatic. Just different types of little boys.

PIUS ADESANMI: NKOSI SIKELEL' IAFRIKA

By Pius Adesanmi.

The only good news I see coming out of the African continent this week is that there is enough reason to grant political independence to two African citizens and welcome them as the newest member states of the African Union.

Come with me and do the math as you come along.

In Ghana, we hear that somebody or some people stole $89 million of that country's oil revenue. Peanuts but not a bad beginning for a country taking her oil industry doggedly down the familiar path of her giant cousin's oil industry in the sub-region. For now, only New York-based Sahara Reporters has reported this case. With dedication and application, corruption figures in Ghana's oil sector should increase next year and approach levels that are worth reporting in traditional media in Nigeria.

In Liberia, we hear that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has upped her game. By appointing her sons to what we, in Nigeria, call "juicy positions", President Sirleaf had debunked the myth that only the continent's patriarch-presidents were capable of personalizing the state and turning it into an extension of your father's farm.

Reading the sexist scholarship of Africa's political scientists, you'd think that only the Dos Santoses, the Sassou Nguessos, the Yoweri Musevenis and the Teodoro Obiangs of this world were capable of personalizing the state for your children in Africa. Mama Johnson Sirleaf debunked that myth by appointing her son Governor of the Central Bank of Liberia.

Then she got bored on the state personalization front and has now outsourced Liberia's entire pre-primary and primary education system to an American company. What used to be a funny joke in cities across Africa that the continent should be returned voluntarily to the former colonizers for more competent management has suddenly become reality in Liberia. Well, Liberia was never really colonized. Maybe that is why President Sirleaf has decided to redress that historical anomaly by handing over the education of every Liberian child to an American capitalist company making a killing in Africa.

When France was designing the curriculum for children across Francophone Africa, the generation of Leopold Sedar Senghor went to school and were taught that they had no ancestors. They were taught that their ancestors were the proud Gauls who defied the savage Romans to pave the way for the emergence of France - the only European civilization worth talking about.

It took a lot of work and Negritude for kids across Africa's Francophonia to understand that they had ancestors like Lat Dior and Samory Toure and those ancestors were not the unworthy savages and heathens that they read about in the curriculum designed by France.

Now that Mama Sirleaf has decided to roll back the hand of the clock in Liberia, here is looking forward to future generations of Liberian kids raised in awe of their illustrious ancestors such as Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Because the outsourcing of Liberia's pre-primary and primary education system has been announced as a public-private partnership, Liberia will pay $65 million to the company over the next five years.

God bless that American company for being so generous. If somebody was willing to pay me money to enslave them, I'd charge them more than $65 million to make them slaves of their own volition.

Then in South Africa, our brother, President Jacob Zuma, spent a cool $15 million of public funds to upgrade his private home. Remember, President Zuma had wanted to buy a pimped up presidential jet while raising school fees. Popular protests by ignorant South Africans who do not know that the Nigerian President keeps a harem of 11 palatial presidential jets prevented brother Zuma from acquiring his second jet. While South Africans protested the jet idea, Brother Zuma scurried behind their backs to upgrade his country home at public expense. He has now been publicly humiliated and asked to refund the money.

When I look at this continental round up of corruption figures (or waste in Liberia), I see $89 million in Ghana, $65 million in Liberia, and $15 million in South Africa.

The total in these three cases still falls way below the monthly haul of any serious individual player in Nigeria's corruption sector. The totality of the figures from Ghana, Liberia, and South Africa in the cited instances hasn't even come close to Dasuki or Badeh.

This is why I believe that where we have players in our corruption sector whose individual haul exceeds corruption figures from three African countries combined, we should grant political independence to such individuals instead of prosecuting them with our scarce resources.

Dasuki and Badeh - each of these guys has stolen enough to become an independent African state.

Once we start granting political independence to meritorious players in the Nigerian corruption sector, professional demonizers of Nigeria in the continent, such as Ghana and South Africa, will leave us alone and face their own gigantic corruption industries - which they ignore while badmouthing Nigeria.

God bless Africa.

PIUS ADESANMI: ZERO MEGAWATT, FULL MIKANOWATT

By Pius Adesanmi.

I gave up on the possibility of witnessing regular electricity in Nigeria in my lifetime four years ago. I had gone to spend some time with a friend of mine who is a very very big Oga at the top in the Federal government. A Nigerian big man with a NAFDAC number.

Nearly a week into my stay, NEPA had still not 'taken light'. Not once did it blink. His neighbourhood had constant electricity supply. At first, I thought, well, this is where the Ogas live in Abuja. This is their neighbourhood. Maybe the electricity people are saving their necks and jobs by keeping the light on here?

After a while, I decided that even if this were the case, one week of uninterrupted public electricity supply anywhere in Nigeria, even in Aso Rock, deserved commentary.

I told my host:

"Oga, you people are trying now o. The light has not blinked in this neighbourhood since I arrived o"

He smiled - the expansive smile of a member of the Nigerian ruling class whenever they think that they have caught one of their virulent critics in an aha moment! They love such moments with a critic who, in their estimation, never appreciates their efforts to fix Nigeria, who never gives them sufficient credit for what they are doing to "move Nigeria forward".

I can't recall his exact words - it is four years ago - but his delighted response went something like this:

"Prof, this is why we say that you people should be coming home regularly. You sit out there, always condemning Nigeria, believing that there is no improvement. So, you think that things are so bad that we still use noisy generators in this country? People now use soundproof generators."

He said it before he realized the folly and the bitter irony of his statement. It turned out that what I had thought was constant power supply was the work of soundproof Mikano generators working noiselessly 24/7 in every compound in the entire posh neighbourhood the whole time I had been there!

And here was one of the people who should be fixing Nigeria defining progress as the move by members of his class from noisy generators to noiseless soundproof generators. The next step in their definition of progress will be for Mikano to design generators that they can turn on and off with an app on their phone when the whole family is on vacation in Dubai.

When the power crisis started in Ghana and their power cuts rapidly approached Nigerian proportions, the people took massively to the streets, protesting "dumsor" (power cuts). I reassured my Ghanaian friends that they had two options to fix their problems:

1. The Nigerian option - generators.
2. The South African option - no generators, keep applying critical intelligence till you find a solution.

Yes, I told my Ghanaian friends that if they adopt Nigeria's option, they will never fix their electricity woes because there are no rehab clinics to fix a country's generator addiction. And the Nigerian elite are already defining progress not as improvement in public electricity supply but as improvement in the standard of generators! If you go the Nigerian route, I warned my Ghanaian friends, a generator cartel will emerge, a diesel cartel will emerge - and Ghana is finished!

The South Africans could not risk the folly of the Nigerians in their own approach to their electricity woes. You may blame them for having irresponsibly allowed the constant electricity supply that the Apartheid state handed over to them to become a post-Apartheid nightmare that has placed an uncomfortable question mark on the black man's ability to manage the infrastructure of modernity, but, at least, they have resisted the lure of generators and are applying critical intelligence to solving the problem.

The mental laziness of the Nigerian elite, which defines progress in the power sector as the provision of improved soundproof generators to the rich and mighty, creates a superstructure which suppresses the intelligence of anybody operating from Aso Rock and its environs.

The cliche says that if all you've got is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. In the Nigerian power circles, solving the electricity problem means creating ease of access to soundproof generators; facilitating importation deals and mechanisms with Japan and China; etc. This is the world of political and economic symbolism in which Fashola and Femi Adesina now function.

Aso Rock runs on soundproof generators. For the first time in his life as an adult Nigerian, Femi Adesina is about to enjoy one year of uninterrupted electricity. And he does not hear the sound of the generators. You expect a man like that to still be capable of reason and common sense? That environment does things to the mind. That is why he can tell you to go and catch the vandals - forgetting that it is the responsibility of his boss to provide infrastructure for Nigeria and also secure the infrastructure. He forgets that Buhari and Arase should be the ones catching the vandals, not Nigerians. Exposure to one year of Mikano epistemology is what was talking to you, Nigerians, on Channels TV.

One year after I warned my Ghanaian friends against the Nigerian option, I returned to Accra. I noticed that practically every faculty on the campus of the University of Ghana had acquired gigantic soundproof Mikano generators. Even Departments were in a scramble for Mikanos. I couldn't believe how many Mikanos had been acquired on that campus in just one year.

I decided to tour the very posh neighbourhoods in Accra. Mikanos everywhere!

I shook my head in sadness. Apparently, the Ghanaians had shunned the South African approach to salvation and decided to stand in solidarity with their Nigerian cousins on the road to perdition...

ROTIMI AMAECHI'S WEEK IN PORT HARCOURT

By Pius Adesanmi.

That Rotimi Amaechi is an irresponsible Federal Minister is the least of our worries. Our main worry is that he is still on the job - uncautioned, unquestioned, unsanctioned by his employer.

Why irresponsibility?

Come with me.

I am three months into administrative apprenticeship as head of an academic unit in a University. I've never been in Admin so it's a learning process and I am enjoying every bit of it. You can therefore pardon my naivete when the time came to leave my seat and be absent for a week.

Nigeria happened to me in terms of what I thought the procedures of absence would be.

I called my predecessor and asked him if he didn't mind being Acting Director during my absence and he graciously agreed. I thought that was it.

Poor me!

I was soon thrown into a daunting administrative architecture of disengagement. Two Deans must be notified of my absence; the principal admin staff of the two Deans must be notified; a certain number of people in offices I have never heard about must be notified; the financial office must be notified.

These are all arteries of the administrative system that must be aware of who has signatory authority for the unit in my absence. Oyinbo's work must neither stop nor suffer in your absence.

Throughout the week, the web of required notifications kept expanding. When I finally heaved a sigh of relief and thought it was all over, I received a memo from yet another office asking if I wanted to transfer electronic signature authority to the Acting Director.

Apparently, all I had done during the week did not cover electronic signatures as I could very well decide to hold on to e-authority and sign things electronically during my absence.

Knowing that there is no light, no water, no nothing where I am heading to and my access to the internet could depend on the strength of prayer warriors yonder, I respected myself by also transferring electronic authority to the Acting Director.

One week of painstaking procedures to transfer authority of just one unit in a University just because one society evolved a culture of hatred for impunity and lawlessness - a reality which makes the Institution bigger than the person.

As I went through this handing over process, my blood pressure increased and my health deteriorated. I grumbled to Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, Moses Ochonu, Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo, and Omoyele Sowore.

I told them that I am tired of Nigeria. Here am I being told that the life and work of one academic and administrative unit in a University is incompatible with the ethos of Oga is not on seat. You cannot just take off and go.

That is just one Unit in a University o.

Yet, some useless state governor will be responsible for the lives of about ten million people and will just take off and travel - no handover, no continuity, etc. The life of the state and the people stops once Oga is not on seat. No process, no institutional integrity.

Yet some useless Senators will abandon their duty posts just like that.

Yet some useless Federal Ministers will just take off and leave.

Think of how many Directors, commissioners, etc just take off and leave in Nigeria.

Just like that!

Who, for instance, authorized Rotimi Amaechi's week in Port Harcourt? What were the procedures of disengagement and continuity that were undertaken in his Ministry? How were the perm sec and the Directors in his Ministry notified and what was delegated to who? And which superior authority signed off on this trip to Port Harcourt? What did he say he was going to do in Port Harcourt? Did he tell whoever his superior is that he was abandoning his duty post to go and play gutter politics in Port Harcourt?

A Minister, as we know, has one superior authority. Did he authorize Amaechi's absence from work? Was he notified? Or is it just the Nigerian way? After all, Baba knows that it is APC work that I am going there to do!

How can a Minister just take off and leave?

This jungle society of impunity is not acceptable. It is not sustainable.

And to think that all he went to do was politics at the expense of his job.

Lives were lost. I hold Rotimi Amaechi and Nyesom Wike wholly and exclusively responsible for the lives lost.

There will be no end to barbaric elections in Nigeria until we evolve a process that will hold politicians directly responsible for the loss of lives during elections in which they are involved.

Our society is still too primitive and ignorant for us to expect that we can get civics across to the street and tell the youth beyond social media that useless politicians like Amaechi and Wike ain't worth dying for. No Nigerian politician is even worth missing lunch for - let alone dying. But we are not at that level of national consciousness yet hence the struggle must be to hold the politicians directly accountable for the loss of lives.

Abba Moro is today answering for the lives lost during his corrupt hiring process.

We must struggle for a society in which Amaechi and Wike will one day be hauled before a judge for the lives that were lost in Rivers state this week.

A good place to start is for President Buhari to look into Rotimi Amaechi's absence from work this past week. That is one week of work he has stolen from Nigerians. It should be deducted from his salary. Shior!