Today,
I am in the NTA-mood! The NTA-mood is the situation in which Nigeria
would be on fulltime fire but NTA would be
showing some videos or documentaries
that indicate peace, calmness and
nomalcy. Thus, in a situation in
where Zangon Kataf and Benue/Plateau
are under siege by the untoachables
and another set of untouchables is
‘arsoning’ Alaba market or the Nigerian Aiarforce is straffing the Orlu
axis to get at some allagedly unknown
fellows, NTA will be showing the fishing festival at Argungun or one generals
son marrying a princess or Abriba war-dance or even tales by the moonlight-at noon!. That is
the mood I am in today.
I am aware that on Sunday 28/5/23, Buhari left Aso Rock where he
was supposed to have lived for the past 8 years (you know his was in
London hospital or on air for a large
chunk of time), and thus ended his monumentally clueless regime. I am aware
that he was caught by the ‘last
minute bug’ and so, he was appointing, awarding, unveiling (including the new improved State House Clinic that cost
about $46m at official rate) and
borrowing until 12 midnight of that last day. I remember that he started his
tenure with ear wahala and ended with teeth wahala, (both treated in London);
that he declared that he got what he wanted ( it was all about him) and
that he awarded
himself A+! I am aware that he has returned to his cows,
which are more OBIdient than strong-head Nigerians. You want me to
review his tenure? I am not in that spirit today but Olu Fasan, Shehu Sani, Osita Chidoka, Fr Emeka Nwosu, InterSoc and Moses Oludele Idowu have done good
immediate-term post-tenure analysis. I will also enclose one of those VERIFIable
charts flying all over the place.
I am aware that the BAT himself has taken over, with all
the question marks and baggage. He agrees with PMB, IGP & INEC that the
2023 elections were the fairest ever, acknowledged the right of the wailers to ‘go to court’ and assured that he would govern,
dialogue, mend, heal and accommodate those with contrary spirits. The
wife has assured us that they are too wealthy and thus would not need our money. She says the truth; after all BAT himself had
declared that Osun State budget was
petty cash to him. However, the question
of how this wealth came about is still blowing in the wind. I am also aware that a new office has been
created at Aso Rock, FD_FRN( First Daughter of the Federal Republic of
Nigeria). This is not surprising because there is a First Dog in the white
house! BAT has appointed Dele Alake as
his spokesperson; the one who decried the genocide in Rwanda but unrepentantly
made some wicked ‘Rwandaish’ statements just the
other day. How BAT will govern inclusively with a divisive-tongued man as his
spokesperson is one of the wonders that would unfold. And what if Abuja indigenes ask Alake to go
back to Ijebuode, whence he came from? El-Rufai, the short giant of Kaduna, whose greatest quality is ‘pharaseesm’ and the wicked Wike, who is only
happy when others are sad, are now former governors. I am aware that BAT has
removed fuel subsidy or he is implementing the de-subsidisation agenda as already announced by the man from
Daura and/or Niger Republic. I am aware
that he recanted or clarified the statement( but NNPC reaffirmed it) and that
fuel prices have run riots across the land with Abakaliki wining the gold medal
at N1200/Litre. However, I have not gone
to any fuel-station because I have to be
mentally, physically and ‘pocketly’ ready to absorb the
shock. I am aware of all those things but being in an NTA mood and mode, I have
decided to write on the newsiness of a man biting the dog as Seun Kuti has just
done!
Strategies for surviving the new order!
Those who trade in news , have said ages ago that there is no news in a dog biting a man because that is what dogs are wired to do and that is what they have always done. Thus, a report that a dog has bitten another human being will yield a reaction like, before nko!( what do you expect; or and so what?). But whenever a man bites the dog, it becomes a news-worthy news because it is unusual and the person (and the medium) that broke the news receives multiple thumbs ups. The tendency of men in uniform to brutalise guilty and even innocent Nigerians was brought to the fore by the ENDSARSers. However, even since then, the malaise continues and if you scan the news as you are reading this, you will see several reported evidences. On that day, at 3rd Mainland Bridge, the reverse happened; Seun Kuti slapped a policeman in uniform and whose gun was within reach. The mystery in the matter is that Seun’s head is still on his shoulders! The Guinness Book of Records, after they have finished documenting the exploits of the cooking Baci and the Vincent Okezie, the football-juggling wizard, should hurry up to record this Seun-Police Slap incident, especially the fact that he is alive to tell the tale. Sometimes ago at Osumenyi, in Nnewi LGA of Anambra State, a Reverend Father who was always telling the bereaved not to mourn like those without hope (1 Thes,4:13), lost his mother. He wept and wept and wept! It was then the turn of the people to advise him not to mourn like people without hope to which he replied with more tears ‘ that is my mother lying down there’! The policeman tasted a dose of his own medicine and assuredly, it was not funny!
Seun claimed that the police officer wanted to
commit a mass-murder of his entire family that day, that the policeman followed
him to his house where they talked things over, and he( Seun ) agreed not to
place charges and that he gave the ‘slapee’ N12000 for vehicle repairs. When the directive for
his arrest was given ( I don’t know why should policemen should wait to be
ordered to do what they should do) he turned himself in, was put in a cell
where he stayed on a cold hard-floor( that was after the baptism of fire by the inmates who eventually
crowned him the GO, with the Bible as his instrument of office). The police
authorities reported that the policeman who followed him to his house to
receive N12k and probably wrote his own statement, was in coma, sought an
extended detention of Kuti, sought his blood and searched his house, all for a
slap on third mainland bridge.
Policeman
in coma; engagements scattered
Those
who are surprised at the turn of events have probably not encountered the hardworking and friendly Nigerian police officers. In 1983(40 years ago),
the police at Okigwe-Aguata route accosted me for having an ‘irregular’
plate-number. That was in those days when you collected the number and contracted
a nearby road-side artist to do the plate for you. I asked him, with all
sincerity, to show me what was a regular plate number so that I could remedy
the irregularity of mine. I was not in a
hurry that day and so, I relaxed and we discussed a lot of things including my
background, my destination, how schooling
was at Ibadan was(he saw the UI sticker on my car) ,why I took that route
instead of the normal Enugu-Awka axis. After what I thought was a friendly
discussion I made to leave but the man conscripted my plate-number as an
exhibit and asked me to appear at Okigwe
police station the following Monday. As
a law abiding Nigerian, I reported at the police station on Monday (all the way
from Enugu) but I nearly fainted when I heard the number, diversity and weight
of the charges against me, which included every offence in the book. I was actually looking behind me to see if there
was somebody else they were talking about!
If it had been today, they would have charged me with IPOBism!
I walked out a free man because I was a
bank manager and I went with the manager of our Okigwe branch who was known
very well to them. I don’t need to tell you that I still continued with the
plate number because even at the station, they could not tell me what was irregular about my plate number. So, for
me, the charges and all efforts to ‘draw blood’ from Seun were not surprising.
Seun said he
did not commit any offence (and the sister Motunrayo agreed with him), that he had been
police-slapping before (everyday fir the thief…) because he knew
who he was; a free-Seun group emerged,
Sowore accused the police of trying to
continue with the war with Fela by other means, some youths saw the case as an
extension of the end-SARS war and then, he was granted bail!
Seun
was FULLY wrong to have slapped the policeman( or any other person for that
matter) even if the policeman had
‘committed’ against him; he should not
resort to self-help. He is still telling the story with his own mouth
because he is Seun Kuti. If my son had slapped a policeman, we would not have
retrieved the corpse and the whole family would have been arrested and asked to
bail themselves. Our offence? We did not teach him that slapping a policeman
was illegal!
There is something I read in Things Fall apart
in 1973: everything is possible but not everything is expedient.
I think it was in chapter 21 of the African Writes Series edition. It was just
the other (21/5/23) that Martins Oloja reminded me that the statement is also
in the Bible: Everythig is permissible but
not everything does good; not everything builds people up (1 Cor,
10:23). In effect, it is it is not
everything that you can do that you should do. I can move around the streets
without a shirt. But shoud I do that? Of what benefit? Seun can slap a
policeman and he indeed slapped a policeman but but shoul he? I hope he does cost-benefit analysis of that one-minute
madness( including non-monetary elements) and I hope he will not ordinarily
slap a policemen or any other person for that matter again. They have said that
freedom of speech is guaranteed but that freedom after speech may not be
guaranteed. As a corolary, you have the freedom to act but you
may not enjoy that freedom after acting! In those days when I was
in and of the world, Kenny Rogers, Don
Williams, Bob Marley, Lucky Dube( woe
betide those who murdered him) and even the good old Fela, were my favourites.
As I wite this, I remembered Kenny Rogers, ‘Coward of the County’ and the line
that said: ‘you don’t have to fight to be a man( though you may
need to fight when you become a man)! Seun did not need to slap that policeman
to to show that he is a man.
Meanwhile, it appears
that our policemen have become endangered species. Just a week before the
Seun-Slap incidence, a young lady, Olufumilayo Brioluwa boldly and
opendentially assaulted a police officer
in the Ogombo area of Ajah, Lagos State. She is not as lucky as Seun
because she was remanded at the Kirikiri prison, sorry, correctional facility,
untill June 6 when the matter would come up for hearing. I know that by now she will be regretting and
wondering the type of evil spirit that pushed her into that one-minute madness.
Seun should not have slapped the policeman. But the police,
having tested what it looks like, should repent of their brutality against
we the people. They also have to redeem their joint and several image.
A situation in which a small girl would just tie-up a
police man in the public is becoming unbecoming; it shows the extent to which our
police officers have degraded and devalued themselves.
Tenant vs dog
Funny enough, the issue of
a man biting the dog has become commonplace of late. Around the
same time as the Seun-Slap incident, a video was circulating wickedly on
the net of a landlord who unleashed his dog on a tennant over a debt of N45k .
Unfortunately for the dutiful dog, the tennants had had enough of it and its
master because they jointly BEAT the
hell out of the dog and threw it back into the cage! So rather than the dog
running the tennants out of the compound, it was the tenants that brutalised and ran it out of the free space.
Just as I don’t think that Seun will slap a police man again, the landlord will
NEVER unleash his dog on his tenants again, that is if the dog survived the
brutal beating it received that day
And then… I have
Hammered!
I want to announce officially that I have
hammered. You remember that in January last year, I wrote on how I would hammer
in 2022, which involved joining the
pastoring and masquerading industries, auctioning of vintage homes and joining
the SARS( State Aided Robbery Squad). In January this year, I
declared that I must make money and trend through being a delegate,
an influencer, a cross-dresser, a skit maker and a content creator and
engaging in prophetpreneureship.
In all these, I avoided formal
paid-employments. Now I have realized
that all paid employments are not equal; that was when I learnt that the Secretary General of
Nigerian Football Federation, one Alhaji Sanusi, earns $10,000 monthly, basic! (Mathematical Segun Odegbami; $10k for the secretary, Guardian,
20/5/23, p30).
At the Professorial cadre, that is about two years salary, with
and with. If I had that type of
job, I would have hammered since! I have also just found another
lucrative engagement; goat-theft. This was after the police arrested two young
men with 15 stollen goats from Osogbo, Ikirun,
Obagun, Iree, Eripa, Otan-Ayegbaju and Ila communities in Osun State. How do I
know it was very lucrative? They were conveying the goats to Lagos in a Lexus
SUV! They could not have afforded that type of executive ride if the business
were not lucrative
Executhief goat-thieves; The
VRRIFIable evidence!Anyway,
I am glad to announce that I have hammered, even though it took more time than
I anticipated and from and unexpected
source. The most important thing is that
FINALLY, I have hammered and consequently, I will trend. At that time when Nigerian banks were being SOLUDOnised, I lost one of my accounts. There were mergers
and counter-mergers and I could not trace the bank that swallowed the original
bank. But I did not know that I had such a huge investment in the bank. So,
just last week, I received a HEAVY alert for N62858750.45 as interest on term
deposit from an account where I had just a current account, and which I
abandoned almost 20 years ago. I won’t disclose the bank
in question so that envious people from
my village will not block the flow of
further interests. I also know that they will not read this announcement so
that they will not waylay me via remote-control!
Having
hammered, my problem now is how to live large and join the league of big-boys, including those who cruise
in the high-seas for their birthdays.
And then, I remember a comment by my brother that once you have money,
there will always be people around to advise you on how to spend or squander it.
So I am considering many options including relocating to Elon Musk’s hotel at
Mars, ordering a tri-dimensional car ( that can ply on land, sea and air), or having a
mansion ( the type they say PMB has in Niger Republic) under the sea.
You will hear of me soon!
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