Opinion

NYSC, Youth’s Trust And Empowerment

Published

3 years ago

August 24, 2021

NewTimes

By
Emmanuel Onwubiko

“We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward a good end.” -Mary Mcleod Bethune

As I was driving out of the house in the morning to the office, a call came in. The call was persistent to an extent that I had to wait to receive it and for twenty four minutes, the caller from the other end spoke to the issues of the unprecedented levels of societal crimes by the youths and what can be done about this menace.

This concerned caller happens to be my long- time friend, a Nigerian from my Imo State but who spent sometimes in Abuja after her National Youth Service Corps scheme to read for her post-graduate studies.

She would later migrate to the United States of America about a decade and half ago when she got married to a Nigerian/American who is doing one of the top security jobs in the United State of America. So she called me from the United States of America just to exchange ideas of what can be done to minimize the involvement of young Nigerians in different crimes such as advance fee fraud; drug and human trafficking, terrorism, banditry, armed robberies, political thuggery and outright hooliganism.

Although Chinyere has been outside of our shores, she kept herself abreast of happenings because her family lives in Abuja with her parents now retired and back to Owerri, the Imo State capital.

One thing she said to me which inspired this reflection was the huge potential that the National Youths Service Corps scheme holds in the area of economic and skill empowerment if the initiative by the NYSC is adequately funded and transparently managed. Her thinking tallied with the import in my opening quotation aforementioned.

She then referred me to a great interview that was done by This Day newspaper with a senior Director in the NYSC who is in charge of the department on skills acquisition. I will very shortly recall what was said by the senior management member of staff which as someone with interest about developments around the NYSC, I can state categorically to be accurate.

But first, this good friend of mine recalled with nostalgia how the then President Olusegun Obasanjo set up a presidential agency for economic empowerment known as the National Poverty Eradication Project or NAPEP. She then said the collapse of that noble initiative due to a lot of bureaucratic bottlenecks and managerial Ineptitude/corruption, was regrettable and expressed anxiety whether the proposed National Youth Service Corps youth’s trust fund won’t go the way of NAPEP and if administrative bottlenecks would not be activated by public servants that could cripple the initiative.

Well, I told her that I could not guarantee that there would be no teething challenges but one thing that is certain is that the National Youth Service Corp youth trust fund is an idea whose time has come. I remember one of the thinkers in the Western world who said.

“No army in the world can defeat an idea whose time has come.” In the same vein the necessity for the setting up on a solid footing of a trust fund for youths under the auspices of the National Youth Service Corps Scheme has come.

READ ALSO: The Lies A bout NYSC

Aside from the positive, transformational and constructive social impact the youth trust fund would bring, the initiative is about the surest panacea for youths involvement in social crimes because “the idle mind is the devil’s workshop”.

Just like my caller from the state of Texas in the USA said about the social menace of youth’s involvement in Yahoo Yahoo, and a multitude of other organised crimes, I do also think that the Nigerian State is not handling and tackling this social crisis from the root cause and the fact is that the to government is treating the malignant tumour of social crimes from the secondary manifestations but at the same time the government is not rational enough to uproot the cause of the problem which is mass hunger, mass joblessness, public sector corruption and the excesses of the operatives of law enforcement agents who go as far as arresting many innocent youths just so that they can be extorted and their human dignity denied by crude force. The EFCC and the Nigerian Police Force have come under increasing scrutiny for their use of torture to force accused persons to admit crimes they actually never committed.

However, the frightening possibility of many youngsters getting involved in sophisticated crimes can’t be discountenanced and seeing the number of youths illegally paraded by EFCC as suspects makes me think that the Federal Government needs to declare and implement a Marshall Plan for economic empowerment of youth. One of such should be the establishment of the NYSC Youth Trust Fund.

Both I and my caller concluded by endorsing the proposal put forward by the Brigadier General Shuaibu Ibrahim-led NYSC which is the establishment of the NYSC Youth Trust Fund.

Now here are what the key officers in NYSC said about the National Youth Trust Fund to be managed by the NYSC when established through a legal framework which millions of Nigerians are clamouring for.

The NYSC justified its proposal to set up a trust fund for all corps members nationwide, arguing that the fund, if eventually established, will help actualize President Muhammadu Buhari’s vision of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of unemployment before the next decade.

NYSC, a scheme established in 1973 to promote national cohesion and integration, disclosed that it had trained over 500,000 corps members in different agro-allied, skill development and vocational programmes and facilitated N1.184 billion for those who applied in the last decade.

NYSC’s Director Special Duties, Alhaji Musa Abdullahi who said this at a session with THISDAY at the weekend, revealed that corps members had been trained and empowered under the Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED).

Explaining its centrality to the fight against poverty and unemployment, Abdullahi said the Director-General of NYSC, Brig.-Gen. Ibrahim Shuaibu had proposed the establishment to a trust fund as a strategy to help actualise Buhari’s vision of lifting 100 million out of poverty cycle.

Despite huge achievements the scheme had recorded under 48 years of its establishment, the NYSC had its diversified its approach from career advisory to entrepreneurship development with the high rate of poverty and unemployment nation.

Of the 25 NYSC secretariats that set up post-camp mini-training centres nationwide, for instance, Abdullahi noted that the scheme was recording low patronage perhaps due to lack of training tools or lack of awareness among graduates.

Abdullahi explained the centrality of the ongoing establishment of Skills Acquisition Centre in all geo-political zones to raising entrepreneurs, who he argued, would deploy their entrepreneurial potential for national development.

He, therefore, noted that it was on this ground that the NYSC had proposed to establish a trust fund to equip corps members with requisite skills they need for value addition and financial empowerment as they are completing their national services.

When established, according to the NYSC’s director, the trust fund will also provide resources for the training and empowerment of corps members, especially on skill acquisition and entrepreneurship development. It is a strategy to end poverty as the president has envisaged to lift 100 million out of poverty by 2030.

Since its creation in 2012, NYSC’s director listed SAED’s achievements to include the establishment of a full-pledged department that would be saddled with the responsibility of streamlining the skills and entrepreneurial activities of the corps members.

Under the Department of Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development, Abdullahi disclosed that it had received support from the Access Bank Plc to construct and equip a mega skills acquisition centre for in Gombe for the North-east states.

Besides, according to the director, the organisation is building a similar one in Jigawa for the Northwest states and in Nasarawa for the North-central states. The construction of the Southwest skill acquisition centre located in Ekiti State is already at completion stage.

Abdullahi disclosed an ongoing collaboration with Unity Bank Plc, which according to him, focused on funding business plan development programmes for corps members.

He, also, disclosed successful partnership initiatives with such funding institutions as the Bank of Industry (BOI) and the CBN, which he said, would provide start-up capital for corps entrepreneurs.

To realise these plans, Abdullahi noted that General Electric and Cognity Advisory Nigeria, among others had trained 40 SAED officers on entrepreneurship.

He explained that the SAED, which empowered corps members with the support of its partners, had helped set the corps members on the path to prosperity.

“In the process, more entrepreneurs have been created in the country. Since we started the SAED a decade ago, 20,000 trained corps members have been linked with various government agencies and non-governmental organisations.

“They have been able to access N1.184 billion credit facilities. At the end of the training, the corps members are given interest-free loans ranging from N200, O00 to N300, 000) to start their own businesses in their areas of choice or interests.”

BUnder the War against Poverty (WAP), an initiative designed to actualise President Muhammadu Buhari’s aspiration of lifting 100 million people in 10 years, the director explained that NYSC has been able to train and empower close to at least 500,000 corps members to be entrepreneurs and employers of labour rather than looking for jobs.

Abdullahi explained that the WAP initiative started primarily “as a career advisory unit. Since corps members were faced with numerous job opportunities or job offers, the unit was set up to help them make good decisions”.

In the early years of its establishment, corps members had difficulties in choosing where to work due to the numerous job offers they received even before the completion of their national service, This spurred the NYSC to establish a unit called Job Advisory and Counseling Unit (JAC).

When the job opportunities began to dwindle due to the increasing population of graduates, the NYSC introduced various policies and collaborated with government and non-governmental agencies, which gave birth to SAED as a strategy to check the spiraling rate of unemployment in the federation.

He, therefore, noted that government agencies “have been very supportive of the scheme’s SAED. Office of the Special Adviser to the President on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), now Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs) sponsored the WAP initiative, one of the programmes aimed at raising entrepreneurs.

The WAP is usually organised to empower corps members with skill and startup loans to professionalize in agro-allied enterprises. It is in line with the Vision of the NYSC to respond to current realities of unemployment by shifting the attention of the corps members from the unrealistic quest for white-collar jobs to that of becoming self-employed after their national service.

Specifically, Abdullahi said corps members “are empowered with such agro-allied skills as animal husbandry, snail breeding, bee keeping, fish farming, grass cutter farming, plantain/ banana sucker multiplication and poultry farming.”

The director said the NYSC had forged collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which had promoted the spirit of entrepreneurship and self-reliance since it commenced in 2008 with the training of 600 corps members annually.

Through collaboration with the CBN, according to Abdullahi, over 2000 corps members have been reached. “We are sustaining partnership to ensure that at least 600 complete their national service with mindset to establish their businesses”, he said.Abdullahi disclosed that the WAP had been used “to facilitate conduct of advanced entrepreneurial training of seven WAP entrepreneurs at Barry University, Miami, Florida.

Under the initiative, the NYSC’s director disclosed that the National Economic Reconstruction Funds (NERF) gave the corps entrepreneurs credit facilities between N1.8 million and N3 million to expand their enterprises and employ more workers.

“We think the NYSC Youth Trust Fund should be expeditiously established to cut down on the phenomenal rate of youth’s involvement in sophisticated and mind-boggling crimes. The media and the civil rights movements need to key in into this national movement in support of the NYSC Youth Trust Fund now.

Onwubiko is the head of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) and was a federal commissioner at the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria.

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Opinion

Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

Published

4 hours ago

December 22, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2024

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.

Opinion

Burning Issues: (FCT Minister And Paulosa) (2)

Published

3 days ago

December 19, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tony Afejuku

By Tony Afejuku

The other burning issue, apart from Farotimi and Babalola’s, which I wish to take a look at – and which I am taking a look at now – relates to what is happening in our capital territory. What is this burning issue – which our human rightists and civil society organisations and personages are surprisingly and un-satisfactorily not inclined to focus attention on and examine as they should? I may be wrong, but it surely seems to me that this issue, this burning issue, which is of more importance than Farotimi and Babalola’s – which has been given undue adulation – is deliberately being neglected and depreciated by proclaimers and heroes and heroines of human rights, justice, equity and equality of rights in your country my country our country. Why, why, why and why, why, why? Anyone who has any iota of patriotic sensibility, feeling and judgment well watered and buttressed by a very great influence upon his or her critical judgment will keep on asking the question I am asking.

Mr. Nyesom Wike, as almost everybody who can read and write a little knows, is the current minister of your, my and our Federal Capital Territory. His post or office is akin to that of a governor of a state. As the immediate past governor of Rivers State who was drafted, after his two terms there expired, to continue in the FCT as its new minister-governor or governor-minister under the auspices of a party he is not a true member of, Mr. Wike cannot but be seen as a lucky man. He is in every possible and impossible way. Minister-Governor Wike is a lucky man and a very fortunate one indeed. No former governor of Rivers State (or of any Nigerian state), as far as I know, has achieved what the famed political rouser of rabbles has achieved in one short gubernatorial life-time, and at a relatively young and fertile age. His dual achievement with and in two different political parties at this delicate point of Nigerian politics indicates to our politicians and us all that there is always time for a reminder that there are ready-made high rewards for arch-angels of betrayals. And Mr. Wike may go down in Rivers and Nigerian history as both an arch-angel and an emperor of betrayal of us all if we attempt to indicate what I have defined here as his dual achievement.

We can roughly divide, briefly, Wike’s political development into two periods. During the first, excluding his lower political positions before he became the governor of Rivers State, he quickly adapted his style to that of an emperor who became a rabble-rouser of rabble-rousers whose gubernatorial efficiency moved from stiffness to stiffness. He did not at any time feel that he needed suppleness to govern Rivers State. “Let the heavens fall if they must fall!” We are not there yet in this attempted analysis of the stiff-hearted and stiff-minded one. True? But he is already demonstrating this characteristic in Abuja. False? Judge and give the answer yourself.

Even after he left Rivers State a short while ago as governor, he is still trying to control happenings there to the political discomfiture of his hand-picked successor, his erstwhile “boy” and “son” – with whom he has fallen out. As the minister-governor or governor-minister of the FCT, Wike is occupied with the other taste of the emperor-juggernaut formulator – doing the work of two key political masters in one room and desk of political jugglery. Since his appearance in the FCT, minister-governor or governor-minister Wike has allegedly attempted to recover or transform for Abuja what is not traditionally or socially Abuja’s, for example, the city’s social idiom and landscape and terrain as well as its environs. In doing this he sometimes over-steps his bounds and mark of human/inhuman decency/indecency and psychological understanding of human nature, if you follow well what I am saying; he has so far become at best not really better than a typical pedestrian Nigerian lawyer and officer of political power: in his explorations so far in the Federal Capital Territory we have come to the realization, as T. S. Eliot would say, that “it is so often true that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go.” But one has to be a very negatively obstinate and self-serving emperor and a thorough-bred arch-angel of betrayal of the people and masses to justify such perilous and perfidious expeditions and adventures.

Last week, I saw on Arise Television “The Morning Show” Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the dutiful widow of the late Nigerian supreme patriot and soldier, Colonel Ogbebor (of Benin stock) battling, so to say, to wrest the legacy of her late husband from the tight grip of the adventurous FCT minister-governor who has registered his name and signature in the hearts and consciousness of the people as the depriver of their possessions. The three anchors of “The Morning Show” were in their respective ways splendid in their structures of remarks and questions to Chief (Mrs.) Rita Lori-Ogbebor whom I have had occasions in times past to call patriotically Rita A-K 47 on account of her natural right to fire her beautiful tongue at any person, usually an enemy, of just actions. When she made the case she made to protect the estate of Paulosa Nigeria Limited, her late husband’s aforesaid legacy in the FCT, she was in her natural territory, habitat and element where even at age eighty-four, she never ever loses her stability – although she unusually restrained herself in the Arise Television appearance. Dr. Reuben Abati, Rufai Oseni, and Ayo Mairo-Ese clearly explored seriously but delightfully the mind of the mother-hen of Warri – my other coinage and appellation I gave her in my poetry. Her “The Morning Show” appearance enabled me to see the poignant cry de profundis of the FCT inhabitants whose property and residences in different guises have been demolished. She did not say anything that was out of joint. She spoke and came out as a mother, protector and symbol of the people who have suffered – and are suffering – from the state of affliction and anguish Wike’s demolitions have placed – and are placing – the people.

Ojy Okpe in her delicious and delectable “What is Trending” slot on the same show, showed without exaggeration but with further elaboration what people in and outside Abuja/FCT think of the mighty Wike’s demolitions, a burning issue that the Senate has asked “Let Heaven Fall” minister-governor Wike to halt as the committee the Senate set up on the issue starts its work. Of course, we cannot but assume that Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Mrs. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan as well as Mrs. Ireti Kingigbe, the senator representing the FCT in the Senate and other patriotic senators diligently did what they did on the floor of the Senate when the burning issue was tabled for debate with the gracious understanding and authorization of the Senate President.

I need to state further that the “The Morning Show” anchors did well and extremely so by giving the minister-governor the opportunity to air his anti-Paulosa story. His senior special assistant on public communication and social media, Mr. Olalere Olayinka, stood in for him. After he gave the reasons for the clamp-down, his responses to the questions the anchors put to him followed the usual pattern of denials by artificial men in power – denials that they always use to intimidate and betray the people. In fact, Mr. Olayinka’s ploy to ride easily over our dear Rufai Oseni, a wholesome representative of the deprived, that the chap (or is it guy?) and his boss always employ their colloquial speeches and remarks to dishonor, failed. Yes, the ploy failed woefully. In stanza after stanza of the exchanges between Mr. Olayinka and the Arise anchors, he deteriorated – and his deterioration was hall-marked when he unwittingly revealed that the Paulosa land had been acquired by his minister-governor’s close cohort, an act that was nothing short of gross abuse of power and authority.

Because the Senate is already using its authority, power and privilege to resolve the burning issue, hopefully, in a way that the late Colonel Ogbebor’s legacy and family will not be subjected to any kind of degradation, I will utter no more words for now. I trust, however, that the liberties the Senate is taking – or has taken – are for the sake of order to favour the down-trodden.

As for the minister-governor, the PDP emperor at large, here is an immortal quote from Marcus Aurelius, the magnificent and authentic Roman Emperor and philosopher (A.D. 121-180): “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” You lose nothing by giving us a slice of your humanity by your right acts and correct words. Everything changes and passes. Be humane as a human being.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.