Akin-Olugbade Corporation

31/12/2024

*Nigeria Nominates _Taoheed Olufemi Elias_ for Presidency of the International Court of Justice, ICJ colloquially known as The World Court, located in The Hague, Netherlands.*

* *Taoheed Olufemi Elias* is the son of the late World Court President, *Prof. (Justice) Taslim Olawale Elias* who (Taslim) was Nigeria's Federal Attorney General and Minister of Justice 1960 - 1966, Chief Justice of Nigeria 1972 - 1975, and President of same World Court 1982 - 1985.

Taslim's son, the World Court nominee, *Olufemi Elias* studied at *Corona School*, and then *Igbobi College*, both in Lagos, Nigeria before obtaining a law degree from the *University of Oxford*, a Master of Laws from the *University of Cambridge* and a doctorate from *University College London*. He was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1988.
He is the President of the *Administrative Tribunal of the OPEC Fund for International Development*, and Chairman of the *Islamic Development Bank Administrative Tribunal*.

*Taoheed Olufemi Elias* is a former President and member of the *Appeals' Committee of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC*. He advises international organizations and States on legal issues, including litigation before international courts and tribunals. He is a *Member of the Panel of Arbitrators of the Hong Kong Regional Arbitration Centre of the Asian African Legal Consultative Organisation*.

Olufemi Elias is also a visiting *professor in international law at the Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London* and has taught at the *King's College London and the University of Buckingham*. He is also the author of several publications in the field of International Law and *was awarded the Honorary Membership Award of the American Society of International Law(ASIL)* in recognition of his contributions to international law.

*He was Registrar (United Nations Assistant Secretary-General), of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT)* until 30 June 2020.

*Elias has held several positions including being a Judge for Staff Appeals, Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL)*; *Legal Adviser and Director, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), The Hague; Executive Secretary (Registrar), World Bank Administrative Tribunal, Washington D.C.; Senior Legal Officer, OPCW; Special Assistant to the Executive Secretary, United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), Geneva and Legal Adviser, Governing Council Secretariat, UNCC*. Elias was previously a candidate in the 2020 International Court of Justice judges election. He was not elected.

*In early 2022, Elias was appointed by the International Monetary Fund as a member of an external panel to strengthen institutional safeguards in the wake of a data scandal involving IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva during her time at the World Bank.*

*Copied and edited*

15/12/2024

I used to run a kitchen in Yesufu Abiodun, Oniru, where I supplied food to banks and offices in Victoria Island, Lagos. My 15-year-old son often helped with deliveries, as he had just completed his WAEC exams in 2018. On one particular day, we had a delivery close to our house. Since it was nearby, he went without the driver, carrying the food and our POS machine.

Tragically, the Nigerian police abducted him, confiscated his phone, and took him to the anti-cultism unit in Gbagada. We searched everywhere in Victoria Island, unaware that he had been taken so far away. Eventually, they allowed him to call me, and his terrified voice broke me: “Mummy, are you on your way? I’m so scared.”

My husband and I, along with our lawyer, rushed to the station. At the gate, they took our phones, and then I saw my son—half-naked and sitting on the ground with over 100 others outside the station. I collapsed in tears. My husband, who is British, demanded to see the DPO and asked him directly: “What offense are you charging my son with?” The boy hadn’t been allowed to explain himself, yet the food and POS machine were right there at the station. The DPO’s response? “Because he dyed his hair.” That was it. Nothing more.

In the end, we were forced to pay for his release. This incident was a turning point for my husband, who decided that we couldn’t continue living in Nigeria.

What made this even more painful was the nature of our family. My children were homeschooled, had no social circles outside the family, and never went anywhere without us. They were raised in a closely-knit environment. At the time of this ordeal, I was seven months pregnant, and the trauma of the experience caused me to go into premature labor, resulting in an emergency C-section.

My son’s only “crime” was being a hardworking boy, helping with his parents’ legitimate business—a business that provided employment for Nigerians. For my husband, a white British man, to witness such injustice firsthand was a harrowing experience.

Many of us have bitter, painful stories about the Nigerian system. Yet when we speak out and tell the truth, we are accused of defamation or subjected to cyberbullying. It’s truly heartbreaking.
I personally say that Kemi should be left alone, she is saying exactly what she experienced and if I'm asked anywhere in the world the same question, I will narrate my ordeal, so will every member of my family!



we have some good guys in the police, but the policing culture is disoriented from inside out. The country begs for transformational leadership. Reforms that are championed by manifest personal examples by the leaders and rigorous demand for attitudinal changes everywhere.
COPIED!!!

07/12/2024

Country, State, Nation!!!

12/11/2024

TUESDAY FLAT OUT

For Tribune and our National Grid

By Suyi Ayodele

(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Tuesday, November 12, 2024)

https://tribuneonlineng.com/for-tribune-and-our-national-grid/amp/

Yoruba people have the right description for every concept and idea. They have the concept of Ìwòfà àdáwó jo yá (jointly owned pawn). With this saying, they bemoan the abject fate of anything that is jointly owned. They take this further by asserting that a publicly owned Ìwòfà must always look unkempt, his head bushy, his life unwell.

The Daily Times was founded on June 6, 1925, by Richard Barrow, Adeyemo Alakija, Victor Reginald Osborne and other partners. That was 23 years before the Nigerian Tribune came to being. Daily Times was the doyen of the Nigerian press until Nigeria happened to it in 1975, when the military government of the late General Murtala Mohammed forcefully took it over for Nigeria.

When the Yoruba say "irun è kún bi irun Ìwòfà àdáwó jo yá - bushy hair like that of a jointly owned pawn)", they are saying the subject lacks care, needs attention. That simply tells you that, except the divine intervenes, in this clime, publicly owned ventures suffer neglect, and sickness and death.

How come Daily Times is no more, but for the past seven and half decades, the Nigerian Tribune has weathered the storm, waxing strong?

Established by the Avatar, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on November 16, 1949, the Nigerian Tribune will be 75 years old on Saturday. It has not been a bed of roses. The strength of the newspaper is in the vision and mission of its founder, Awolowo. Note also that those who have managed the paper all these 75 years have been committed to the mission of the visioner.

At 75, Tribune has not only outlived its contemporaries but has also remained a going concern; surviving every arrow of death shot at it from different angles. Why is it so?

There is this hunters’ chant, a traditional poem, Salute to the elephant, published in “A Selection of African Poetry” by K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent. In the poem, the poet says the Elephant is: "Ajanaku who walks with a heavy tread. /Demon who swallow palm-fruit bunches whole, even with the spiky pistil-cells.” Nothing describes the Nigerian Tribune at 75 more than these lines. The paper is the real Ajanaku, who "stands sturdy and alert, who walks slowly as if reluctantly / ...Whom one sees and points towards with all one’s fingers."

How has the Tribune managed to survive the last 75 years? The elephant stays its course, maintains its character, remains true to itself and keeps its memory intact. That is why it does not die the death of cats. Can we first understand what Nigeria is, and how the nation runs its affairs? You and I know that here, what belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. The community dog is likely to die of starvation because everyone thinks the other person has fed it. We are a nation where nobody pays attention to any commonly owned venture.

That is the singular reason why our refineries won't work and illegal, crude, bush refineries keep mushrooming and functioning to the chagrin of the State. Our National Grid continues to collapse, and other privately owned power installations thrive. While nobody pays attention to the maintenance of our National Grid and is left to suffer epileptic feats intermittently, private solar power installations receive constant attention from their owners because it is in their interest that they survive.

Again, in Yoruba music kinesiology, the hands come first before the gyration of the body (owó ni saá jú ijó). The axiom admits that it is only when the right step is taken that a dancer can have a perfect outing at the arena.

Power supply in Nigeria, especially when the government became the major key player in that sector, has been epileptic as anyone can imagine. It is a problem that did not start today, will not end today, and has no end in sight. There is no solution in sight to ameliorate its effects on the helpless and hapless people.

Many communities in the country are used to darkness such that they don't know when the defunct National Electrical Power Authority (NEPA), transformed to its current Abiku sibling, the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Generally, Nigerians are used to systemic failures in all aspects of life. We have communities which in the last one decade or more, have not experienced power supply. Those ones don’t belong to any Band, the recent, but amusing stratification of electricity users in Nigeria.

Sleep has become a rarity in our neighbourhoods because of the noise pollution from the various electricity generating sets popularly known as generators. The seeming reprieve we have now, we owe to the high cost of fuel. Our society is the type where the citizens provide their own portable water, fix their roads, hire night guards for their security, provide electricity for themselves and still pay utility taxes to the government!

We question nothing; not even the crass inefficiency of those we elected to be our leaders. Nigerians have developed that thick skin that enables them to move on irrespective of the pain the government dishes out on a daily basis.

We have had more than 10 collapses of our National Grid this year alone. We have had three in the last two weeks! Whatever little electricity the Generating Companies (GENCOs) can generate, we have no capacity to transmit them to the central point called National Grid so that the Distribution Companies (DISCOs) can purchase and distribute to the people. The inconsequential megawatt in the National Grid is what we cannot manage optimally!

Why do we have an Abiku as our National Grid? Why does the facility collapse almost every week? Who is in charge; who has been interrogated and who has been sanctioned for the obvious laxity?

I once explained the meaning of the name of an old diviner, Ifábonmí (The Oracle does not deceive me), on this page. The full name is multiple-syllabic - Ifábomíèminabonràmi (The Oracle does not deceive me, and I will not deceive myself). That is the name I want to adopt in my observations on this matter.

Anyone may want to believe that we have genuine insurmountable problems with our National Grid. I don't share that opinion. I know, with the hindsight of a singular experience, that whatever is wrong with our National Grid is deliberate, a result of our personal greed! The National Grid collapses at will because there is a calculated attempt put in place to satisfy the greed of some Nigerians. In essence, what we are experiencing in terms of power outages occasioned by a malfunctioning National Grid is the work of profiteering vampires whose greed has remained insatiable!

In February this year, I was in the entourage of the Minister of Power, Adedayo Adelabu, to a GENCO in Ihovbor Community, Benin City. The minister’s mission to the community was to inspect the power-generating plant located in the agrarian community.

The plant, which goes by the name, Ihovbor Power Plant or Benin Power Generating Company, is owned by the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC). It was set up in May 2013, as “an open cycle gas turbine power plant built to accommodate future Conversion to Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) configuration.”

The government-owned power plant, when fully operated, can generate 500 megawatts of power for evacuation (transmission) to the National Grid. The minister said that the plant “is a brand new one.” Unfortunately, new as the Ihovbor Power Plant is, it transmits nothing to the National Grid because its turbines are perpetually shut down for its neighbouring plant owned by some individuals to work.

I documented that visit in a piece published on this page on February 27, 2024, under the headline: “The darkness called Nigeria”. While the government plant generates 100 megawatts of its 500 megawatts capacity, the private plant generates 461 megawatts. Now, the arrangement is that for any megawatt the private plant generates which the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) cannot transmit to the National Grid, the TCN entered into a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the private plant and pays an average of $30 million every month!

This is where the complication arises. The government shuts down its own power plant to allow a private plant to function and then goes ahead to pay a whopping sum of $30 million for megawatts that are generated but not transmitted. The private plant, to add insult to our national injury, runs on the facilities of the government owned plant! If you ask a multi-billionaire, I know, to describe this situation, he will simply tell you it is a case of someone helping someone!

Incidentally, the NDPHC, which owns the Ihovbor Power Plant in Benin City, has nine other such plants in Omotoso, Olorunsogo, Calabar, Geregu, Omoku, Gbaron, Sapele and Enugu. All these plants, if optimally used, will generate 4,700 megawatts of power!

The questions we should ask is: How many of such government owned plants are working? How many privately owned plants are getting $30 million PPA every month at the expense of our public plants? Who are the owners of the private plants? Who are their partners in government and out of government?

And before we think that private power generation and distribution is rocket science, I present to you the experience of the CCETC Ossiomo Power Company LTD, Benin City, which was initiated by the immediate past Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, as an Independent Power Project (IPP). It was a fierce battle before the project saw the light of the day. The Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) management fought tooth and nail to frustrate the project.

In one of the meetings between the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the Edo State Government, Obaseki practically walked the then Managing Director of the BEDC out of the Government House. Obaseki succeeded with the Private Power Project because of his tenacity of purpose. Today, all Edo State Government offices in Benin City are connected to the Ossiomo power supply and they have good stories to tell.

The example of Ossiomo is a definition of a focused government. What Obaseki demonstrated is rugged political will and the determination to make a difference and place the people above any other consideration. The same feat was replicated in Enugu a few months ago.

Why can't we have as many Ossiomo across the nation? Why do we rely on a National Grid that is suffering from epilepsy? The answer is very clear: GREED! The National Grid needs to collapse as many times as possible so that the fat maggots of power generating profiteers can get their monthly $30 million PPA for power generated but not transmitted.

To fix whatever problems we have with our National Grid, we need to first address and permanently fix the problem of our National Greed! What solution do I recommend? I commend the managers of our power industry to take a tutorial from the resilience of the Nigerian Tribune, our inimitable Elephant (Ajanaku), huge as a hill, even in a crouching posture! At 75, Tribune is still waxing stronger and remains resolute, keeping fidelity with the mission and vision of its founder! When we stop treating our National Grid like the proverbial Ìwòfà àdáwó jo yá (jointly owned Ìwòfà - pawn), Nigerians will begin to experience uninterrupted power supply. That is hugely doable!

Yoruba people have the right description for every concept and idea. They have the concept of Ìwòfà àdáwó jo yá (jointly owned pawn).

08/11/2024

Alhaji Sule Lamido, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and two-term governor of Jigawa State, in this interview with Mannir Dan Ali on Trust TV’s 30-minute programme, traced the current crisis bedevilling his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), partly to the fallout among northern lead...

26/10/2024

The Curious Phenomenon of the Nigerian Trump Supporter
- A Psychiatric Investigation.

The curious phenomenon of the Nigerian Trump supporter deserves a closer look rather than disdain or derision, however justified such dismissive attitudes might be. The sheer incongruity of blind, and sometimes rabid, support for a man that certainly does not care much for you and your ilk, in a system that is alien to you and your kind, is a useful study in the mechanics of human behaviour. The material for this kind of study is amply provided by the sheer volume of the Nigerian Trumpists’ output on social media and by careful distillation of the fog of inchoate posts, predictable comments and automatic reactions of these compatriots.

A number of unifying themes and thought patterns begin to emerge from this dirty crucible.

1.Many Nigerians are deeply amoral and capricious when it comes to material things. They see Donald Trump’s vulgar buccaneering as admirable because ‘the end justifies the means’. Let’s remind ourselves that this is a country where many defend known thieves. Many Nigerians currently active on social media are a product of the economic depredations and social upheaval of the 1980s and 1990s, and have developed a prophylactic poverty allergy that venerates wealth, or just the appearance thereof, without a care about its provenance. We have learnt that the virtue of honesty is a dangerous luxury that our society punishes severely and will not take the same risk of honest endeavour that nearly killed many in our parents’ generation.

2.Many Nigerians are deeply ignorant about Donald Trump and their blind support derives from information curated from limited consumption of media and social media output, in a totally random manner that is certain to produce nothing more sophisticated than a hotchpotch of fragmented ideas. They have never read any books ‘by’ and about him, and although it is helpful, it is not necessary to read huge books about every public figure but some systematic organisation of your knowledge is helpful in building an objective mental image if you intend to have your conclusions backed by some measure of empirical validity. In most cases, they simply fill that knowledge gap by a contrived appearance of certitude and conviction, much in the personal tradition of their principal. Or even outright fables, again in that ignoble tradition of their principal.
Read More: Banned from the USA: Nigeria’s New Friends

3.Many Nigerian Trumpists are drawn to him by a sense of Christian duty, having bought the American Pentecostal Right’s risible promotion of a habitual liar, serial philanderer and fraudster as ‘God’s imperfect vessel’ for doing his work. This is not as shocking as it might seem at first sight, once you remember that many of the evils of our recent history have been condoned, rationalized, encouraged and collaborated with by many Bible-thumping Christians. Furthermore, you can get a glimpse into the moral hinterland of many adult Christians by simply imagining a child fed tales of genocide and misogyny from the Old Testament, and who develops admiration for the awesomeness of that majesty rather than revulsion for such evils, in adolescence and early adulthood. For such persons, the acceptance of ‘a moral evil for a higher purpose’ in adulthood is a logical progression of their moral development.

4.Many Nigerians like to imagine they are part of a global political Liberal (that is conservatism as defined by Milton Friedman) and see DJT and the coterie of criminals around him, as the current avatars of that movement. They see Trump in terms of Left v Right, and impose that schema on everything else. It is of course patently untrue that Donald Trump understands neo-liberal economics or consistently espouses any economic philosophy at all. As the Don himself was informed by Steve Bannon, he had donated much more to Democratic candidates than Republican ones before 2014 and in any case, it is totally incongruous to consider a man who is protectionist, pro-trade tariffs, anti-free trade and unilateralist, a fiscal conservative of any sort. But our Nigerian Trumpians, excluding the minority that are informed right-wing ideologues, simply have no clue about such arcana.

5. Quite a few of these guys are sexually obsessed, repressed and insecure. They labour under a delusional fear that social liberals are going to make us all homosexuals and trans-gendered. Coming from a deeply censorious mindset, they see social danger in the sexual expression of others and imagine that Barack Obama and the Democrats were responsible for this threatened moral pestilence and see in the philandering agnostic Trump, and his supporting cast of yet-to-be-exposed morally flaky evangelicals, the all-conquering sword of moral correction aided by a re-purposed American power. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.

6.Many Nigerians lack self-confidence and desire to be led, preferably by demagogues (even an inarticulate, semi-literate buffoon) and charismatic religious leaders (even shady ones). The wolf whistle of religious duty is merely the catalyst they require to pledge allegiance to this latest flag of convenience and they find reassurance in the echo chambers, thriving in the circularity of its own self-validating perversion, that have developed around this movement of unreason.

7. Some of these guys are under-employed trolls that find in this crusade some employment for their energies and salve for the personal distress of stunted ambition. One must assume that the exertions of the GRU and their allies do not extend to permanent employment for this specie of human bots as there is no immediately obvious electoral advantage or strategic purpose in such bribery.

8. Lastly, many Nigerians know Donald Trump is bad but think he is divine retribution on the USA for helping, hell making, Candidate Buhari defeat President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. They deeply resent the overt partisanship of the Obama administration in 2014-15, especially the refusal to supply weapons to the Jonathan administration to fight Boko Haram, public statements by Secretary of State John Kerry that were diplomatic broadsides aimed at President Jonathan’s administration, the meetings of Northern Governors in the USA- quite correct, in my view and the recruitment of David Axelrod by the APC campaign effort. They want Americans to squirm in discomfort as Nigerians have squirmed under President Buhari.

There are a few more esoteric considerations based on psychodynamic metaphors but they are too boring for a general audience and I will refrain from putting them out here.

Femi Adebajo is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service

12/08/2024

(If you want to understand the reality that Nigerian athletes face and why we struggle to win Olympic medals due to lack of support and our perennial anyhowness, read this personal story by D**e Chukwumerije)

PURPOSE by D**e Chukwumerije

This picture was taken 25 years ago. I was 20, and angling to take my school – University of Abuja – to NUGA Games. This picture was taken at the regional qualifiers that held that year, 1999, in Maiduguri. In truth, I wasn’t fighting fit. But I qualified at Maiduguri and went on to Kaduna for NUGA, where I lost in the quarter finals.

A conversation with my younger brother, Yaga – 2003 National champion, 2007 African champion, and 2008 Olympic bronze medallist – sparked this memory.

My own career was nowhere as illustrious. You see? I had the disadvantage of going to a University that didn’t even go to NUGA at all, till my 4th year. So I missed out on active competition for those years, and became rusty. Still, being the 4th child – coming behind 3 older ones who all, in their own time, became National Champions – I knew I had to go there and try. So, after NUGA, I struck out for the National Sports Festival. And that was where I had my firsthand experience of what Nigerian athletes go through.

I made the Abuja contingent. We trained at Old Parade Ground. Those who had come from outside Abuja also slept there. These were national athletes, sleeping on the floor.

When it was time to go to Bauchi, we crowded into a small danfo. We didn’t make it there in one day. That transit night, I folded myself into a small ball so I could fit unto the seat of a broken desk, discarded under a tree. This was where I slept.

In Bauchi, our ‘athletes camp’ was a dilapidated classroom. We all slept on the floor through the whole competition. This was a competition for Nigeria’s elite athletes.

I made it all the way to the final, where in the second round I took a direct punch to the face. (In Taekwondo, punches to the face are not allowed.) My corner coach took a look at my face and decided to throw in the towel. I went straight to the clinic. The punch had cracked one of my molars and slightly indented my cheek bone. The doctor said I was lucky it missed my eye.

There was not much in that clinic. If it had been a fight for my life, I would have lost it. Just like in Maiduguri, the previous year, where I had watched my brother – exhausted from the heat – stagger out of the ring and fall to his knees. There was no water, no glucose, no nothing. Athletes were on their own.

Nigerian athletes are on their own. They run, they fight, they jump, they lift – on their own. While they struggle, no one cares. If they lose, no one cares. But if they win, hah! If they win, people will use their exploits to write speeches on the ‘Nigerian spirit’.

I get it. When my brother fell in Azerbaijan, during his London 2012 Olympic qualifiers, and his opponent wickedly stepped on his face and broke his nose, I wrote a poem about his warrior heart, and how it picked him up from that adversity, and pushed him on to win. I get it.

But poetry never robbed me of clarity at the systemic injustice of it all. Monkey work, Baboon chop. True. It is no exaggeration, but the Nigerian state – with its convoy-driving, mansion-building, estacode-pocketing, contingent-populating agents – is not deserving of the Nigerian athlete.

For this reason, my joy at the victory of Nigerian athletes is always constrained by a secret desire that it didn’t happen. Because the state will claim it. The state that was not there in the athlete’s struggle. Only when there is something to be reaped, something it did not plant, only there will you find the Nigerian state. True. That is what leadership today in Nigeria is fast becoming – parasitic. Feeding so voraciously off society, society is dying.

Who cares?

I quit competitive Taekwondo that day in Bauchi. Because I realized that it was not what I was willing to die doing. It was not my purpose. I have since found my purpose, wherein my own warrior heart is activated.

I care.

By D**e Chukwumerije

13/07/2024

⁉️🇳🇬😡 *FROM THE ARCHIVES*

*A Nation of Idiots*
By Tola Adeniyi
www.compassnews

*Monday, 25 May 2009*

*We are all damned stupid. Stupendously stupid. Stupid to the point of stupor.* *Stinking stupid swine. That’s what we all are*

Not what we had always, been though. Not until 1979 anyway when this columnist cried out in the Nigerian Tribune that Nigeria harboured the largest collection of stupid men and women in the world.

And that stupid sting had stayed with us ever since. I mean ever since some stupid men imposed some stupid men on all the stupid people of this country in 1979.

*If you want to remember, it was that year that the leader of the stupid men announced to the larger community of stupid men that the best man would not be fit enough to lead the nation of Africa ’s most enlightened people.*

And the best man was rigged out of contest and was made to bow at the feet of the cabal of stupid men.

*That idiocy which captured the body and soul of the nation has refused to go, and I am told it will never go voluntarily.*

You wonder how a nation can continue to stomach the horrible things that assail it every day. *How a people have become so helpless that they allow themselves to be bedraggled by less than 3,000 heartless men.*

*Those who hold this country by the jugular are less than 3,000 nationwide.* All former political [mis]rulers and their collaborators. And the present crop of day light robbers who have infected Abuja with a plague.

Every day, newspapers and television screens and radio airwaves are awash with news of billions of Naira ‘missing’, ‘misappropriated’, ‘embezzled’, ‘stolen’, and so on and so forth. At the end of the day, all of us idiots merely leave our mouths ajar, mumble some curses at beer parlour joints and resign ourselves to suffering unending.

Roads were meant to be built, contracts were awarded, adequate fees paid, and all we get in return are the death traps on Ibadan-Lagos expressway, *Lagos-Benin human body-parts supermarket,* gorges on motor ways across the land. In some cases whole vehicles are swallowed up by deep gaps in the middle of the road.

And how do the idiots who populate the country react? They rain curses and move on. And their tormentors are grinning from ear to ear in their ill-gotten military contraption called Hummer.

You see councillors who were mere truck pushers yesterday now donating brand new jeeps to their wives or girl friends as birthday gifts and no questions are asked. Why? In a nation of idiots, everything goes. Idiots all over the world are known to be timid people. Nigerian brand of idiots are worse than timid. They are zombies made worse by collective spell heaped on them by the day-light robbers who have imposed themselves on them.

*But this nation had not always been like this. This had been a country of brave men and women who fought the colonial masters to a standstill. This was the country of Queen Amina. This was the land of Jaja of Opobo. This was the territory of Bashorun Ogunmola Olodogbo-keri-keriThe land of Lisabi Ogbongbo-akala. The land of Queen Orisamuro Eriwo . This was the country of Herbert Macaulay. The land of Raji Abdllah . The land of Aminu Kano. This was the country of Joseph Sarwuan Tarka. The land of Isaac Adaka Boro. The land of fiery Josiah Olawoyin. This land produced the great Nnamdi Azikiwe. The legendary Sir Ahmadu Bello came, saw and conquered. The Kiniwun Onibudo, the Olumoko, Agbola’ya bi aara Obafemi Awolowo was a nationalist of this same country now overgrown with timid weeds.*

*Perhaps all of us idiots now suffering in inexplicable silence are waiting for the one-man su***de squad Tai Solarin, Bala Usman, Omorogie Ohonbamu, Bros Kanmi Ishola Osobu, SLB Labanji Bolaji, Comrade Ola Oni, Comrade Niyi Oniororo, Wahab Goodluck, Pa Imoudu, Genius Ayodele Awojobi to come from their current places of abode to free us from this suffocating slavery on our soil.*

It was in this country that the inimitable Fela Anikulapo Kuti carried coffin to harass Obasanjo at Dodan Barracks. The same Fela carried loads of ‘sh*t’ to block MKO Abiola’s house to protest ‘unfair treatment’ by Decca. Dr Beko Ransom Kuti led hundreds of thousands in protest to confront the fierce military tanks of Abacha in protest against the annulment of June 12 elections.

*Now the generation suffering the most are still waiting for Ebenezer Babatope, Yemi Farounmbi, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, Felix Adenaike, Arthur Nwankwo, Haroun Adamu, Tola Adeniyi, Rasheed Gbadamosi, our revered Dr Frederick Fasehun, our respected Gani Fawehimi, literary icons Soyinka and Achebe…. (men in their late sixties and mid seventies already shopping for travel agents for the best ticket out of planet earth), to fight for them.*

*I should remind the people in their 20s and 30s that they are the ones whose present and future are being trampled upon.*

It is they, more than any other idiots in the idiots’ country, that are having their lives and the lives of their children ruined by the massive stealing going on in the country today.

*And they should know that throughout history it is only people under age 35 who initiate and lead revolutions.*

How is a country the size of Nigeria with all her resources not able to supply ordinary electricity to her citizens? Imagine the billions of Naira lost daily because of lack of power. Imagine the number of industries that have closed down. Imagine the multiplying effects of lack of electricity on the nation’s security and social/economic well-being. How is a country, with all God has given her be unable to provide drinking water?

Why should Nigeria fail in providing gainful employment to her teeming population? Why should over 20 million children be out of school nationwide?

*And yet all of us idiots watch in helpless resignation the men who led us into this mess living in vulgar opulence, feeding fat on our stolen money, sentencing our daughters to prostitution, and we do nothing.*

*This nonsense cannot continue.*

*Imprisonment is not the answer.*

Imprisonment did not work in Ghana . It did not work in China. It did not solve the problem in Louis X1V’s France. It did not solve the problem in Russia before the Bolsheviks came with their chopping axe. No, Romania did not yield to imprisonment.

*Ask them in Ethiopia ; Meriam Mengistu led all to the chopping block.*

If I am one of the 3,000 men who have brought Nigeria into this mess, come for me today, take me to the Bar Beach and chop my head off!