Bandits: Deities with footprints everywhere

There is danger in shifting and compromising with evil. Some principalities don’t take a fraction of their accommodating neighbour’s space. They take all. They are like a Yoruba deity who knows not how to respect boundaries. It is rapacious in seizing whatever it covets. And so, my people warn those who think they could appease evil through avoidance and accommodation. They sing: “The ones without wisdom, they say if this deity takes over the home and the stream, they would go to the farm. They forget that a god that takes over the home and the stream will also seize the farm”.

My provincial upbringing availed me the opportunity to watch hunters do their trades through Ijala ere Ode – the hunters’ chants. One of the ijalas I listened to then is paraphrased above. It speaks to our discourse today. This is exactly what came to my mind immediately the news of last week’s bombing of the Abuja-Kaduna train by terrorists hit the airwaves. I did not gloat over the unfortunate, but avoidable incident. I would have been completely inhuman to have done that. But that does not vitiate the fact that the incident and its accompanying pains, deaths, injury and traumas, were self-inflicted. That is one of the prices we have been paying and we are still going to pay for allowing the present sanguinary administration to come into play in Nigeria. How many more will have to go the way of the Abuja-Kaduna train victims before the cosmic will intervene is wrapped in mystery.

When the Abuja-Kaduna road became too hot for our leaders and the movers and shakers of Abuja politics, because bandits, kidnappers and killer herdsmen had taken over the route, they resorted to air travel and mostly, journeys by train. The poor commuters in that axis, lamented then that they could not see train tickets to buy because the moneybags and the docile leaders had mopped up everything for themselves, their families and cronies. That is habitually the ways of those we are unfortunate to have as leaders in this season of the locusts. If they had had their ways, they would have asphyxiated us by boxing the air we breathe into cylinders. Instead of addressing the issues that made the road unsafe for commuters, they, big men of Abuja, resorted to travel by air. They can easily afford that because we, the commoners, pay for their comfort. Our leaders are tapeworms, the very parasitic worms that drain the nation’s patrimony.

Then, like the deity mentioned above, the bandits decided to visit their violence on the airspace. Penultimate week, the free range armed merchants of blood and death touched base with the Kaduna Airport. We all shouted ‘eemo’ – abomination. But our leaders did nothing other than the hollow ritual press statements, condemning the act. They had their alternate plan, the railway. They have forgotten, like the hunters’ chant that the bandits who take over the roads and the airports, can as well take over the railway. Lai Mohammed, the Minister for Information, announced, gleefully, that Nigerians could travel safely in our trains. The bandits put a lie to that hours later. In a very audacious way, the sons of perdition bombed a fully loaded train heading for Kaduna from Abuja. As of today, we have over two hundred victims of that unfortunate incident – the dead, the missing and the unaccounted for.

That was not the end of the misfortune. The man in charge of our railway system, Rotimi Amaechi, Minister of Transportation, rubbed salt on our national calamity and injury. Reacting to the bombing incident, Amaechi said he forewarned Nigeria about the tragedy. He expected us to clap for him. His soul mate, the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, threatened to hire mercenaries to assist in fighting terrorists in his domain. There are certain words a hunter must not utter. It is disgusting to hear a hunter say that he was chased back from the forest by a wild animal (oro buruku ni fun olode to so pe eranko buburu le ohun wale lati igbe). That is exactly what Amaechi did when he announced that he was frustrated by his fellow ministers, when he proposed to buy the equipment that would have prevented the Abuja-Kaduna train bomb. Never mind, our leaders tell us shit and we have repeatedly failed to rub it on their faces. If Amaechi’s proposal for the tracking equipment was denied and this tragedy happened, what is he still doing in the cabinet? What noble step should such a minister take after the calamity? We are in Nigeria, of course; we move, as the street lingo says. Who knows, Amaechi may soon ask us to allow him to lead us as a president.

Now, what do you make of El-Rufai’s threat to employ mercenaries to wrest his state from the strangulating grip of these marauders? Hollow? The same El-Rufai, who in 2012 told us that anyone, soldier or whoever, who killed a Fulani bandit had purchased a repayable IOU is the one talking of mercenaries to fight the same people he protected? Wonderful! Can we ask him what has changed from his 2012 stance? Evil will surely follow the evil doers. The “clueless” Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is no longer in power today. Their much-touted messiah who has turned out to be a mere “enumiokalu”- I have no control over my domain- is now the president. The amplified insecurity of 2015 politicking has now become a huge reality. And we are all victims. But they, the ones in power, are the real victims. We judge them condemned now, just as posterity will record them on the deficit side of our national account book. The powder of the ash they threw into the air seven years ago now follows them wherever they go.

Did Buhari feel insulted by the open card of failure El-Rufai issued him on his abysmal failure at securing us all? Or the president knows that that is how the diminutive governor speaks from both sides of the mouth? Are we even sure the Daura General hears anything at all? I ask these questions because I don’t understand how General Buhari feels comfortable in the Villa while Nigerians die in their hundreds on a daily basis. Nothing moves again here. Penultimate week again, the nation’s military celebrated its discovery of the carcass of the NAF jet that went missing in March 2021. Nobody felt ashamed to announce such ‘discovery’ of an aircraft equipped with all communication gadgets, but got lost for a whole year. They will rather want us to believe that the discovery is novel. As far back as the year 2000, when the Obasanjo administration introduced GSM, Nigeria has developed the capacity for the closest of coordinate search and location. The two pilots of the NAF jet made final contact with their base before the bird went down. Yet, it took us a full 12 months before some straying military boys stumbled on the remnants of the aircraft. And it was discovered in the same Sambisa Forest; the one that our leaders have projected to be bigger and more dreadful than the allegorical D.O. Fagunwa’s Igbo Irunmole – Forest of a thousand demons. And guess what; they only told us about the carcass of the plane. Nobody talked about the bones of the two NAF gentlemen and officers, who went down with the bird. Why? Human lives have ceased to matter to our leaders.

Just as I was settling down to do this piece on Monday morning, two videos were sent to me. The first one, I christened “Barugu is going down”. The second I baptised “A bad leader like Buhari”. The videos are disturbing and I encourage Nigerians to search for them and watch. You shall surely weep for our beloved country.

“Barugu is going down”. is a war ship owned by the Nigerian authorities. This is precisely the message that accompanied the video: “NIMASA-Barugu, one of the gun boats in the fleet of Global West Specialist Vessels, a former partner with NIMASA; sank yesterday afternoon at the Kirikiri Terminal, behind NIMASA Resource Center in Lagos”. One of the narrators in the video stated that they alerted NIMASA about the impending disaster on January 18, 2022. The gunboat sank on Sunday, April 3, 2022 – clear 75 days after the alarm was raised. Nothing was done. The narrator, as the boat took the last dive, announced: “Barugu is gone”. Just think for a moment if we need Barugu to confront pirates on our waterways at this time. We can all see that the deity that takes over the house can also take over the seas and more.

“A bad leader like Buhari” shows a foreign lecturer using Buhari as an example of bad leadership. In a leadership class, conspicuously displayed on the electronic teaching board is the sentence: “Don’t be a bad leader like Buhari”. The country and school are unknown. But the message is clear. When your relation who is ill is grinding pepper on the grinding stone, with mucus oozing from her noses, relations will know it is illness but to outsiders, it is a pure dirty habit. The entire world regards Buhari as a monumental failure and he has become an object of persistent symposia in world classrooms. That is the same Buhari Masari, Katsina State governor, described as next to Peter the Apostle in our current political firmaments. Yet Masari is already under the siege of bandits and terrorists, who daily visit sorrow, tears and blood on his Katsina citizenry.

Now, I cannot go home to visit my people in the hinterland of Ekiti because the footprints of the nation’s tormentors are all over the place. The roads are unsafe. The waterways, though appear safe for now, are limited in spread. There is no single navigational stream in my Ekiti backyard. No railway passes through the entire 16 local government areas of the state. The proposed airport or airstrip has been the object of bitter politicking. The roads? That’s unthinkable! I am from a local government area of Ekiti State that has become the headquarters of kidnapping in the entire South-West. On a daily basis, we read of kidnapping in Ikole Local Government. If I attempt to enter Ekiti from Akure, the bad boys are waiting at either Iju or Itaogbolu, and the short distance between Ikere and Ado. Ado via Iworoko-Ifaki-Ayegbaju is an abduction zone. Itapa-Osin up to Oke Agarigi route houses killer herdsmen. The route from Ado via Ijesa Isu to Ikole recorded four kidnapping incidents within one week. I dare not take the Ikare-Omu- Ilasha-Ayebode-Ayedun route. They kidnap three for ten Kobo on that route. How do I go to my beloved Odo-Oro Ekiti? The only available means is the ways of our forebears which I, like millions others, relinquished when I became Born Again. The same inhibitions on the routes to Ekitiland are the same as everywhere else North, South, East and West.

As it stands, what is left for Nigerians is astral travelling. The roads are dangerous. Bandits now attack airports. Terrorists bomb trains. Locomotives run short of diesel in the middle of nowhere. Barugu, our gunboat has gone under. I can see the covens becoming active in the days to come. We may not need ‘deliverance ministers’ to cast witchcraft spirits out of us anymore. Those wings are needed now. How I wish I had paid more attention, while growing up, to the African metaphysics of “Egbe” (astral travel), “Kanako” (shorten the journey) and Afeeri (see me not). They will be handier in the days ahead.

IN CASE YOU MISSED THESE FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE