So when ex-President Goodluck Jonathan stirred the hornet’s nest last week by unveiling his memoir, My Transition Hours, he reminded me of a deep scar in my heart that is yet to be healed. Jonathan had recounted how Buhari and his foot soldiers used the tripod of Boko Haram insurgency, abduction of Chibok schoolgirls and fuel subsidy to shove him out of Aso Rock in 2015. The launch of the book on Monday, November 19, 2018 almost coincided with the insurgents’ strike. Reports claimed that over 70 soldiers of the Nigerian Army were brutally killed by the terrorists.
There is also this tear-jerking story currently trending on Facebook entitled “Boko Haram killed K., my cousin.” The writer had said and I quote him verbatim, “We haven’t seen his corpse. His old mother has been asking questions, but our collective lies have kept her going: my mother’s death hit her hard enough: her son’s would be worse.” We may continue to play politics with the up-scaling and worrisome number of dead Nigerian soldiers in the hands of the insurgents, with government throwing its hands up in the air like helpless kindergarten kids. Only the soldiers’ family members know the gravity of the losses. I have been led through this thorny route before and I know the sustained pains it leaves on the feet and in the heart.
And if you clinically dissect this mounting casualty in the hands of Boko Haram and our soldiers’ seeming incapacitation to successfully rout them, corruption will be at its cusp. It is akin to what Eddie Iroh, in his Toads of war and Victor Nwakwo in The Road to Udima, called the evils of corruption and war-profiteering which prolonged the carnage of Biafra. Iroh’s trilogy; Forty-Eight Guns for the General (1975), Toads of War (1979) and The Siren in the Night (1982) reacted to the gory and unpleasant experiences of the war from the Biafran perspective. Someday, the revelation will come out that Buhari and Jonathan’s governmental effeminacy has ensured the interment of the bones of thousands of our soldiers, even as both exhibit palpable incapability to stop the toads of Boko Haram war at the top echelon of their governments and among huge epaulettes military top brasses. These elements swallow cash meant for armaments, which in turn fattens their stomachs, like the bulging tummy of a toad, leaving the soldiers to literally fight, with their bare hands, insurgents who are armed with sophisticated armaments.
I begin my interrogation from the Nigerian military and the insurgency of Boko Haram. There have been back and forth arguments on who had greater grips of the insurgents between Jonathan and Buhari. While this analysis is handicapped about the correct statistics of casualties during the Jonathan era, it was apparent that the insurgents had a field day while Jonathan reigned. They invaded military bases, took over towns in the North East and inflicted mayhem of notorious credentials without let on the people. The insurgents’ bloodletting was so bothersome that many people believed that it gained notoriety because the North, whose ruling class was alleged to be stoking the insurgency for political reasons, would easily rein in the animals in human skin once power vacates the yanminrin tenant in the Villa. This narrative was fueled by Buhari’s unabashed statements which seemed to suggest that the insurgency was native to the North. Recall that on June 12, 2013, as candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), Buhari, speaking in Hausa, on a Liberty Radio programme, Guest of the Week in Kaduna, had attacked the Jonathan government’s clampdown on Boko Haram, accusing it of killing and destroying the insurgents’ houses while the Niger Delta militants were given special treatment.
The Buhari government actually made public demonstration of routing the insurgents upon coming to government in 2015. Armaments, jet fighters and military hardware which was public knowledge that the Obama government declined to sell to the Jonathan government – for whatever reasons – were made available to the new Buhari government, thus making the news of the Buhari rout very believable. While the soldiers were allegedly combing the Sambisa Forest where the messengers of Mephistopheles were domiciled, Lai Mohammed, the government’s Goebbels, kindled the oil of the propaganda by stating that the insurgents had almost been totally decimated. Buhari himself picked the encore of this claim. At a time, the Nigerian government claimed that Shekau, leader of the insurgents, had been killed. It almost declared a public holiday! Shekau however came out almost immediately to mock government’s claim. All Nigerians saw and which got them bothered was that blood-soaked news of Shekau’s apostles killing Nigerians in their hundreds went on unabated. Even till today.
The abduction of Chibok girls is only ancillary to the above. It is on record that Jonathan was so consumed by his theory that Boko Haram is a creation of the Northern elite that he didn’t believe initially that hundreds of schoolgirls were kidnapped from Chibok. His naivety, manifest in how he dithered from taking action, further cemented claims of his cluelessness in government, which the Buhari propaganda machine vended with aplomb. Dapchie girls were also kidnapped by the insurgents under Buhari, as a counterpoise to the Chibok narrative.
On the fuel subsidy payment, while this singular issue promoted to the front burner the massive corruption that undergirded Jonathan’s government, the cancerous nature of fuel subsidy corruption under the Buhari government is also said to be legendary. Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, had not long ago announced annual expenditure on fuel subsidy as having escalated to over N1.4 trillion. Rumours have it that it is layered with monumental sleaze.
Like Jonathan, Buhari has exhibited lack of understanding of the gravitas of government. Either as a result of flakes from his health challenge or his natural laidback attitude, the Buhari government is full of fury and no bite. It is no rumour that government today is being run by a combine of very lethal power apparatchik with Buhari only a rubber stamp. While Jonathan was physically agile but mentally incapable to understand the enormity of governmental power, Buhari is not only mentally incapable to understand power, he is too feeble to stop its drift into the hands of surrogates.
On the score of corruption, while this carcinogen swam ashore naked under Jonathan, the few public examples Buhari made of the naked monster have forced the octopod to continue its swim underneath the water, hidden from public glare. If Buhari does not know that corruption in his government shares common skin pigmentation with Jonathan’s, he is either hiding behind his finger or he is playing politics with the truth. The decision on what to do with him in 2019 is in the hands of the Nigerian electorate.
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How did we survive life without mobile telephony?
Many times, I often wonder what miserable lives we lived before the advent of mobile telephony. An event which occurred sometimes in 1997 which I recollect with pain tells me we were indeed living an uncharted life like our ape ancestors. At that juncture, life was flashing wry and unpleasant smiles at me. I thus decided to travel from Ibadan to Lagos to seek bailout from my University of Lagos classmate, Remi Falohun. I had spoken to him on the analogue telephone notifying him of my arrival that day. I however chose to tarry a while in my departure to Lagos. By the time I arrived his bank office not too far away from the Panti police station in Lagos, he had closed for the day. No one could locate his house. With no one or anywhere to turn to for shelter for the night, I loitered about like a vagrant, until about midnight when owners of kiosks opposite the station had vacated them for their houses. This was where I made my temporary refuge. I found a long wooden bench which I hid closely behind one of the kiosks, away from prying eyes. This was where I spent the night. By the time my friend resumed for work the next day, he met a disheveled me by the gate of his bank office. He was so sorry about my fate as he took me home to freshen up. Since 2000 when the mobile telephony was birthed, this pathetic odyssey of mine to Lagos has become almost unheard of. A telephone will effectively save you that embarrassment.
If Nigerians are assembled to tell their tales of woes before the advent of the General System of Mobile, (GSM) they will fill heavy baskets. Was it someone who travelled from Lagos to Kano to visit an uncle whom he had apprised of it via a letter he sent by post and on arrival in Kano, was told the uncle had just travelled that morning to Lagos? Is it the ease of doing business that it has brought, the shrinking of spatial differences between any parts of the world; the enhancement of research; the delivery of the world on our laps? Is it the premature end that it brought to vigils that Nigerians had at NITEL offices? All that ended with mobile telephony. The benefits are so enormous. This is why, no matter the drawbacks of the democratic experiment that came in 1999, Nigerians have civil rule to thank for bringing about this revolution.
The stories told about what mobile telephony would do sounded fictive and impossible. When someone calls you, a fellow volunteered to me, you would see his name on your phone. My unbelieving scorn made the fellow sound like a weaver of ancient fables. Then came ECONET and MTN and their aim at NITEL’s backbone of monopoly. The cost of SIM cards was almost enough to buy a hundred bags of cement, about N35,000. The billing system was also very crazy. When Nigerians complained, the response they got was that that was all the service providers could do. If MTN, a South African firm, couldn’t watch our back, what about ECONET, said to have large chunk of our indigenous cash? In the midst of this melee, GLO came to Nigerians’ rescue to show that further deregulation of the billing system was doable. Before we could open our eyes, the per-second billing system had come from our very own, forcing our foreign concubines to quickly scamper to whip selves unto the line.
The data, Wi-Fi, network and sundry other ancillary benefits of mobile telephony came. Thus, by January 19, 2019, when Nigeria marks 18 years of this historic Digital Mobile Licensing round revolution, it should be done with an acknowledgement that we moved from existing to living on the surface of the earth. Like one of my old uncles says, what will Nigerians who exited prior to the advent of this magical pouch tell God upon their arrival at Heavensgate? Would they claim to have lived or merely existed? This is because, even though it is also packed full with its disadvantages, one of which is the upswing in amorous relationships as mobile telephone gives sex trade a vivid portrayal, its advantages far outweigh these. You could order whatever – from Brazilian hairs to the latest doughnuts in a Chinese restaurant – and make dialogical conversations more real than ever by picturising the interface. The aspect of how it enables one work on-the-go is perhaps the greatest achievement of mobile telephony, ensuring that you could send and receive photos and downloads, as well as make video calls. These all shrink space.
In April, 2018, Jumia, Nigeria’s largest online retailer said that the number of Nigeria’s mobile subscribers had hit the 150 million mark while the number of her internet users had swelled to 97.2 million, according to it, “at penetration rates of 81% and 53%, respectively.” The projection is also that, by next year, Nigeria’s smart phone users will climb to 23.3 million while internet users will hit 93 million. At the end of August 2018, NCC figures show that Nigeria had a total of 104,628,342 internet users. Globacom, Nigeria’s giant network is said to have the largest chunk of that, leading with 574,821 and its data subscription rising by 26.57 million in June; to 27.15 in July and gaining 66 per cent of total 866,656.
I learnt that as part of activities marking its 15th anniversary, Glo upgraded its networks and its capacity technology with submarine cables and the fibre optic and microwave backbone. Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC’s) choice of the telecom company as the 4th Most Admired African brand for the month of July 2018 is also a pointer that Nigerians, with encouragement, can make Nigeria proud.
and then