The beheaded boy by Ogun River bank

On the morning of September 21, 2001, the dismembered body of a boy was found by the Thames River, near Tower Bridge in Central London, United Kingdom. He was putting on orange girls’ shorts and paraphernalia of voodoo ensconced the remains. The Metropolitan Police was astounded but it knew it wasn’t dealing with a strange phenomenon in the UK. It was said that on the average in London yearly, the Met Police and the Coroner’s Court have on their hands between forty and forty-five cases of bodies retrieved from Thames. Preliminary evidence pieced together by the British police revealed that the torso was that of a male of between four and seven years old. Immediately, the police sprang into action. Unable to put a tab on his real name, he was named Boy Adam, apparently after the biblical Adam, who was said to have been naked in the Garden of Eden. After a thorough post-mortem, it was found out that Adam had been poisoned and his throat slit clinically like a professional butcher to drain it of blood. The post-mortem, which examined the boy’s stomach, found traces of minerals in his bones which seemed to establish that the boy had been brought to the UK just a few days before then. Sure that the case on their hands was voodoo sacrifice, investigators pieced together further evidence which kick-started by an initial haunch that Boy Adam probably hailed from Benin City, Nigeria. Confused about the distinction between Benin City and Benin Republic, British investigators were initially drafted to Nigeria, after the lead from one Joy Osagiede who was believed to have trafficked the boy proved abortive. Unable to get enough substance in Benin City, the police thereafter headed to Cotonou in Benin Republic.

Unable to get concrete links to the killing in Benin Republic as well, investigations even took the police to Southern Africa. The police theory was that the boy was trafficked to the UK for muti sacrifice. Till today, with millions of British pounds spent on the investigation, the police haven’t given up on it. Only recently however, one of the suspects in the Boy Adam killing, a Nigerian, has owned up to it. Yet, the Metropolitan Police is still on the matter.

The fastidious investigation in the Boy Adam matter is the same in virtually all sane countries of the world. The gravitas with which such cases are pursued is that, being an impurity on a pure society they attempt to foster, all efforts must be made to gorge out any stain, no matter how long it will take, from society. This is why you find in those sane countries that crime cases may take decades to be busted but they surely do. It is also the jurisprudence behind the legal maxim that crime cases cannot be impeached by an effusion of time. In Nigeria and many developed countries however, this philosophy of impurity does not have any place in our criminal system. It is a system that has the criminals and the law-abiding intermix in one huge whirlpool. This is why, in spite of the presence of powerful wordings against crime committals and deterrence for offenders in our constitutions and Acts, those who administer Nigeria are a bunch of rogues and criminals, with the attendant tendency to shield their fellow criminals in same high places at every opportunity. We as the ruled ourselves do not see any wrong committed when allegations of criminality are leveled against members of the ruling class. Oppression has denuded our sense of rightness and societal order.

In Ogun State, Nigeria, another dismembered body of a boy is right now by its own Thames River. Or put rightly, by the Ogun River bank. In this case, however, unlike the relentless and selfless investment of energy by the Metropolitan Police to stave off this pollutant by the British river bank, neither Nigerians as a whole nor even the people of Ogun State are bothered a bit by this lifeless torso. To them, the torso may have been as a result of politics or any other God-knows-what reason. The dismembered Boy Adam in Ogun is the allegation that is ravaging the political landscape of the state now. It is the news that billionaire and renowned oil and gas magnate who hails from Ijebu Remo and governorship candidate of the All Progressive Congress, Dapo Abiodun, lied about the possession of a university degree. The converse of the allegation is that, if he possessed the degree, he did not pass through the mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme.

Abiodun was said to have claimed that he graduated from the university in the 1980s but tendered the West African School Certificate in the form he submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the 2019 polls. When he ran for same office in 2015, however, Abiodun was said to have tendered a university degree certificate obtained from the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, which he purportedly obtained in 1986 and another from Kennesaw State University, Atlanta Georgia, United States of America, obtained in 1998.

The questions for resolution are so straightforward that they should bother anyone that they still linger. They are part of the same question that President Muhammadu Buhari has spent years waffling on. Did Dapo Abiodun have a university degree or degrees? Did he lie on oath that he possessed any as allegedly claimed on his 2015 INEC form? Did he submit his WAEC certificate while filling the INEC form in the election that is slated for 2019? Isn’t it suspicious, thus raising what legal practitioners call rebuttable presumption, that if he submitted a WAEC certificate preparatory to the 2019 elections, it could be inferred that he does not have a university degree or is lying not to have a university degree? Or is there some obvious lacuna in the university degrees he claimed? If he actually didn’t attend these universities as he has made the world to infer from the WAEC certificate submission, the onus would be on the people of Ogun State – where the Missionary, Rev. Henry Townsend, established the second printing press in Nigeria in 1854 – to decide whether they want to hand over the high office of the governor of their state into the hands of a man who possesses only a school certificate. Or could it be that Abiodun actually possesses those degrees but did not submit himself for the mandatory NYSC exercise? If this is so, what are the penalties for non-observance of the one-year scheme? Shouldn’t they be meted on him? Or that he graduated from the university after he clocked 30 years of age when it was no longer necessary to engage in the exercise? Then he will need to provide his exemption certificate. These are the questions that should be answered.

It is now becoming a noticeable pattern for Nigerian public office seekers to put a shroud on their past, especially their academic records, while seeking political offices. While it is not a crime to possess only a WAEC certificate since the drafters of the constitution request only that, in most instances where this is done, a criminal offence is lying by its fuselage. It is either to evade an ancillary claim that will go with production of a degree certificate, which is the NYSC discharge certificate, or a criminal and unedifying past while in the university can be taken for granted. We all know that it is a crime for any Nigerian graduate to evade the compulsory one-year NYSC scheme, except those exempted. It is akin to draft-dodging in the Vietnam war in America which was criminalized.

Certificate forgers, NYSC dodgers and suchlike have ruled and are still ruling Nigeria. Unfortunately, the Buhari government is leading the pack with cases of two of its ministers which have landed in the book of public opprobrium. The President himself still has a number of unpleasant tangs hovering round his possession or not of a common school certificate. Unbeknown to us all, the purport for society of these widespread cases of elite forgery of certificates and a retinue of NYSC dodgers is huge.

Though a school certificate-holder can perform wonders as a political office holder, the impurity of forgery and national assignment dodging is symptomatic of the fact that such an office seeker can never be a responsible leader if he gets there. Do we think that it is for fun that America almost literally scans the genes of its future presidents for traces of drug usage while they were youth or any trace of delinquencies whatsoever? It is for the reason of maintaining the purity of governmental blood. Thus, no matter how extraneous the colour that makes up the reasons being advanced for the surge of angsts at the Dapo Abiodun certificate matter is, the oil magnate has to address the issues personally, one by one, not through hirelings. Through this allegation of certificate forgery or national assignment dodging, Ogun currently has no nominee at the Federal Executive Council. It can’t afford to travel this route again. We as a people also have to maintain that Dapo Abiodun addresses these grave issues. INEC, which already had copies of his claims in 2015, should also do the needful to rescue Nigeria from yet another pollutant. Or else, we all will be suffocated by the smell of the decay called Boy Adam who is currently lying by the Ogun riverside.
————————————————

Day Awo wept at Oyo House of Chiefs  

When we all heard the news during the week that the pan-Yoruba organization, Afenifere had declared its intention to support the candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and current President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, some of us peeped into our calendar to be sure the calendar was not up to some lunar mischief.  A faction of the organization, led by Senator Ayo Fasanmi, in a communique issued after its long hours of closed door deliberations at the House of Chiefs, Oyo State Secretariat, Ibadan, had immediately rebutted our doubt.

The Publicity Secretary of this group, Biodun Fasae, who spoke on behalf of Senator Fasanmi had confirmed this. To imagine that the hallowed ground where this literally treasonable statement against the Yoruba people was made was that same ground where Awolowo and the great parliamentarians of the First Republic sat on issues that moulded Yoruba and Yorubaland into a land of envy by the black race!

If the dead weep in heaven, the most recent ancestor of the Yoruba people, Obafemi Awolowo, must have wept profusely as these pass-offs of his in ethnic leadership masquerading as his alter-ego emerged from their apparently engineered assembly. And the reasons are obvious.

From the press statement of Fasae, it is obvious that this assemblage’s proverbial fly walzing to an unheard musical rhythm on the top of the river has a drummer shrouded from view. Its statement even betrays this much. From its adulations of governors of the South West and President Buhari, it is obvious that this rump of Afenifere is composed of lickspittles of the APC whose Christmas booties are assured by that audacious statement. What economy or, put succinctly, what aspect of the Buhari economy is its own Afenifere pleased with? Is it the selfsame economy which the Brookings Institution recently said has now taken over as one domiciled in a nation with the highest number of extremely poor people?

Said the report: “According to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extremely poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of Congo could soon take over the number 2 spot.” Is this the same Nigeria that this Afenifebi (seekers of evil) is talking about? This is not to talk of another report on the Nigerian economy under Buhari which said that 86.9 million Nigerians are now living in extreme poverty, a figure of nearly 50% of the country’s estimated 180 million population.

Can this rump of Afenifere tell us the outcome of its poll survey which indicates that their view represents that of the average Yoruba man on the streets? Awolowo – God bless his soul wherever he is – was known to be a man who spoke truth to power via verifiable figures. Long before the austerity of the Shehu Shagari era, Awolowo foretold the economic crisis via tabulated figures of how Shagari was leading Nigeria to Golgotha. How come these self-anointed children of Awolowo chose to deceive the people with voodoo economic indices?

Those who claim to be in the other group of Afenifere, none of them have ever contested an election. Apart from its obvious meaninglessness, the italicized words coming from this Afenifere rump even shows that it is consumed by an ancient hubris that it is yet to purge itself of. What has contesting and winning an election got to do with this obvious charge of ethnic Judas that they are playing?

Please, get me right – I am not saying that the other group, whose trenchant voice against Buhari that we were hitherto used to, is any better or isn’t consumed by an equal ounce of esophagus pursuit. What I am saying is that these are Yoruba elders dancing naked in the market place for the sake of their stomachs. Neither Buhari nor Abubakar Atiku means well for the Yoruba people. They may mean well for the throats of these shameless Afenifebis whose race to the national tills to collect their shares of the proverbial national cake has put Yoruba people in disgrace. Fortunately for the Yoruba, none of these discredited voices can win a polling booth in favour of their principals in the 2019 elections. They cannot even convince their siblings to vote in a particular direction. Let them however enjoy their booties while the crisp notes last.