SOMETHING quite typical of Western societies happened in the UK this week. Sharon Taylor, a cheating wife who made false rape allegations against her husband of 21 years for refusing to do household chores, was spared jail time. Mr. David Taylor had moved out of his matrimonial home in Malvern, Worcestershire, last year after his wife admitted having an affair, and the ex-councillor, 61, had gone haywire, vowing to destroy him. As reported by the Daily Mail, Sharon had bombarded her estranged husband with abusive messages asking him to continue doing household chores. Between March and April this year, she sent him 216 messages, including one branding him a ‘robotic Nazi’. As a matter of fact, she stormed the post office where he worked and told his boss that he had raped her over a number of years. She had also threatened to report him to the police for rape unless he quit his job.
But all of that wasn’t enough to persuade Lady Justice. Even though Judge Martin Jackson acknowledged that “false allegations of rape are extremely unsettling” and that “threatening to make an allegation that is untrue is a very serious matter,” he still refused to jail her because she had been in “emotional turmoil” while committing the offences. He gave her a two-year suspended sentence, an order to complete a 30-day rehabilitation and an order restraining her from contacting her husband. Apparently, the termagant’s tears had moved him.
You see, in the West these days, it’s a crime to be male. If the shoe had been on the other foot, the Honourable Judge would not have hesitated to put Mr. Taylor behind bars for the rest of his life. But since it was the noble gender that was involved, “emotional turmoil” came to the rescue. This was a whore who, reversing the order of nature, wanted her husband to keep scrubbing the floor and doing the dishes while she slept around with every man she could lay her leprous fingers upon, a woman who had gone to her husband’s workplace and concocted lies to tarnish his image and ruin him forever. But the justice system does not care: it’s long declared a war on the male species and its women are the most venerated bunch on this planet. The system that puts a man behind bars at the slightest allegation by a female never hesitates to let women off the hook. It loves them too much to do justice. As a Nigerian, if you get abroad and hook up with any of these women, your life will be crushed like a rabbit under a moving train.
I was ruminating on this gross miscarriage of justice when I read of the cement manufacturing firm, BUA Group’s ding dong with the Kogi State government over a 50,000-hectare land that the state House of Assembly alleged had been unpaid for ten years since its acquisition. Listen to the Deputy Speaker of the House, Mr. Alfa Momoh-Rabiu: “We are having problems with the BUA Group over the 50,000 hectares of land it acquired in 2012 and even obtained a Certificate of Occupancy, but has not paid a kobo for. We have written to the group several times but it has not responded to any of the letters.” And then came BUA’s reply, probably the most scandalous corporate statement I’ve read in years. In a letter dated October 14, 2022 and addressed to the director-general of the state’s Bureau of Lands and Urban Development, BUA Group said:“Since our invitation by the state in 2012 to invest through that land, there has been no visible effort by the state and successive governments till date, to address the issue of access (i.e. infrastructure, roads) that will enable us utilise the land for its intended purpose. Currently, the land is only accessible by water and without the required investments and other enabling infrastructure, the venture will not be feasible. There has been a massive deterioration of security in and around the area for the past few years making it practically impossible to start any project there as an investor.”
BUA Group added that it had conducted feasibility studies on the land and found out that only about 30 per cent of it was suitable for its investment, “with the rest – 66 percent – consisting of rocky, hilly and undulating areas which is (sic) not suitable for its intended purpose.” It then wished “to indicate through this letter, and inform you that we are no longer interested in continuing with our proposed investment.” It didn’t fail to add the gratuitous insult that if it had decided to proceed with the project, it would have been happy to pay all dues and necessary compensation to the state and other stakeholders.
Folks, we are in trouble in this country! From the government to Dangote and BUA, there just doesn’t seem to be anyone who wants to play fair. First off, how and why would a governor allocate 50,000 hectares to anyone and grant a Certificate of Occupancy without receiving a kobo, then make no move to see the deal through? Going by a measurement standard of 50×100ft, that is 750,000 plots of land!! I don’t care if the land is only accessible from hell: BUA, having acquired a C of O on the land, ought not to have left it lying fallow while holding on to the document. In telling Nigerians that it procured a C of O before carrying out a feasibility study on the land, BUA sounded horrendously bizarre.
Besides, would BUA have communicated its rejection of the allocation if the Kogi State officials had kept mum about it? This is like engaging a lady for marriage, then saying you don’t want to “do” again after ten years! It is morally reprehensible, criminal and unjust. It shows that BUA and the governor that allocated the land to it treated the Kogi people with utter contempt. The Yoruba say to their gods: “If you can’t make my case better, then leave me in the state you found me.” Only crony capitalism, the system that has made wealthy crooks Africa’s richest men, can explain holding 50,000 hectares to ransom as it were for so long.
I have found Yahaya Bello and his men to have a valid case against the sacred cows called investors. It’s s a terrible thing to see truth in plain sight, then discard it because of the medium through which it came.
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