With agbero takeover, Abuja’s leper’s colony is now complete

The Muhammadu Buhari administration, placing animal life above human life, overran Abuja with the siege of cows and the terror of herders. It made a cattle colony of the city that represents Nigeria’s beauty, advertising its covenant with filth. Under it, terrorists cut down soldiers in cold blood and sacked university staff quarters, putting academic sages in emotional turmoil. The Bola Tinubu administration, ignoring the violence unleashed on transporters by invaders from Lagos, is replacing herder terrorism with the elevation of touts. That’s why I wasn’t shocked when I read this week that the president of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NUTTW), Alhaji Tajudeen Baruwa and 21 others, including three other national officers of the union, had been detained by the police in Abuja, charged with “criminal conspiracy, culpable homicide, public disturbance, and conduct likely to cause breach of peace.”

The suspects were arrested and detained between Tuesday and Wednesday, then moved to the facility of the defunct SARS popularly known as abattoir in Guzape, Abuja. This followed the chaos that engulfed Sapele Crescent, Garki on Tuesday when two factions of the NURTW “clashed.” One person was killed and many others injured, with the police recovering three rifles. According to The Punch, Baruwa was basically railroaded into his manacles:”CP Garba invited Baruwa to a meeting on Wednesday which was also attended by the faction other NURTW faction led by its former Vice President, Tajudeen Agbede and Musiliu Akinsanya, a.k.a MC Oluomo, who was formerly leading the disbanded Lagos Park Management Committee whose members now occupy the NURTW Headquarters in Abuja. A source… said Baruwa honoured the invitation believing that the meeting would help address the ongoing rift, but he was instead arrested and detained alongside three other NURTW national executives.”

Now watch the utter shamelessness of the Nigerian Establishment: “However, members and supporters of the Lagos State Park Management Committee led by Agbede who allegedly forcefully took over the NURTW national secretariat… after a violent attack, were neither arrested nor detained.” There you have it: democratically elected NURTW leaders who had ceaselessly cried out over an impending takeover of the NURTW headquarters by invaders from Lagos have been clamped in jail while the invaders walk Abuja’s streets as free men. Just how can we have a nation in which,  “Baruwa had on several occasions raised the alarm and sought the intervention of the Nigeria Police Force and Department of State Services over an alleged plot by the Agbede and MC Oluomo’s group to launch a violent attack on the secretariat but the security operatives feigned ignorance”? Are we now in Agbero Republic???  Why deploy the powers of the Nigerian State in this brazenly illegal manner?

If “Baruwa also alleged that the police were working in connivance with Agbede and Oluomo’s NURTW faction, an allegation that led the Nigeria Labour Congress to give the NPF a 48-hour ultimatum to vacate the secretariat of the union,” it is precisely because the police have never bothered about justice where MC Oluomo is concerned. Shortly before the March 18 governorship election in Lagos, this character was captured in a video openly charging Igbo people in the state to stay at home during the election if they would not vote APC. Instead of arresting him like they did an Igbo chief who had threatened to bring members of the proscribed IPOB to Lagos to defend Igbos in the state, the police actually made a case for him, daring anyone who felt offended by his remarks to “go to court.” It was a most shameless, demonic declaration, but the police got away with it. This was, of course, amply precedented. During the Buhari administration, a riot broke out between Hausa/Fulani residents of Ile-Ife, Osun State, and local residents, with a number of casualties recorded on both sides. However, in an extremely odd development following the incident, the police herded only Yoruba chiefs into jail, arresting not a single soul from the other side. It was a most unconscionable demonstration of bias, and the case died very quickly.

As a Yoruba fuji song says: “The chief trades in marijuana, and his wife in ogogoro, and yet you say you want no chaos in the village?” If under a leader with a shady background and a well documented history of drug trafficking the police are openly condoning motor park hoodlums, it can only mean, as they say in this clime, that the country has entered a “one chance vehicle,” the vehicle in which ritual killers solicit passengers like normal transporters, then herd them into the forest to harvest their body parts. Before our very eyes, the agbero violence that characterizes elections and political rule in many states is being replicated in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) with impunity.

Meanwhile, as the authorities dwell on nothing, Abuja is getting even more unsafe. On Friday, September 8, one Mistura Olasinde and her two daughters, Hauwa and Fatima, were abducted in the nation’s capital. According to Mistura’s husband, Surajudeen Olasinde, a staffer of the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority, the incident happened at Kabusa Garden Estate while his wife and children were driving in their Toyota Highlander from Garki to their home in Starwood Estate located in-between Galadimawa and Lokokogoma areas of Abuja.

MC Oluomo and his boys must be extremely lucky. For years, they held Lagos, a former federal capital, by the jugular and now they are in the present capital to continue their power grab. In a previous piece, I wrote that Lagos was parading hoodlums as the face of civilization, but little did I realise that Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital, was going to follow suit. And so we have moved from herder lawlessness to transporter lawlessness; we the hapless citizens of a nation that glorifies and venerates evil. This won’t end well.

 

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