PDP’s rigging is the cause of Boko Haram menace – Buhari

- From NigeriaNewsdesk -
The 2011 Presidential Candidate for the Congress for Progressive Change [CPC], Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has again said that injustice is the major cause of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria.
Buhari, a former Military Head of State also said that the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party [PDP]’s Government has been unfair to Nigerians since it started ruling the nation 13 years ago.
The former Military leader, who spoke with reporters in Kaduna State, however said that the country will only witness peace when Nigeria has a free and fair election, which he said can only be achieved when PDP is kicked out of power.
He assured that the on-going coalition among political parties across the country will dethrone the PDP government, stressing that come 2015, the new forces will take over power from PDP.
His words: “The type of rigging pattern perfected by the PDP must be stopped. People must be allowed to vote for candidates of their choice. If our election processes are free, fair and credible, there will be no problem in Nigeria. But the PDP government is making the country very difficult to stabilise with its rigging pattern.
“This is the evil that we have to fight in this country to move forward. I have said it so many times that multi-party democracy system is the best.
“Elections must be free and fair. That is what the CPC is all about. I couldn’t get it done in the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), but God willing, we will realize this ambition.
“The only thing that will stabilise this multi-party democracy system is to have free and fair elections. All hands must be on deck to ensure this; unless that is done, those who are in government will not sit up and ensure social justice.
On Boko Haram’s menace Buhari said, “I believe injustice is at the root of the problem. The PDP has said that they will rule forever and I know this is not possible, I am sure if you go down memory lane, you will see what we have gone through. In 2010, when opposition parties tried to merge and form an alliance, there was no time. And there must be understanding from parties to accept an alliance.Now, the time is on our side. The ACN, the CPC and the ANPP have realised now that to defeat PDP, opposition parties must come together. The merger is on course.” He had affirmed.

Security Beefed Up In Northern Nigeria Over Movie On Prophet Mohammed

Protesters in Egypt take over US Embassy in Cairo

By SaharaReporters, New York

SaharaReporters has learned that security measures have been strengthened in volatile Northern Nigerian cities in order to guard against the kind of violence in Libya last night which claimed the life of the United States ambassador to that country.
Reports said that Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and four other Americans were killed when militants, incensed about a US-produced film seen as having insulted Prophet Muhammad, attacked the Consulate with bombs and guns.
A top security chief in Northern Nigeria said that the heads of military and police commands in Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto, Borno, Bauchi, Plateau, Yobe, Adamawa, Gombe, Kebbi, Niger and Katsina States have been put on red alert against any protests that could generate into violence.
It was also gathered that they were instructed to bar any open demonstrations by religious groups, or political activities that could provide an opportunity for hostilities.
The source added that the latest development coincides with warnings of attempts by an unknown terrorist group to wage terrorist attacks in Sokoto.  Speculations to that effect have been rife in the area.
SaharaReporters has also exclusively gathered that all United States citizens on official assignments in troubled parts of Northern Nigeria have been alerted to be security conscious, and to take precaution.  A source in Abuja said the measure was taken as a means of making sure all US citizens are safe.
A diplomatic source who did not want to be identified said that other embassies in Nigeria, particularly those of the Western countries, have also taken similar measures.

That our votes may count (2)

 by Alade Fawole
YES, the July 14 Edo State governorship polls truly emblematized the critical relevance of the electorate in our democratic process. For a fact, the electorate has not been vaporized; they still exist and can be active in the democratic process. I am not among those who would gloat that this has brought an end to god-fatherism in politics, for it has not. It may seem so for now in Edo state but it won’t be for long, and it is definitely not going to be so in the rest of the country. In any case, god-fatherism in the real sense is not what it has come to symbolize in the Nigerian context. A little on that below. Now that the voting is over and the winner has finally emerged then real governance must begin and the peoples’ votes must begin to count. The voters must now begin to make their government work to provide the real dividends of democracy. If they fail to exercise the requisite vigilance, then they risk their democracy being reduced to nothing more than the mere ritual of queuing up to vote and then going back to sleep until the next election cycle four years from now. Since they have not allowed the legendary godfathers of Edo politics to vaporize them this time around, they have sent strong signals to all politicians that they want to control their own political destiny. It is now up to them to make the government responsible and accountable to them. That is an edge they must not allow to slip from their grip again. All governments generally are capable of and do relish behaving lawlessly but democratic governments tend to perform better not because of any genetic predisposition on the part of democrats but only because the electorate holds them accountable to their electoral promises and wouldn’t hesitate to vote them out next election cycle. What this implies is that democracy thrives, deepens, yields dividends only to the extent to which the people are willing to make it. Democracy is too important to be left to the whims of so-called democrats alone. Active involvement of the people in the process of governance is a critical factor. America’s democracy is mature and envied today not because of its operators as much as because of the vigilance of the people and their readiness to defend their own interests. Nigerians can only hope to enjoy the fruits of democracy when they are prepared to regard their welfare and wellbeing as the most important reasons why government exist in the first place. If democracy fails in Edo state henceforth, then the people themselves must be to blame.
But I need to stress that while the good performance of Governor Adams Oshiomhole in his first term in office was responsible for the overwhelming endorsement he has received from the people for a second term, performance alone is not all that democracy is made of. Provision of good social and physical infrastructure, education, healthcare and other goodies for the vast majority of the people is a bounden duty of every government and not that of democratic governments alone. Good performance in the area of physical development as witnessed in Edo, as necessary and desirable as it is, must never be the yardstick for determining overall democratic performance. Let me hasten to remind us that Nigerians protested, struggled valiantly and many even died, and generally made near super-human sacrifices to rid our polity of authoritarian military rule, not because military regimes failed to perform or provide good social and physical infrastructure, but because military rule is antithetical to democracy. To be honest with ourselves and fair to the military, it was during the three decades of military dictatorship that Nigeria witnessed some of the most impressive infrastructural development that we still enjoy today. Soldiers paid salaries, established schools and universities; built hospitals, stadiums, good roads and flyovers, bridges, electricity generating dams and other wonderful structures. Yet, Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected them and successfully forced them back to their barracks in 1999. It then implies that, at bottom, democracy must surely mean more than mere performance and provision of physical development.
In reality, some of the basic elements which are unique to democracy, and which no other form of government is able to guarantee include the notions that:  sovereignty ultimately belongs to the people; governments exist at the instance and for the welfare of the people; it is the right of the people to freely choose their own leaders through free and fair elections in which all adults are allowed to participate without restrictions except as stipulated by law; the rule of law as opposed to force must prevail, which implies that all are equal before and subject to the law, and that government operates according to law and not outside it; rulers are accountable to the people they govern and that the people have the right to change any government they no longer want, among others. These, in a nutshell, are the integral and irreducible minimum dividends which people are entitled to in every democracy, regardless whether democratic governments actually performs well or not in the area of physical development. And these are the standards that Edo people and, by extension, all Nigerians, must insist their governments adhere to. Any government that fails to meet these minimum standards is at best a caricature of democracy and not a real one. With regard to performance, democratic governments strive to meet the yearnings and expectations of the people for development if they ever hope to be returned to power next time. However, adherence to the democratic tenets mentioned above, rather than mere provision of good infrastructure and evident physical development, which even dictatorial governments often excel at, must be the yardstick for assessing democracy.
Many Nigerians are today totally dissatisfied with our democratic experiment because it has failed to satisfy the minimum standards listed above. We are saddled with an executive arm of government that is overbearing and anti-democratic in temperament and action; a National Assembly that shamelessly appropriates a quarter of the national budget for fewer than five hundred members against the welfare of 160 million Nigerians, and one that is unrepresentative of the people, if not anti-people in its conduct; and a judiciary which should ordinarily be the last hope of the people for justice to prevail but is, unfortunately, the bastion of injustice, delayed and twisted justice. Today twelve years later, impunity reigns supreme in the conduct of government, corruption and insecurity have combined to make life a nightmare for majority of Nigerians, and the democracy they struggled so hard to enthrone is almost going totally berserk before their very eyes. Only popular will, and not any government, can make this democracy work. The ball is therefore in our court!
Permit a little digression into godfatherism and its impact on politics and governance which I alluded to above. Beyond the opprobrium it has attracted in Nigerian politics, godfatherism has positive role in democratic politics.
Unfortunately, most of those whom our local media erroneously refer to as godfathers are little more that political entrepreneurs or contractors whose main interests are selfish and at variance with what real godfathers are known for. I reserve a fuller discussion on godfatherism and democratic politics for another day.
Four years from now, Adams Oshiomhole will himself start acting out the role of a godfather in Edo politics once he completes his second term as governor. It is common knowledge that every elected leader is always interested in who succeeds him/her. General Ibrahim Babangida, even though unelected, during his interminable transition to civil rule programme, reportedly asserted that while he did not know who would succeed him, he certainly knew those who would not be allowed to succeed him. End of story! Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria in his state would definitely not sit idly by and allow anyone who would rubbish his accomplishments to take over from him. That would be against commonsense. Since he would also not want his party to lose to the opposition in the next elections, he would invariably find himself playing the role of gate-keeper and godfather. Governor Bola Tinubu did that by carefully overseeing the emergence of a credible successor before leaving office as governor of Lagos State in 2007. That is godfatherism of sorts. All good political leaders are supposed to be godfathers to mentor others, oversee their adherence to party manifestoes, rules and regulations, and whip them into line when need be. So, godfatherism is not such a bad thing after all.
This is the positive role that Governor Oshiomhole and, indeed, all political leaders and elder statesmen, would be expected to play once out of office so that our democracy can be run by real democrats and it can begin to deliver to us the much anticipated dividends.

That our votes may count

 by Alade Fawole.

THERE is a sense in which the July 14 governorship election in Edo State gives us a ray of hope that our fledgling democracy may yet thrive and deepen. I have been quite skeptical for long, but in the Edo case, the will of the people, rather than the might of the federal government and its rigging machine, actually prevailed. That is what popular choice is all about. I’m not sure though that the success of the election and the triumph of the will of the electorate can or should be attributed to President Jonathan’s faithfulness to the promise he made while campaigning in Benin for the PDP candidate, retired General Charles Airhiavbere, that he would ensure a free and fair election in Edo State. I will rather attribute it to the electorate themselves. If anything, the Edo electorate have taught Nigerians two invaluable lessons in democracy, that is, that eternal vigilance is the price that all lovers of democracy and freedom must pay to secure and defend their votes, and that the integrity of elections in our country depends not so much on the impartiality of electoral umpires or security agents alone but on the readiness of the people themselves as the owners of the mandate.
Let me enter a caveat here. I make the above assertions not to undermine or underestimate President Jonathan’s faithfulness, but that even in spite of him, the famous election riggers did try but could not prevail due to the people’s remarkable tenacity to defend their mandate this time around. Neither do I intend to diminish the rigorous preparation and integrity of INEC. It must be stressed that since 1999, the PDP and its members across the nation have been the greatest election-riggers in Nigeria, and the serial reversals of their electoral heists are more than enough to prove my point. Let us remember that the 1999 presidential election that ushered in the Fourth Republic was so fatally rigged that former President Jimmy Carter who headed an election observation team angrily left the country than endorse the results.  Arising from this impressive rigging record, many had expected that the party would, once again, roll out its formidable rigging machine, as it had done back in 2007, when it openly robbed Comrade Adams Oshiomhole of his mandate. It turned out to be an anticlimax, as even the legendary Mr. Fix-it of Edo State couldn’t fix anything, even in his own ward! Because the people wouldn’t let him!
Importantly, of course, the successful conduct of the Edo election and the ultimate triumph of popular will testify pungently to an important fact: that we can actually make our votes count! Permit me to explain. Many people assume, erroneously in my view, that making our votes count simply means that when votes are tallied the results would reflect the actual winners and that they would not be doctored or tinkered with by riggers who do not wish that people’s will prevail. That is only a part of the story. And an important one, I might add. I would address that shortly. For most of our lives, especially since the British deliberately rigged the 1959 elections that ushered us into independence in favour of their preferred parties and candidates, there is hardly any election at the national level that has not attracted widespread opprobrium and condemnation because of deliberate and inexcusable electoral malfeasances. Electoral robbery is so comprehensive and integral to our national political psyche that hardly anyone seriously expects a fair and free poll that would reflect popular choice. That explains why the June 12, 1993 election which M. K. O. Abiola won so overwhelmingly remains exemplary and unique in terms of its integrity and fairness. It is still a reference point as far as free and fair elections go. Since the return of democracy in 1999, the criminal practice under PDP’s supervision has been simply this: rig the election in favour of its candidates first, and let the opponents lick their wounds or go to the courts to seek justice, if they can get it.
The philosophy behind electoral wrongdoing is this: those who vote don’t count, but those who count the votes! What the clever riggers do so remarkably well therefore is to capture the entire electoral process, the electoral umpire and the security forces well ahead of the actual voting day. These range from the compilation of fraudulent voters registers, to printing fake voters cards, under-age and or multiple registration, ballot-box snatching and stuffing prior to the election, suborning electoral officials and police officers before and during the exercise, to brazen alteration of actual results and announcing fake ones, and to sundry other criminal practices that rob the electorate of their right to choose their own leaders. Even when those so brazenly robbed of electoral victory approach the tribunals to seek justice, they are further denied victory by some ingeniously contrived judicial legerdemain. General Muhammadu Buhari, three-time presidential contender, can testify to this. If he had thought that the 2003 presidential election was the worst in Nigeria’s history, he had greater surprises waiting for him in 2007. The electoral heist of that year was so gross that even Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the ultimate beneficiary of that electoral theft, openly acknowledged that the election that brought him to power was less than perfect. Notwithstanding that honest presidential confession, the courts still ruled in his favour. End of story! The courts having failed him, retired General Buhari had no choice but to stoically lick his wounds. At least, so it was until another election cycle in 2011 when all hell was let lose after he reportedly lost, again. Well, you know the rest of the story.
Now back to the lessons of the recent Edo election and making our votes count. Making our votes count means vastly more than having successful elections, necessary as that may be. It is only just the beginning. Since democracy is all about the people governing themselves through their elected representatives, making our votes count requires that we make our leaders to be accountable to us in the performance of their job of governing us. Governments exist primarily to do the will of the people, and it is the people themselves that must exercise the requisite vigilance to ensure that governments do not violate the sacred mandate to see to the welfare and wellbeing of the people. It is our duty to hold all elected governments to the time honoured maxim: salus populi suprema lex esto (translation: let the welfare of the people be the supreme law). It profits us nothing to go to sleep once elections are over. Governments behave responsibly only when they know that people are vigilant and would hold them to account.
Democracy may not be the only best form of government but it at least offers the most suitable platform for people to be involved in shaping their own destiny. In doing so, they are not likely to opt for anything that would put their welfare and wellbeing in abeyance, and thus would not permit governments to behave unjustly or against their interests. Our democracy must function to deliver the expected benefits for which reasons we had struggled valiantly to get rid of our domestic conquistadors. Let us not forget Reinhold Neibuhr assertion that “man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” The people of Edo State had voted in 2007 for a governor but were robbed of victory. That governor, having been declared winner much later by the court, went on to perform reasonably to their satisfaction in improving their welfare and wellbeing and thus they decided to renew his mandate for a second term that the constitution allows. Not only did they massively vote to re-elect him but they also resolutely defended their votes from being stolen. Now is the time for them to hold that government to account for its electoral promises in order to make their votes count in governance.
The rest of Nigeria now must take a cue from Edo people and begin to compel all our elected governments to perform so that we can troop out at the next election cycle to rid ourselves of governments that fail us. If we resolve and do this effectively, we will no doubt deal a devastating blow to all the anti-democratic elements currently running our affairs and begin the process of consolidating our democracy to make it work for us. Done well, we would be able to agree with Abraham Lincoln on the importance of “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” I salute the Edo electorate and their governor who cherished the mandate he received from the people and went on to fulfill his sacred promises to improve their welfare.

As PDP Fails Nigeria, What Chances Are There For ACN-CPC Alliance?

Abdullahi Bako.

To spell out the limits of any proposition is not to give a dog a bad name, but a way of expanding the future outcome of an enterprise. PDP emerged after the elections of 1999 with a huge, seemingly undeflatable balloon of national goodwill. Meanwhile, no sooner had Nigerians settled down in the post-election years with the aim of savouring the PDP’s much-talked-about democracy dividends than the party started deflating the big balloon, the beautiful banquet presented to it by the electorate, until it is left with no content.
The party’s moral platform in government has been the anti-corruption crusade, yet it is where the failure is most disastrous. In this culture of graft that has been taken to an unprecedented level, no institution or organ of government is spared. Siphoning or tinkering with the commonwealth is now in trillions, with PDP chieftains leading the leagues followed by the Police Force, PHCN and Education striving to outstage them. These have dire consequences for our democratic process, internal security, infrastructural basis of the transformation agenda and, of course, the future of generations yet unborn.
True, there is no more bombing of minority groups as it happened in Odi during the Obasanjo era. The state’s penchant for watching killings in Jos to get to the sky before declaring a state of emergency has ceased to be. The guns are silent in Ife-Modakeke, Aguleri-Umuleri, and the Niger Delta amnesty has worked, at least, up till date. All these seem to be more of security threatschanging colour than any dependable progress.
PDP’s addition of the least imaginable chapter to this chequered history —  paying trillions of naira to perpetrators of insecurity  — is absolutely a wrong signal to other splinter groups: the genuinely disenchanted or loafers. The chief state actor’s unacceptable thesis is that armed uprising is an easy route to the state’s largesse under the auspices of PDP mis-governance. Years on, the eloquent absence of a clearly articulated security policy on Boko Haram has become a singular cause of loss of hope as regards the PDP government’s commitment to security of life and property in Nigeria. Who knows how much of these is a part of the largest party in Africa’s grand strategy for 2015!
If the party’s first inaugural speech in 1999 is anything to go by, one would be convinced that the party knows what to do. Back then, even in Obasanjo’s subsequent references, the nation was convinced that the party had been aware that mainstreaming of intelligence gathering was internal security strategic constant, yet, till date, this party of salad has refused to act accordingly.
The infrastructure under the PDP-led governments are prostrate and an expression of record mismanagement of resources and opportunities. PHCN is the third most corrupt institution in the country. The fact is that electricity is not supplied to households, the cost of running small-scale businesses gets prohibitive, and the planned prospecting for other sources of energy in the last 12 years has failed.Take the Independent Power Projects (IPPs),for instance. FERMA is making some contributions but an estimated N80 billion loss is recorded annually due to neglect of national road networks; additional N35 billion operational cost is a criminal denial of resources to national development enterprise.
In the area of Education, performances at all the levels are dismal. When corruption in terms of all manner of bribery and examination malpractice is added to it, the picture becomes scary. A CBN report shows that Nigerians’ loss of confidence in the Education sector enriches the Ghanaian economy with a whopping N155 billion annually. This accrues from school fees paid by young Nigerians schooling there.
What keeps this coat of many colours, the PDP, as an apparel is the belief of politicians desperate for power that, unless you belong, you cannot win. Its instruments are rigging, perpetrating election-related violence and disobeying court orders, among a few other antics, in the name of political tactics. Other rude ways of PDP abuse of the psyche of Nigerians include candidates’ substitution regardless of the stage of the election process.
Abuse of the constitution is flagrantly done by the party. An instance that remains the most amusing was the way INEC ignored the election petition of recall concerning Senator Ibrahim Nasir Mantu in December 2005. This petition was signed by 208,408 registered voters out of 388,833. The PDP did not see anything wrong with this, hence its desperate bid in the 2007 election to rig him back to the National Assembly.
What signal the end of the road for this uncivilized tradition are many: the most telling are lessons from global best practices brought to individual groups and families by international election monitors/observers, conventional and social media etc. The seeming absence of an alternative party that can take the PDP head-on and wrestle power from it is a sad commentary on the struggles that culminated into the birth of the Fourth Republic. Therefore, it has become imperative for all patriots to facilitate the coming to life of this phase of alliance (called merger) between the ACN and CPC.
In the light of the foregoing, the chances are bright for the alliance. In addition to discrediting itself is the fact that increasing numbers of the children of chieftains of the ruling party are rejecting them not as parents but as perpetrators of unacceptable values. The governors of ACN-CPC are re-inventing the electorate’s beliefs in feasibility of good governance. Meanwhile, the threats cannot also be dismissed with a light shake of the shoulder. Any sign of ACN-CPC mismanaging the process will spell unpalatable consequences.
Alliance,  coalition or merger has saved nations from self-inflicted doom or suffocation of alternative voice. In the same vein, there were alliance attempts in history that raised the hopes of citizens and subsequently smashed beautiful opportunities. Limited was our expectation in the Buhari-Atiku attempt in 2007; that of over-hyped 2011 Buhari-Tinubu initiative generated interest; the clincher is the current one. We must invest new energy and sacrifices for the common good.Let’s not scuttle it.

NUC’s Alarm Over Foreign Universities

LEADERSHIP EDITORIAL

The deteriorating quality of our education is gradually drawing the attention of policymakers, as can be seen in the efforts being made by the federal and state governments to sponsor brilliant candidates to acquire postgraduate studies in foreign countries. It is reasoned that those sponsored for such programmes will help to steer the ship of state in their chosen careers in the future. Such scholarship now comes in different names.
However, Prof Julius Okojie, executive secretary of the National Universities Commission, NUC, recently stated that the foreign universities which some state governments have chosen to train their scholarship beneficiaries are substandard. His statement has thrown the whole process into confusion and wild controversy. Okojie specifically mentioned Ukraine as the host of such low-quality education. Interestingly, Kano and Osun, the states at the centre of this controversy, have fired back at the NUC boss, insisting that his declaration was meant to tarnish their efforts genuinely aimed at uplifting the quality of education in their respective states. Kano has gone further to take newspaper spaces to counter the NUC helmsman’s statement, averring that its ministry of higher education had done a thorough check and “is ready to make further improvements in making this laudable and unstoppable programme a high success”. The state noted that since it was sending candidates to study in Jordan, Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, Ukraine, Malaysia, India, China, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, it is not possible for 70 per cent of the beneficiaries to go to Ukraine, the country the NUC boss gave a thumbs-down in his pronouncement.
We are concerned about this argument at this time. Nigeria is already battling with low-quality education in our low-quality environment with some of our universities rated as glorified secondary schools at the international arena. Perhaps, this is what has prompted Prof Okojie to raise the alarm. However, his claim must be substantiated in order to be seen as valid, if he would like to be taken seriously.
He should do his homework. If he has his facts, he should choose the appropriate venue such as the Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities. The NUC, the organisation which he manages, should send the list of licensed or accredited foreign institutions to states and other agencies that may be desirous of sponsoring candidates abroad. That is when his position on such important issue will be acknowledged. 

Why Nigerian Police Will Continue To Sleep On Duty

IYOBOSA UWUGIAREN.

Inspector-general of police Mohammed Abubakar appears not to be telling himself the truth. In an attempt to explain the deadly Lagos armed robbery incident that claimed some lives on Sunday, he had blamed his men, saying they were “sleeping on duty”. Abubakar, who was said to be particularly disappointed that the incident occurred when he was in Lagos, reportedly warned:  “The story of Sunday robbery should not repeat itself. I could not sleep throughout because some of you were sleeping. I`ve directed the assistant inspector-general for Zone II and the commissioner of police in the state to sit down, re-strategise and improve on the security of Lagos.”
Governor Babatunde Fashola also expressed surprise about the incident: “We need to be bold, audacious and show we understand what the people feel. Innovation, perseverance and industry will lead us.”
Even though many people believe that Abubakar and Fashola are doing great jobs to fight increasing crimes in the state, they appear to have scratched the challenges facing the police force on the surface while trying to explain what led to the Sunday robbery. From the emotional reasoning of the police boss, one could say he lacks the current mindset of his men, the poor knowledge of the society where the police operate, the poor understanding of their responsibility to the society and the low morale of his men. Does Abubakar pretend not to know that many of his men today believe that our great nation is not worth dying for? And that his men need to do extra jobs in order to sustain their families?
If he is still in doubt, the IGP should ask the Delta State commissioner of police about his experience with his men sometime ago. The Delta State police boss had to pay an official visit to the state complex housing some state high courts. In their usual manner, the state police boss’ guards were shooting sporadically in the air, apparently to scare deadly criminals off their boss. But some mobile police orderlies attached to some state judges were said to have abandoned their guns and the judges they were supposed to be protecting and entered the nearby bush, when they heard the powerful sound of their colleagues’ guns, thinking that armed robbers were about to invade the premises. According to the report, many of the affected policemen, who later found out that no armed robber was after them, never returned to their duty posts till date. For them, the judges were not worth dying for; their lives mattered most.
Just as a few people are still wondering whether this story narrated by a Delta State high court judge to newsmen is true or not, let me also share the experience of one of my colleagues, an Abuja-based journalist. He was travelling from Kaduna to Abuja, and before he got to Suleja town – about 28 kilometres before Abuja - he was flagged down by a policeman at one of the many checkpoints that used to characterise the Kaduna/Abuja expressway.
First, the policeman, with the rank of a sergeant asked the journalist to produce his vehicle documents, which he quickly did. Thereafter, the journalist was requested to identify himself and he immediately brought out his identification card, telling the policeman that he was a journalist. The policeman looked at the identification card and the journalist with shock and immediately alerted his colleagues with him at the checkpoint by shouting in his local language what was later translated to mean “Come and see a fake journalist. He says he is a journalist but he has no NTA identification card.”
For that policeman, only those working with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) are journalists. But for the intervention of his colleagues who laughed at him over his huge ignorance, he wanted to arrest this journalist for impersonation.
The police sergeant is just one of the many products of the Nigeria Police Force that are today charged with the enormous responsibility of intelligence gathering, policing, arresting, detaining suspects, and detecting and preventing crime in the country. They are the people whom Abubakar wants to use to fight the deadly and well equipped criminals in the country, especially in Lagos.
I do not want to believe that the IGP is not aware of “the political unsteadiness, prolonged military rule, widespread insecurity, ethnic and religious conflicts and corruption” that have negatively influenced the police force and its everyday job of policing the nation. And this could be attributed to the inability of our police to effectively maintain law and order – as evidenced by the glaring cases of armed robbery and the Sunday incident in Lagos. I do not also think many Nigerians doubt that the police force today are ill-equipped to perform their functions well and in compliance with the rule of law. Even the “big men” they are visibly mobilised in large numbers during ceremonial occasions to protect and assigned to guard their homes and offices, are no longer safe in their hands.
Let’s get serious: these policemen and women of today cannot effectively fight crimes in a complex nation like Nigeria, where scientific methods of committing crimes are being invented on a daily basis. And experts have identified many factors responsible for it. They include inadequate manpower, in terms of quantity but most especially quality; inadequate funding; poor crime and operational information management, including inaccurate recording and collation, poor storage and retrieval; inadequate analysis and infrequent publication of criminal statistics; poor remuneration and general conditions of service.
Our policemen will continue to sleep on duty until indiscipline and involvement in crime or collusion with criminals and a lack of integrity among other things are tackled by the police authorities and the federal government. Our policemen and women will continue to run away from armed robbers for fear of being killed until they are better equipped and paid living wages. They will continue to fight over N20 note at various checkpoints until corruption is tackled squarely within the system. Their morale will continue to be low until they are rest assured that their families would be taken care of if they died while carrying out their official assignments.
The police are humans; they buy things from the same markets with us; their children need all the good things of life like so many of us. If they have their way, they will also want their children to attend some of the best primary, secondary and higher institutions in the world like many Nigerians.

Still on Ethiopia
Last week on this page, I narrated how a young woman tried to frustrate me in my several attempts to get an Ethiopian visa to travel to Addis Ababa to attend a pan-media international conference kicking off tomorrow, after presenting all the necessary requirements. She asked me on Monday, to come for it this morning, against the 24 hours that are required to get the visa. I hope she will not deny me the visa, in spite of the assurance by a very friendly Ethiopian ambassador to Nigeria on Monday that I would get the visa.
However, in an attempt to narrate my experience in the hand of the visa lady last week and her poor treatment of visa applicants, I later realised that I went too far by allowing my emotion and the perceived sin of an Ethiopian to run a not-too-tasteful general commentary about “a great country like Ethiopia”. I had received over 50 responses both on the LEADERSHIP website and my e-mail address with over 96 per cent of them protesting my judgement. I admit I went too far and consequently tender an unreserved apology to my readers and the good people of Ethiopia.