By Okey Ndibe, Connecticut, USA – Nov. 29, 2011 -

As a fledging journalist in Lagos in the mid-1980s, I ran into Ojukwu in Enugu and received an open invitation to drop in at his 29 Queens Drive residence in Ikoyi, Lagos. Sometimes alone, sometimes along with a few colleagues – among them, Nnamdi Obasi and C.Don Adinuba – I’d often visit Ojukwu’s residence with that famous sign at the gate, “Beware of snake”.

Alone or accompanied by others, I’d spend several hours listening as Ojukwu discoursed. At these informal sessions, he’d smoke cigarette after cigarette and sip from his glass of cognac as he weighed in on Nigerian politics. His favorite subject, a theme he returned to again and again, was the failure of the Nigerian state to crystallize anything approaching a clear sense of citizenship. He was troubled that the Nigerian was in no position to affirm that there was any verifiable content to being a citizen.
Of course, Ojukwu was not alone in articulating that specific malady, that contradiction that easily betrays the hollowness at the heart of Nigeria’s claim to being a meaningful community and coherent idea. What made his voice urgent and lent poignancy to his stipulations was, apart from his uncommon prowess as a speaker, his stature as the man who led a war to resolve that contradiction. There was something heartrending, then, about the experience of sitting with Ojukwu as he eloquently, piquantly, and ruefully demonstrated that Nigeria had embarked on a ruinous war, but had failed – despite the sacrifice of more than a million lives – to address the central question that had triggered the war.

A few months into these informal exchanges, Ojukwu agreed to grant his first extensive interview since returning from exile to the African Guardian, the now defunct weekly magazine that I worked for at the time. One bitingly sunny afternoon, a team of us from the magazine – Editor Ted Iwere, senior correspondent Kingsley Osadalor, and I – spent several hours asking questions that ran the gamut of his life as a historian, soldier, war leader, exile, and refreshed Nigerian. What emerged from that encounter were two paradoxical, but far from inconsistent, considerations. One was Ojukwu’s declaration of his readiness to go to war in order to preserve the unity of Nigeria. The other was his insistence that Nigeria as a nation had not come to terms with its meaning, that its constituent elements had not hashed out the terms of their engagement, and that the country had yet to take seriously the redemption of its implicit pledge to all citizens, especially erstwhile Biafrans.

In the heady flush of emotions after his death, there are those who would leave the impression that Ojukwu was beloved by all Igbo. That impression fudges the evidence. No, he was no object of universal acclaim. Like all great men – and he was a great man in all the ways that count – he was too complex to command everybody’s affection. Many despised the haste with which, once home from exile, he entered the partisan political fray on the side of the widely unpopular National Party of Nigeria, thus seeming to spurn the going political sentiment of most Igbos at the time. He paid a stiff price for that precipitate decision, and seemed to reel from its effect till the very end. I regret that he never took time to offer the world his own written insider’s account of the darkest moments in Nigeria’s history.

Still, nobody would seriously deny that, when his people were tested by fire, he stood up to be counted. Born into privilege on a legendary scale, Ojukwu sacrificed his worldly possessions in the fight to secure a safe space for his beleaguered people. In a Nigeria where relative paupers shoot or rig their ways into office and loot their way out to obscene wealth, here was a man who went in as a leader wealthy and left materially wretched.

That, and his other gifts, among them an inimitable way with language, an uncommon insight into the plight of dispossessed Nigerians, an ability to speak a language that resonates with the downtrodden, a deeply powerful historical acumen, and that incomparable sense of drama – these endowments speak to a titanic personality. Since the death of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and Alhaji Aminu Kano, the Ikemba has given us our closest glimpse of a true leader’s mettle. I’m willing to predict that, with time, his leadership credentials are likely to receive wider appreciation and magnification whilst his flaws slip into insignificance. He’s physically dead, but his spirit will loom, will infuse the hearts of those he touched and whom he allowed to touch him in return. May his soul rest in peace.
 
Lotachukwu Ezeudu: A Memo to the Police and Prisons
 
Both the Inspector-General of Police and the Director-General of Nigerian Prisons ought to take an urgent interest in the sad saga of Lotachukwu Ezeudu, a 19-year-old accountancy student at the University of Nigeria (Enugu campus) who was kidnapped in September, 2009 and has not been seen since. Thanks to the unyielding devotion of young Lota’s parents, the tenacity of police investigators, and the diligence of prosecutors at the Enugu State Ministry of Justice, most of the suspects in Lota’s kidnap have been identified – and arrested.

Even so, certain developments in the case threaten to cause further serious dents to the already terribly tarnished image of the police and prisons.
One of the suspects in Lota’s kidnap is a young man named Uche Moses Amajor. Declared wanted in connection with the case, Moses, whose father is a businessman and the owner of Prosper Hotel in Trans-Ekulu, Enugu, went underground for a year and a half, eluding police investigators. It was only in April this year that his parents finally surrendered him to the police.

And then the story became trickier – in a really sordid, disturbing way. First, one Mahmud Isah, the area commander of the Funtua police in Katsina State, reportedly signed a letter stating that the suspect, Moses Uche Amajor, had come to the station on September 25, 2009 to file a report that armed robbers had stolen various documents from him. If that report were true, then Amajor would have produced proof that he wasn’t in Enugu on September 26, the day Lota was kidnapped. That would have amounted to a perfect alibi.

Except that the investigators in Enugu insist that Moses Amajor was indeed in Enugu and participated in a heinous crime. If their account is true, it follows that, a, perhaps the “alibi” letter from Funtua police was forged (in which event the person who produced the letter ought to be arrested and prosecuted) or, b, that a senior police officer in Funtua consented to give a false statement with the aim of misleading the law and miscarrying justice. That calls for a serious investigation by the IG of Police. If he finds the officer guilty, he must order his immediate firing, arrest and prosecution. Police officers who give cover or comfort to criminals worsen the already bad image of the police and are a menace to society.

Meanwhile, the Inspector-General should also order an investigation into the whereabouts of Sam Chukwu, a Divisional Police Officer (DPO) who has been named as a suspect in the kidnap. On several occasions, Mr. Chukwu has failed to show up in court to face charges. Is it not time the IG ordered a wide search to nab him, wherever he’s hiding?
More recently, a doctor at the Nigeria Prison Service reportedly wrote a statement to the effect that the same Moses Amajor was suffering from hepatitis. The prison doctor then recommended that the suspect be released to seek treatment on his own.
The report is troubling, and not only because prosecutors question its veracity. A man accused of a crime as grave as kidnapping should never be released to fend for himself. If Moses Amajor is infected with hepatitis, the prison authorities ought to put him in solitary confinement to ensure he does not jeopardize others. At any rate, the director general of prisons should order a second set of tests to ensure that the diagnosis of hepatitis is sound – not another attempt by Amajor to dribble his way to freedom.
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One of the officials, a female Assistant Director in the department (names withheld) suspected to be the head of the syndicate, which trades with names of candidates with the use of fictitious court orders has been suspended indefinitely.
Reliable sources at the INEC told Daily Sun that the affected officials were discovered to be behind illegal fiddling with candidates’ lists through incessant changes of names of candidates even when there were no court orders necessitating such.

The officials have been allegedly interrogated by the Police and the operatives of the State Security Service (SSS) following outcries by some candidates whose names were substituted even when their parties did not seek for such or have any problem with their nomination. Daily Sun reliably learnt that the decision by Jega to interdict the affected officials was in line with the reports from the two security agencies indicting them of culpability in illegal substitution of candidates’ names.

When contacted, the INEC Chairman’s Chief Press Secretary, Kayode Idowu denied knowledge of the development saying, “I am not aware.” A Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senatorial candidate in Anambra, Chief John Emeka, had lodged a complain when his name was substituted on the order of a court, which his lawyer was later found to be fake.

It was in the process of investigations that it was discovered that a cartel existed in the Commission which specializes in production of fake court order and INEC stamp. Only two days ago, the INEC Chairman restated his resolve not to spare any staff of the Commission found to have connived with politicians to sabotage the electoral process. Meanwhile, Prof. Jega has appealed to all Nigerains to give his Commission maximum cooperation and endure inconveniences they might arise during the presidential election tomorrow.

He stated that no amount of sacrifice would be too much to ensure that the electoral process was credible. The INEC boss made the appeal while addressing a delegation of the European Election Observation Mission which paid him a courtesy visit at the Abuja Headquarters of the commission yesterday.

On the preparation for the election, he disclosed that the procedures for voting would be strictly complied with, adding that accreditation of voters would be strengthene “Our hope is that the presidential election would be better conducted than what obtained last Saturday. We are committed to strengthening the commission’s logistics,” she said.

In his response, the spokesman of the European Union’s Election Observation Team, Mr Alojz Peterle, a former President of Slovenia said the group was encouraged by the utterances of Prof. Jega, especially his promise that the electoral process would improve with each election.

-Sun

This is apart from the fact that Nigeria’s crises are man-made, manufactured by the greed and criminal acts of those who pass themselves off as leaders – and often with the tacit connivance or permission of the rest of us. As I stated elsewhere, God is not going to build our roads, sweep Nigerian streets strewn with “pure water” plastic, provide funds for our schools, produce a sound healthcare system, prosecute the “stakeholders” whose specialty is to pocket public funds, restrain electoral officials who aide and abet the stealing of votes by politicians, rewrite the judgments of corrupt judges, edit the reports and opinions of suborned journalists, or stop the police from shooting motorists slow to produce that N20 collection at checkpoints.

When many Nigerians, in searching for a solution for their mess of a country, are compelled to scale back their gaze from divine heights, they are frequently seized by what I call a Jerry Rawlings fantasy. Simply put, this fantasy bears a hope that we would wake up one sunny day to the emergence of a made-in-Nigeria clone of the former Ghanaian military leader who, in an access of rage, tied some of his country’s former leaders to stakes and shot them.
There are Nigerians who (day)dream that some outraged and steely-hearted fellow – their own home-grown Rawlings – would arise from somewhere and, in a volley of bullets, cleanse their country of its execrable past and present misrulers.

Again, the Rawlings fantasy strikes me as a bit like the God solution. Rawlings could emerge in Ghana because certain historical circumstances in his country made him possible. He was a product of the Ghanaian moral and political climate. He arose at a point in Ghanaian history when the country’s humiliation was near-total, the masses of the people were not just dejected but also prepared to contemplate extreme action to reshape their shattered lives and pull themselves from the edge of a chasm.

Rawlings was far from a lone agent of history. He had around him a nucleus of, among others, the intelligentsia, workers, traders and student leaders who shared his idealism and revolutionary fervor.
At any rate, even as Nigerians celebrate Rawlings’ mini killing spree, many Ghanaians – including admirers of Rawlings – have developed a healthy dose of skepticism about that bloodlust. There’s little question that the event had a cathartic effect. In a lot of ways, it has come, unfortunately, to define – or to shadow – the career of a man who is far more complex, at once impressive and deeply flawed. The point is that there may not be a Rawlings anywhere in sight in Nigeria. And that, I daresay, is not a bad thing.

Nigerians don’t need a slaughterfest. We don’t have to shot the men and women who have turned our lives into a horror reality show. A Nigerian Rawlings would spend too much energy and time processing targets. There would be several heads of state, a multitude of former and serving governors, a flood of local government chairmen, and an avalanche of ministers, commissioners, and special assistants. The sheer scale of the slaughter would scar the nation and prove counterproductive.

What purpose would be served by enacting such a gargantuan bloodbath? Is it to establish a deterrent effect? But there are, surely, less expensive ways of achieving this goal. How about prosecuting public officials who betray the public trust? How about ensuring that guilty officials serve long jail terms, like Bode George in a real prison, not in a hospital? How about insisting that the scandal called executive immunity be expunged from the constitution? Nigeria may be the only place where a man who’s committed a crime is shielded from prosecution because he occupies the governor’s seat.
When wiretaps revealed that Governor Rod Blagojevitch of Illinois was seeking to auction off Barack Obama’s Senate seat for cash, officials of the FBI did not wring their hands and say, “Oh, what a sleazy guy, but he’s protected by immunity.” No, they went to the man’s home, arrested him, put handcuffs on him, and then led him away. As he awaited trial, Illinois residents made it clear they didn’t want him running their affairs. They insisted that he resign. They didn’t call in a Rawlings to do the job for them.

How about each citizen deciding to be his or her own Rawlings? How about staunchly defending your vote against usurpers? Or reforming the judiciary, ensuring that only men and women of outstanding ethical funds and legal training are elevated to the bench? With general election nearing, Nigerians are being treated to judicial farce. Take the role the judiciary played in forcing INEC to register one set of political aspirants over another. The ease with which all kinds of miscreants obtained ex parte rulings restraining or compelling the electoral commission, ordering it to act in one way or another bespeaks a system where judges are bought and sold, more or less in the open.
Again, it is humans, not God, creating the mess, seeking to gain political advantage by crooked means – in order to pursue their crooked agenda.

After toiling, groaning and moaning through thirty Mubarak years, the people of Egypt last week said, “Enough’s enough!” Without a Rawlings in sight, the collective resolve, tenacity and dedication of ordinary Egyptians unseated a man who had stolen billions from their country whilst pretending he was God’s gift to the people. Mubarak had finalized plans to hand over the country he’d turned into a virtual shell to his son to proceed with the program of pauperization and exploitation. But the people of Egypt, sans Rawlings, rose up one day and asserted their sovereignty.

At first, Mubarak talked tough, vowed he would not go. But the people, buoyed by the triumph of Tunisians, stood their ground. One day, the embattled Mubarak sent his armed surrogates to whip and shoot the protesters. He must have reckoned that this action would frighten the crowd of protesters. The opposite became true.
The day after the assault, a larger crowd turned up. An American TV reporter interviewed an elderly man. He said he had not cared to join the anti-Mubarak rally until he saw the beating of protesters. “Then I knew I must come out here to join them and show support,” the man said.

Outraged by the assault, Shakira Amin, an Egyptian TV journalist, quit her anchor job in protest. She said she had to identify with her fellow citizens against a despot who required that she ignore the great uprising and instead read a depraved and concocted version of events each night.
A Nigerian friend asked if I thought the events that shook up Tunisia and Egypt – and now convulsing Algeria and Iran – could happen in Nigeria. I paused to weigh a response. In the end, I had to hedge my bets. Yes, Nigerians are capable of reclaiming their much-abused country from the thieftains who run amok, plundering, pillaging and laying waste. But they must first recognize two truths: that the Tunisians and Egyptians did it through sheer determination. If God and Rawlings were at Tahrir Square, they kept an invisible profile and let the Egyptian people do their stuff.
That’s an important lesson for us. 

-Sun

I arrived at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on January 8 for what I imagined – or hoped – would be a routine two-week visit to Nigeria. Within moments of arrival, I came to realize that my trip would be anything but normal.

The plain-clothed immigration officer, a lanky fortyish man with a paunchy belly, seemed to linger on my passport. He took one look at the passport and then, face screwed up, inspected my face. Then he did a double take. He looked to his left and raised his left hand, apparently to attract somebody’s attention. The man he wanted to draw to him appeared preoccupied. He then peered once again at the passport and then scoped out my face. He sighed.

“Are you Okey Ndibe?” he asked, as if the matter might be in serious doubt.

“I am Okey Ndibe,” I replied in a tone calculated to dispel any doubt.

“Hold on.” He stood up and shambled a few feet to another man. Bending, he whispered to the other man who then leaned back to catch a glance of me. They exchanged a few more words. The man with my passport returned to me.

“I’ll hold your passport,” he announced. “Go and get your luggage and come back.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just get your luggage and come back,” he restated with an air of finality.

I retrieved my luggage and an official of the State Security Service (SSS) led me to the agency’s first floor office. For a moment there was nobody in the room. Then a gangly officer emerged from an inner room and said, “Brother, welcome.” He motioned to a leather couch and I settled in it. He sat at his desk, picked up my passport, and began to make entries on a computer and scribble on a white sheet of paper. Pausing, he asked whether I had another passport. When I said that I carried an American passport as well, he asked for it. He made more entries on the computer as well as a piece of paper.

The phone calls began. The officer exchanged numerous phone calls with a woman – he called her “Ma” – and a man he addressed as “sir.” He’d speak for a moment and then hasten outside the room to finish the conversation. Then, during a lull in the frenetic relay of phone calls, he asked, “Are you a journalist?” I told him I was a professor who wrote a weekly column. He made a call to relay the information, then hurried out.

After some two hours of this puzzling demonstration of state power, I told the officer that he’d not even introduced himself. “Don’t worry, I’ll do it soon,” he answered. He cut a sheet of paper in half and wrote on both of them. Each paper was a receipt of sorts, an acknowledgment that he’d taken away my passports. Handing the papers to me, he instructed that I report on Monday morning at the agency’s office on Kingsway Road, Ikoyi to see the director. The director would decide about the release of my passports.

It was 11:45 p.m. when I walked out of the SSS’s airport office. It was then that the full import of the experience hit me: I’d been cast in the role of enemy of the state. And the incongruity of it all struck me with particular power. No, I couldn’t recall breaking any laws in Nigeria or elsewhere. I had never stolen a kobo of public funds; I had instead called those who did by their proper names – criminals, “thieftains,” nation wreckers. I’d never been an instrument of electoral fraud; rather, I had insisted that Nigerians have a right to credible elections in which their votes count.

It didn’t escape me that scores of innocent Nigerians had perished in recent months, victims of bomb blasts set off by religious and other terror groups. As far as I know, the government, despite its extensive apparati of law enforcement and intelligence – including the SSS – has not succeeded in infiltrating and neutralizing the murderous gangs. And for all the assurance by the Goodluck Jonathan administration, one is not aware that a single perpetrator of these explosive crimes is awaiting prosecution.

The point is, Nigeria is in the throes of a grave and quickly worsening violence. The resources of the state ought to be husbanded to confront this burgeoning virulent threat. But instead of going after those who ambush innocents with bombs, guns and machetes, the SSS diverts itself with intimidating principled commentators on national affairs.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that I considered being put in the role of enemy of the state preposterous; the Nigerian state had decided to designate me an enemy, and that was it. My emotion bypassed disbelief and went from shock to indignation.

When I arrived at the agency’s office on Monday morning, a lawyer friend in tow, I was curious – since nobody had told me at the airport – to learn the particulars of my offence. After signing in at the gate and surrendering our cell phones, we were shown to a waiting room. An hour and a half later, we were ushered to the director’s office. Two men shook hands with us, then the director told my lawyer that the meeting was “a simple matter.” After the lawyer left the room, the director said, “Professor Ndibe, please regard what happened as one of those things that happen in life.” I thought the explanation inadequate.

“A lot of people are convinced that I committed a crime,” I said. “What’s the nature of my crime?”

The director said there was no crime, that the unpleasant encounter at the airport arose from something in the past that the agency should have taken care of.

In December, 2008, I had received three tips – by e-mail and telephone – that the Umaru Yar’Adua regime had ordered that my name be included on an enemy list of critics and activists. We were to be arrested if seen at any Nigerian point of entry. But soon after Mr. Jonathan moved into Aso Rock, a website reported his spokesman as stating that the enemy list had been discarded.

That misleading statement lulled me into letting my guards down. I arrived in Lagos without the precaution of alerting family and friends that I faced the risk of detention.

For me, there are a few points that bear amplification. On a personal note, I was deeply moved by the deluge of messages of solidarity – through statements, e-mails, facebook messages, and phone calls – that came from many groups and individuals, from within and without Nigeria. A refrain of these expressions was an insistence that the maintenance of an enemy list was antithetical to the spirit democracy that Nigeria claims – in the eyes of many, falsely – to practice. Instructive in a perverse way were the intermittent voices that speculated that I must have committed some serious crime, or professed absolute confidence that the SSS must have had solid grounds for briefly detaining me and confiscating my passports.

The director was at pains to assure me that I would never be stopped on future trips. But that assurance, I told him, was not enough – if others were left on the list. At any rate, an editor called me one evening to share startling news. He’d spoken with the director-general of the SSS who insisted that my name was still on the list – and would remain there unless I addressed a petition to the agency’s boss asking that my name be deleted. I immediately rejected the idea. I didn’t write to ask that my name be put on the list; I wasn’t going to beg anybody to remove it.

For me – and this was a point I stressed in interviews with local and foreign reporters – the airport encounter was far from personal. The quality of my citizenship is degraded when any citizen is, without cause, treated wretchedly. If Nigeria is to mean anything, then its enlightened citizens ought to work – must fight – to achieve a country where an SSS official would rebuff an illegal order, where a police officer would not lend himself to the machinations of nation-destroyers, and where an electoral officer would resist instructions to falsify records and announce an impostor as winner.

Without deigning to speak officially, officials of the Jonathan administration privately blamed my brush with the SSS on Yar’Adua’s paranoia. It may or may not be so. But the onus is on Jonathan to state clearly, the sooner the better, that he has renounced the list of “enemies” at the nation’s airports. Let’s send the SSS on a mission that counts: to catch those who work tirelessly, sleeplessly, to make Nigeria a hell of a space. And many of those, as every Okeke, Haruna and Idowu knows, are in the very corridors of power.

As if Jos wasn’t gory enough, the habitués of a “mammy” market abutting a military barrack in Abuja received their own deadly jolt on New Year’s Eve. A series of blasts claimed an unspecified number of lives and gravely wounded. In fact, there’s larger, long-term cost, hard if not impossible to calculate. It lies in the psychological havoc that the bomb blasts have wrought on the nation. How does one assign a value to the air of foreboding that now pervades the body politic, the sheer sense of terror that is bound to sweep the national canvas? Imagine the thousands, perhaps millions, of residents whose nerves are now set on edge, citizens who are utterly uncertain about their very next moment.

 That’s the space that Nigerians, high and mighty alike, willy-nilly inhabit. The nightmare this sorry, misconceived and thoroughly mismanaged nation ordered has arrived – again!
Both bloody events – along with other death-spewing explosions or acts of violence in Maiduguri, Yenogoa, and Ibadan – signal a new nightmarish low in Nigeria’s depressing narrative. Nigeria’s record, sadly, is one of taking tragic acts and turning them into the norm. Think about the scourge of kidnapping. It started sporadically in the oil-producing Niger Delta and, at first, targeted expatriates employed in the oil industry.

Then, before anybody could spell ransom, cells of kidnappers sprouted all over the southeast. Unchecked, they have since smothered economic as well as social activities. Few Nigerians would believe that their governments have any antidote for the plague. Before our very eyes, kidnapping has become a fact of life, another specter haunting a much-betrayed, much-abused people. So it is, one fears, with car bombs and other explosives. Rabid sectarian fundamentalists, the economically destitute, and political desperadoes have come together and found a perfect, awful weapon. And Nigeria may never be the same. Nigeria has grown into a perfect kingdom for criminals. No society is immune from crimes. In Nigeria’s case, however, crime is fertilized by two factors. One is the deep involvement of the most prominent citizens in a broad spectrum of crimes. Think about past and present presidents, governors, legislators, ministers, commissioners and local government leaders and their mind-boggling cache of looted funds. Recall the gargantuan gap between the revenues that flow into public treasuries and the paltry sums that are ever accounted for or invested in the public cause.

Another catalyst for crime in Nigeria is the absence of serious deterrence. In other words, whereas most other societies make an effort to identify, prosecute and punish criminals, Nigeria is a virtual crime zone, a place where the privileged not only perpetrate the highest crimes but also ensure that their wizardry at crime never invites sanction of any kind. It’s an election season in Nigeria – and we can expect an exacerbation of violent crimes. For one, despite the creation of agencies like the EFCC and ICPC, aspirants to public office in Nigeria know that their country has one of the lowest thresholds of accountability and transparency in the world. Despite the current legal troubles of former Governor James Onanefe Ibori, most Nigerian governors – as well as the candidates eyeing their posts from the sidelines – can count on facing no prosecutorial sanction whatever for their money laundering and graft.

 Nigeria has gone through its one-week charade of hounding former Vice President Dick Cheney for facilitating Halliburton’s $180 million bribery of Nigerian officials. Yet, Nigerian prosecutors have not identified, much less docked, one significant Nigerian recipient of the bribe. Rather than face prosecution, the Nigerians who sold their country to an affiliate of Halliburton are parading their national honors, quaffing and gorging at official functions, and basking in their media-created adulation as “stake [steak] holders.”

 The Sultan of Sokoto, Mr. Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, recently claimed that politicians masterminded the bomb blasts that shook Jos on the eve of Christmas. That assertion coincides with the conventional wisdom. Mr. Goodluck Jonathan and his aides have said as much. But that conclusion begs the question: Do these political instigators have faces and names? If they do, why is it that the government has not unmasked a single sponsor of these death squads? Why does the Nigerian state continue to send the signal that it’s always sent: that religious zealots who kill indiscriminately in the name of their god would not be made to pay for their crime?
 Therein lies a terrible contradiction. Jonathan has vowed that those who ambushed innocent Nigerians with explosives will be found out and tried. But such rhetoric strikes many Nigerians as hollow. Numerous Nigerians perished in a series of car bombs that punctuated – and marred – Nigeria’s 50th anniversary fiesta in Abuja. The SSS made a fanfare of arresting Mr. Raymond Dokpesi, a media entrepreneur who was then running the doomed presidential campaign of former dictator Ibrahim Babangida. Three months later, the state is yet to formally charge anybody with the crimes.

 Ply the archives of Nigeria’s religious violence and you’ll read a litany of the kind of assurance Jonathan issued. But the record of action is dismal. A security apparatus that couldn’t tell us who killed former Attorney General Bola Ige is unlikely to figure out who’s planting and detonating bombs in Nigeria. But wait a minute: Perhaps, the security apparatus know who organized Mr. Ige’s assassination. They may well know those behind the blasts in Abuja and Jos. Perhaps, then, they are hamstrung, unable to contemplate the arrest and censure of the highly placed elements implicated in these crimes.
 At any rate, there’s been a long build-up to this nightmare of bomb blasts. Thanks to the succession of rapacious criminals and mediocrities that have dominated the affairs of Nigeria, the country now resembles a strafed landscape, the majority of its citizens deprived of humanity dignity, stripped of hope, reduced to living squalid, animalized lives.

 With elections looming, nobody should be surprised that the human parasites who suck the nation’s blood would wish to ratchet up the violence. The PDP’s “do-or-die” approach to the 2007 elections – a doctrine established by Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo – has set the stage, one fears, for a much more violent set of elections in 2011. Essentially, what the PDP did in 2007 was steal whatever state or elective post it fancied – and then, affecting a falsely sanctimonious tone, ask those it disinherited not to “overheat the polity” but instead to go to court.

 The PDP’s policy was cynical through and through. Obasanjo and his band of mischief-makers reckoned that too many judges were craven, susceptible to inducement. A judiciary whose members are ready agents for sealing and authenticating stolen elections must realize its complicity in the festering violence that attends political contests.
 Mr. Jonathan, acting alone, does not have the will, tools or muscle to address the crisis of violence. The challenge is for all Nigerians, and the answer lies in creating a society that’s truly founded on a healthy notion of the rule of law. Nigerians should insist on the enthronement of the principle of equality before the law. The police should be thoroughly professionalized. Police officers ought to be able to arrest a former head of state or governor – without first seeking approval from the president.

Those who embezzle public funds, rig elections, or kill for their divine entities should know that, once caught, they would be made to pay a stiff price. Supreme Court justices ought to have the courage to overturn a purloined presidential election and demand a new, credible election. Those who run the nation, or states or local governments must subject themselves to scrutiny – and realize that they are accountable to those they govern. We must begin to invest public funds in bettering the public space, rather than in fattening some officials’ bank accounts. Unless we combat those who steal the nation into a state of dejection and hopelessness, we risk a Nigeria where bomb blasts are a staple. 

(E-mail: okndibe@yahoo.com )

- Sun