How Greed And Insensitivity By Nigerian Politicians Stoke Insecurity

BRASS TACKS

with Suleiman Uba Gaya

0809 413 4069 (Text Message Only)

On December 3, 2017, while driving in my car with my wife and daughter around 8pm, I was flagged-down by what I presumed to be personnel of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in the heart of Abuja. It looked like the thousands of checkpoints that police personnel mount in our cities especially at nights, and I had no hesitation stopping. By the time, however, I realized that those stopping me were men of the underworld, it was too late for me to do anything to escape. The gang leader opened the door from the driver’s side and first of all removed the key from the ignition. He then closed the door to make the operation look normal for passerby and then proceeded to snatch the cellphone from my hands. Together with his gang members, they made sure they robbed us of every valuable in the car, including the little cash we had on us.

It was while they were still desperately searching the car and seeking for more that I summoned the courage to query why they could not leave us alone. The answer came from a hungry looking member of the gang who, surprisingly, apologized to me and explained that he had a masters degree that he toiled to secure, hoping it was going to assure him a solid future, but that he roamed the streets of Lagos for over two years without getting a job; that it was after a hopeless search for job that someone advised him to move to Abuja where, in his words, “all the money in Nigeria is being shared.” That moving to Abuja ended up becoming a disaster, as he found it to be “a city where the rich resented the poor,” and that he took to crime only as a last resort. Two other members of the gang explained to me that they had not eaten since the previous day, and all efforts by them to engage in menial jobs came to naught.

In June 2014, also in the same Abuja, I was driving one evening when I noticed that the tyre pressure in my car was low and I stopped by a vulcaniser somewhere in Wuse 2 to get the air beefed up. I then decided to venture out of the car to take some fresh air. It is an area of the city that I thought was very secure, with tens of people mingling about. Suddenly a young man approached me and asked for help, saying he had not eaten since the previous day.

It was around 7pm, and having convinced myself that he truly looked desperate, I gave him one thousand naira. The young man thanked me profusely and left. But all of a sudden I saw him coming back to where I was. He explained, to my shock, that it was my good heart that saved me because he had taken a decision to stab to death the next person he was going to ask for help (who happened to be me), if the person refuse to oblige him. He said that before meeting me, he asked quite a number of people for help but none obliged him. From one of the inner pockets of the suit he was wearing, he showed me a small sharp knife that he said he wanted to deploy in attacking the next person that turned him down. He told me he took the risk of explaining that to me, to encourage me to continue to be good to everyone, irrespective of tribe or religion.

But I also strongly advised him never to kill anyone because the person refuses him help, and he explained further that death was better than the situation he found himself in, and if he is lucky to only end up in prison, he could at least get free meal served by the authorities. This is a story of a young Nigerian who has given up on his country. It is the story of sheer hopelessness, and I am sure there are thousands or even millions of our young men and women facing similar situations. We parted on that note, but I surely won’t be surprised if that young man becomes a full-pledged criminal shortly after that meeting. I could not but agree with the Sultan of Sokoto when he recently said that we are brewing a monster that is worse than Boko Haram, and he cited hunger as that monster.

There are of course many other reasons why some people take to crime, and this is by no means an excuse for anyone that chooses to tread that dangerous path. But for those of us who are Muslims (and I am sure there are similar traditions in Christianity), there was the story of someone working in a farm, who stole from the produce of the farm to feed his family. The owner caught him red-handed and reported him to the Caliph of the time, who was one of the direct successors of Prophet Muhammad ruling over the Islamic world.

The Caliph asked the man how much he was paying as salary to the young man who stole from his farm. When the owner mentioned the amount, the Caliph saw that it was grossly inadequate. He then asked the next question about how regular the employer was paying his employee, and when the owner attempted to lie, the worker mentioned that he had not been paid any salary for months. It was at that point that the Caliph decided that the real culprit in this case was the owner. But because the worker also took laws into his hands by stealing, he punished both of them, with the owner receiving a larger share of the punishment, for pushing his worker to crime.

Sadly, in Nigeria, not only do governments at various levels blatantly come up with all sorts of spurious excuses refuse to pay workers salary as and when due, they also steal the money that is meant for that purpose and use it only for themselves and members of their small families. Today, whereas our legislators earn the highest salaries in the whole world, our workers earn some of the worst wages globally.

In Nigeria today, and this has been going on for ages, if job vacancies exist in any state or federal establishment, the chief executives will in the case of states, share it among the governor, his wife and cabinet members, and then the legislators. This is also what obtains at the federal level where in NNPC and Central Bank, for example, almost all the aides of the chief executives are sons and daughters of the rich and the mighty whose parents have stashed enough money to last their families five generations down. I recall a chief executive of a federal agency telling me that if he were to live the next two hundred years, there was no way he could be poor. But when a vacancy existed in a sister “lucrative” federal agency, he ensured he grabbed it for his two children. For many of them, they will rather give such job offers to their girlfriends, rather than their own relations.

Senate and House of Representative committees make it a duty to corner almost every job vacancy existing in organizations they exercise oversight responsibilities over, inspite of the billions many of the members individually make illegitimately annually. Yet, only a few Nigerians have true access to those legislators, inspite of deceiving ourselves referring to them as being close to the grassroots members of the society. Some of them so greedily even go to the ridiculous extent of selling job offers. It is common knowledge that in Nigeria today, if you are not a member of the establishment and want to help your son or daughter or any person to secure a job, you must part with millions of naira for organizations whose salary is excellent. The anti graft agencies know of all these, but it doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. It is amazing therefore when we keep talking about building the ideal society when unprecedented greed and sheer wickedness could well pass for the first names of our leaders at various levels.

I recall that the first thing President Paul Kagame of Rwanda did, upon coming to power, was to ensure that the very deep poverty in the rural areas of the country was significantly reduced. The Rwandan President told me, in a chanced meeting I had with him last year in Abuja, that he had the good fortune of realizing that his country could not make any meaningful progress or attract the much sought-after foreign investment unless crime was reduced to the barest minimum. His strategy was simple: reduce the rural to urban migration and make the citizens productive wherever they may be, and ensure the striking imbalance between the rich and the poor was significantly reduced.

President Kagame does not go about seizing the legitimate property of the rich. He succeeded in building a just and egalitarian society by ensuring that as much as possible, citizens only own property or any wealth through their sweat. With that, he said, he encouraged the spirit of enterprise and fair competition among the citizens, with the result that today, Rwanda is one of the most attractive countries in the world, with a solid record of foreign direct investment. Foreigners flock to that country in large numbers for vacation and other noble causes because the rate of crime in Rwanda is one of the lowest anywhere, all because the country’s leadership has been insisting in fair treatment of its citizens.

For twelve years now, the poor has been at the receiving end of the major problems of terrorism and banditry afflicting Nigeria. The rich and the powerful hardly get affected because they have the means to secure themselves from the brigands. And we all know that those who gave rise to the menace are the politicians whose shoes we are forced by hopelessness and poverty to lick.

A renowned politician, whose identity we all know, gave rise to Boko Haram in his desperation to win a second term of office as governor and dominate the politics of his state. He armed the group and mobilized them to intimidate the opposition. Today, that politician is living in absolute peace and comfort while those, including soldiers that have nothing to do with the evil he sowed, are the ones being killed everyday. We applaud the same politician and others of his ilk inspite of the fact that the billions that they stole is the very reason the government of the day could not access adequate funding to fully equip and mobilize our military to completely wipe out the twin evils of banditry and terrorism bedeviling the society.

Talking about banditry, a former governor of one of the states worst hit by bandits is reported to have perfected the criminal art of awarding contracts at the most ridiculous sums, with one borehole costing over two hundred million naira. I recall drilling a borehole in my house in Kano, located in a rocky area of the city, at a cost of seven hundred thousand naira, and it has been working very well for many years now. It costs much less to drill a borehole in other areas of Kano and other cities of Nigeria. But this politician is today living in absolute comfort and peace because he belongs to the ruling political party whose national chairman publicly said one’s sins get completely forgiven for merely being a member of the party. Not only does the man, whose disastrous misgovernance is said to have contributed significantly to birthing the banditry afflicting the entire northwest and some other parts of the country living in absolute comfort, he has continued to insult our collective sensibilities because he rightly believes he is above the law.

In Nigeria, our elections are war; a survival of only the fittest. In last year’s general election and the two governorship elections that took place later in the year in Bayelsa and Kogi, we saw how governors that were defeated in the election hired deadly thugs and armed them to intimidate the opposition. In Kogi, an innocent elderly woman was roasted to death just because she was opposed to a second term of office of the incumbent governor. In Nembe in Bayelsa State, tens of people were killed just because they were members of the PDP. In Kano, hundreds of thugs chased away everyone who they were not convinced was going to vote for the person that hired them, during the rerun election induced by a compromised electoral commission. The same thing obtained in Osun months earlier.

Sadly, the judiciary that should be the last hope of the common man compromised and gave a stamp of judicial approval to these acts of treasonable felony. Now, seeing that thuggery and criminality pay, chances are that we have bid goodbye to peaceful and fair election anywhere in Nigeria, in the next round for elections. The means to power is no longer by popular vote, but the ability to hire dare-devil thugs and equipping them with deadly weapons to terrorise everyone and ensure victory by all means. I am not a prophet of doom, but this is simply the whirlwind we sow, and which we must collectively reap, if we have to tell ourselves the bitter truth. Living in denial or saying only things that are politically correct cannot, and will surely not help us even one inch as a nation.

Inspite of the best efforts of our security services, terrorism and banditry have continued to increase in Nigeria because we have refused to address them from the roots. We have refused to point at the perpetrators of evil and get the law to deal decisively with them. Even our President was recently misled to congratulate the Governor of Kogi State, inspite of the fact that a record number of innocent people were killed by thugs loyal to him, all in his desperate but successful bid to return to office by hook and by crook in the election that took place in that state.

Every Nigerian will tell you they want terrorism and banditry to come to an immediate end; that our soldiers should perform magic and crush the deviants making life difficult for us. But we all know that this cannot be possible because even if the military totally crushes the present set of criminals spread all over Nigeria, another set is warming up to inflict evil because after the elections, the governors and senators who hired them to crookedly win elections abandon them with those sophisticated weapons at their disposal.

DO YOU HAVE A TRUE FRIEND LIKE GOVERNOR EL-RUFA’I?

It took the dethronement, eleven days ago, of Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as emir of Kano by the government of that state for many Nigerians to see a living example of what true friendship really means.

Malam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufa’i, Governor of Kaduna State, is one of the closest persons to President Muhammadu Buhari. He has everything going for him, as a key member of the ruling party governing one of Nigeria’s frontline states. But he staked it all by giving life to what true brotherhood and friendship means when he decided to pitch his tent with the deposed Emir of Kano, who was like an abandoned orphan that the system wanted to teach life-changing bitter lessons.

It is not the intention of this column to dwell on the merits or demerits of that action by Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano State. Between that time and now, a lot of justice has been done to that subject by many informed commentators on national issues. I have also had the privilege of writing on the fracas between the governor and the then emir on these pages, advising Governor Ganduje to learn to live with Sanusi as someone who cannot keep his mouth shut on any issue he believes in. I reminded the governor that if Sanusi could criticize President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s Seven Point Agenda during the senate hearing convened for the confirmation of his appointment by the President in 2009, it was futile to expect him to keep quite on any issue he disagrees with. Recall that at the time Sanusi was criticizing President Yar’adua’s Seven Points Agenda, he was running the risk of infuriating the President and getting him to withdraw the nomination or quietly asking the senate not to approve it. It was the quintessential Sanusi who has had the tradition of fearing no consequences for saying it as it is.

I was one of those who, having studied the man rather closely, argued from the very beginning that Sanusi was not going to fit in as an emir. In northern Nigeria, emirs are known for keeping a dignified silence on issues, refraining to make comments in public. They are said to always advice the powers-that-be privately. These are virtues I knew Sanusi will have nothing or little to associate himself with. And predictably, he did not only criticize Governor Ganduje on policies of the government he disagreed with, but also even the Buhari administration that he significantly helped in bringing to power. It is common knowledge that many prime movers of the government are not happy with Sanusi, and some of them were said to have played a key part in urging Ganduje to wield the big stick against the man they all love to hate.

In the typical Nigerian politics of crass opportunism, the normal thing would have been for Governor El-Rufa’i to look the other way especially when his friend the emir was consigned to the dustbin of history – or so it seemed. And he had every reason to do that. Sanusi Lamido was toxic, and anyone afraid of getting enlisted into the black book of the federal and Kano State governments would be doing the right thing to keep a serious distance with the deposed emir.

But it was at that material time that most Nigerians even knew that the Kaduna governor and the deposed emir were friends since teen-age. Sanusi also risked it all when the Jonathan administration was antagonizing El-Rufa’i, an administration to which he was a top official as governor of the Central Bank. And El-Rufa’i also gave Sanusi every support to become the nation’s Number One Banker. They were said to have been standing by and for each other for more than forty years.

William Shakespeare probably had Nigerian politicians in mind when he came up with the maxim that failure is an orphan. Once you lose a position of authority in Nigeria, those singing your praises to high heavens disappear in to the thin air and at times even transform to your worst critics. But we all saw how the Kaduna Governor endured the hardship of traveling by road to Awe, a drive of more than six hours from Kaduna, just to visit Sanusi and give him comfort. He not only stopped at that, the governor leveraged on the court pronouncement that the banishment of the former emir was illegal to drive his childhood friend to Abuja, from where he personally saw him off to the private jet that transported the former emir to Lagos.

What this means is that the rest of us need to start asking ourselves the hard question: do we, among our friends, have true pals like Nasir El-Rufa’i who could stake it all to stand by us in our hour of need? Are we also ready to do as El-Rufa’i did to Sanusi, for our circle of many friends?

I do not wish to publicly criticize my Governor, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, who I voted for at the last gubernatorial election. I honestly see him as one of the highest performing governors Kano has had the good fortune of producing. But I am compelled to ask him to reflect deeply whether among the coterie of aides that pushed him to deal with Sanusi, any of them can do for him what his Kaduna State counterpart has done for the erstwhile emir.

Let Ganduje remember that the same politicians all around him today were only recently singing the praises of Engr Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, his predecessor, and the same people will eulogise his successor, whether of APC or PDP. They are a shameless breed of human beings, and serving any government in power has been their economic mainstay.

It is for this main reason I always pity our leaders who have repeatedly failed to learn the hard lessons of history by thinking that those licking their boots today will remain loyal to them forever. They simply will not, and as a leader today, you will be left to bear your cross all alone when you leave office.

SURVEYOR KABIR M.M. AS BEACON OF HOPE

He came to office as Registrar of the Surveyors Registration Council of Nigeria (SURCON) almost three years ago. His name is Surveyor Kabir M.M. For ten years prior to his appointment, Kabir was the Surveyor-General of Katsina State and a member of many national and international bodies regulating the practice of survey in Nigeria and globally.

In keeping with the promise of this column to deploy space and celebrate men and women of deep excellence, we are today bringing to focus the unprecedented performance of this man of destiny who has quietly been making Nigeria very proud in his chosen profession..

In the past three years, Kabir has ensured that SURCON has received global recognition and also gained the much sought-after Ordinance Surveys of the United Kingdom. For the first time, the organization is registered as a full-pledged member of the International Federation of Surveyors in 2018. He also brought about the prevailing peace and synergy currently existing between SURCON and the other sister survey agencies, like the Nigerian Institution of Survey and the Office of the Surveyor-General of the Federation.

To ensure continued respect for all surveyors in Nigeria, Surveyor Kabir has continued to ensure that quality and high standards are the key watchwords in governing the regulatory agency of the profession. For the first time since the establishment of the body thirty years ago, selection of examiners is open to all members of the council. Exams are organized and conducted in the most transparent manner. Candidates and examiners are also well taken care of by ensuring 24 hours free medical services for all of them, while meals are provided to them during the course of writing the professional examination.

For reason of limited space, we can only mention a few of the unprecedented achievements recorded under Surveyor Kabir M.M. But when this column asked him how he came about achieving so much with so little, the SURCON Chief Executive attributed it to the support he is enjoying from the supervising Minister of Works and other leaders in that ministry, but even more significantly the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari, who he credits with showing deep commitment to the promotion and appreciation of geo-spatial information for Nigeria’s national development. Surveyor Kabir also has generous words for the President and members of the Council, as well as all workers of the organization.

Here’s wishing Surveyor Kabir M.M the very best as he continues to steer the ship of SURCON to glory.

Sent from my iPhone

with Suleiman Uba Gaya

0809 413 4069 (Text Message Only)

How Greed And Insensitivity By Nigerian Politicians Stoke Insecurity

On December 3, 2017, while driving in my car with my wife and daughter around 8pm, I was flagged-down by what I presumed to be personnel of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in the heart of Abuja. It looked like the thousands of checkpoints that police personnel mount in our cities especially at nights, and I had no hesitation stopping. By the time, however, I realized that those stopping me were men of the underworld, it was too late for me to do anything to escape. The gang leader opened the door from the driver’s side and first of all removed the key from the ignition. He then closed the door to make the operation look normal for passerby and then proceeded to snatch the cellphone from my hands. Together with his gang members, they made sure they robbed us of every valuable in the car, including the little cash we had on us.

It was while they were still desperately searching the car and seeking for more that I summoned the courage to query why they could not leave us alone. The answer came from a hungry looking member of the gang who, surprisingly, apologized to me and explained that he had a masters degree that he toiled to secure, hoping it was going to assure him a solid future, but that he roamed the streets of Lagos for over two years without getting a job; that it was after a hopeless search for job that someone advised him to move to Abuja where, in his words, “all the money in Nigeria is being shared.” That moving to Abuja ended up becoming a disaster, as he found it to be “a city where the rich resented the poor,” and that he took to crime only as a last resort. Two other members of the gang explained to me that they had not eaten since the previous day, and all efforts by them to engage in menial jobs came to naught.

In June 2014, also in the same Abuja, I was driving one evening when I noticed that the tyre pressure in my car was low and I stopped by a vulcaniser somewhere in Wuse 2 to get the air beefed up. I then decided to venture out of the car to take some fresh air. It is an area of the city that I thought was very secure, with tens of people mingling about. Suddenly a young man approached me and asked for help, saying he had not eaten since the previous day.

It was around 7pm, and having convinced myself that he truly looked desperate, I gave him one thousand naira. The young man thanked me profusely and left. But all of a sudden I saw him coming back to where I was. He explained, to my shock, that it was my good heart that saved me because he had taken a decision to stab to death the next person he was going to ask for help (who happened to be me), if the person refuse to oblige him. He said that before meeting me, he asked quite a number of people for help but none obliged him. From one of the inner pockets of the suit he was wearing, he showed me a small sharp knife that he said he wanted to deploy in attacking the next person that turned him down. He told me he took the risk of explaining that to me, to encourage me to continue to be good to everyone, irrespective of tribe or religion.

But I also strongly advised him never to kill anyone because the person refuses him help, and he explained further that death was better than the situation he found himself in, and if he is lucky to only end up in prison, he could at least get free meal served by the authorities. This is a story of a young Nigerian who has given up on his country. It is the story of sheer hopelessness, and I am sure there are thousands or even millions of our young men and women facing similar situations. We parted on that note, but I surely won’t be surprised if that young man becomes a full-pledged criminal shortly after that meeting. I could not but agree with the Sultan of Sokoto when he recently said that we are brewing a monster that is worse than Boko Haram, and he cited hunger as that monster.

There are of course many other reasons why some people take to crime, and this is by no means an excuse for anyone that chooses to tread that dangerous path. But for those of us who are Muslims (and I am sure there are similar traditions in Christianity), there was the story of someone working in a farm, who stole from the produce of the farm to feed his family. The owner caught him red-handed and reported him to the Caliph of the time, who was one of the direct successors of Prophet Muhammad ruling over the Islamic world.

The Caliph asked the man how much he was paying as salary to the young man who stole from his farm. When the owner mentioned the amount, the Caliph saw that it was grossly inadequate. He then asked the next question about how regular the employer was paying his employee, and when the owner attempted to lie, the worker mentioned that he had not been paid any salary for months. It was at that point that the Caliph decided that the real culprit in this case was the owner. But because the worker also took laws into his hands by stealing, he punished both of them, with the owner receiving a larger share of the punishment, for pushing his worker to crime.

Sadly, in Nigeria, not only do governments at various levels blatantly come up with all sorts of spurious excuses refuse to pay workers salary as and when due, they also steal the money that is meant for that purpose and use it only for themselves and members of their small families. Today, whereas our legislators earn the highest salaries in the whole world, our workers earn some of the worst wages globally.

In Nigeria today, and this has been going on for ages, if job vacancies exist in any state or federal establishment, the chief executives will in the case of states, share it among the governor, his wife and cabinet members, and then the legislators. This is also what obtains at the federal level where in NNPC and Central Bank, for example, almost all the aides of the chief executives are sons and daughters of the rich and the mighty whose parents have stashed enough money to last their families five generations down. I recall a chief executive of a federal agency telling me that if he were to live the next two hundred years, there was no way he could be poor. But when a vacancy existed in a sister “lucrative” federal agency, he ensured he grabbed it for his two children. For many of them, they will rather give such job offers to their girlfriends, rather than their own relations.

Senate and House of Representative committees make it a duty to corner almost every job vacancy existing in organizations they exercise oversight responsibilities over, inspite of the billions many of the members individually make illegitimately annually. Yet, only a few Nigerians have true access to those legislators, inspite of deceiving ourselves referring to them as being close to the grassroots members of the society. Some of them so greedily even go to the ridiculous extent of selling job offers. It is common knowledge that in Nigeria today, if you are not a member of the establishment and want to help your son or daughter or any person to secure a job, you must part with millions of naira for organizations whose salary is excellent. The anti graft agencies know of all these, but it doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. It is amazing therefore when we keep talking about building the ideal society when unprecedented greed and sheer wickedness could well pass for the first names of our leaders at various levels.

I recall that the first thing President Paul Kagame of Rwanda did, upon coming to power, was to ensure that the very deep poverty in the rural areas of the country was significantly reduced. The Rwandan President told me, in a chanced meeting I had with him last year in Abuja, that he had the good fortune of realizing that his country could not make any meaningful progress or attract the much sought-after foreign investment unless crime was reduced to the barest minimum. His strategy was simple: reduce the rural to urban migration and make the citizens productive wherever they may be, and ensure the striking imbalance between the rich and the poor was significantly reduced.

President Kagame does not go about seizing the legitimate property of the rich. He succeeded in building a just and egalitarian society by ensuring that as much as possible, citizens only own property or any wealth through their sweat. With that, he said, he encouraged the spirit of enterprise and fair competition among the citizens, with the result that today, Rwanda is one of the most attractive countries in the world, with a solid record of foreign direct investment. Foreigners flock to that country in large numbers for vacation and other noble causes because the rate of crime in Rwanda is one of the lowest anywhere, all because the country’s leadership has been insisting in fair treatment of its citizens.

For twelve years now, the poor has been at the receiving end of the major problems of terrorism and banditry afflicting Nigeria. The rich and the powerful hardly get affected because they have the means to secure themselves from the brigands. And we all know that those who gave rise to the menace are the politicians whose shoes we are forced by hopelessness and poverty to lick.

A renowned politician, whose identity we all know, gave rise to Boko Haram in his desperation to win a second term of office as governor and dominate the politics of his state. He armed the group and mobilized them to intimidate the opposition. Today, that politician is living in absolute peace and comfort while those, including soldiers that have nothing to do with the evil he sowed, are the ones being killed everyday. We applaud the same politician and others of his ilk inspite of the fact that the billions that they stole is the very reason the government of the day could not access adequate funding to fully equip and mobilize our military to completely wipe out the twin evils of banditry and terrorism bedeviling the society.

Talking about banditry, a former governor of one of the states worst hit by bandits is reported to have perfected the criminal art of awarding contracts at the most ridiculous sums, with one borehole costing over two hundred million naira. I recall drilling a borehole in my house in Kano, located in a rocky area of the city, at a cost of seven hundred thousand naira, and it has been working very well for many years now. It costs much less to drill a borehole in other areas of Kano and other cities of Nigeria. But this politician is today living in absolute comfort and peace because he belongs to the ruling political party whose national chairman publicly said one’s sins get completely forgiven for merely being a member of the party. Not only does the man, whose disastrous misgovernance is said to have contributed significantly to birthing the banditry afflicting the entire northwest and some other parts of the country living in absolute comfort, he has continued to insult our collective sensibilities because he rightly believes he is above the law.

In Nigeria, our elections are war; a survival of only the fittest. In last year’s general election and the two governorship elections that took place later in the year in Bayelsa and Kogi, we saw how governors that were defeated in the election hired deadly thugs and armed them to intimidate the opposition. In Kogi, an innocent elderly woman was roasted to death just because she was opposed to a second term of office of the incumbent governor. In Nembe in Bayelsa State, tens of people were killed just because they were members of the PDP. In Kano, hundreds of thugs chased away everyone who they were not convinced was going to vote for the person that hired them, during the rerun election induced by a compromised electoral commission. The same thing obtained in Osun months earlier.

Sadly, the judiciary that should be the last hope of the common man compromised and gave a stamp of judicial approval to these acts of treasonable felony. Now, seeing that thuggery and criminality pay, chances are that we have bid goodbye to peaceful and fair election anywhere in Nigeria, in the next round for elections. The means to power is no longer by popular vote, but the ability to hire dare-devil thugs and equipping them with deadly weapons to terrorise everyone and ensure victory by all means. I am not a prophet of doom, but this is simply the whirlwind we sow, and which we must collectively reap, if we have to tell ourselves the bitter truth. Living in denial or saying only things that are politically correct cannot, and will surely not help us even one inch as a nation.

Inspite of the best efforts of our security services, terrorism and banditry have continued to increase in Nigeria because we have refused to address them from the roots. We have refused to point at the perpetrators of evil and get the law to deal decisively with them. Even our President was recently misled to congratulate the Governor of Kogi State, inspite of the fact that a record number of innocent people were killed by thugs loyal to him, all in his desperate but successful bid to return to office by hook and by crook in the election that took place in that state.

Every Nigerian will tell you they want terrorism and banditry to come to an immediate end; that our soldiers should perform magic and crush the deviants making life difficult for us. But we all know that this cannot be possible because even if the military totally crushes the present set of criminals spread all over Nigeria, another set is warming up to inflict evil because after the elections, the governors and senators who hired them to crookedly win elections abandon them with those sophisticated weapons at their disposal.

DO YOU HAVE A TRUE FRIEND LIKE GOVERNOR EL-RUFA’I?

It took the dethronement, eleven days ago, of Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as emir of Kano by the government of that state for many Nigerians to see a living example of what true friendship really means.

Malam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufa’i, Governor of Kaduna State, is one of the closest persons to President Muhammadu Buhari. He has everything going for him, as a key member of the ruling party governing one of Nigeria’s frontline states. But he staked it all by giving life to what true brotherhood and friendship means when he decided to pitch his tent with the deposed Emir of Kano, who was like an abandoned orphan that the system wanted to teach life-changing bitter lessons.

It is not the intention of this column to dwell on the merits or demerits of that action by Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano State. Between that time and now, a lot of justice has been done to that subject by many informed commentators on national issues. I have also had the privilege of writing on the fracas between the governor and the then emir on these pages, advising Governor Ganduje to learn to live with Sanusi as someone who cannot keep his mouth shut on any issue he believes in. I reminded the governor that if Sanusi could criticize President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s Seven Point Agenda during the senate hearing convened for the confirmation of his appointment by the President in 2009, it was futile to expect him to keep quite on any issue he disagrees with. Recall that at the time Sanusi was criticizing President Yar’adua’s Seven Points Agenda, he was running the risk of infuriating the President and getting him to withdraw the nomination or quietly asking the senate not to approve it. It was the quintessential Sanusi who has had the tradition of fearing no consequences for saying it as it is.

I was one of those who, having studied the man rather closely, argued from the very beginning that Sanusi was not going to fit in as an emir. In northern Nigeria, emirs are known for keeping a dignified silence on issues, refraining to make comments in public. They are said to always advice the powers-that-be privately. These are virtues I knew Sanusi will have nothing or little to associate himself with. And predictably, he did not only criticize Governor Ganduje on policies of the government he disagreed with, but also even the Buhari administration that he significantly helped in bringing to power. It is common knowledge that many prime movers of the government are not happy with Sanusi, and some of them were said to have played a key part in urging Ganduje to wield the big stick against the man they all love to hate.

In the typical Nigerian politics of crass opportunism, the normal thing would have been for Governor El-Rufa’i to look the other way especially when his friend the emir was consigned to the dustbin of history – or so it seemed. And he had every reason to do that. Sanusi Lamido was toxic, and anyone afraid of getting enlisted into the black book of the federal and Kano State governments would be doing the right thing to keep a serious distance with the deposed emir.

But it was at that material time that most Nigerians even knew that the Kaduna governor and the deposed emir were friends since teen-age. Sanusi also risked it all when the Jonathan administration was antagonizing El-Rufa’i, an administration to which he was a top official as governor of the Central Bank. And El-Rufa’i also gave Sanusi every support to become the nation’s Number One Banker. They were said to have been standing by and for each other for more than forty years.

William Shakespeare probably had Nigerian politicians in mind when he came up with the maxim that failure is an orphan. Once you lose a position of authority in Nigeria, those singing your praises to high heavens disappear in to the thin air and at times even transform to your worst critics. But we all saw how the Kaduna Governor endured the hardship of traveling by road to Awe, a drive of more than six hours from Kaduna, just to visit Sanusi and give him comfort. He not only stopped at that, the governor leveraged on the court pronouncement that the banishment of the former emir was illegal to drive his childhood friend to Abuja, from where he personally saw him off to the private jet that transported the former emir to Lagos.

What this means is that the rest of us need to start asking ourselves the hard question: do we, among our friends, have true pals like Nasir El-Rufa’i who could stake it all to stand by us in our hour of need? Are we also ready to do as El-Rufa’i did to Sanusi, for our circle of many friends?

I do not wish to publicly criticize my Governor, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, who I voted for at the last gubernatorial election. I honestly see him as one of the highest performing governors Kano has had the good fortune of producing. But I am compelled to ask him to reflect deeply whether among the coterie of aides that pushed him to deal with Sanusi, any of them can do for him what his Kaduna State counterpart has done for the erstwhile emir.

Let Ganduje remember that the same politicians all around him today were only recently singing the praises of Engr Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, his predecessor, and the same people will eulogise his successor, whether of APC or PDP. They are a shameless breed of human beings, and serving any government in power has been their economic mainstay.

It is for this main reason I always pity our leaders who have repeatedly failed to learn the hard lessons of history by thinking that those licking their boots today will remain loyal to them forever. They simply will not, and as a leader today, you will be left to bear your cross all alone when you leave office.

SURVEYOR KABIR M.M. AS BEACON OF HOPE

He came to office as Registrar of the Surveyors Registration Council of Nigeria (SURCON) almost three years ago. His name is Surveyor Kabir M.M. For ten years prior to his appointment, Kabir was the Surveyor-General of Katsina State and a member of many national and international bodies regulating the practice of survey in Nigeria and globally.

In keeping with the promise of this column to deploy space and celebrate men and women of deep excellence, we are today bringing to focus the unprecedented performance of this man of destiny who has quietly been making Nigeria very proud in his chosen profession..

In the past three years, Kabir has ensured that SURCON has received global recognition and also gained the much sought-after Ordinance Surveys of the United Kingdom. For the first time, the organization is registered as a full-pledged member of the International Federation of Surveyors in 2018. He also brought about the prevailing peace and synergy currently existing between SURCON and the other sister survey agencies, like the Nigerian Institution of Survey and the Office of the Surveyor-General of the Federation.

To ensure continued respect for all surveyors in Nigeria, Surveyor Kabir has continued to ensure that quality and high standards are the key watchwords in governing the regulatory agency of the profession. For the first time since the establishment of the body thirty years ago, selection of examiners is open to all members of the council. Exams are organized and conducted in the most transparent manner. Candidates and examiners are also well taken care of by ensuring 24 hours free medical services for all of them, while meals are provided to them during the course of writing the professional examination.

For reason of limited space, we can only mention a few of the unprecedented achievements recorded under Surveyor Kabir M.M. But when this column asked him how he came about achieving so much with so little, the SURCON Chief Executive attributed it to the support he is enjoying from the supervising Minister of Works and other leaders in that ministry, but even more significantly the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari, who he credits with showing deep commitment to the promotion and appreciation of geo-spatial information for Nigeria’s national development. Surveyor Kabir also has generous words for the President and members of the Council, as well as all workers of the organization.

Here’s wishing Surveyor Kabir M.M the very best as he continues to steer the ship of SURCON to glory.