3 days Ago By Tunde Asaju
By Tunde Asaju ...
Here is a broken city; And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave When I am talking with you. What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance with official lies..
. Czeslaw Milosz [1911-2004] It is embarrassing that despite spending billions into eradicating poverty by the ruining party, there are still spoilsports hell-bent on calling Nigeria the poverty capital of Africa. These unpatriotic elements strive daily to nullify the UN-acknowledged efforts of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s campaign and his recruitment of his adorable wife, Pastor Oluremi Tinubu at fumigating poverty from here with acknowledged success.
Symbolically, making sure this happens before the Yuletide season, Mama Tinubu was in Kaduna, the capital of beggarly Nigeria, completing the project to banish poverty from Nigeria. In the southwest, the president’s home base, poverty died since the era of the sage, Obafemi Awolowo as a cruise around Western Nigeria would show. Ibadan, where the stampede occurred, has kept the celebrated rusty roofs described in JP Clark’s poetry named after the city as a memento of this fact.
Shamefully three mischief makers Oriyomi Hamzat, a media mogul; Queen Naomi Silekunola Ogunwusi and their accomplice, Abass Adetunji, the principal of a religious high school in Ibadan decided to wake a dead scourge. From the poverty capitals of northern Nigeria and some say neighbouring countries, the trio connived with others soon to be apprehended to import beggars to Ibadan to embarrass the government. They embarked on a publicity blitzkrieg to distribute $3.
20-to-five-thousand-day-old kids and young adults in a school playground. They organised this to coincide with a time when enemies of this regime were wondering if the venerable Governor Yemi Cardoso of the Central Bank was operating the discarded manual of his disgraced predecessor, Godwin Emefiele, by starving people of their hard cash. The organisers assured their fans that security was well taken care of as if anyone in Nigeria needed handouts that are not government projects.
On D-Day for the bonanza, not even an Amotekun was in sight. As a result of the sheer number of imported indigents recruited from northern Nigeria, parents who had been looking for a way to get rid of their unwanted children started throwing them over the fence into an ecstatic crowd in the school compound. While this was going on, the ex-Olori and the media megastar she recruited were still turning in their beds while the school principal was writing the annual financial report to the owners of the school.
By the time they were told of a stampede, about 40 almajiri children had been stomped to death. Stampedes last occurred in 2014, the year of the locust when one Abba Moro, now a distinguished senator of the federal republic was interior minister. That was before the All-Progressives Congress (APC) eradicated poverty the way the WHO expunged polio from its plagues list.
Who in their right sense could embarrass the government this way except enemies of progress? The moment the president heard the report, he recused himself from a planned regatta in Lagos meant to celebrate a feat that only he could have achieved. Next, he authorised the police to wade into the matter, a very important order since the police in Nigeria do nothing until they are told to do so. This is because our police, the best in the world, hardly do anything these days since crime and criminality have become history in our land.
Promptly, they swung into action and arrested the trio mentioned above. It was on record that Hamzat constantly exposed the government’s perceived foibles and that he even supported an opposition governor win a state germane to the president’s agenda to completely control the southwest. Oriyomi’s radio station, Agidigbo FM, never fails to exhume a plague already eradicated.
He grants scholarships, constantly gives cash to the so-called needy and even embarrasses the government by forcing the police to act on cases that society wants buried. These are state crimes for which the state had put him on a watchlist. Thankfully, the trio is in remand on the orders of a judge, something that must be shocking for Abba Moro.
After all, in 2014, when he presided over a fake immigration recruitment exercise in which over 20 able-bodied Nigerians died; the then honourable minister returned home to the comforting arms of his loving wife. Attempts to hold him responsible for that tragedy failed terribly prompting his people to ask him to run for a vacant Senate seat as a testament to their confidence in him. Mr Moro picked this challenge while pleading his innocence in the 2014 stampede and won with a resounding victory.
He is the red chamber’s leader of the opposition, a victory that shows how Nigeria shocks the enlightened and awe the confused. The shameful thing about Oriyomi Hamzat and co’s detention is that Nigeria learns nothing from its own errors. For, days after what is now known as the Ibadan stampede, enemies organised similar gatherings in Okija and Maitama.
The police are still waiting for official orders, but usually, unreliable sources say it might issue an international arrest warrant for His Eminence Pope Francis. The stampede in Abuja occurred in a Catholic Church and could be viewed as a Papal plot to tarnish the reputation of a Muslim president. As for the Okija incident, the entire world knows it must be the handiwork of Biafra agitators hell-bent on tarnishing the image of a government fighting to keep them within the boundaries of a strong and disunited nation.
No action is needed there because Biafra leaders are in detention in Nigeria and abroad. While patriots are pondering over these things, unpatriotic elements drove through the three-mile-long line of youngsters queueing around the president’s Bourdillon Drive in Lagos. They claim they are there for monetary handouts forgetting that they are there to thank the president for including them in the Student Loans Scheme.
Others are there to lobby for inclusion in the 2024 Youth Summit. Only patriots like us know these well-kept secrets. In times of yore, these queueing youths would have paid for a page or two of advertisements in newspapers.
Today, they know that the president does not read newspapers for the sake of his ebullient health. Mr President takes frequent breaks from the reality on the ground for the sake of his health. Nigerians constantly pray that he will complete his terms and leave Nigeria alone since it is evidently clear that he won’t improve the country better than he met it.
The continued detention of Oriyomi and co is tough love from a caring government not to swat the gnats that constantly try to embarrass the government or force it to acknowledge that things might not be as rosy as the president hallucinates. Everywhere the president goes, he never forgets the slogan that under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigerians are richer than they think and better under him than they were under his revered predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, if not for that chasm that usually exists between dreams and reality. With Oriyomi, Silekunola and Abass in detention, poverty and stampedes would never reoccur in our nation.
And everybody says – amen inshallah. [email protected] Join Daily Trust WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You..
