Month: June 2008

Those Nigerian Tropical Gangsters Again?

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Adeola Aderounmu.

Babangida, Buhari and Abdulsalami are obviously sick men. Abacha is one of these mad men but he died to the abundant joy of millions of Nigerians.

These men are among the people who brought shame and dishonour to our dear country Nigeria. It is still very amazing how we have been fooling around in this country. As a matter of fact, we are still dancing around in circles since the independence in 1960.

Why are these mad men still seen dancing naked in public places? It is very difficult to blame these shameless men who continue to parade themselves around like nonentities.

The fact is that no one has been bold enough to tell them their real names to their faces. Babangida is a thief. Buhari is a thief and Abdulsalami is a thief. The most untold truth in Nigeria is that all our politicians and autocratic leaders are thieves. The difference and the battle among them is how much they are capable of stealing yet escaping the Nigerian short arm of the law.

In 2008, 21st century jet age and globalize world, some idiots who stole, looted and ripped Nigeria to pieces will open their dirty stinking mouths that Abacha did not steal! Nonsense! These people are mad. If we follow the sharia law that they are supposed to be practicing, they should all be amputated and thereafter stone to death in open places.

Since the rule of law has died a natural and sudden death in Nigeria, people who stole and merry with our commonwealth can have the audacity to return into our lives anytime they like and tell us what they think in their korofo skull.

If there is rule of law in Nigeria, where does Babangida thinks that his correspondence address would be since 1993? Where does Buhari, Abdulsalami and the other thieves think that they would have been receiving visitors? Please o, I am tired of this rubbish. Let these men just shut up and continue to enjoy their loots until they rot away. Every living thing must rot anyway. Vanity of men!

Enough of these insults to our collective intelligence. In their idleness and madness if they have nothing to do, they should just sleep or take a trip to a place of solitude where no one can hear or record the insanity emanating from their fractured cerebrals.

Abacha did not steal from Nigeria? Ok, it is my mother who stole billions and stashed them away in several banks at home and abroad. What a way to go? Even madam Abacha had the guts to appear in public places. What is she parading? Shame? Insanity? Both?

This country remains in square one all the time. Few are enjoying and millions are suffering. The calamities of this nation continue despite all the attempts by the present illegal leadership and past dictators to paint it otherwise.

No regime or leadership in Nigeria should be taken seriously at all. Any leader that wants to be taken seriously must be ready to do the unthinkable and lay his or her life for the prosperity of Nigeria. History of corruption had been written and re-written time and time over again. Almost no tangible positivity has emerged on the war on corruption.

If people like Babangida continue to live as freemen and as a matter of fact if he dies a freeman, the coffin of Nigeria would have been laid forever. It will be cited in our annals as a reference for the ability to loot, steal, kill and walk free. He should face the consequences of his misdeeds before anything else

If Nigeria must make progress, the biggest giant step will be to round up these thieves and murderers in and out of power and send them to where they belong. That will immediately awaken all the present and current looters to know that governance means service and not looting and killing.

There is nothing that has not been said about Nigeria but there is a lot that has not been done to set the records straight. One of our biggest deficiencies is the mentality that governance is a means to acquire wealth and make money. The lack of prosecution or the use of selective prosecution has made many sacred but mad cows to roam our biosphere and parade their ineptitudes.

What a pity that we can still be fed with these types of jargons by the men who catalysed and accelerated the destruction of our great country. It is very annoying. It is inexplicable and it shows that this country is in bondage. It is absolutely within the fangs of some tropical gangsters whose folds continue to multiply and manifest in various forms. This country Nigeria needs Deliverance

The French Embassy in Nigeria must be useless!

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Adeola Aderounmu.

It is annoying that one stupid and ignorant person at the Embassy with probably a Secondary School Certificate was the one that attended to me and turned me down- Wale A.

I am very angry right now.

What are the roles of the foreign embassies in Nigeria? Why do the semi-literates in these embassies deny Nigerian professionals and others the basic right to acquire entry visas that will allow them visit many countries in Europe and other places?

A recent case at the French embassy in Nigeria is still causing a source of agitation in my mind and here I will narrate the story. Wale has worked as a professional banker for more than 15 years. In these 15 years or more, he has travelled to all the continents on planet earth. First he worked in Lagos on Marina Street with Nigerian’s foremost merchant bank.

About 5 years ago like many of his contemporaries Wale relocated to Abuja and took up another job but still in the banking industry. This year alone, Wale has travelled to the United States on a number of occasions. He has also been to the United Kingdom, Dubai and Malaysia. Wale has travelled the entire length and breadth of Nigeria and Africa. As I write this article, he is on his way to Asaba, then to Onitsha and then Aba.

This has been the nature of Wale’s job for over a decade-travelling and meeting with clients and seeking the prosperity of Nigeria. When he leaves Aba at the end of this week, he would be on his way to Switzerland but this time for the purpose of education to advance his professional life and this is where the crux of my anger with the French Embassy in Nigeria sets in.

Wale will attend a professional course in Switzerland for 3 weeks starting June 16. At the end of the course, the school is offering a school trip to Paris by bus. Wale would definitely like to be part of the trip after which he would also like to take a flight to Sweden where his younger brother lives.

Switzerland is not a member of the EU and she is also not a Schengen state. Hence, Wale turned to the French Embassy for a schengen visa since all schengen countries offer that. Unfortunately, Wale was denied a schengen visa by the French. It was only at the interview that they told him to present a hotel booking in Paris.

Wale explained to them at the embassy that he was not going to stay in Paris, that his destination is Sweden. But anyway if they wanted a booking for a hotel in Paris, this would have been easily done by Wale or his brother in Sweden. Wale spent a great deal of time explaining the entire situation to the nonentities at the French embassy, but they were hell-bent on denying him the visa. If he was to present the hotel booking in Paris, he cannot do that until another 15 days at which time the course would have started in Geneva. The embassies have a silly rule that keeps a failed applicant away for minimum 15 days.

How can a man who is going to Geneva be denied a schengen visa to Paris? It is totally despicable and nonsensical. It is absolute rubbish! Wale has been to Sweden before in 2005. Then he was on a business trip to Brussels and he had a Schengen visa so it was easy to take a flight to Sweden. He stayed for only 5 days and went back to Nigeria.

I don’t know how many Nigerian passports wale has used in the last 15 years but it must be quite a number. Why didn’t the half-educated people at the French embassy have a thorough look at the visas and stamps on these passports? I am very mad right now as I imagine the trauma that they put Wale through.

He was really upset at this development and he regretted that he didn’t turn to the Swedish Embassy in the first place. I mean what difference does it make? A man is going to Paris and would like to touch Sweden before he returns to work in Abuja. He presented his ticket to those fools but that didn’t matter. How could he have known that the people working at the French embassy in Nigeria have no initiatives of their own? That they are completely stereotyped dummies.

Wale is just one of the several legitimate cases of Nigerians who have been denied the right to travel out of Nigeria to pursue one thing or the other. A number of students have been traumatized because they cannot obtain visa to further their education abroad. Many legitimate Nigerian tourists are locked down there without right to get back their application fees or to even re-apply. In a way, the foreign embassies in Nigeria have continued to rip millions of naira from Nigeria every year.

If the embassy is in doubt of an application, what does it take them to crosscheck with the destination of the applicant? In Wale’s case, what is the doubt about? He has a visa to Switzerland and I am pretty sure he still has valid entry visas to the US and UK? What is their problem? They should give me one reason why Wale will stay in Paris if he was given a Schengen visa.

I am actually using this medium to call the French Embassy to order. If this is what they do to legitimate travelers, then they should pack out of Nigeria forthwith. If there are more embassies like the French Embassy, then the Federal Government should wake up and have a chat with them. They cannot continue to threat Nigerians with contempt in Nigeria? We don’t do similar things to them when they apply to visit our country. That is unacceptable and this is the message Wale wanted me to get across to the Nigerian Government.

The mad militants; Nigerians killing Nigerians

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Adeola Aderounmu

It is up to the federal government of Nigeria to acknowledge or deny the existence of the several wars going on in Nigeria. This is so because even the government itself is at war with the people. Imagine a country where the people, the ordinary masses cannot determine the state of affairs through the power of their votes. Imagine the country where the men and women who should be doing time in prisons continue to hold sway at the helm of governance albeit illegitimately.

Recently, women and children in some parts of the Niger Delta came out to vehemently protest the spate of kidnapping that had continued unabated. In our dear country, the security of individuals is not one of the responsibilities of the state. Instead, your safety and security are a function of how much care you can grant yourself both physically and spiritually.

The killings of Nigerians by Nigerians are usually never met by stiff condemnations. If an unpopular government sees itself to be at war with the ordinary citizenry, it will definitely care less if the citizenry turns fire on itself. Thousands of lives have been wasted in Nigeria under military and civilian dictatorships but life goes on, just like that! One can easily loose count of innocent citizens whose lives were prematurely terminated under the different regimes in Nigeria. The leadership under Obasanjo wiped away an entire community with its own hand. No one has been charged with genocide.

In Nigeria if you are very influential politically or economically, you can kill as many as you like and walk away free. No major breakthroughs have been achieved in the murder cases of senior citizens and big politicians in Nigeria. The list continues to grow as the chickens continue to eat the intestines of their kinds. It is sad then that the government (itself a killing machine in many ways) is not showing any concern or sign of awareness regarding the conversion of the Delta region into a major killing field in Nigeria.

The militants in the Niger Delta are not only kidnapping expatriates or indigenes in order to obtain ransom but are also on a daily basis sending tens of Nigerians to their early graves. The activities of the militants have been diversified and proliferated probably due to the emergence of hundreds (thousands maybe)of factions and counter factions in the Niger Delta.

On the 30th of May 2008, a cook on one of the shipping trawlers met his untimely death when he got hit by a stray bullet. What the militants do is that they approach trawlers in their own speed boats while shooting randomly at the same time. They stop the boats or trawlers; rip the occupants of major items, money and valuables. Sometimes at very close range, they gun down one or two occupants of the trawlers and disappear into thin air. If you are lucky, they give you only verbal warnings while they cart away valuables.

On a daily basis, lives are lost in this region. This type of news or information is not what you get on the pages of newspapers. You have to be affected one way or the other by this menace to know about it. I have a family member who is a marine engineer and this is his 20th year on African waters. Just to ensure that they conduct their business and fishing in normal way, the fishing companies have bribed and settled the major militant groups or warlords but out of insatiable greed some fresh factions would emerge from nowhere to make new demands and unwarranted incursions. The fishing entrepreneurs, marine engineers, sailors, fishermen, hustlers, casual workers and just ordinary Nigerians carrying on decent living are left perplexed and worried by this development. It has been going on for a long time.

The persistence of this menace is very worrying and like every other ill in Nigeria, it looks like another Nigerian problem that will last forever. The Nigerian Navy or coast guards are either helpless or irresponsible in this scenario. As an arm of the Nigerian defense, they are irresponsible. They cannot offer security to people doing legitimate businesses in their motherland. As fallout of the malady of the Nigerian state or federation, it is helplessness. Nigeria is definitely not a normal country.

The problems in the Niger Delta have been allowed to drag on for too long. It is now clear that the solutions to these problems are beyond the workings of any insensitive or illegitimate leadership steering the nation from in Abuja. For several years, the leadership in Nigeria has ignored the genuine plights of the Niger Delta masses. These genuine plights have now become fireballs which invariably have led to the unannounced but silent declarations of war on the larger Nigerian state.

The regional leaders, past and present governors in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria share larger portions of the blame concerning the troubled delta. They have contributed to making the region volatile, unstable and ungovernable. The winner takes all attitudes of our politics and politicians have deprived millions of Nigeria of decent existence. These deprived millions; about 90m to be sure, are voiceless and powerless. They are disenfranchised, suffering and smiling.

A fragment of these aggrieved souls found some voice and aggression; they possess firearms and ammunition (no thanks to politics, corruption and smuggling), they fight for what they thought they deserved. They are the supposedly true militants of the Niger Delta. Unfortunately, their struggles have been converted to armed robberies, arsons, senseless murders and an aggression turned towards the wrong set of people in the country. This message is clear; the disoriented and fragmented Niger Delta militants have now intensified their unannounced war on the rest of us instead of the people in power who continue to deprive them of their demands.

Related article: The Troubled Delta