Last July, the Government of Nigeria announced it had placed orders for the Nigeria Air Force of 40 helicopters, towards ending the routing the insurgents in the North of the country “once and for all.”
The orders were said to have been placed in the United States and Russia, and some of them were due to arrive as early as last month, and the others before the end of the year.
In a country in which journalists seem to be asking fewer and fewer questions instead of more and more, there is silence over whether any of those orders has been delivered.
Instead, on September 5, the stunning discovery was made in South Africa of a Nigerian delegation trying to smuggle into the country an astonishing $9.3 million in cash, allegedly to buy arms. Among the items on the shopping list was a helicopter.
Given the cash-and-carry-arms story, does anyone know if the 40 helicopters of July were also paid for in cash? Did we pay the Americans (whom we are holding responsible for our South Africa cash-flight) also in cash in Johannesburg, or did we fly straight to an American city?
If the Russians were willing to accept payment in rubles, where in Abuja do you buy enough to pay for many helicopters? With how many jets do you fly so much money to Johannesburg for Tier One to middleman such a deal, and how many mysterious Israelis were on that expedition?
If we did not have to pay cash for those helicopters, is that because the September deal was “light”? Who determined what deal qualified for normal international trade practices and which needed the pastoral jet approach?
Speaking of cash, the Senate last week approved the new foreign loan of $1bn requested by President Goodluck Jonathan to combat Boko Haram.
Senator Ahmed Makarfi, who chairs the Senate Joint Committee on Finance and Local and Foreign Debt explained that the request was not in cash (hint! hint!!) but for equipment to be paid over seven years.
Which makes little sense at a time the same the same executive is physically transporting as much as $9.3 million in hard currency to another country on one jet for the purpose, it claims of buying other/similar/parallel hardware, including helicopters.
Speaking of helicopters, the Minister of Police Affairs, Mr. Jelili Adesiyan last Sunday morning swaggered into Ibadan in one, and casually landed in Bodija International, a private school. The Minister did not ask for approval.
In a petition, the school drew attention to the “considerable damage to underlying drainage pipes in the School Sports Arena” caused by the Minister’s trespass, noting that the landing could have disrupted educational activities and posed considerable danger [to staff and students] had the school been in session.
Adesiyan is no stranger to the arrogance of power. He was the one who, last June, shamelessly expressed regret he did not, when he had the chance, flog Senator Isiaka Adetunji Adeleke a former governor of Osun State, during an altercation in Osogbo.
“My regret was that I did not beat him as he claimed I did. If I had not been a Minister, I would have flogged him like a baby. You know … Adeleke is sick; maybe he would have died that day.”
Minister Adesiyan also carries baggage from the unsolved 2001 murder in Ibadan of Chief Bola Ige, the then Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. He and Senator Iyiola Omisore were suspects in the ensuing murder trial that was dismissed by a court.
It is only in Nigeria that a man with this kind of background and temperament gets to lord it over the police. What is really scary is that a school would write a petition to challenge such a powerful Minister landing a helicopter on its property without permission.
Permission, Minister? They are asking you to obtain THEIR permission? Don’t they know you can flog them like a baby?
On the subject of permissions, hasn’t the time arrived when Ojo Madueke, now Ambassador of Nigeria to Canada, to enjoy the right to inspect the guest list of every event to which he is invited? Last week, the former Foreign Affairs Minister discovered far too late that one Omoyele Sowore from across the border in the United States was also a participant in an Afenifere Renewal Group seminar he was attending.
Event organizers please write this down: Madueke and Sowore, who publishes SaharaReporters, do not mix! Evidence: At the United Nations in 2010, both men were involved in a face-off so tense and testy Madueke was asking, “Who is in charge here?”
During last weekend’s event, the ambassador flattered the Yoruba as Nigeria’s most “sophisticated,” which might normally have been cause for miliki throughout the land.
But then the ambassador watched, aghast, as Sowore took the microphone, and took off the gloves. He asked his listeners to ignore their flatterer: if the Yoruba are so highly-regarded, he observed, why does Madueke’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) insist on imposing some of their most criminal and dishonourable elements on the people?
Both Sowore and Madueke were wrong, in this one instance, but in different ways. The PDP is naughty by nature: it bathes in mud because it knows no water.
One example of mud: violent Southern Kaduna last Monday, where Governor Mukhtar Yero, electoral nightmares in his future, finally showed up.
It was the same day that football players of the government-owned Kaduna United went on a protest to him to demand their wages. They have not been paid in nearly a full year.
Yero is the spoiled political son of Vice-President Namadi Sambo. First transported overnight from one of Sambo’s private firms into the deputy governorship, Yero became gpovernor when Governor Patrick Yakowa died in a helicopter crash in December 2012.
Since last year, Southern Kaduna has been the scene of repeated violent attacks by faceless mass murders, and an estimated 1000 people have been killed.
But like President Jonathan in response to the abductions in Chibok, Yero simply settled back into the luxury and privilege of the Governors’s Lodge
The grief didn’t sway him. The wailing didn’t bother him. The repeated attacks didn’t move him.
Then came last Monday, when Yero suddenly found “concern” under the fig leaf of a new attack in which 40 persons died. Arriving in Fadan Karshi in a massively-protected motorcade, he was welcomed by the women of Gwandara, Gwantu, Mada, Nandu, Ninzom and Numana.
Most were dressed in black, but some were appropriately attired in their nakedness. Grieving both from lives cut into pieces as well as government abandonment, many of them wept and rolled in the mud.
Yero knows this means he is accursed. For many office holders of this day, the message for 2015 is the same: the Nigerian people—abandoned to poverty and hurt while conceit, deceit and mysterious spending passes for government—are coming to the polls to collect their political souls.
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Twitter: @SonalaOlumhense