By Obadiah Mailafia

Nigeria is dying. A dying elephant,encircled by vultures and hyenas. Waiting to feast on the carcass. A fractured, broken nation. The ghost continues to limp aimlessly in the shadows. The question is: Who will bury it?

Every nation is born with a peculiar glory. Britain isn’t the most powerful nation on earth; but its name somehow evokes a certain radiance. Same goes for Japan, Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia and Sweden, to give but a few examples. There is this aura and prestige around some nations that speaks for them more than macroeconomic indices such as GDP, per capita income and external reserves. The very essence of national greatness.

Our glory once irradiatedthe nations. Nigeria was an illustrious country. Our naira was at par with the pound sterling and was stronger than the American dollar. Our armed forces acquitted themselves with distinction in international peace-keeping operations. When we spoke, the world listened.

Today, alas, the glory has departed. We have become a by-word among the nations – notorious for grand larceny, kidnapping, violence and lawlessness. A British Prime Minister described us as a “fantastically corrupt country”. We recently overtook India as the world capital of poverty. Botswana, Rwanda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya and South Africa enjoy more prestige and command more influence than our country in the councils of the family of nations.

UNICEF recently revealed that more than 345,000 children have died in the North East in the past 12 years. Governor Babagana Zulum has announced that more than 540,000 of Borno citizens have “disappeared”. If in the North East alone, nearly a million have been killed, what would you imagine the figure to be for the rest of the country? I would say probably a minimum of 500,000. Add to that the people that have perished over decades of ethno-religious carnage since 1970, perhaps 100,000. And if we agree that some three million died during the civil war, the total dead in our country since 1967 number nearly five million. Add to that the more than three million refugees that we have today. No country could survive such a holocaust.

Righteousness exalts a nation while sin is a reproach to any people.The Book of Samuel recounts the story ofHigh Priest Eli and his sons Hophni and Phinehas, custodians of the Ark of the Covenant. The sons were killed in war with the Philistines, who took the Ark of the Covenant into captivity. When the news reached Eli,he fell off his chair, broke his neck and died. His daughter in-law, Hophni’s wife, fell into premature labour and gave birth to a son whom she named Ichabod; meaning: “without glory”, or “where is the glory?” This calamity befell Israel because the watchmen had become gravely corrupted. We are the Ichabod generation.

British historian Arnold Toynbee has identified no less than 26 civilisations that have risen and fallen throughout the long drama of human history. High civilisations were built, according to him, by “creative elites”, through creative adaptation to changing global eco-systems. They also failed because there were no creative elites to steer them through turbulent times. From a purely systems-analytic viewpoint, our system cannot survive this destructive path-dependence of “Islamisation and Fulanisation”. The vast majority of Nigerians will never agree to live under the yoke of a brutal and rapacious theocracy that belongs to the Middle Ages.

During the procession following the coronation of a new Pope in medieval times, thepapal master of ceremonies would mournfully declare: “Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi!” (“Holy Father, so passes worldly glory!”). A reminder that all the pomp and pageantry of this world is temporary. Anyone who plays God in this country will sooner or later eat the dust of his own wickedness. The prayers of the holy ones cannot be toyed with and the blood of the holy martyrs can never be in vain.

American theologian Richard Hollerman reminds us that the rich and powerful nations of today will, like the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome,become dead monuments. “The aspirations of modern kings, presidents and potentates, and the designs of contemporary nations and peoples will eventually be destroyed. In His own predetermined time and according to His sovereign will, the Lord God will bring all of this to its end. But the rule of God and the Kingdom of our Lord will last forever.”

In our 21st century, national power is determined by population, territory, landmass, economic prowess, technological capability and military might. National glory is an important, albeit unquantifiable, element, in that equation. National glory is about prestige, national reputation and aura. The French describe it in terms “rayonnement national”or”la gloire nationale”.

The Swiss jurist, Emmerich de Vattel, in his book, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758), sees national glory as ”the favourable opinion of men of wisdom and discernment; it is acquired by the virtues or good qualities of the head and the heart, and by great actions, which are the fruits of those virtues. A nation may have a two-fold claim to it; — first, by what it does in its national character, by the conduct of those who have the administration of its affairs, and are invested with its authority and government; and, secondly, by the merit of the individuals of whom the nation is composed”.

De Vattel sees national glory as being inextricably linked to national power: “A nation whose reputation is well established – especially one whose glory is illustrious – is courted by all sovereigns; they desire its friendship, and are afraid of offending it. Its friends, and those who wish to become so, favour its enterprises; and those who envy its prosperity are afraid to show their ill-will”.

Every occupant of the high magistracy of a republic has a bounden duty to safeguard the glory of his nation: ”A prince, a sovereign of whatever kind, being bound to exert every effort for the good of the nation, is doubtless obliged to extend its glory as far as lies in his power. We have seen that his duty is to labour after the perfection of the state, and of the people who are subject to him; by that means he will make them merit a good reputation and glory….Let him, in all his actions, display justice, moderation, and greatness of soul, and he will thus acquire for himself and his people a name respected by the universe, and not less useful than glorious”.

Indeed, so important is national glory to a country that, when attacked, countries must take steps to avenge it. As de Vattel makes clear: “Since the glory of a nation is a real and substantial advantage, she has a right to defend it, as well as her other advantages. He who attacks her glory does her an injury; and she has a right to exact of him, even by force of arms, a just reparation. We cannot, then condemn those measures, sometimes taken by sovereigns to support or avenge the dignity of their crown”.

Students of power politics, from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Kautilya, Metternich and Kissinger, have defined national power from the viewpoint of military capabilities, and war-making. The Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye has, however, drawn our attention to the idea of “soft power”, which he defines as the ability to “co-opt” rather than “coerce”.

This entails ability to shape the preferences of others through influence, appeal and the power of attraction. A country would tend to have considerable soft power when its culture is considered attractive by others; when its political values are held to be morally upright and when its international policies are regarded as morally legitimate and political progressive.

Funnily enough,Nigeria has a reservoir of soft power emanating from its youth. Nollywood and Nigerian music are making waves across the world. Nigerian students have been shiny ornaments in top Ivy-League institutions. We are a land of geniuses governed by barbarians.

In line with the laws of evolutionary biology, perhaps the Old Nigeria will have to die for the New to be born. Those who saw to the wind will sooner or later reap the whirlwind. The evil men who govern us with such arrogance today belong to the dustbin of history. A New Nigeria will arise from the ashes of the old. She will fulfil her destiny as a progressive, enlightened industrial-technological state anchored on the rule of law, democracy and social justice and liberty.

And all the people shall rejoice together! We shall resume our place as the standard-bearer of African civilisation and as leader and defender of the Black Race throughout the world.

Arise and shine, Nigeria! For your light has come. And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon you and His glory will appear upon you!

In 2003, as a lawyer in Georgia, USA, he stole $25,000 personal injury claim of his client. He took the money and ran to Nigeria to contest for election.

Wednesday turned on the loudspeakers of his mouth blaring above 55 decibels in public space. He likened IPOB and Yoruba agitators for self-determination to Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP) terrorist groups.

He said: “These people, in their inclination for  devastating violence against fellow citizens… are no different from Boko Haram and ISWAP. Given space and time, they will take our nation down the same path of destruction.”

Gbajabiamila is the most despicable person ever elected as speaker of house of reps. He’s a political pinhead, a dishonorable person with no character, morals, principles, and decency. Who is Gbajabiamila? What moral right has he to liken Yoruba agitators for self-determination and IPOB to Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists? Gbajabiamila is a rogue. He’s dirty and corrupt. He’s a fraudster. Take a look at few of his many fraudulent and corrupt life:

In 2020, he took 300 guests to Dubai for his mother’s 90th birthday on public funds. The guests stayed at Conrad Hilton Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai where the least room goes for $122 (N43,920) per night. The 300 guests stayed for eight days. Per night the hotel accommodation was $36,600 (N13,176,000). For the eight days the total was $292,800 (N105,408,000).

Femi Gbajabiamila

In 2021, he was bribed with $1.5 million (N617 million) to ensure the passage of the controversial Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).

In 2003, as a lawyer in Georgia, USA, he stole $25,000 personal injury claim of his client. He took the money and ran to Nigeria to contest for election. 

There’s no record that Gbajabiamila served in the NYSC.

As a lawless crook, he’s likely to break more rules and norms as long as he’s in power. He’s an unworthy creature: heartless and calculating. He lacks character or integrity. Nothing smacks of poor leadership like being a rogue speaker. As a speaker, he doesn’t understand the concept of “service above self.” Display of ego, pride, and arrogance is the most terrible trait that defines Gbajabiamila. He behaves like the goons and hoodlums of a criminal gang. 

It amounts to political heresy for Gbajabiamila to say that Yoruba agitators for self-determination and IPOB are like Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists.  Yoruba agitators didn’t kill, rape, rob, anyone. They didn’t destroy anybody’s farm or property. The IPOB acted in self defense when they were being killed by federal forces. Where was Gbajabiamila when Fulani terrorists killed, raped, robbed, kidnapped the Yoruba people? The world knows the terrorists: Boko Haram, Fulani terrorists, ISWAP and Buhari, The Butcher of Aso Rock. 

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•His PhD is in Social Science, not ICT •He has 10 publications, 39 citations •His teaching experience less than 10 yrs

THERE are basically three legitimate ways to become a professor: by climbing the professional ladder in a university; by being appointed to the position from outside academia in recognition of vast and varied industry experience or artistic wizardly in a field; and through a courtesy appointment. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s record does not qualify him for any.

Let’s start with the first. Pantami’s undergraduate degree in computer science from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, was earned in 2003. That’s less than 20 years ago.

When he started his academic career as a Graduate Assistant at ATBU in 2004, the computer science department that awarded him his bachelor’s degree rejected him because his degree was “weak”; he was instead employed in the Information Technology section of the Faculty of Management where he also got his master’s degree in 2010/2011 and got promoted to Assistant Lecturer.

In 2011, he got the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF) scholarship to study for a PhD at the Department of Management in the Aberdeen Business School of Robert Gordon University, which he earned in August 2014.

Upon his return to ATBU, he was promoted to Lecturer 1—skipping one rank. He requested to be promoted to Senior Lecturer but was denied because he had insufficient publication record to justify his request. He resigned in protest and took up an appointment at the Salafist, male-Muslim-only Islamic University of Madinah as an Assistant Professor of Information Science.

In 2016, he accepted a government appointment as DG of NITDA and has never returned to academia since then.

Now, three criteria are used to promote academics: teaching, research, and service. Pantami’s entire university teaching record is less than 10 years—if you consider that he never taught either at ATBU or at Robert Gordon University (although he lied that he did during his senate confirmation hearing) during his three years of doctoral studies.

His research output is even more underwhelming. Although he brags about having “over 160 publications,” his actual scholarly output is really thin for someone who wants to be a professor.

When I checked SCOPUS, the well-regarded database of top-level, peer-reviewed academic journals, using his legal name, that is, Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami is the name of his neighbourhood in Gombe town, which he doesn’t legally bear), only three articles and one citation came up.

Of the three articles, he is the single author of one (which is actually only a 2-page country report) and a distant co-author in two. All three articles were published between 2018 and 2019 while he’s in government.

But SCOPUS can be unjustifiably exclusionary, so I looked him up on Google Scholar, a more expansive and laissez faire database of scholarly articles and books. He has exactly 10 articles and 39 citations there. Of the 10 articles, he is the first or sole author of 5 and a “tag-me-along” co-author of 5.

Sadly, at least 5 of his 10 articles are in dubious, pay-to-play, predatory journals that would destroy the academic career of any scholar in a serious country. Most of the articles were accepted and published in the same month that they were submitted!

Since peer review typically takes months, the articles were clearly not peer-reviewed.

Evidence of a lack of peer review is evident in the fact that several of the articles are riddled with avoidable proofreading and grammatical errors. Plus, many of them, such as one that was basically an unimaginative 7-page rehash of publicly available facts about NAFDAC, are flat-out scholarly scams that a serious undergraduate won’t even be caught committing.

He published only two scholarly articles—in 2013 (from his PhD thesis) and in 2015—before he came to government, which explains why ATBU refused to promote him to senior lectureship.

By 2014 when he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer, he had only one notable publication.

There is no serious university in the world that can legitimately promote a former Lecturer I (at ATBU) or an Assistant Professor (at the Islamic University of Madinah) overnight to the position of professor with only 10 substandard publications in predatory journals and 39 citations. The minimum number of publications required to be promoted to professorship in most Nigerian universities is 15. A professor should ideally have at least 100 citations.

Plus, Pantami didn’t spend up to a year as Lecturer I. Nigerian academics are required to spend at least 3 years in a rank. Three years as a Lecturer I, 3 years as a Senior Lecturer, and 3 years as a Reader would give you 9 years. That means he needs to spend at least 9 years in the university after his ministerial appointment—and publish a few more articles— to be qualified for promotion to professor. In Saudi Arabia, it would require at least 8 more years.

(Of course, if he was actually employed by FUTO that “promoted” him, his unmerited professorship wouldn’t have attracted any notice since there are several such examples of perversions of traditions all over Nigerian universities. It’s the absurdity of being promoted to a professor at and by a university he was never affiliated with while he’s a serving minister that made the fraud stick out like a sore thumb.)

Also note that Pantami’s PhD is in management, a social science discipline, not in computer science or cybersecurity. So, it’s doubly fraudulent that he has been “promoted” to the professorship of a discipline he didn’t study or publish in extensively.

His doctoral dissertation, titled “A theoretical and empirical investigation of the barriers to the adoption of state-of-the-art information systems by Nigerian indigenous oil companies,” which is freely available on the Internet, is basically a survey of employees of Nigerian oil companies on their perceptions of IT policies in their places of employment. It’s a social scientific study that any political science, sociology, or economics graduate can conduct.

Now that I have established that he can’t legitimately be a professor anywhere in the world on the basis of his scholarship and pedagogy, can he be appointed a professor on the strength of his industry experience? No! The only other job Pantami has ever done outside of government and his less than 10 years of university teaching is being the Imam of ATBU. He has never invented any cybersecurity patent and has never worked in a cybersecurity company.

The only discipline that can validly appoint him as a professor of practice is Islamic Studies. Say what you may about him, he is one of northern Nigeria’s most prodigious and consequential Islamic exegetes. His oeuvre in Islamic exegesis is unquestionably worthy of a professorial appointment in Islamic jurisprudence.

That’s the path of least resistance he should have taken since he desperately desires to be addressed as a professor.

In defence of Pantami’s professorial fraud, one Professor Tukur Sa’ad hashed over a litany of people who became professors without terminal degrees and without prior teaching experience, as if I didn’t already make that point and called it an example of what we call a “professor of practice” in American academe.

In my December 20, 2015 column titled “A Comparison of Everyday University Vocabularies in Nigeria, America, and Britain (II),” I gave an even more dramatic example than Sa’ad’s in the late Maya Angelou who was a lifetime endowed professor of American literature at Wake Forest University but who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and a host of other literary icons didn’t have—and didn’t need to have—a PhD to become professors. Apart from the fact that they didn’t climb the professorial mountain from the top (they started from lectureship), their path-breaking and prodigiously creative output was equivalent to—and in some cases exceed—a PhD.

In North American universities, it’s called “Research and Creative Activity” for a reason. Wole Soyinka, Achebe, JP Clark, etc. had vast and varied oeuvres in “creative activity” before they became professors. Plus, during their time, the possession of a PhD was not a requirement to move through the academic hierarchy.

Pantami does not come even remotely close to their record in the field FUTO awarded him a fraudulent professorship. In any case, Soyinka, Achebe, etc. taught at the universities where they were professors. Pantami is a serving minister.

How about a courtesy professorship? Pantami isn’t qualified for that, either. A courtesy professorship is a professorial appointment given to distinguished professors at other universities who need not be at the universities that appointed them.

It’s called an “honorary professor” in some UK universities, an “extraordinary professor” in South African universities, and a “professor-at-large” in others. It’s basically an honour given to people who’re already professors elsewhere, so you can’t become a courtesy professor at another university if you are not already one somewhere else.

Some people said Pantami’s “achievements” as a minister are worthy of a professorial appointment. Haha! OK, so people who imagine themselves to be successful in whatever they do should now apply to FUTO for a Pantamized fraud fessorship to aggrandise their insecure egos?

Look, I’m calling out Pantami’s professorial fraud not in spite of my being a Muslim and his friend but because I’m a Muslim and his friend. My father, who was a Hafiz like him, would disown me if I ignored or gave comfort to fraud.

By Shaka Momodu

The political stakes as the 2023 general election draw near are almost unimaginable – all the more so because of the overlapping and complementary vulnerabilities of the two leading political parties – accentuated by the public perception of them as essentially Siamese twins. But one is gaining ground, the other is losing.

The umbrella of Prince Uche Secondus, chairman of the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is leaking and badly. Buffeted mercilessly on all sides by disloyal and defecting members whose politics lack principle, endurance, moral direction, and sacrifice, the holes in the umbrella are getting bigger and bigger.

The beneficiary of PDP’s many troubles is the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which ordinarily should be in its death throes by now on account of its unimaginable mismanagement of our diversity, colossal failure of governance, unprecedented insecurity across the country, corruption on a scale never before seen in our lifetime. A party with an imprudent disdain for criticism, whose governance model is based on incompetence, economic mismanagement and nepotism, the elevation of one religion/ethnicity over others, clannishness and crony capitalism, as well as lies and propaganda. It is unfortunate that such a party is being made to feel that failure is a virtue to be emulated and rewarded.

Many well-meaning Nigerians would naturally be pleased to see the back of the APC for its many sins against the Nigerian people but is now being given some oxygen to live a day longer than necessary and pummel us further. It even boasts about its exploits with haunting arrogance. I have asked the question repeatedly, what’s the reason for the sudden desire to defect to such a party? I can’t find any rational explanation for the mad rush other than to conclude that it is pure bread-and-butter politics that is at play – aided by the APC itself whose take-no-prisoners approach to ‘winning’ any seat is legendary. And I dare say that that is what is pulling in the crowds.

It is sad that state governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, party chieftains are jumping ship and ditching the umbrella because they know that our votes don’t count. Nigeria is on the ropes because a motley assortment of shady characters has taken up leadership positions at all levels and is now a moral hazard to the health of the body politic. Nigerian politics is heavily driven by what is in it for one, not what is in it for the country.

Reasons for the mass defections are as hazy and confounding as they come. Their explanations make no sense. They ranged from the palpably selfish, disguised as altruistic, to the pitifully ridiculous. Interestingly, none of the governors or lawmakers that defected pointed to any crisis in the PDP as a reason for jumping ship.

Now, let’s interrogate their reasons for leaving the PDP: On November 17, 2020, Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State dumped the PDP for the APC. According to him, he moved to the APC because of “injustice” meted out to the southeast by the party. This was how he put it: “It is absurd that since 1999, going to 2023, the southeast will never be considered to run for the presidency under the PDP. And this is my position and will continue to be my position,”
If Umahi left the PDP in protest against the “injustice” done to his people, the question to ask him is, was the southeast being treated justly under the APC-led federal government before he crossed over to the party? Has the situation improved since President Muhammadu Buhari shook his hand in the Presidential Villa to welcome him to their fold? Immediately he came to power, Buhari made it clear that he would govern on the basis of 97 percent and 5 percent and proceeded to implement every policy decision and all appointments on that basis. The southeast has got 5 percent or less of all federal appointments and projects location.

Just recently, to underscore his contempt for the southeast, he described the region as dot in a circle. Yet, Umahi left the party that he had been a member for 25 years just to associate with Buhari who clearly is not enomoured of him or his ethnicity. At every opportunity, he praises Buhari to the skies and even calls him his friend and father. But a man he calls father doesn’t see him as a son but just a dot in a circle! What further evidence does anyone want to get the message?

Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State, another deplorable, had this to say: “Having seen and known President Buhari and his commitment to this country, his nationalistic disposition and all the efforts he has made to bring Nigeria to where we are today, it is obvious that, at this point, we need to join hands with him to build a Nigeria that we can be proud of.”

Can anything be more ridiculous and insensitive to our feelings? Why would Ayade rub salt into the wound? Why did he decide to traumatise us with claims he himself knows are false? Watching him make that statement was gut-wrenching and pathetic. To think he is a professor, who once taught in a university, was even more disturbing. What commitment to Nigeria was he really talking about? To bring Nigeria to where we are today? Nigerians should ask this verbose professor whether where Buhari has brought this country to is enviable. With the level of mismanagement of our diversity and the national economy, the insecurity pervading the entire length and breadth of the country, the governor was trying to teach us a lesson in revisionism. The world can see how well Buhari is building our national economy. In the 2020 budget implementation released by the finance ministry and BudgIT, debt servicing alone gulped 97% (N3.34 trillion) of the government’s total revenue (N3.42 trillion). Total expenditure stood at N10.01 trillion. This means nearly all federal government’s salaries, overhead and CAPEX were financed with loans and Central Bank’s support. What does this say about the government?

If Ayade was emboldened by his success in teaching his students such nonsense in the university, then he should have realised by now that he is dealing with a more informed and resilient public who will not clap for him while spewing out nonsense grammar to cover his emptiness. Is it any wonder students are turning out the way they are these days? With dishonest claims from men like Ayade, we can only pray that our nightmare ends in a miracle. I often ask myself what cause do I believe in strongly enough that I am willing to lose for it. And I believe some Nigerians have laid down a marker as boundaries they will not cross no matter what. A man should be able to stand for something in life.

Now let’s look at the case of the Zamfara State Governor, Bello Matawalle, the latest on the list of the deplorable. He had this to say: “I decided to change (political party) so that I can bring peace to my state. Now that we all belong to the ruling party, I now have the full backing of the federal government to fight insecurity.” Is this man really serious at all? Is there anything more absurd than this claim?
Reading that statement, two things immediately jumped out at me. Either the federal government is not taking the insecurity in Zamfafa State, nay, the entire country seriously, or it is using it as a tool of coercion of opposition-controlled states and their lawmakers to jump ship and join its fold. Whichever it is, it does not tell well of both Matawalle and the APC-controlled federal government which up till now has not rebuffed the impression created by Matawalle. Nevertheless, it is important we interrogate the claim and see whether Matawalle’s reason holds water.

Among the nine states worst hit by insecurity in the country, namely, Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, Borno, Adamawa Yobe, Benue, Niger and Plateau States, only Zamfara, Adamawa and Benue were opposition-controlled states. Kaduna State, which is fast becoming the capital of kidnappings, is under the control of the APC. What has the federal government done to stop terrorists from invading schools, hospitals and private residences to kidnap scores of students, patients in hospitals, including babies as young as four months old, and individuals? Several schools have been closed down indefinitely because of the insecurity in the state.

Banditry, kidnapping of schoolchildren and killings are rife in Buhari’s home state of Katsina. So desperate is the situation that the state chapter of the PDP had to resort to stone-age tactics of buying catapults for members to fight the bandits. The situation in the APC-controlled Niger State is just as bad. The state governor, Abubakar Bello in April cried out that the state was not getting federal help to curtail the terrorists who are targeting schools for kidnappings. Just a few weeks ago, he again raised the alarm that Boko Haram terrorists had infiltrated the state and had not only hoisted their flags in captured villages, including Kaure village in the Shiroro Local Government of the state, they had also forcefully allocated displaced women to themselves as wives. The governor contended that the Sambisa Forest is several kilometres from Abuja, but Kaure is just two kilometres from the Federal Capital Territary, FCT, insisting that nobody is safe anymore, not even residents of Abuja.

So what was Matawalle talking about that joining the APC would bring more federal muscle to fight insecurity in his troubled Zamfara State? Let’s not even talk of Borno State, the epicentre of terrorist groups. Clearly, the governor’s defection was not about getting more federal help to bring the security situation under control as he claimed. The fact is that he has always wanted to join Buhari’s APC since the Supreme Court disqualified all the APC candidates who had won the election and handed PDP candidates victory in the state. From the outset, his admiration for the president was clear for the discerning. He largely shares Buhari’s ethno/religious views and has defended him on several occasions, even more than the APC governors before finally showing his true colours.

This same governor, instead of dealing with bandits frontally and decisively has been appeasing them and paying them not to kidnap. Matawalle gives out Toyota Hilux vehicles, motorcycles, money, etc, to bandits as incentives to stop their nefarious and heinous criminal activities. What has been the result? A spectacular, criminal enterprise has been berthed in his state through his incompetence and collusion. His appeasement has only served to embolden the terrorists to continue to ply their trade of killing, maiming and kidnapping people. Some of the Hilux vehicles and motorcycles he gave the bandits are actually used to ferry more kidnapped victims into the forest until ransom is paid. His poor leadership style and policy of appeasement are fuelling the security challenges facing the state.

While Matawalle has been soft on those committing mass murder and kidnappings in his state, he is ready to go to war with southerners over killings in Sasha in Ibadan and Imo. He boasts of the destructive capacity of the north to unleash violence on southerners and their businesses in the north. For those who might have missed it, here are excerpts from what Matawalle said in April: “Despite what northerners are experiencing today in many parts of the southwest and southeast in particular, all we hear is the conspiracy of silence from northern leaders and elites who are supposed to stand firm, in the manner in which other leaders of the south are doing even when they know that their people are at fault. This must not continue.

“As northern leaders, our dignified silence in the face of constant provocation and assault, because of our desire for peace, must not be taken as a sign of weakness. Indeed no community or region has the monopoly of violence. If northerners and their means of livelihood will not be protected, accommodated and be dignified anywhere they choose to stay in any part of the south, southerners should not expect protection from the north as the north has more than what it takes to respond to any kind of aggression and hatred.

“We have seen the destruction, the killings and the devastation recently at Sasha market against northerners and their economic interests. Properties worth billions of Naira were lost in addition to human lives, yet some leaders in the southwest are downplaying the atrocities committed or, worse still, justifying it. Some of them have shamefully gone to the extent of apportioning blame on the victims and casualties of their aggression. We will not take that any longer, as no human life is worthier than another. No business interest is better than another. In fact, in a crisis situation, the south has more to lose in terms of its business interests in the north and the strategic nature they established themselves in the north than northerners living in the south.

“The north is very much aware of such weaknesses and disadvantages the south is exposed to whenever there is such a crisis, but we always choose the path of peace and cherish peace beyond any act of lawlessness and hatred.” This outburst was clearly in consonance with the divisive ethno/religious views expressed by Buhari in the years preceding his ascension to the presidency. So his defection to the party of his soul mate was in furtherance of a much-desired association.

Be that as it may, you can see his foolery from his statements. Matawalle recognises that many businesses in the north are owned by southerners – businesses that by no small measure have brought development and created jobs in the north, but in the same breath, he threatened to unleash his urchins of violence on southerners and their businesses. He doesn’t care if the north remains a barren land of underdevelopment.

You see, people like Matawalle are not designed for progress. He and his terror bandit brothers are the antitheses of progress. They have held Nigeria down and aborted its dreams.
The gold deposits in Zamfara, which would have brought more development to the state and given a boost to the Federation Account, is mined and ferried away by bandits and the untouchables as he looks the other way. As such, the state contributes next to nothing to the Federation Account.

Here is a governor presiding over a state with one of the lowest school enrollments in the country. A governor that appeases terrorists, one that cannot protect his own people but is threatening the south that generates the money he gets from the Federation Account to run the affairs of his state? Now that he has joined Buhari, his alter ego in the APC, one hopes that he can lend him a helping hand in his desperate search for the grazing routes’ gazette.
Pliant governors Umahi, Ayade, Matawalle and the like belong to the basket of deplorables.

•Momodu writes from Lagos