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Tag: IKEDDY ISIGUZO

  • Language of Kaduna train attacks really important – Ikeddy Isiguzo

    Language of Kaduna train attacks really important – Ikeddy Isiguzo

    Ikeddy Isiguzo

     

    WHAT struck in the midst of the tragedies of the past week, particularly the attacks on the Abuja-Kaduna passenger train, is the continued helplessness of Nigerians. The revealing reactions to the attacks confirmed worsening insecurity, unimportance of lives in Nigeria, and the refusal of the authorities to ameliorate the situation.

    The most basic things befuddle us. Our sentimental attachment to tribe, tongue, and religion is relived through each tragedy which is a fractional replay of earlier mishaps.

    Why is the language of the attackers more important than government’s failure to tackle insecurity? Simple. Each witness to the crime that made that remark was alluding to the fact that nothing would be done. Or nothing can be done?

    An attack on the Nigerian Defence Academy only attracted the mumbling response of “one attack too many”. We were also reminded to keep off the subject as it was a military affair.

    Was it different when some armed bandits gunned down an Alpha jet in January 2021 in Zamfara State? The Nigerian Air Force’s official statement confirmed that the aircraft “came under intense enemy fire which led to its crash in Zamfara State. Luckily, the gallant pilot of the aircraft, Flight Lieutenant Abayomi Dairo, successfully ejected from the aircraft.”

    Energies that should have been deployed against the menace of terrorist attacks like Monday night’s have been dissipated in explaining to Nigerians that the attackers were bandits, not terrorists, were foreign Fulanis whose cattle were rustled, who climate change had pushed to attack others.

    When will the excuses be exhausted, when will the Federal Government of President Muhammadu Buhari halt the slide of the country to anarchy? Does the President notice the shrinking of safe spaces in Nigeria?

    Where is the urgency in making Nigeria safer? Do lives mean anything to the President? Has he given up on securing Nigeria? Is he waiting for the next attack? Even then what will he do apart from the situation being “saddening”.

    Are we waiting for what to happen before government acts decisively? The blames are not a solution.

    Our governments are meant to consider our security and welfare the primary purpose of government. Our Constitution to which they swore says so. Does the matter end with the ceremonies?

    Governor Nasir el-Rufai appears angry, shocked, or surprised at the attacks. Has he forgotten his announcements of payments he made to Fulani cattle owners for their rustled animals? Has he stopped defending their criminality? Has he come to a sudden realisation of the crimes he did nothing about except to promote the importance of appeasing criminals?

    The security agencies take instructions from above. Have they been instructed? What were they told? Why is their performance not deemed inadequate by those who appraise them?

    Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, minister of Transportation, was lost for words when he witnessed the mayhem. When he spoke he was talking losses of over N3 billion. The speed of the assessment of the costs of physical losses was impressive. How did he know what was lost at such short notice?

    So how much were the lost lives, the kidnapped, the injured worth? How would they even be important when we cannot be sure how many people were in the train? We cannot count people!

    How many are missing, killed, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for in this single incident?

    Our lives have long ceased to matter. The positions of the Minister accord the attacks and insecurity the type of narratives that point to no solution in sight.

    How would anyone think that patrolling the rail lines is the solution to the attacks in Kaduna State? Are the rails the only targets? We are supposed to be delighted at the smartness of suggesting an investment of N3.7 billion on securing the rails alone?

    When we stop caring about the language of criminals, who they are, where they are from, we would start being serious with protecting the lives of our people. Criminals must be treated the way they deserve. No efforts should be spared in telling criminals, wherever they are found, that they are criminals. The slap-on-the-wrist or pampering treatment of criminals is responsible for what we are witnessing in Kaduna State and most of the North West.

    Stories of these attacks, how they are decimating family, shredding communities, shrinking Nigeria rend the heart. What we get as assurance are the same trite statements that have become templates for responding to the consistent tragedies that dot Nigerian life.

    Whatever language criminals speak is unimportant. What matters is what language we speak to them. At the moment we are telling them crime is a rewarding enterprise in the North West.

    Kaduna State is outstanding in this respect.

    Finally…

    OUR tragedies during the week were more. Some consider not qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in football as one. I can only comment my reserve.

  • Anyim @61: Readier for more service to Nigeria – By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

    Anyim @61: Readier for more service to Nigeria – By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

    By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

    MANY who pontificate on former Senate President Anyim Pius Anyim barely know him. Those who do will tell you of a man whose 61 years have been a roll through life’s challenges – he wins, mainly.

    While at it, he has shunned the vanities of power in ways that stun even his most dedicated critics. He elected to serve, he is readier to serve, leveraging his experience, and his conviction that he can make contributions that can improve Nigeria.

    At 37 Anyim was elected a Senator. Two years later, he was Senate President at 39, still the youngest to have held the position. Hid voluntary decision not seek re-election to the Senate in 2003 surprised those who have followed his humble beginnings.

    He is an unusual politician. He acts without noises about intentions. The clarity, depth and breath of his thoughts unveil the few moments he speaks. His preference is to get things done. Others can do the talking.

    Anyim is more public these days as he pitches for the presidency of Nigeria. The votes will be cast on 18 February 2023, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. He believes that his service can bring about the change many Nigerians think is possible only in dreams.

    He is big. He dreams big. He is also big about the Almighty making things possible. His quite moments are invested in that voice that urges him on to imagine and emerge from the least expected directions to distinctions.

    Anyim is not timid. He acts differently to get results that rattle those who preface their actions with noise. He has nothing against them. He has chosen his style.

    How can timidity be associated with the one who set out for the presidential race with firm strides when people wondered where the aspirants were? Anyim declared, others delayed.

    It was not a hasty decision. Years of poring through Nigeria’s challenges from the prisms of the public service, Senate, and as Secretary to the Government of the Federation have equipped him with cross-cutting experience of the Executive and Legislature.

    What about the Judiciary? Anyim trained as a lawyer. He has been in practice. Moreover, as Secretary to Government of the Federation, he played prominent parts where all three arms of government interacted frequently, and fully.

    Born on 19 February 1961, Anyim’s arrival broke the ‘ogbanje’ circle of his mother’s six other male children not living beyond two years. He has three sisters.

    Anyim knows what it means to be poor, deprived, hungry and despondent at challenges that dot education, health, jobs and their consequences for families. He lived through them.

    He missed school because there was no money for fees, went hungry many times, hawked bread, worked in a brewery but the Almighty God showed up through his mother, elder sister, and benefactors. His father took a fourth wife and fending for the children fell on each wife.

    Educated at Ishiagu High School, Federal School of Arts and Science, Aba, and Imo State University, where he read Law, finishing in 1987, Anyim drew enduring lessons of life and relationships from his school days.
    His National Youth Service Corps programme was in Sokoto with the Directorate for Social Mobilisation, a federal government agency, spread his national outlook, and landed him a career in the civil service. The National Commission for Refugees, NCR, was his next stop after a stint at the Abuja headquarters of the Directorate for Social Mobilisation. At NCR, he headed the Protection Unit.

    A backward glance at the progress he has made since winning a Senate seat under United Nigeria Congress Party, UNCP, in 1998, would surprise Anyim. He was just 37! The victory passed with General Sani Abacha’s demise.

    He became Senate President ahead of more known politicians after the 1999 transition. His tenure marked the laying of the foundation of the structure of the National Assembly after years military regimes.
    His political battles have upped since he declared his intentions to run for President of Nigeria. He accepts them as part of the turf. He manages them in manners that mark him as a different politician.

    Happy birthday Anyim. The future awaits your offer to serve more.

     

    •Isiguzo, a major commentator on minor issues, writes from Abuja.

  • Sir Victor Olaiya-A rare encounter, 37 years ago

    Sir Victor Olaiya-A rare encounter, 37 years ago

    By Ikeddy Isiguzo

     

    SIR Victor Abimbola Olaiya , 89, passed on 12 February 2020 in a Lagos hospital, creating a huge vacuum in highlife music, a genre he not only dominated, but held a long lasting influence on music to remain relevant, as other music on the wheels of digitalisation took music to spheres that few imaginations accommodated.

    Lagos would claim Sir Olaiya – almost all parts of Nigeria would lay solid claims to the man whose music had a pan-Nigerian appeal with the same appeal seeping beyond Nigerian borders. He was a great man with a genial spirit that had no emphasis for origins or the importance that people place on them now.

    A stay in Lagos without savouring highlife music at Stadium Hotel, where he played regularly, was incomplete. The space at Stadium Hotel, close to the National Stadium, though older than the national edifice, was so small that the audience was close to the legend as he sang, danced, and went on at the trumpet. It was impossible to take the eyes off him or have ears for another thing once he was on the stage.

    Famous for his legendary trumpeting skills, his immaculate white attires, and a white handkerchief with which he shone the trumpet, as if petting it, Sir Olaiya was a delight to generations of Nigerian music lovers, some of whom followed his music wherever he performed.

    I had the rare privilege one night 37 years ago, when Prince Funsho Adeolu, famously known in the rested Village Headmaster television series, as Chief Eleyinmi, told me “let’s go somewhere”. Adeolu used to be a high hurdler; I met him through sports reporting. He went on to be the Alaye Ode of Ode-Remo, he passed on in August 2008.

    Nothing told me where the “somewhere” was. Once I knew where we were, I had no qualms in waiting as other musicians warmed up the stage for the arrival of Sir Olaiya. I was lost in the moment.

    I cannot remember how long he played. I was not the only one asking him that he continued. We left in the early hours drunk in live highlife music from the source.

    His coarse voice was honey to the ears of his admirers. How we waited for him to get off the trumpet to sing any of his popular tunes, which we would have been humming as he blasted the trumpet as if he wanted to end it that day.

    Thereafter, anytime I passed near Stadium Hotel, I remembered that night of engagement with the man who was fluent in the major Nigerian languages and spoke them with a rare facility.

    His fans maintained their relationship with the man by ensuring that their collections never lacked any of his releases. And they came in torrents throughout the decades that he performed, until with age, he cut down on the rigours of record making.

    The 20th in a family of 24 children, his parents, Alfred Omolona Olaiya and Bathsheba Owolabi Motajo, came from Ijesha-Ishu in Ekiti State. He rich father had expected him to study Engineering when he gained admission to Howard University in the United States. He shunned Howard and chose a music career and stuck with it for the rest of his life. Music was his life and growing up later in Lagos exposed him to the earlier influences of the city’s bourgeoning social life.

    Sir Olaiya played with the Sammy Akpabot Band, trumpeted for the Old Lagos City Orchestra and jammed with the Bobby Benson Jam Session Orchestra. Those were the bands of the day.

    At 24, he owned the Cool Cats, and chose popular highlife music as his platform. Ghanaian performers influenced him. He was established enough to play at the state ball when British monarch Queen Elizabeth II visited Nigeria in 1956. He again played at the state balls for Nigeria’s independence in 1960 and in 1963 when Nigeria became a republic.

    Sir Olaiya shared the stage with the American jazz musician Louis Armstrong. He had the honorary title Lieutenant-Colonel and performed for the Nigerian army during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. The Cool Cats were also in the Congo to perform for United Nations troops.

    Born in Calabar, on 1 December 1930, Sir Olaiya’s pan-Nigerian credentials went beyond Calabar. He played extensively in Onitsha from where he reached other parts of the East.

    Musicians who played with Sir Olaiya before going solo to their own successes included Tony Allen and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Sir Olaiya had a joint album with the famous Ghanaian E. T. Mensah with his most recent work being the July 2013, music video remix of Baby Jowo (Baby Mi Da), one of his most popular tunes, with 2Face Idibia. It was widely received.

    He must have faced some challenges through his long life, but none seemed to have hit him as hard as the passing of his famous actress daughter Moji, seven years ago.

    Adieu Sir Victor Olaiya. You played the music to the end. Thanks very much for the memories of Lagos, when we could go “somewhere” and enjoyed music.