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OPINION: Kumuyi, Tortoise And Looters Of Noodles

Published

1 year ago

March 4, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

Wise old Tortoise sat his children down. “My dear ones, two things are essential for your growth and wellbeing in life: Always tell the truth, and never ever take whatever is not yours.” The attentive children nodded; they promised to do as their father counseled. They bowed before their dad and left. Four years down the road, there was a severe famine in the land. Food was as scarce as masquerade’s shit. Husbands bartered their wives for grains; wives traded their husbands for a basket of yam. It was as bad as Ireland’s Great Hunger of 1845 which killed one million out of a population of eight million people.

Upright Tortoise’s household was hit by this mother-of-all-famines. There were casualties in his neighborhood. His own children may soon join the fallen. Tortoise panicked. What was he going to do? He talked to himself. He went out one day and came back home with a solution to hunger in his home. On his head was a big basket containing a variety of food items. Tortoise told his children that he found the foodstuffs abandoned in the forest. “It must have been God at work,” he told his children. His disappointed children exchanged looks. They knew that their father had just lied. He stole the items and they told him so: “Father, but you told us never to take what is not ours, and never to lie.” Embarrassed, Tortoise could only mutter some incoherent words. Then he found his voice: “I did it for you, my children. These are terrible times.”

This last Friday at a place called Dogarawa near Zaria, a truck driver transporting cartons of noodles thought it was time to say his Jumat prayers. He parked his BUA truck and joined the congregation. Like predatory soldier ants swarming a bunch of palm nuts, an army of looters invaded the truck and stripped it of every item it was carrying. “Not a single carton of the noodles the truck was carrying was left by the hoodlums,” an eyewitness told a reporter. The driver was helpless. The people he shared the prayer ground with largely made up the looting party. The invaders left the mosque for the truck. They were contemptuous of the law and disdainful of morality. They had no fear of God to whom they prayed. They chose food over faith. “Ba imani (they have no faith),” a disappointed man who video-recorded the event lamented. Ten of the looters were arrested. I will be shocked if the looters agree that they committed any offence.

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“Hunger makes a thief of any man” is a popular quote among famine and poverty scholars. It is originally from Pearl Buck’s 1931 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth. The book is the first volume of her House of Earth trilogy which largely contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. The novel’s protagonist, poverty-stricken Wang Lung, nurses a starving family. One day, one of his sons brings home stolen meat. Wang Lung sees the stolen item and vows that his sons must not grow up to become thieves. In anger, he throws away the stolen meat. But his wife disagrees – there is a family to feed. She gets up, calmly picks up the meat and cooks it. Wang Lung may deplore that act of thievery and his wife’s disgraceful act of receiving a stolen property, but the hungry must eat. The food is ready; the family eats the forbidden and washes it down with cold water. Fast-forward to years of unremitting poverty and hunger. The same upright Wang Lung later in the story joins a food riot, invades a rich man’s house, takes all the rich man’s money and builds his wealth from the heist.

I am scared because rain does not fall on one roof. In 2024 Lagos, a stampede for rice killed many. Yesterday (Sunday), there were reports of yet another invasion of a government warehouse in Gwagwa, Abuja, by looters of stored food items. Some of the looters probably left Sunday’s church service to partake in the looting. A week before the Zaria truck looting incident, some trailers loaded with foodstuffs in the Suleja area of Niger State suffered the same fate. Bags of rice and other food items in the vehicles were looted by wanton boys and girls. The loot-takers probably thought they were poor because the truck owners were rich. Such a line of thought is dangerous. It is equally dangerous to assume that the hungry are responsible for their own hunger and should, therefore, fix themselves.

Jibia is a border town in Nigeria’s North-West. One Sade Rabiu, a leader of that community, told Qatar-based Aljazeera last week that his people were dying of hunger. “Poverty can lead to theft and murder…anything for survival,” the community leader was quoted as saying. What he said was very unpleasant but may be brutally true. Colonial archives are replete with records of hunger-induced crimes in every corner of Nigeria. Kostadis Papaioannou in 2014 did extensive work on this issue covering the years between 1912 and 1945. He quotes documents and persons; he cites books. He uses “historical newspapers and government reports to explore food shortages, crop-price spikes and outbreaks of violence.” The picture you get after reading his 43-page report tells you that what we saw in Zaria on Friday and in Abuja yesterday were simply a reenactment of the blights of the last century. Nothing new is happening under our heavens. The poor have refused to change in their larcenous reaction to hunger; the society has remained inattentive to implications of mass poverty. In 100 years, we’ve moved without progressing.

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There was a very bad famine in Nigeria in 1913 which saw people doing the unthinkable to survive. There are always social consequences for food inadequacies. Colonial official A. C. G. Hastings (1925: 111) recalls that “…the ghost of famine stalked aboard through Kano and every other part. The stricken people…ravenous in their hunger, seized on anything they could steal or plunder.” In a particular province, “the local inhabitants, in need for food, plundered and stole everything in their way.” That was in 1913. Similar experiences dotted the years of lean or no harvest throughout our colonial period. Judicial statistics, police and army documents on that period, according to Papaioannou, showed increased crimes in Ogoja (present Cross River), Ondo and Enugu – all due to increased food prices, decreased income, and generally heightened economic pressures.

People react differently to hunger. Dirty, hungry Tortoise tells the soap hawker at his backyard: “When I have not washed my inside, how can I wash my outside?” Last December, the General Superintendent of the Deeper Life Bible Church, Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi, asked members of his church to redirect their offerings from the church to the poor and the needy in their communities. He said: “All the offerings are not just for the church. There are poor people around. There are unemployed people around. There are indigent people around. We must build our campground – I understand; we are going to build it. But, while you are building (the church), your neighbours are dying. Those who do not have anything to feed are there. Your brothers, your sisters have nothing to send their children to school. Which one comes first when your house is leaking and your mother is dying? How will you spend it (your money) —mending the leaking room or taking care of your mother?” He said his church would go back to “the good old days” when religion served God by taking care of the poor. And, truly, unlike now, the poor used to have a space in the heart of priests and prophets.

Pastor Kumuyi’s sermon was a breath of fresh air. In that short message, he radically redefined religion’s engagement with the people. The former should subsidise the latter; it should not be the other way round. I am not a member of Kumuyi’s church and, so, I do not know how far he has gone in making real what he said on the pulpit. But he did well and should not be alone. Others, particularly the Imams of northern Nigeria, should extend their mandates beyond leading prayers and mobilising the poor for politics. A Jumat service and a looting spree happened at the same place, same time in Zaria last Friday. How else do we define failure of religion? People are stealing to survive. Pastors are losing their flock to satanic fodders; Imams are losing their followers to grains of haram.

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The rich cannot continue to ignore the poor – particularly when the poor are poor due to no fault of theirs. We (the elite) are an unfeeling lot. We relate with hunger only as mere media content. We take it as mere texts read in newspapers and as staid social media posts. We think today’s suffering is unreal, contrived. How do you tell the hungry that his hunger is not hunger; that it is exaggerated, or that his loud protests are sponsored? It is time we dispensed with our disgust for the dirt of the poor. Time is running out. We should stop gawking at the grotesque of want. Can we “stop a moment” and “see the poor” as Rebecca Harding Davis asks the rich to do in her ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’? Can we, like Davis, stop taking heed of our “clean clothes” and plunge “into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia” and save our skins by stopping the hunger in the land? The clock is ticking. Any age that packs what Jacob Riss (1890) calls “ignorant poverty” and “ignorant wealth” into its social space incubates a big bang. New York’s Fifth Avenue is a metaphor for world-class luxury. ‘The Man with the Knife’, Riss warns, stands at the corner of the “Fifth Avenue”. Helping him to drop the knife is helping ourselves.

Nigeria can’t be tired of helping the poor. Forget about the government and its voodoo economics on subsidy. The social consequences of mass hunger are never pleasant. The developed world today has various social safety nets for vulnerable families and individuals in poverty. The society that does this is neither stupid nor is it a spendthrift. It has simply come to accept that people can be poor without being hungry. My people say when hunger is removed from poverty, poverty is dead. Looting of stores and trucks are bad omens. These acts nudge us to wake up and act responsibly. We may not eradicate poverty but every good society, from the earliest times, knows that the way to peace and security is in taking starvation out of people’s poverty.

There was a time Western Europe burnt its fingers trying to de-subsidise the needy and legislate the poor out of existence. It failed. I use England here as an example. In 1834, England introduced what it called the New Poor Law to regulate paupers and their unenviable lives. The rich and powerful welcomed the law; they applauded its provisions which reduced the cost of looking after the poor. The new law created what was called ‘workhouses’ to house and hide the poor. The privileged were happy that the workhouse provision would “take beggars off the streets and encourage poor people to work hard to support themselves.” Critics called the workhouses “prisons for the poor.” Of course, the workhouse concept failed; it suffered riots and the structures were victims of attempted arsons. You are very conversant with Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The story draws its plot from this experience of structures without humanity; its message mimics mansions of well-fed masters and hungry, scrawny inmates. If the Poor Law had worked and the workhouse had been a success, Oliver Twist would not have asked for more.

Between 21 and 25 October, 2009, I was in Las Vegas, United States for that year’s Conference of American Black Mayors. One of the leaders who spoke at that event was the then vice president of Malawi, Mrs Joyce Banda. Banda, who spoke on the African woman and resilience in the face of hardship, said “African women don’t cry. They don’t feel pain. Touching fire is nothing.” The African woman was always a hero in very bad times. She would feed her family even from nothing. Banda likened her to Hare who was seen cooking something in a season of hunger. The story teller said all the other starving, helpless animals saw smoke coming out of Hare’s hearth and rushed to her kitchen. “I am not cooking food. I am boiling stones,” she told her guests. Disappointed, the guests hissed, and Hare told them softly not to rebuke her: “At least I am doing something about the situation.” Our government has repeatedly told the hungry to be patient (E lo f’okàn balè). I hope what is cooking in Abuja’s pot is not what Hare was boiling – stones.

News

OPINION: Again, Buhari Nails Femi Adesina To The Cross

Published

16 minutes ago

July 25, 2025

Editor

Tunde Odesola

By some indices of human assessment, such as professionalism, intellect, carriage, humility, handsomeness, etc., the erstwhile Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari (of bitter memory), Mr Femi Adesina, was not cut from the same cloth as many of his colleague editors. There was the tale of a toad-eyed, bosomy and big-mouthed female editor of a weekend newspaper, whose pair of laser-sharp designer glasses could identify a ‘dollarful’ brown envelope in pitch darkness. She’s a Jebusite. Unhatable, oga Adesina is disarmingly different, however.

Meeting Adesina is like walking into a room scented with simplicity and kindness. Who can hate a pair of white eyes nestling on a cherubic black face with a signature haircut and an innocent smile? I can’t.

I once told the story of how I met editor Adesina. I’ll tell it a second time. Twice, I met Adesina in close quarters; twice, I learnt a lesson in humility. The first time I got in the Adesina orbit was around 15 years ago. It was at the Source, Ile-Ife, where his relative was getting married. He had invited the Publisher, Conscience International Magazine, Chief Abiola Ogundokun, who extended the invitation to Osun State newspaper correspondents, on the platter of comradeship.

Adesina didn’t turn water into wine at the marriage, which was held inside the compound of SS Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Lagere, Ile-Ife, but he fed us to our throats, just like Jesus fed the 5,000 multitude. While we were still picking our teeth and sipping drinks after the meal, Oga Adesina began to pack our used plates by himself, like a male servant, but some of us protested and managed to wring some of the plates from his grip. Oga Adesina, at the time, was the editor of The Sun newspaper while we were mere correspondents.

We were three correspondents at the party: The Nation state correspondent, but now the Alagbeda of Agbeda-Ijesa in Ilesa-West Local Government Area of Osun, Oba Adesoji Adeniyi; National Life state correspondent, Omo’ba Wale Olayemi, of Otan Ayegbaju, and my little self.

A Yoruba proverb says, “If the youngster knows how to wash his hands properly, he will have the opportunity to dine with elders.” Eldership is not always an index of age. Sometimes, position or competence confers eldership. Not too long after dining with elder Adesina, I was promoted to the position of news and politics editor of Saturday PUNCH, triggering my relocation to Lagos. I was later appointed group politics editor of the three PUNCH titles. That role came with its perks. One of them was an annual invite by the U.S. Consulate in Lagos to their July 4 media seminar marking America’s Independence Day.

I was a guest at one of such events when I came across The Sun newspapers’ top dog again. This time, a former editor of The PUNCH, Mr Gbemiga Ogunleye, was also present. An extraordinary mentor and exemplar, if Oga Ogunleye lived during the time of Sango, the god of thunder, a news shrine would have been erected in his honour. He would have been worshipped to date as Ogunleye, the god of news.

I was super excited to be at the seminar with industry giants. I looked forward to hearing divergent views from participants like Adesina, whose newspaper articles I was following, but with whom I’ve never had the opportunity to interact professionally. When Adesina finally spoke, nuggets of humility and intelligence dropped like precious stones from his lips.

The Adesina whom I knew wasn’t the same Adesina who served Buhari. I’m not talking about integrity here; his integrity remains his integrity, but I’m talking about a media guru who sits smugly and clings to the totem of Buhari while the burning train plunges downhill to doom. Adesina, in his heart of hearts, knows the disaster Buhari was, but, in order not to be seen as someone who spread the Buharian good news, which turned out as sad news, he has decided to carry the Buhari cross till he breathes his last.

In his 488-page book, “Working with Buhari: Reflections of a Special Adviser, Media and Publicity (2015 – 2023), Adesina says he left his good job at The Sun, where he earned three times more than what Buhari offered, describing his time in Buhari’s administration as national service.

While it is in Adesina’s rights to fetishise the shroud of Buhari, I feel his justification of Buhari spending undisclosed tonnes of pounds sterling on personal foreign medical trips while Nigerian hospitals were in a shambles was a slap on the face of Nigerians. It was a sin, too.

In the interview on Channels Television, Adesina said, “Buhari has always had his medicals in London, even when he was not in the office. So, it was not about the time he was president alone. He had always had it there,” adding that UK medical doctors had been managing Buhari’s health before his election in 2015 and were well acquainted with his medical history, making it unwise to change medical teams, mid-treatment.

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What the wise special adviser was saying was that Buhari, from birth, had never been sick, never been treated in a Nigerian hospital. As soon as he was born, herdsmen hoisted him on a cow, and off to London hospital they went.

Mr Special Adviser, stop feeding Ngerians with nonsense, please! It is a no-brainer that Buhari’s medical records lay in various military hospitals located in the states where he served, before his health became a national liability, after he snatched power.

Of course, you know, Mr Adesina, that Buhari had his QAmedical records in a few military hospitals where he received treatment as a middle cadre and senior officer. So, the same way he transferred his medical records abroad was the same way he should’ve transferred his medical records back to the country, upon assuming power in 2015, if his promise of change wasn’t a shortchange.

As a Christian, I expect Adesina to throw away the empty can of Buhari’s deodorant and not kick it about like a little village boy kicking a self-made ball of knotted rags. Buhari has gone to his grave with his innumerable leadership imperfections. Adesina should let him rest in peace, and not in pieces.

Nothing defines Buhari’s self-centredness and megalomania than his exposure by Aisha, his wife, and daughter, Zarah, in September 2017. Both mother and daughter intoned that Aso Rock clinic, meant to treat their breadwinner and his First Family, was shambolic, under Buhari’s very nose.

Zarah, in a series of Instagram posts, said, “More than N3bn budgeted for the State House clinic and workers there don’t have the equipment to work with? Why?” Where is the money going to? Medication only stocked once since the beginning of the year? Why? State House permanent secretary, please answer. Why isn’t there simple paracetamol, gloves, syringes… Why do patients/staff have to buy what they need in the state house clinic?”

Wait for her mother’s bomb. Aisha said, “…as you are all aware, Nigeria wasn’t stable because of my husband’s ill health. We thank God he is fully recovered now. If somebody like Mr President can spend several months outside Nigeria, then you wonder what will happen to a common man on the street?

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“(A) few weeks ago, I was sick as well; they advised me to take the first flight out to London. I refused to go. I said I must be treated in Nigeria because there is a budget for an assigned clinic to take care of us. I insisted they call Aso Clinic to find out if the X-ray machine was working; they said it was not working. They didn’t know I was the one who was supposed to be in that hospital at that very time.

“I had to go to a hospital that was established by foreigners, in and out 100 per cent. What does that mean? If something like this can happen to me, no need for me to ask the governors’ wives what is happening in their states.”

Sadly, it’s this incompetent Buhari that Adesina was defending after he had sucked the nation dry, treating himself at The London Clinic when he should have ensured the establishment of good hospitals back at home. For Buhari and the members of the ruling class, it was okay if diseases struck Nigerians dead on the streets, provided they could access adequate healthcare abroad.

Spending donkey’s years receiving treatment in a £3,500 per day elite clinic that caters for the British royal family and political leaders, exposes Buhari as a sailor without a compass. He was the soldier without a gun; an Ogun without iron; a Sango without thunder. Buhari was nothing.

But Buhari had a heart. He had a heart strong enough to push him to spend 225 days outside the country on medical trips, visiting no fewer than 40 countries since 2015. That was Adesina’s hero, whose reign amounted to zero in eight years.

I suspect that without realising it, Adesina was in a toxic relationship with Buhari, like a husband-and-wife abusive relationship, where the husband regularly beats the wife, but the wife soldiers on, wipes her face when a knock sounds at the door, smiles and opens the door, adulating her husband. Or, Adesina probably knew it but was encaged?

With his meagre earnings, where Mr Integrity got the money to fund his expensive healthcare treatment in one of the most expensive clinics in London should be a source of investigation for the EFCC, but corruption is fast killing Nigeria before Nigeria kills corruption.

I pity the Ipetumodu-born Adesina, but I don’t understand why his dove chose to fly with vultures. I put the Adesina kernel on a stone and smashed it with a stone, just to unravel why the tender earthworm crawled to the table salt. Questions popped up in my mind: Why do people smoke when they know smoking kills? Why do people traffic drugs to Saudi Arabia when they know what would happen to their necks? Why do people scream Christiano Ronaldo when they know Lionel Messi is the GOAT? Why?

Insecurity. Compensation. Disillusionment. Hypocrisy.

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola

News

Emir Of Gusau, Ibrahim Bello Is Dead

Published

50 minutes ago

July 25, 2025

Editor

Ibrahim Bello, the Emir of Gusau in Zamfara State, has died at the age of 71 after battling a long-term illness. He passed away on Friday in Abuja.

The news of his death was confirmed by Sulaiman Idris, spokesperson to Zamfara State Governor Dauda Lawal.

In an official statement, Governor Lawal mourned the loss, describing the late Emir as a dependable monarch who worked tirelessly for the peace and progress of Zamfara.

“I received with deep sadness the news of the passing of our father, His Royal Highness, Dr. Ibrahim Bello, the Emir of Gusau… I have lost a confidant and a father whose wisdom guides me and other state leaders. May the Almighty Allah (SWT) forgive his shortcomings and grant him Aljannah,” the governor said.

Appointed as the 16th Emir of Gusau in March 2015 following the death of his father, Bello spent over a decade on the throne, during which he played a significant role in the socio-cultural affairs of the state.

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Expert Tasks NGOs On Int’l Standard Procurement Procedure

Published

16 hours ago

July 24, 2025

Editor

A procurement expert, Mr Ogunnupe Olushiga, has urged Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to fine-tune their policies and procurement activities to fit national and international standards.

Olushiga gave the advice at a two-day capacity building workshop for 15 NGOs on International Standard Practice on Procurement Processes.

The workshop was organised by Efficiency Management Consulting Firm in Bauchi and supported by Young Leaders Network, CARD, JO Ogun and Sons Enterprise.

Olushiga, the Convener and Lead Facilitator of the training, said the workshop was to help organisations mirror their activities in line with the Nigeria Procurement Act.

He noted the training would help organisations adjust their policies and procurement activities to fit global benchmarks.

He said it would also help procurement, administration, finance, compliance and programme officers align their procurement practices with national laws and global donor policies.

Olushiga added that it would equally build a fraud resistant-audit ready and value driven procurement system.

“The training is to increase the capacity of the not-for-profit sector partners or workers and all those organisations that work under the not-for-profit to bring them up to international standards in procurement practice.

“It is also to help them to mirror their activities with the Nigerian Procurement Act which is not mandatory for them but compels them to have their policies and procurement activities in tune with national policy and international standard.

“This standard fits into the World Bank and other donor agencies that come into partnership with them,” he said.

He pointed out that the new global, national, state laws and frameworks on procurement aligned with the need to safeguard the environment in rendering services by being eco-friendly and energy efficient in all procurement processes and services.

Patricia James, a Legal Procurement Consultant, listed some of the existing laws that guide organisations in procurement matters to include the Public Procurement Act, 2007, and the Bauchi State Public Procurement Law, 2020.

Others she said are the World Bank Procurement Regulations (2023), Transparency International (2021), Corruption Risks in Public Procurement, Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply CIPS (2020) and Ethical Procurement.

In his address, Malam Nura Mohammed, the Director-General, State Agency for Sustainable Microfinance, said the government would henceforth channel all its Micro-credit Revolving Fund facilities through Participating Financial Banks down to the grassroots.

He said this would ensure financial inclusion in underserved communities.

He said the agency was established by the state Governor, Bala Mohammed, to act as an intermediary between the government, financial institutions, and businesses towards providing access to credit, business development services, and policy support.

The director-general who said procurement was critical to the operations of every organisation, commended the facilitator for his commitment.

He urged the participants to practicalise the knowledge gained to ensure procurement credibility and integrity in their organisations.