News

OPINION: Kumuyi, Tortoise And Looters Of Noodles

Published

2 years 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.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Our President’s Love Affair With The IMF

“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.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Abuja And The Two Nigerias

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.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: For Nigerian Soldiers And Judges

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

Why We Expanded Presidential Amnesty Scholarship Scheme — Otuaro

Published

11 hours ago

October 26, 2025

Editor

Otuaro (middle) in a group photograph with the PAP foreign scholarship students in the United Kingdom after an interactive session in London on Saturday, 25 October, 2025.

The Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, Dr Dennis Otuaro, has expressed his unwavering commitment to ensuring that more indigent students and communities of the Niger Delta benefit from the PAP scholarship scheme.

He stated this while explaining what informed his decision to expand the scheme and increase formal education opportunities for poor students, and to build a huge manpower base in the region.

A statement issued by Mr Igoniko Oduma, Special Assistant on Media to the PAP boss said Otuaro spoke during an interactive session in London on Saturday with the beneficiaries of the scholarship initiative deployed for undergraduate and post-graduate programmes in universities across the United Kingdom.

The engagement, which was at the instance of the PAP boss, provided an opportunity for the Office and the scholarship students to discuss issues pertaining to their welfare and challenges with a view to addressing them.

Otuaro said that while in-country scholarship deployment was 3800 in the 2024/2025 academic year, the figure increased to 3900 in the 2025/2026 and foreign scholarships were about 200.

He attributed the increase in deployment to the massive support of President Bola Tinubu and the Office of the National Security Adviser.

Otuaro stressed that he was greatly encouraged by the President and the NSA, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, and that he knows how impressed both of them are concerning the PAP initiatives, which align with the Renewed Hope Agenda.

He reiterated his call on the students to justify the huge investment in their education by the Federal Government by studying hard to make good grades.

He also urged them to conduct themselves and be responsible ambassadors of Nigeria while in the U.K, stressing that “you will be adding value to your families and communities when you complete your programmes successfully.”

The PAP helmsman said, “We want the scholarship programme to impact more students and communities in the Niger Delta. That’s why we have expanded it and increased formal education opportunities.

“We want you to take this opportunity very seriously so that the government, too, will be encouraged. I know how much support His Excellency, President Bola Tinubu GCFR, gives to the Presidential Amnesty Programme.

“Mr President and the National Security Adviser (NSA), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, are very impressed with what we are doing. On your behalf I would like to, once again , thank His Excellency and the NSA for giving you this life-changing opportunity. We are confident that Mr President and the NSA will continue to support us.

“The knowledge you are receiving in your institutions today is to enable you plan yourself and prepare for the future. Whatever knowledge you gain cannot be taken from you.

“So as PAP scholarship students, we expect responsible and good behaviour from you. Government is investing heavily in you and you have the obligation to justify the investment. Be agents of change and avoid acts of mischief while in the U.K.”

News

OPINION: A ‘Crazy’ African Nation, Where Citizens Eat And Drink Football

Published

12 hours ago

October 26, 2025

Editor

By Tony Erha

It was in October, a semi-summer-month and twilight of the year that ushers in the chilling and extreme winter. A nonagenarian woman gave me a friendly smile that revealed cheeky dimples. As I bowed respectfully to her ripened age, she offered a leathery hand for a handshake, which I received warmly, returning her infectious smile. For a youth who prays for longevity shouldn’t deprive the elderly of the walking stick. I had helped her, carrying a furred handbag to our seats on a night-long intercity bus, from Istanbul to Ankara, in Turkey, the Balkan nation, where we stopped over, in year 2004.

She spoke Turkish rapidly, whilst I retorted in a passable and incoherent Turkish language that ‘I don’t speak the official language of the only country of the world that is located on two continents; Europe and Asia. “You American?” She asked in English. It was obvious that my jeans, necklace and a fez cap that I upturned, in the manner of the Yankees, might have portrayed me as one. “No. I am a Nigerian”, I said, dragging the words. “You Nee-jay-rian!” she exclaimed, whilst I nodded confidently. Then she was elated; “Okocha Jay-Jay!” She spoke to others in the bus that clapped and hailed. I wondered why a 91 years-old-woman, was so passionate about football and one of its heroes, as if she was a youth.

At her request, an old video of a football match showed the mesmerising display of Austin ‘Jay Jay’ Okocha, viewed on a television set affixed to the bus. There were instantaneous excitement and catcalls each time Okocha, the great football ‘talisman’ from Nigeria, did his ball flips and dribble-runs that displaced his opponents, earning him one of the few (if not the greatest) football entertainers in football’s history. It was as if the video tape, recorded in his notable plays in Besiktas, a Turkish club side, was a live match. So great was Okocha’s global fame that the old woman relived again; “Jay Jay Okocha is a dangerous footballer, who’s full of tricks on the field of play. The only trick he didn’t do with the ball from his bag of football artistry was to play on top the swimming pool”. In Mustafa Ataturk’s nation, footballers of Nigeria’s decent had and still make their soccer very eventful.

Victor Osimhen, the leggy playmaker and striker with a dye-hair like the white mushroom head, who recently renewed his contract with Galatasaray, a Turkish top team, is also a Nigerian, who has received the applause in the peninsula country and across the globe like Jay Jay Okocha. Candidly, Oshimen, the goal mechine, who is a tonic to the Turks and football fans across the world, also does the unimaginative with the round leather, but certainly not with the same fascinating skills of Jay Jay! But the Turkish fans are readily tilted to football fanaticism.

Victor Osimhen

If it’s ‘fanatic-fans’ in Turkish football, it’s certainly ‘supporters hooliganism’ in the United Kingdom (UK), where association soccer (football) was founded in 1863, with similar kicking games played in Greece, China and Rome since 2,000 years. In UK, football is played with fanfares, pool betting and media vuvuzela. English soccer is a gainful entertainment industry raking in huge gate fees from plays, promotions, television and media razzmatazz, which is often imitated in Nigeria, with passions and ‘occult’ following. So worrisome was the ‘social hype and lawlessness’ youths and others attach to English soccer that security operatives have constant migraine fighting soccer addiction and frequent street brawls.

Jay Jay Okocha, Nwankwo Kanu, Dan Amokachi, Taribo West and other Nigerian stars, that once dominated and currently rule other foreign clubs, opened the floodlight of extremist football following into the country. Once upon a time, the then Prince Charles (now the king of England), was spotted (with young boys) playing the game, inside the Buckingham Palace, all wearing jersey number ’10’ with Jay Jay Okocha’s name inscribed). That the number-one-global-royalty adored soccer by wearing the jersey of a footballer from a third-world African nation, somewhat illustrates that which is often said about soccer being more than a mere sport. ‘Football Tripper’, a British online news porter, describes soccer as “oxygen” to numerous men and women. In Brazil, the South American nation, there is a deity called “Soccer”, as well as it’s a vivacious Reggae, a unique music genre in Jamaica.

Still, it is food and sups in Nigeria. In this Africa’s most populous nation, with plentiful viewing centres and liquor spots, there are live television football tournaments and soccer video games, with consumable food, alcoholics, carbonated drinks and some ‘unlawful substances’ that are at the behest of business owners and ‘intoxicated’ fans.

In what soccer dramatics came to know as ‘the Dammam Miracle’, viewing centres, beer parlours and restaurants were instantly sold out in the country, in 1989, after ‘footbocrazy’ Nigerians, stormed the streets in prolonged wild celebrations. For the Nigerian U-20 football team, at the FIFA World Youth Championship, held in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, came back from a four-goal deficit to level up and defeat the Russian counterpart, making the Nigerian team the first to come back from a semi-final to win a FIFA tournament. Soccer, indeed, is a crazy sport in Nigeria. Once upon a time, a man had shattered the screen of his expensive television, because Austin Jay Jay Okocha, his favourite star, had lost a penalty in a continental match!

It’s said that football, especially when the Nigerian national teams of men and woman play, tends to unite Nigerians than other national blights that turn them apart. Now, the current national fanaticism is for the Victor Osimhen-inspired Super Eagles, to qualify for the 2026 World Cup gala, even though it has to go the extra obstacles of playing more legs, whereas the team had frittered the early opportunities to qualify.

And sensing that most Nigerians care less of the economic woes that plagued them, but for the football fad, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the nation’s President, would cash-in to feed their ago awarding huge cash to high profile football tournaments and wins, like he recently accorded the Super Falcons, the female national team, for achieving a similitude of the Dammam miracle, to bring home a coveted African Cup of Nations (AFCON) trophy!

News

Ex-soldiers Fume Over Lifetime Benefits For Sacked Service Chiefs

Published

17 hours ago

October 26, 2025

Editor

The sacked Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, and two other service chiefs, Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Hasan Abubakar, and Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Emmanuel Ogalla, are set to receive generous retirement benefits.

The benefits include bulletproof vehicles, domestic aides, and lifetime medical care.

Their exit follows President Bola Tinubu’s appointment of new service chiefs on Friday.

General Olufemi Oluyede has been named the new Chief of Defence Staff, while Major-General W. Shaibu takes over as Chief of Army Staff.

Air Vice Marshal Sunday Kelvin Aneke becomes the new Chief of Air Staff, and Rear Admiral I. Abbas the Chief of Naval Staff. The Chief of Defence Intelligence, Major-General E.A.P. Undiendeye, retains his position.

The President’s Special Adviser on Media and Public Communication, Sunday Dare, said in a statement on Friday that the removal of the service chiefs was in furtherance of the Federal Government’s ongoing efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s national security architecture.

According to the Harmonised Terms and Conditions of Service for Officers and Enlisted Personnel in the Nigerian Armed Forces, signed by President Tinubu on December 14, 2024, the service chiefs are entitled to substantial retirement packages upon disengagement.

The document stipulates that each retiring service chief will receive a bulletproof SUV or an equivalent vehicle, to be maintained and replaced every four years by the military.

They are also entitled to a Peugeot 508 or an equivalent backup vehicle.

Beyond the vehicles, the package includes five domestic aides — two service cooks, two stewards, and one civilian gardener — along with an aide-de-camp or security officer, and a personal assistant or special assistant.

They will also retain three service drivers, a service orderly, and a standard guard unit comprising nine soldiers.

The benefits extend to free medical treatment both in Nigeria and abroad, as well as the retention of personal firearms to be retrieved upon their demise.

However, while officers of lieutenant-general rank and equivalents are entitled to international and local medical care worth up to $20,000 annually, the benefits for the service chiefs, though not stated in the document, are believed to be considerably higher.

The HTCOS reads, “Retirement benefits for CDS and Service Chiefs: The following benefits shall be applicable: one bulletproof SUV or equivalent vehicle to be maintained by the Service and to be replaced every four years. One Peugeot 508 or equivalent backup vehicle.

‘’Retention of all military uniforms and accoutrement to be worn for appropriate ceremonies; five domestic aides (two service cooks, two stewards, and one civilian gardener); one Aide-de-Camp/security officer; one Special Assistant (Lt/Capt or equivalents) or one Personal Assistant (Warrant Officer or equivalents); standard guard (nine soldiers).

“Three service drivers; one service orderly; escorts (to be provided by appropriate military units/formation as the need arises); retention of personal firearms (on his demise, the personal firearm(s) shall be retrieved by the relevant service); and free medical cover in Nigeria and abroad.”

However, the policy specifies that such entitlements apply only if the retired officers have not accepted any other appointment funded from public resources — except when such an appointment is made by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

In such cases, the officers, according to the document, will only receive allowances commensurate with the new role rather than a full salary.

Retired soldiers protest lavish perks

Reacting, some retired soldiers decried what they described as the luxurious benefits and entitlements reserved for service chiefs and senior military officers.

They lamented that junior personnel continued to suffer neglect and unpaid entitlements despite years of service to the nation.

The retired officers expressed frustration over the disparity in welfare and treatment between senior and junior ranks within the military.

One of the leaders of the discharged soldiers demanding their owed entitlements, Sgt. Zaki Williams, expressed frustration over the entitlements reserved for the service chiefs.

Speaking in an emotional tone, Williams, who claimed to be speaking for more than 700 soldiers in his group, said many retired non-commissioned officers had been abandoned despite dedicating their lives to defending the country.

He said, “I don’t really understand how our people in Nigeria do things. The people at the top always do things to favour only themselves. They don’t care about the poor or the junior ones who sacrificed everything.”

The retired sergeant recalled that government officials had made several promises to improve their welfare, but none had been fulfilled.

“Since the day they made those promises to us, we went back home and didn’t hear anything again. Everything just ended there. We’ve been waiting till now, but nothing has happened,” he added.

Williams said the situation had left many of his colleagues demoralised and divided over whether to continue pressing for their entitlements.

“Some of us said we should protest again, but others refused. We told them that day that we were not going for another protest. If the government wants to help us, they should help us. If not, we’re done,” he said.

He also accused senior military officers of frustrating efforts by the defence ministry to address the concerns of retired personnel.

According to Williams, life after service has been extremely difficult for most of them who retired voluntarily or were discharged without compensation.

“How can someone retire after years of service and still not get their entitlement? Many of us can’t even build a house. The senior officers have houses, cars, and everything good, but the rest of us have nothing,” he said.

He added that the little compensation given to some was not enough to rebuild their lives.

“If they give you N2m today, what can you really start with it in this country? You have children, family, and responsibilities, yet you can’t even afford a plot of land,” he said.

Expressing disappointment, he said most junior officers had lost faith in the system.

“We’ve handed everything over to God,” he said quietly. “We’ve cried and done our best. They promised us, but in the end, it’s still zero. We haven’t seen anything. That’s why many of us are now silent.”

Another retired soldier, Abdul Isiak, lamented that promises made to retired personnel had remained unfulfilled, leaving many struggling to survive.

He said, “All you said they would give to them would be done promptly, and they are more than what we need to sustain our lives. This is very unfair. We have suffered a lot, and they’re yet to give us our entitlements after leaving the service. What is our offence? Is it because we are junior officers?”

The former sergeant said the senior officers continued to enjoy generous retirement packages while lower ranks were denied their due benefits.

“We are preparing for another protest for them to pay us. This is very bad,” he said.

(PUNCH)