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OPINION: Tell Your Papa As Spirit Of Rwanda’s Simon Bikindi

Published

8 months ago

April 13, 2025

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By Festus Adedayo

In July, 2006, John Street, Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the United States’ University of East Anglia, received a call from Wilfred Ngunjiri Nderitu, Chairman of the Kenyan International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Nderitu wanted Street to be an expert witness in a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Simon Bikindi, a Rwandan musician, accused of inciting genocide via his songs during the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi war, was on trial. Bikindi, a Hutu from Gisenyi, same region where assassinated Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose airplane was downed shortly before the genocide, was prominent in Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time of the genocide, Bikindi had a renown of composing and singing popular music songs, a mixture of rap and folk songs. He was described as having “elliptical lyrics and catchy tunes” and sang them in English, French and native Kinyarwanda. Bikindi was alleged to have sang songs played on Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines which incited genocide. He was also alleged to have associated with the extremist Hutu paramilitary militia Interahamwe which butchered Tutsis in their thousands.

At the end of the prolonged trial, though convicted, Bikindi could not be indicted on account of his songs with the title, “Nanga Abahutu,” – “I hate these Hutus”. Thus, on charge of “conspiracy to commit genocide,” having “composed, sang, recorded or distributed musical works extolling Hutu solidarity and accusing Tutsis of enslaving Hutus,” he was acquitted. He was however convicted for complicity to commit genocide, the court having confirmed that, prior to the genocide, Bikindi “consulted President Habyarimana” and, “during the 100 days of genocide from 7 April to 14 July 1994, Bikindi participated personally in the killings, both in Kigali and Gisenyi prefecture, and helped to recruit and organize Interahamwe militias.” While sentencing Bikindi to 15 years imprisonment in December 2008, though proved beyond reasonable doubt that he participated in the killings, the court dismissed the charge that his songs had an inciting character. Corroborating this, Professor John Street, as well as the court, held that the charge of an inciting song was problematic “because of the troubling possibility of an artist being arbitrarily prosecuted for his work, art being open to a variety of interpretations.”

In his Music and politics, (2012) Prof Street says the divide between music and politics is very thin. Though this was not its first, the recent ban slammed by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) on Eedris Abdulkareem’s newly released song, ‘Seyi, Tell Your Papa’ has roused Nigerians to look out through the window to see the unholy dalliance between the Nigerian state and a defunct USSR organisation similar to the NBC called Gosteleradio. In a letter to all radio stations in Nigeria, the NBC banned airing of the song on all Nigerian airwaves, according to it, for violation of the tenets of its regulatory code.

When a protest song like Abdulkareem’s is censored by political power, or criminalized as was done in the Bikindi song’s trial, it reveals the paranoia of states and political regimes. Music does not just provide power of political expression, says Street, music is that expression. Unlike the hen and egg causal mystery, it is bad governance, governmental deception and authoritarianism that give birth to protest songs and not vice versa. It reminds me of three traditional chiefs, the Jagùnnà, Àró and the Odofin. When flies bit the Jagùnnà, the two other chiefs pretended they did not hear but when the time comes and the Jagùnnà began to barbecue the flies, both Àró and Ọ̀dọ̀fin cry blue murder. So, why are Villa’s Àró and Ọ̀dọ̀fin scared now when the people’s plights find expression in the lyrics of their bards?

The issues Abdulkareem dwelt on in that song litter the Nigerian street. He sang: “Seyi, how far? I swear your papa, no try—there are too many empty promises. On behalf of Nigerians, take our message to him. Kidnappers dey kill Nigerians. Try to travel by road without your security makes you feel the pains of fellow Nigerians. You dey fly private jets, insecurity no be your problem”. The song centres on mis-governance, hopelessness, deception, despair, failure and tyrannical power. Abdulkareem merely implored Tinubu’s spoilt brat child, Seyi, who he berated for embarking on an infantile combing of Nigerian northern states in gleaming automobiles, to dispatch his message to his father. It is a bold and courageous deployment of music as a tool and weapon of political commentary. By the way, I am curious at why Seyi’s crowd-sourcing is centered in the north and not the south? Was it because he needed the Rankadede genuflection which he can get in the north but can never have in the south where such groveling before father and son is an anathema?

This takes me to Uganda. In Africa’s world of the 1970s, awash with military despotism, Uganda stood out. The famous unwritten cliche about Africa was, “look towards Uganda.” It was a country of hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism and oxymoron. In Uganda, you had the grotesque, the weird and the outright bizarre rolled into a single ball. It was a theatre of the surreal. Like the mountainous size of its despot, Idi Amin Dada, Uganda was huge on the laughable. For instance, to demonstrate his male power dominance, Dada sent love letters to Queen Elizabeth II of England, asking for her hand in marriage so that he could become the King of Scotland. He indeed conferred himself with the title, “Conqueror of the British Empire”. To demonstrate this, he physically rode his elephantine weight on the backs of British workers in Kampala. At the peak of his squabble with Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, Amin sent a love letter telegram to Nyerere. In it, he described the man famously known as Walimu as such a good and sultry fellow, so much that if was a woman, he would give serious consideration to marrying him, regardless of his grizzled head.

Nigeria is today wearing the shoes of Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda. All manner of the laughable and grotesque ooze out from Nigeria’s imperial palace. The global tariff war, borne out of Donald Trump’s implacable narcissism, is raging like a typhoon. The world is scampering to escape the wrath of its Achilles’ hill, a man labeled reincarnate of Adolf Hitler, whose own Aryan race – superior specimen of mankind – slogan is, Make America Great Again. Country leaders are dousing tensions, physically addressing their citizens and assuring them of home-grown ways out of the projected global economic tribulation. Ours is trapped in the beautiful city of Paris, hiding behind a finger of a claim that he is on “working visit”. But, why is Paris the beautiful bride of African leaders’ excitement? Decades ago, Mobutu Desire-Sese Seko, the Congolese tyrant, also made Paris his nesting comfort, spending Congo’s national patrimony on extravagant shopping trips in Paris and flying supersonic Concorde aircraft. Someday when we calculate Nigeria’s wealth squandered on this Paris hospice fancy, it may rival Mobutu’s.

When you look at the Abdulkareem song ban in its totality, you will realize that a tragic paradox is slowly building today in Nigeria. It is an electoral route to authoritarianism which comes through an off-the-cuff rise of institutions that make themselves the “Aj’itọ Ọba” of imperial power. In old Oyo empire, with a system of infallibility and God-ordained status of the monarch, the Aj’itọ Ọba confirmed the All-mightiness and deity attribution of the king. He is entrusted with the role of licking the king’s spittle. He cleaned the monarch’s mess and dared not exhibit any form of revulsion to it. Today, what a smart despot does is to make state institutions lend themselves as executioners of democracy. This reminds me of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s submission in their How democracies die that those who assassinate democracy use its very institutions to gradually, subtly and even legally, kill it.

Freedom of expression, of course, with its caveats, is a major kernel of democracy. When autocrats set out on a path of strangulating democracy, the first thing they do is to muffle free speech. During the rules of Amins, Sani Abachas, Francisco Macìas Nguemas, et al, their terror against freedom of expression was overt. Now, with the world being a global village, institutional tyrannies have been on the upswing. They are buoyed by Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which teaches tyrants that, in the bid to put a leash on voices of dissents, cultural institutions and ideas, rather than just raw brute and force, hold the key. Institutions are gradually replacing the Aj’itọ Ọba, becoming the new lickspittle of imperial power.

As the ‘mass’ in the mass media is being gradually corroded over the decades, chief among its reasons being economic meltdown, the radio and the social media have conveniently become the media outlets with the ‘mass’ of the 21st century. Their audiences are spontaneous, massive and equal the audience of newspaper press of the 20th and early 21sr centuries. It is why the attention of modern totalitarian governments is focused on them. They find them easy objects to tweak in the service of personal rule. The NBC, the regulatory body for broadcasting in Nigeria, has become a formidable lickspittle of presidential power. From the days of Muhammadu Buhari, the NBC has helped gag free speech. It capitalizes on its role as an industry regulator, entrusted with the business of regulating and controlling the levers of broadcasting industry in Nigeria to do this.

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NBC was patterned after the “Gosteleradio”. An abbreviation for the Russian “State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the Soviet Union” which was in existence from 1931, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Joseph Stalin used it to stave off dissent against his infernal rule. The NBC has acted same way. Gosteleradio was the primary state body responsible for overseeing all television and radio broadcasting in the Soviet Union. A powerful organization which exerted significant control over all broadcasts within the defunct USSR, Gosteleradio served as the central authority for decision-making related to broadcasting content, forcefully maintaining a stranglehold on broadcast content’s alignment with the state’s ideology and political goals.

Thus, like the Gosteleradio, Nigerian broadcasters narrate their agonizing ordeals under the NBC as akin to Third Reich’s. NBC is an Omnipotent power with millions of ears like a sieve (ab’etilukara bi ajere). Like a Gestapo, it snouts round for infractions. Aware of the power of financial emasculation to broadcast stations, every word spoken against presidential power on radio is tantamount to treason. Fines, like gags on the mouths of captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade era, are slammed on stations which dare broadcast criticisms of imperial power.

It is not as if the folks at the NBC are not equally recipients of the mis-governance that has become ten a dime in the polity. It is not that their lives have not witnessed phenomenal regression since 2023. NBC’s readiness to lend itself as platform for criminalization of free speech is a pattern noticeable at the outset of authoritarianism. Some weeks ago, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) did same when it forced a youth corps member to apologize for voicing her frustration with the Nigerian economy.

The folks at the NBC are not unaware that banning Abdulkareem’s song will increase its listening audience. Like the Aj’itọ Ọba, the name of the game is grovelling by an authoritarian power inclined towards stomping on dissent. Banning of songs by artists by dictatorial governments has never worked. It makes it available to a wider spectrum of inquisitive audience whose minds cohere with the message in the banned songs.

As it is happening today with Abdulkareem’s song, in June 1976, as response to victimization by Jamaican police of smokers of cannabis and as a political push for its legalization due to its medical use, Jamaican reggae musician, Peter Tosh, released his debut studio album named Legalize It. He even predicted in an interview in 1978 that “Herb will become like cigarettes”. The Jamaican government immediately banned the album from being aired on radio or television. After its release in 1976 in America, the album appeared on the Billboard 200 album chart for two weeks and peaked at No 199. Twenty three years after, it was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, having sold more than one million copies. It was also included in the 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

For a government that wants the people to continually say Rankadede to those who purvey hunger and despondency, we need more of Eedris Abdulkareem. The letters of the acquittal of Simon Bikindi (not his actual involvement in the Rwandan genocide) show that protest music is not criminal. It is soothing to the souls of suffering people.

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Out-of-school: Group To Enroll Adolescent Mothers In Bauchi

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3 days ago

December 10, 2025

Editor

Women Child Youth Health and Education Initiative (WCY) with support from Malala Education Champion Network, have charted a way to enroll adolescent mothers to access education in Bauchi schools.

Rashida Mukaddas, the Executive Director, WCY stated this in Bauchi on Wednesday during a one-day planning and inception meeting with education stakeholders on Adolescent Mothers Education Access (AMEA) project of the organisation.

According to her, the project targeted three Local Government Areas of Bauchi, Misau and Katagum for implementation in the three years project.

She explained that all stakeholders in advancing education in the state would be engaged by the organisation to advocate for Girl-Child education.

The target, she added, was to ensure that as many as married adolescent mothers and girls were enrolled back in school in the state.

“Today marks an important step in our collective commitment to ensuring that every girl in Bauchi state, especially adolescent who are married, pregnant, or young mothers has the right, opportunity, and support to continue and complete her education.

“This project has been designed to address the real and persistent barriers that prevent too many adolescent mothers from returning to school or staying enrolled.

“It is to address the barriers preventing adolescent mothers from continuing and completing their education and adopting strategies that will create an enabling environment that safeguard girls’ rights to education while removing socio-cultural and economic obstacles,” said Mukaddas.

She further explained to the stakeholders that the success of the project depended on the strength of their collaboration, the alignment of their actions, and the commitments they forge toward the implementation of the project.

Also speaking, Mr Kamal Bello, the Project Officer of WCY, said that the collaboration of all the education stakeholders in the state with the organisation could ensure stronger enforcement of the Child Rights Law.

This, he said, could further ensure effective re-entry and retention policies for adolescent girls, increased community support for girls’ education and a Bauchi state where no girl was left behind because of marriage, pregnancy, or motherhood.

“It is observed that early marriage is one of the problems hindering girls’ access to education.

“This organisation is working toward ensuring that girls that have dropped out of school due to early marriage are re-enrolled back in school,” he said.

Education stakeholders present at the event included representatives from the state Ministry of Education, Justice, Budget and Economic Planning and Multilateral Coordination.

Others were representatives from International Federation of Women Lawyers, Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE), Bauchi state Agency for Mass Education, Civil Society Organization, Religious and Traditional institutions, among others.

They all welcomed and promised to support the project so as to ensure its effective implementation and achieve its set objectives in the state.

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OPINION: Fubara, Adeleke And The Survival Dance

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3 days ago

December 10, 2025

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By Israel Adebiyi

You should be aware by now that the dancing governor, Ademola Adeleke has danced his last dance in the colours of the Peoples Democratic Party. His counterpart in Rivers, Siminalayi Fubara has elected to follow some of his persecutors to the All Progressive Congress, after all “if you can’t beat them, you can join them.”
Politics in Nigeria has always been dramatic, but every now and then a pattern emerges that forces us to pause and think again about where our democracy is heading. This week on The Nation’s Pulse, that pattern is what I call the politics of survival. Two events in two different states have brought this into sharp focus. In both cases, sitting governors elected on the platform of the same party have found new homes elsewhere. Their decisions may look sudden, but they reveal deeper issues that have been growing under the surface for years.

In Rivers, Governor Siminalayi Fubara has crossed into the All Progressives Congress. In Osun, Governor Ademola Adeleke has moved to the Accord Party. These are not small shifts. These are moves by people at the top of their political careers, people who ordinarily should be the ones holding their parties together. When those at the highest levels start fleeing, it means the ground beneath them has become too shaky to stand on. It means something has broken.

A Yoruba proverb captures it perfectly: Iku to n pa oju gba eni, owe lo n pa fun ni. The death that visits your neighbour is sending you a message. The crisis that has engulfed the Peoples Democratic Party did not start today. It has been building like an untreated infection. Adeleke saw the signs early. He watched senior figures fight openly. He watched the party fail to resolve its zoning battles. He watched leaders undermine their own candidates. At some point, you begin to ask yourself a simple question: if this house collapses today, what happens to me? In Osun, where the competition between the two major parties has always been fierce, Adeleke was not going to sit back and become another casualty of a party that refused to heal itself. Survival became the most reasonable option.

His case makes sense when you consider the political temperature in Osun. This is a state where the opposition does not sleep. Every misstep is amplified. Every weakness is exploited. Adeleke has spent his time in office under constant scrutiny. Add that to the fact that the national structure of his party is wobbly, divided and uncertain about its future, and the move begins to look less like betrayal and more like self-preservation.

Rivers, however, tells a slightly different story. Fubara’s journey has been a long lesson in endurance. From the moment he emerged as governor, it became clear he was stepping into an environment loaded with expectations that had nothing to do with governance. His political godfather was not content with being a supporter. He wanted control. He wanted influence. He wanted obedience. Every decision was interpreted through the lens of loyalty. From the assembly crisis to the endless reconciliation meetings, to the barely hidden power struggles, Fubara spent more time fighting shadows than building the state he was elected to lead.

It soon became clear that he was governing through a maze of minefields. Those who should have been allies began to treat him like an accidental visitor in the Government House. The same legislators who were meant to be partners in governance suddenly became instruments of pressure. Orders came from places outside the official structure. Courtrooms turned into battlegrounds. At some point, even the national leadership of his party seemed unsure how to tame the situation. These storms did not come in seasons, they came in waves. One misunderstanding today. Another in two weeks. Another by the end of the month. Anyone watching closely could see that the governor was in a permanent state of emergency.

So when the winds started shifting again and lawmakers began to realign, those who understood the undercurrents knew exactly what was coming. Fubara knew too. A man can only take so much. After months of attacks, humiliations and attempts to cage his authority, the move to another party was not just political. It was personal. He had given the reconciliation process more chances than most would. He had swallowed more insults than any governor should. He had watched institutions bend and twist under the weight of private interests. In many ways, his defection is a declaration that he has finally chosen to protect himself.

But the bigger question is how we got here. How did two governors in two different parts of the country end up taking the same decision for different but related reasons? The answer goes back to the state of internal democracy in our parties. No party in Nigeria today fully practices the constitution it claims to follow. They have elaborate rules on paper but very loose habits in reality. They talk about fairness, but their primaries are often messy. They preach unity, but their caucuses are usually divided into rival camps. They call themselves democratic institutions, yet dissent is treated as disloyalty.

Political parties are supposed to be the engine rooms of democracy. They are the homes where ideas are debated, leaders are groomed, and future candidates are shaped. In Nigeria, they increasingly look like fighting arenas where the loudest voices drown out everyone else. When leaders ignore their own constitutions, the structure begins to crack. When factions begin to run parallel meetings, the foundation gets weaker. When decisions are forced down the throats of members, people begin making private plans for their future.

No governor wants to govern in chaos. No politician wants to be the last one standing in a sinking ship. This is why defections are becoming more common. A party that cannot manage itself cannot manage its members. And members who feel exposed will always look for safer ground.

But while these moves make sense for Adeleke and Fubara personally, the people they govern often become the ones left in confusion. Voters choose candidates partly because of party ideology, even if our ideologies are weak. They expect stability. They expect continuity. They expect that the mandate they gave will remain intact. So when a governor shifts political camp without prior consultation, the people feel blindsided. They begin to wonder whether their votes carry weight in a system where elected officials can switch platforms in the blink of an eye.

This is where the politics of survival becomes dangerous for democracy. If leaders keep prioritizing their personal safety over party stability, the system begins to lose coherence. Parties lose their identity. Elections lose their meaning. Governance becomes a game of musical chairs. Today you are here. Tomorrow you are there. Next week you may be somewhere else. The people become bystanders in a democracy that is supposed to revolve around them.

Rivers and Osun should serve as reminders that political parties need urgent restructuring. They need to rebuild trust internally. They need to enforce their constitutions consistently. They need to treat members as stakeholders, not spectators. When members feel protected, they stay. When they feel targeted, they run. This pattern will continue until parties learn the simple truth that power is not built by intimidation, but by inclusion.

There is also the question of what these defections mean for governance. When governors are dragged into endless party drama, service delivery suffers. Time that should be spent on roads, schools, hospitals, water projects and job creation ends up being spent in meetings, reconciliations and press briefings. Resources that should strengthen the state end up funding political battles. The public loses twice. First as witnesses to the drama. Then as victims of delayed or abandoned development.

In Rivers, the months of tension slowed down the government. Initiatives were stalled because the governor was busy trying to survive political ambush. In Osun, Adeleke had to juggle governance with internal fights in a crumbling party structure. Imagine what they could have achieved if they were not constantly looking over their shoulders.

Now, as both men settle into new political homes, the final question is whether these new homes will provide stability or merely temporary shelter. Nigeria’s politics teaches one consistent lesson. New alliances often come with new expectations. New platforms often come with new demands. And new godfathers often come with new conditions. Whether Adeleke and Fubara have truly found peace or simply bought time is something only time will tell.

But as citizens, what we must insist on is simple. The politics of survival should not become the politics of abandonment. Our leaders can fight for their political life, but they must not forget that they hold the people’s mandate. The hunger, poverty, insecurity and infrastructural decay that Nigerians face will not be solved by defection. It will be solved by steady leadership and functional governance.

The bigger lesson from Rivers and Osun is clear. If political parties in Nigeria continue on this path of disunity and internal sabotage, they will keep losing their brightest and most strategic figures. And if leaders keep running instead of reforming the system, then we will wake up one day to a democracy where the people are treated as an afterthought.

Governors may survive the storms. Parties may adjust to new alignments. But the people cannot keep paying the price. Nigeria deserves a democracy that works for the many, not the few. That is the real pulse of the nation.

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Human Rights Day: Stakeholders Call For More Campaigns Against GBV

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3 days ago

December 10, 2025

Editor

Panel of discussants at an event to commemorate the International Human Rights Day, 2025 on Wednesday called for more campaigns against Gender-Based Violence, adding that it must start from the family.

The panel of discussants drawn from religious and community leaders, security agents, members of the civil society community, chiefs, etc, made the call in Benin in an event organised by Justice Development & Peace Centre (JDPC), Benin, in collaboration with Women Aid Collective (WACOL) with the theme: Multilevel Dialogue for Men, Women, Youth and Critical Take holders on the Prevention and Response to Gender-Based Violence (GBV).

The stakeholders, who said causes of GBV are enormous, called for more enlightenment and education in the family, community and the religious circle.

Security agents in the panel charged members of the public to report GBV cases to security agents regardless of the sex Involved, adding: “When GBV happens, it should be reported to the appropriate quarters. It doesn’t matter if the woman or the man is the victim. GBV perpetrators should not be covered up, they must be exposed. We are there to carry out the prosecution after carrying out the necessary investigation.”

Earlier in his opening remarks, Executive Director, JDPC, Rev. Fr. Benedicta Onwugbenu, lamented that (GBV) remains the most prevalent in the society yet hidden because of silence from victims.

According to him, GBV knows no age, gender or race, adding that “It affects people of all ages, whether man or woman, boy or girl.”

“It affects people from different backgrounds and communities, yet it remains hidden because of silence, stigma, and fear. Victims of GBV are suffering in silence.”

On her part, Programme Director, WACOL, Mrs. Francisca Nweke, who said “women are more affected, and that is why we are emphasising on them,” stressed “we are empowering Christian women and women leaders of culture for prevention and response to Gender-Based Violence in Nigeria through the strengthening of grassroots organisations.”