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OPINION: The Shuffle In Abuja [Monday Lines]

By Lasisi Olagunju
Patient walks unaided into the doctor’s consulting room. Patient soon suffers mismanagement. She goes pale and jerky, unconscious. Doctor gives his best shot – or so he claims. Patient is not responsive. Doctor strolls off, leaving the patient to sip his tea. Doctor comes back and sees worsening symptoms: Cold hands. Weak pulse. Fatigue. Incontinence. Dyspnea – respiratory distress. Restlessness. The clock ticks, and the patient’s condition deteriorates. Doctor sets up a symptom control team. Symptoms persist. Patient’s relatives accuse the doctor of incompetence and negligence. Doctor denies all charges and promises to do something. He ponders and sacks members of the symptom control team. A few other nurses also kiss the canvas. Doctor looks into anxious eyes and tells everyone that with that step he has taken, the sick should be well soon. The leader is the physician; the country they tend to is the patient.
Where vigilance tanks, a bad government is easily replaced with something worse. It is the same with team management. Where the leader is easily distracted or he distracts himself, a mortician calmly slips into the delivery team. In Ibn Butlan’s ‘Doctors’ Dinner Party’, we read of a certain gentleman who proclaims himself doctor after recovering from an illness. The story teller says: “God said to him: ‘Become a physician and destroy people! Take sick man’s money — that’s excusable — and send him to the grave.’” Doctor becomes rich, ostentatious and gilded. Author notes other things and prays: “God protect us and you from the misfortunes wrought by his hands…” A government with demonstrable lack of competence and empathy is a killer hospital. Its problem goes deeper than the names on its management list.
I refuse to join those whose drums are out because a cost-cutting president last week sacked five ministers and replaced them with seven. How is that oxymoronic step going to cure the nation of its chronic illness? I would rather seek therapeutic answers by asking why the sick fell into a coma. Was it the doctor’s fault? Or nurses’ wickedness? Or the consequence of the patient’s own life choices? Or the ailment is congenital? Or a combination of all of the above? If the fault lies with the caregivers, who then should sack whom? Who should be sacked? And, how is the sack of that someone going to correct the near-fatal error that has sent the country into this terrible distress?
Five ministers were fired last week by the big boss who hired them. I read celebratory posts from people mocking the sacked. Why should anyone be happy because someone fell from a height? People who inherited those widows danced and sharpened their teeth. The ones who lost their scepters sank into sofas of consolation: Every job must end one day either because the job takers are fired, retired or because they are hired elsewhere. Or as a consequence of death. I align with their logic. So, let no one rejoice that Tinubu asked five big men and women out of his powerhouse. Today’s hirer and the hired will also become ex one day. That is the solace of the dismissed.
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As a consequence of that cabinet reshuffle, the government scrapped the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and from its ashes has risen a humongous ministry in charge of regional development commissions. I call that new creation the ‘Ministry of Nigeria Affairs’ because virtually all regions will find rooms in its mansion. What sense does that make?
Certain big men in the Niger Delta are loudly condemning the scrapping of the Niger Delta ministry. One of them, Asari Dokubo, blames the whole of Bola Tinubu’s ethnicity for his government’s action. The agitator says in a purpose-made video that he would join forces with the North because “the Yoruba are betrayers.” Around the same time, I see the Muhammadu Buhari people loudly complaining about power outages in the North. They also throw innuendoes of the Yoruba as the cause and beneficiary of the darkness in the North. I saw all these and wondered why the angry wailers mistook the victim for the culprit. They are raining knocks on the head whereas it was the bottom that farted – Ìdí só, orí ni wón nkàn ní’kó.
Prolonged power outage is ongoing in the North. It is officially blamed on vandalism wreaked by bandits. The North can complain – and should complain if the state is failing them. But I find the Buhari people’s complaint particularly interesting – and galling. While in power, their principal was like Unoka, Okonkwo’s flute-loving father in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’. Achebe describes Unoka as a man famous “for the weakness of his machete and…hoe. When Unoka’s neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests,” the man sows his yams “on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear.” Such men, in Yorubaland, are identified with farming under the shade of palm trees. Where weeds do not grow, crops can’t do well there.
The Buhari corridor and all who egged on his regime or pressed the mute button while he was here should not insult us with complaints of lack of electricity, and should not make any demand on even the Tinubu government. I recommend to them the wisdom of Achebe’s Obiako. This character is told by an oracle: “Your dead father wants you to sacrifice a goat to him.” And, Obiako replies the oracle with indignation: “Ask my dead father if he ever had a fowl when he was alive.” Those asking for light today, was it not darkness they sowed yesterday?
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That is for the fox, our angry Unoka. And, back to the cock of this regime. Where is the light it promised? It pledged to sanitize and fumigate the nation, north to south. When is that going to be?
With this government, austerity means ostentation. It’s been churning out one regional commission after the other while wearing the lapel of a lean government. On 26 February, 2024, President Tinubu presided over a meeting of the Federal Executive Council. We were informed after that meeting that the president had ordered a full implementation of the Stephen Oronsaye report which demanded a reduction in the number of federal government agencies. In furtherance of that directive, we were told that the president had constituted a committee to effect certain agencies’ mergers, scrapping, and relocations within 12 weeks. Today is 28 October, 2024 – eight months, two days after that directive, nothing serious has been heard of that directive. Or did I miss something? Instead of doing what it announced and celebrated with pomp, what we had last week tells how the government rates our intelligence.
On June 5, 2000, despoiled Niger Delta was given a development commission as its balm of Gilead by the Olusegun Obasanjo government. Because that troubled region had that commission, insurgent-wracked North-East demanded its own from Buhari and got it in 2017. Because the North-East got it, the South-West demanded its own from Tinubu and got it last month. The South-East received its own; the North-West also has; the North-Central too – all from Tinubu. This is one government that actively sells laxative but sees nothing contradictory in its eating mountains of pounded yam. Why do we need regional development commissions? I recently asked an ègbón, an Emilokan, if he sincerely thought a South-West Development Commission would be of any usefulness to the people of the region. His response: “Create another opportunity for sleaze among Yoruba politicians and their business associates. I was fundamentally against it but aligned eventually on the basis of ‘what is good for the goose…’ If the other regions are being awarded cash cows for the boys, why not us? When Nigeria becomes serious about development, we’ll jointly scrap all such distractive wastage…” I am sure if you asked around the other regions and your subject is as truthful as mine above, you would get the same answer. Now, what kind of country is this? And what kind of government cuts costs by increasing them?
Hunger dusts up strange, dangerous ideas. People’s suffering is unremitting. If a government functions as people’s undertakers, why should the people desire it? Why do we even need a government? Because it was failing tragically, a radio station in Poland recently stopped using human beings for its operations. It sacked all its journalists and did something novel. Last week, it brought in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated presenters. The result has been magical. A Nobel Laureate who died in 2012 was made to present a popular programme on that radio station last Tuesday. The audience heard him and applauded the undead.
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Now, should we really have ministers as many as the sands of the desert? Can’t we live without the hordes of overpaid, overfed officials of the state? Or sell them to buy what eludes us? Those extreme questions you may find in every mouth that hasn’t tasted food since yesterday. And, truly, a government that fails in fulfilling its social contract with the people is not a government; it is a gang of pirates like the one led by one-eyed, one-legged Long John Silver in ‘Treasure Island’. John Silver sails under The Jolly Roger – pirates’ flag with white skull and crossbones; the ones here are at sea with our Green White Green. That is the sole difference.
The president may change his team every hour like a child’s diapers. It won’t make his government work well unless he himself sits up. He should teach himself how to enlarge his vision beyond the narrow tunnel that opens at his backyard and ends inside his dockyard. We won’t stop telling him and the other owners of today that leadership is about service. It is not about how much they have locked up in their strong rooms and how many billions they spray in arrant oppression of the poor. We will keep reminding them of life after office. And that as they rule the town, they should endeavor to rule their homes also. Collapsing state affairs into the affairs of their home endangers the wellness of all.
Basorun is the second in command to the Alaafin of Oyo. He may not be king but he rules his corner like a king. And, because power is wine, sweet and strong, it intoxicates the entire royalty. There was a Basorun Gaa in Oyo history whose sons reigned more forcefully than even the Alaafin. Samuel Johnson, author of ‘The History of the Yorubas’, records an instance: “One of them once engaged a carrier to whom he gave a load too heavy for him to carry, but he dared not refuse to do so. He walked behind the man, amusing himself with the sight of the man’s suffering from the weight of the load. He remarked in jest that the man’s neck had become so thick that he doubted whether a sword could cut through it. He suited his action to his words, drew his sword, and actually tried it! The man was decapitated. His body was left wallowing in his blood, and another man was compelled to take up the load.”
Powerful people see nothing wrong loading helpless people with super excess luggage. They call it sacrifice. They also won’t mind trying their swords on the calcified neck of the burdened- just to prove the point of their almightiness. They swim in mindless insouciance yet they deceive themselves with silly assurances of permanence. To them, every warning is a dangling, swirling sword, an act of treason. There was a king in a Yoruba kingdom who came with a name that defies death. He was Oba Maku (Maku means Don’t-die). The king launched his despotism the very day he ascended the throne. Because he was a king whose ways were not his people’s ways, the people soon skirted death around his name and turned it into a song. From street to street, loud was the echo of ‘When will Don’t-die Not die?’ I say that in Yoruba: Ìgbàwo ni Maku kò níí kú sí? The man reigned for only two months.
The impermanence of nothing is the consolation. Every era, no matter how painfully long, will eventually end. General Francisco Franco ruled over Spain from 1939 until his death on November 20, 1975. He was a dictator with a vast network of spies home and abroad. He muzzled the press and muffled the gong. Because his reign was long and very eventful, he never believed it could end. And when death was drawing his curtain he denied it was his door death was knocking. Oriol Pi-Sunyer captures that moment well in his ‘Political Humour in a Dictatorial State’ (1977). He writes: “In the final hours of his life, Franco becomes aware that a crowd is forming in the street outside his chamber. The semiconscious dictator asks an attendant what the subdued sounds are – ‘It is nothing, Excellency, just some people passing.’
As the crowd grows and the noise increases, this fiction cannot be maintained.
Franco: ‘I insist you tell me what is going on outside.’
Attendant: ‘The people, Excellency.’
Franco: ‘The people?’
Attendant: ‘Yes, the Spanish people.’
Franco: ‘What are they doing?’
Attendant: ‘The Spanish people have come to say goodbye.’
Franco: ‘Oh, where are they going?’”
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VIDEO: Why I’ve Never Tried Convincing My Christian Wife To Convert To Islam — Tinubu

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has explained why he has never attempted to convince his wife, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu, to convert to Islam, stressing his belief in love, religious freedom, and mutual respect among people of different faiths.
Speaking on Saturday at the funeral service of Nana Lydia Yilwatda, mother of the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Prof. Nentawe Yilwada, Tinubu said his marriage to a Christian pastor has never created any conflict in their home.
The president, who arrived in Jos, Plateau State around 2 p.m. for the ceremony at the COCIN headquarters church, said he inherited Islam from his family and has always upheld the principle of freedom of religion.
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He noted that both he and the First Lady serve the same God and would ultimately be answerable to Him, adding that what matters most are people’s deeds, character, and love for others.
Tinubu urged Nigerians to embrace tolerance and peaceful coexistence, emphasising that hate should never have a place in the country.
He also prayed for the repose of the soul of the late Lydia Yilwada and asked God to grant comfort and blessings to those she left behind.
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He said, “Hate is not an option for us. Love is what you preach, that we should love one another.
“Nobody, nobody determines what God has ordained. God’s ordained action and his promises are what matter. I inherited Islam from my family. I didn’t change. But my wife is a pastor. She prays for me.
“No conflict. And I never did at any single time try to convince her or convert her. I believe in the freedom of religion.
“We are praying to the same God. We are answerable to the same almighty God. We will answer to him. We will account to him. Our deeds, our character, our love for our fellow beings are what are important.
“May the almighty accept the soul of Lydia and give all that she left behind blessings and glory, so we say, may her soul rest in peace.”
News
UK Police Quiz Six After Fatal Synagogue Attack

Six people arrested on suspicion of “terrorism”-linked offences after a fatal car-ramming and knife attack on a UK synagogue remained in police custody on Saturday, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged people not to take part in pro-Palestinian protests.
Two people were killed and three others seriously wounded in Thursday’s attack in northwestern Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Police shot dead the assailant, Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old UK citizen of Syrian descent, within minutes of the alarm being raised.
Three men and three women are in custody.
The attack has heightened fear among Britain’s Jewish community.
Police said they were patrolling places of worship across the city “with a particular focus on providing a high-visibility presence within our Jewish communities”.
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The attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in north Manchester was one of the worst antisemitic incidents in Europe since the October 7, 2023, attack in Israel led by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive on the Gaza Strip has killed at least 66,288 Palestinians, also mostly civilians, according to health ministry figures in the occupied territory that the United Nations considers reliable.
The Gaza conflict has inflamed passions in Britain, with frequent pro-Palestinian rallies in cities that some critics allege have stoked antisemitism.
A “global movement for Gaza UK” protest went ahead in London late on Thursday, with police making 40 arrests.
London’s Metropolitan Police asked organisers delay another planned demonstration backing the banned Palestine Action group later on Saturday.
However, organisers Defend Our Juries rejected the calls.
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A spokesman said the group “stood in solidarity” with the Jewish community over the attack.
– Accidental shooting –
Starmer urged protesters not to join the pro-Palestinian rally.
“I urge anyone thinking about protesting this weekend to recognise and respect the grief of British Jews. This is a moment of mourning. It is not a time to stoke tension and cause further pain,” he said on X.
During the attack, Shamie was seen “with a big knife, banging his knife into the glass, trying to get through”, synagogue chairman of trustees Alan Levy, who helped barricade the doors, told ITV News.
“The heroes of the congregation who saw what was happening then came to the doors because he was trying to break the doors down to get in,” he added.
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A UK police watchdog, meanwhile, said it would look at the police shooting of Shamie.
The probe would also look at the shooting of a second victim who suffered a fatal gunshot and a third person who was shot but survived.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said there was no evidence anyone other than police used firearms at the scene.
“Our independent investigation will look at the circumstances surrounding the fatal police shooting of Jihad Al-Shamie,” it said in a statement.
“A post mortem has today (Friday) concluded another man who died at the scene suffered a fatal gunshot wound.”
IOPC investigations are standard practice in situations where the use of force by police may have resulted in the death of a member of the public.
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Edo Inaugurates Committee On Drug Abuse, Healthy Living

Edo State Government has inaugurated Drug Control Committee for the state and local governments, aimed at curbing the menace of drug abuse in the state.
Inaugurating the committee, Governor Monday Okpehbolo said the committee was not only saddled with the responsibility of curbing the menace of illicit substances, but to promote healthier living across communities in the state.
Represented by his deputy, Hon. Dennis Idahosa, Okpebholo described the initiative as “a vital step in our unwavering commitment to stopping the menace of drug trafficking and substance use among youths.”
The governor, who bemoaned the rising tide of drug dependency and its impact on society, pointed out that the committee’s creation aligns with the national drug master plan and represents a bold stride toward protecting Edo future generations.
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On his part, Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa, represented by ACGN, Fidelis Cocodia, Zonal Commander, Zone 13, emphasised grassroots interventions, awareness campaigns, and support systems as the backbone of the fight against drug abuse.
Edo State commander of the NDLEA, Mitchell Ofoyeju disclosed that while national drug use prevalence stands at 14.4 percent, Edo state surpasses the average at 15 percent.
He noted that the state is one of the hardest-hit states in the country, warning that the trend has fueled crime and heightened youth vulnerability.
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The state’s Commissioner for Health, Dr. Cyril Oshiomhole pledged to make Edo a model in drug control through rehabilitation, youth enlightenment, and second-chance opportunities for recovering addicts.
Coordinator, Office of the First Lady, Edo State, Mrs. Edesili Okpebholo Anani, described drug abuse as a pandemic, noting that “you hardly see a crime without drugs being involved.”
She added that women’s empathy and influence must be harnessed in the campaign against drug abuse.
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