Most Unfortunate Murder of Security Personnel

by Eze Eluchie

To any discerning mind, the news that not 10, not 20, not 40 but over 100 security personnel, inclusive of over 80 specially trained police men, and officers of the State Security Service and Civil Defense operatives were killed in a single operation by a little known rag-tag rural cult group comprised of an admixture of subsistence farmers, fishermen and their apprentices, sounds preposterous, incredulous, like the stuff tales are made of. Not so when you factor in that this is Nigeria. After all, we are the country where the preposterous acquires reason and the incredulous becomes credible.

The pristine, evergreen luscious landscape of Alakyo community in Nasarawa State (north-central Nigeria) in the night of Tuesday 7th May 2013, became the latest waterloo of Nigeria’s (in)security agencies . Over 100 fully armed officers and men from various security outfits, had stormed Alakyo under what had been planned as a clandestine operation to ostensibly arrest a feeble old man who serves as head of an indigenous cult group (Ombatse) – as it turned out, some persons who were suspicious and adverse to security agency operations in the area got wind of the ‘clandestine’ operation, and confronted the huge security convoy of more than 10-truck loads of personnel, resulting in the huge wastage of human lives and destruction of security apparatus.

Media failure

by Eze Eluchie

Like every other institution of the Nigerian contraption, our media is failing us.

If the issue had been to get journalists who will tag along with a Presidential or Ministerial or other governmental delegation on an international trip, there would have been no shortage of journalists willing to join the entourage.

Now that a segment of the Nigerian State has been cordoned off and being ruled under ‘Emergency Rule’, there is near total blanket of information on happenings in Bornu, Yobe and Adamawa States. There is simply no information coming out, save for the terse briefings from the Military High Command, on what the military wants us to know.

At last, he's awake!

by Eze Eluchie

A close scrutiny of the powers vested in the President of Nigeria will reveal that the occupant of that office is by a wide margin, the most powerful ‘elected’ political office holder on earth. Barack Obama, Putin, Cameron and other elected political leaders can only dream of the powers Nigerian laws vests in the Nigerian President – short of an ability to declare a man as a woman and vice versa, there is scarcely anything that the Nigerian President is unable to do (within Nigeria) once he sets his mind to it.

Such powers, in the hands of a morally bankrupt personality can be turned into a tool for victimization, retrogression and monumental fraud and evil – as experienced during Nigeria’s ‘reign of evil’ (May 29^th 1999 – May 28^th 2007). On the converse side, if the same powers are handled by a person with his country at heart, the positive results could be beyond all known indices for measuring national development.