BRITISH CONSPIRACY...PART THREE.

Shola Adebowale

The Concluding Part ‘The three Regions of Nigeria already had a measure of independence and were in effect federal states. The 1956 elections would be the final regional elections before Independence and the major political parties were preparing massive campaigns. The Minister of Labour, whose constituency in the mid-west returned a member to the Western parliament, was campaigning heavily for his party’s candidate. Okotie Eboh was a major figure in the N.C.N.C., Zik’s party, because he was also Party Treasurer.’ In Foggon’ s absence, Francis Nwokedi was running the Labour Department with Peter Cook, while Harold, a ‘mere’ Labour Officer, was charged by the Commissioner to ‘keep an eye on things.’ At this juncture the order arrived which was to change Harold’s life. It had come through the chain of command headed by the Governor General and was addressed to Harold personally. The order directed Harold to arrange for all Nigerian staff of the Department and all departmental vehicles to proceed to the Minister’s constituency for the duration of the election campaign to work under the Minister’s orders and to get his candidate elected. This was a covert operation and a cover story was needed. Harold was to devise a survey of migrant labour covering the Minister’s constituency. Harold’s reply was brief. ‘No,’ he wrote on the minute sheet. ‘This would be a criminal act.’ He was immediately ordered to leave the head office of the Department and take over the Lagos office at Alakoro. ‘I was preparing my resignation from the Colonial Service when Vic Beck came to see me. He had brought an apology from Francis Nwokedi. It had all been a dreadful mistake. I was flattered by Francis’s message. I liked him very much. I went along with what he wanted and agreed to return to the central office and my desk. It was the wrong move really. I should have resigned. Strangely perhaps, I thought George Foggon would approve of my action. I had played it by the book!’ Nwokedi was only acting on the Governor General’s orders to prevent him resigning and creating a fuss. Harold’s masters were much more clever than he was in foreseeing his moves and forestalling them. While still awaiting Foggon’s return from leave, Harold was approached by Vic Beck again. Apparently, when Harold had refused to get involved in the covert election plan, the orders had passed to Major Charles Bunker, a Senior Labour Officer. It was unclear whether he had carried them out. Bunker had been ordered to put severe pressure on British and foreign firms, such as Shell and BP, to make donations to the N.C.N.C.’s election funds (the Party happened to be bankrupt at the time). ‘Threats of official harassment by the Labour Department’s Inspectors were to be made against firms who refused to pay up. In addition fleets of cars with loudspeakers were to be obtained either free or at greatly reduced prices and free or cheap petrol to run them.’ Vic Beck and Charles Bunker went to see Harold to discuss what could be done. “You’re not going to carry out these orders, Charles, surely?” Harold asked. But it was already too late. Charles replied, “I’ve done it.” ‘The British Government was taking credit for its liberal policies in moving towards Independence and the honest and fair handover of power to the new democratically elected leaders of Nigeria. Yet here was chicanery and cynical interference in the electoral process beyond belief. The thrust of the British Government’s policy was against the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo which ruled in the Western Region. Not only was the British Government working hand in glove with the North which was a puppet state favoured and controlled by the British administration, but it was colluding through Okotie Eboh with Dr Azikiwe - Zik- the leader of the largely Igbo N.C.N.C. which ruled in the East. The actual orders which were clearly a criminal breach of Nigeria’s own electoral laws, as well as being a gross betrayal of trust by the British who were supposed to embody the notion of even handedness, fair play and honesty, had come through Francis Nwokedi, the acting head of the Labour Department, and Peter Cook, the Deputy Commissioner, both close friends of Dr Azikiwe. And Okotie Eboh, the Minister of Labour, was Dr Azikiwe’s Party Treasurer.’ The British loved the largely illiterate and backward North and had arranged for fifty percent of the votes to be controlled by the Northern party, the N.P.C., which was largely a creation of the British and hardly a normal political party in the accepted sense. It was funded by the British controlled Native Authorities and was quite simply a tool of the British administration (it was also supposed to receive funds from the multi-nationals, channelled through British officials).  Because of this, Independence was to some extent a sham because the results were a foregone conclusion. The North and the British would continue to rule. However, it was still possible that the two advanced and educated Southern parties would unite against the North, so it was necessary to keep them apart. Divide and rule, the old British device for creating conflict, was employed in its most brazen and cynical form to keep the Igbos and Yorubas from working together in Nigeria. British policy was to encourage tribal rule in the East and West by discouraging the creation of new states which would have broken up these two power groups. Of particular importance was the need for the N.P.C, in the North to go unchallenged. And it was made quite clear to the leaders in the South that the British would not tolerate more than token electioneering against the British-favoured N.P.C. in the North. There may well have been tacit agreements between the British and the leaders of the West and East. There was certainly anger from the British when the Action Group in the West was seen to be planning a major election campaign in the North.’ ‘What was obvious from the orders coming out of Government House in 1956 was that Zik was working with the British and the N.P.C. in the North against the Action Group in the West. The Northerners disliked all the Southerners, East or West, as being too clever by half, a view shared by the British administration. In many respects in the North it was difficult to detect where the British administration ended and Northern rule began.  The sickening sycophancy of the Northern leaders towards the British and the equally nauseating and patronising contempt (disguised as admiration) displayed by the British to Northern leaders, horrified educated Nigerians. But Southern politicians were needed to work with the North so as to ensure total domination by the North. Festus Okotie Eboh was the ideal candidate to become the lynchpin of this pact between the North and Zik’s N.C.N.C. which ruled in the East. Okotie Eboh was from the mid-West, so was not too close to the Igbo in the East, although he was Party Treasurer of the Eastern Party. Although from the mid-West, he was not a Yoruba but an Itsikeri, so he could be relied on to be hostile to the Yoruba-dominated Action Group in the West. As Party Treasurer, he held a powerful position so long as he could raise funds for the N.C.N.C. But the N.C.N.C. was bankrupt. To strengthen Okotie Eboh’s position, it was essential that he should be able to raise funds. The British then set about helping their stooge to do this. Okotie Eboh had to sell a policy of collaboration with the North to the N.C.N.C and to Dr Azikiwe in particular. The Minister of Labour was a cynical party hack intent on becoming rich very quickly. Already in the late 1950’s he was a byword for corruption. Okotie Eboh was not a nationalist and in no sense an idealist. He was a large, fat, cheerful crook and he was much loved by George Foggon and the Governor General, perhaps because he conformed to a stereotype which confirmed their low opinion of Africans in general.’ Zik had a reputation for devious behaviour which was well deserved, but he had learned from masters of deceit. The British used every possible stratagem to defeat Zik and there was no intelligence technique that was not employed against him. His telephone was tapped; his mail opened, or even destroyed, routinely. Plots and dirty tricks were used; conspiracies and sabotage encouraged. That Zik survived this barrage of assaults by a determined enemy is a tribute to the skill of the old fox. Sadly, he did not survive unscathed. By 1956 Zik was caged. Suddenly he was a damp squib on the political scene. His trips to Northern leaders were not those of a major politician seeking alliances but a defeated, burnt-out leader begging for scraps.’ A warning shot had been fired by the Governor General over Dr Azikiwe’s bows, with an investigation - based on secret police reports - of his African Continental Bank and the Eastern Region Finance Corporation which had been financing the N.C.N.C. ‘Very serious malpractice was revealed as also was the fact that Zik’s business affairs were in a mess and he was practically bankrupt. There was no question of Zik financing his party’s election campaign. The charges were allowed to lie on the table, and although Zik could very easily have been dismissed from public office, as Adelabu was in very similar circumstances, no action was taken by the British which would perhaps have put Dr Azikiwe behind bars, a fate he had always shown considerable ingenuity in avoiding, unlike other nationalist leaders. The Bank enquiry not only served as a warning to Zik, it made it impossible for the Eastern Regional Government, which was under the spotlight, to divert funds to finance its party, the N.C.N.C. That the North and the West used public funds to finance their parties was no secret to anybody in the British administration.’ Quite how much moneywas used is not known, but it is a fact that the N.C.N.C. spent £1,200,000, though it only had an income between January 1957 and July 1960 of £500,000. Harold Smith estimates that at least £1 came from British companies in the years leading up to Independence. ‘The result of all this was to make Okotie Eboh a key figure and, after Zik, the most powerful leader in the N.C.N.C. It also meant that Okotie Eboh was able to influence both N.C.N.C. and Zik’s policies away from confrontation with the British and the Northerners and in favour of collaboration and a cynical display of horse dealing which would make the 1959 Federal election a mockery, because the outcome - Northern domination of Nigeria after Independence - was assured before a single vote was cast in that election.’ ‘The group of Ministers which gathered round Okotie Eboh was known as the ‘lkoyi clique’ because they lived in the largely European suburb of Ikoyi. A close ally of Okotie Eboh was T.O.S. Benson, the Minister of Information. His offices were next to the Labour Department on the Ikoyi Road. ‘The roar of anger from Government House at our audacity in questioning His Excellency’s orders at least made it quite clear that the orders was official and not some freakish forgery.’ At this Beck and Bunker put their heads together and decided to pin the blame on Harold Smith. ‘I had persuaded them into this foolish action against their will. After all Bunker had carried out his orders! And Beck made it quite clear he would be perfectly happy to do anything he was told. To make sure he really was pliable, Beck was posted to the North where he happily applied himself to hush-hush political duties.’ Harold Smith had, in the past, volunteered to help in elections in Lagos; he had also volunteered for everything else which came his way.  However, he wanted nothing to do with the 1956 election in the West and made his views known. Foggon retaliated immediately by informing him that he had volunteered to take part. Smith told Foggon that he was misinformed. The next he heard of this was a remarkable letter from Sir Ralph Grey, the Chief Secretary, informing him that he had been recommended for immediate dismissal by the Commissioner of Labour for willfully refusing to obey orders to volunteer to help in the elections. The world around him was in a state of chaos. ‘The seventeen stone Governor General of the most populous British colony in Africa, in his white uniform and plumed hat, while posing as a liberal to visiting V.I.P.’s, was secretly rigging elections and destroying the very foundations of democracy in the new state which outwardly would be the fifth largest democracy in the world. Sir James Robertson, not content with that, was urging his newly elected Ministers to loot and pillage the State and make Nigeria’s first great nationalist political party, the N.C.N.C. almost totally dependent for funds on levies and bribes from British and other multinational firms which already had a powerful grip on Nigeria’s economy.’ By the mid-1950’s, when Harold Smith’s wife became the Personal Secretary to the General Manager of BP (West Africa), Shell BP and Exploration were becoming aware that Nigeria possessed vast oil supplies. The Foreign Office knew what had to be done and it was done quickly and efficiently. ‘Our oil’ had to be placed in ‘safe hands’ at Independence. George Foggon then attempted to have Harold kicked out of the Colonial Service on a trumped up charge, which Sir Ralph Grey scornfully rejected. Harold continued to work flat out on his several combined schedules of work to the last day of his two- year tour in Lagos and his return to London. Harold had gone to Nigeria on a contract which was renewable. ‘However, I had made it clear that I was not returning. It was not my intention to have any further contact with the Colonial Office.’ Edgar Parry had made it abundantly clear that he was fully informed on events in Lagos when Harold was first appointed. The election rigging could not have been carried out without the approval of Whitehall. ‘However, it was my very success in finding a new job which put me in touch. Learning I had returned to the U.K., a friend working with a market research firm asked if I would like to work with them.’ The firm had taken on an assignment for the U.S. Government. The State Department wanted to know the reactions of leading British political figures to U.S. foreign policy. ‘This seemed an extremely interesting proposition. Considerations were in my mind. Was the proposed employment strictly above board politically, or was it some kind of semi- intelligence, C.I.A. operation? Barltrop was shaken. “How could you possibly wish to work for a foreign power?” he asked Smith. Barltrop made the Americans sound like the enemy. Was this a reaction to Suez? He insisted Harold must return to Lagos. ‘I had a brilliant career and rapid promotion to look forward to. I would be throwing away the brilliant start I had made. I chose my words carefully. “Mr Barltrop, the Labour Department was and still is a shambles. It is also corrupt. The Colonial Government is busy rigging the so-called democratic elections to decide who is going to take over at Independence.” Harold Smith turned down the State Department job and also declined an offer to work for the T.U.C. ‘I could pick and choose from many offers. There was an interesting job going at Esso as Personnel Officer. It was a well paid job and I liked the people who interviewed me. The job was mine if I wanted it.’ Soon after, however, Esso received a secret letter from Whitehall saying that their new Personnel Officer was totally unsuitable for any kind of responsible employment in a senior capacity. He was disruptive, uncooperative and disloyal. ‘Somebody is trying to destroy you,’ Smith was told by a friend at Esso. Esso will not want to upset Whitehall, however unjustified this is. Harold telephoned Barltrop at the Colonial Office. ‘Mr. Barltrop was dead. He had had a heart attack. Had I caused this by forcing him to lift the lid on the atrocities in Lagos? A Mr Foggon had recently taken over as Labour Advisor to the Secretary of State.’ Foggon’s first act had been to try to get Smith sacked but he had been overruled. He then supplied Esso with a terrible reference on Smith. ‘The bastard wants you dead. You must have a lot on him’, his friend at Esso told Smith. Foggon was rewarded by Whitehall with a C.M.G. ‘With the assistance of these Whitehall officials who had been astounded at my story of cynical election rigging, I returned to Nigeria for the second time in 1958. My story had been checked out and found to be true by these officials. All they could do, however, was to return me to active service, and this they did. At the same time, I knew they were removing a source of considerable political embarrassment for the Government. From Whitehall’s point of view, the Governor General had brought this clandestine operation close to disaster.’ ‘Lagos was changing. Young American college boys were driving and cycling around Lagos and they did not all belong to the C.I.A. Journalists and writers, anthropologists and sociologists, were wandering around the back alleys. Carol took up her old job at British Petroleum and we could pay our bills. Okotie Eboh’s name had become synonymous with corruption in Lagos. During our stay in London, Carol had called on a friend in the City who specialised in unusual deals. Carol had worked for him on leaving University. “You’ll know Okotie Eboh then, Carol, Festering Sam. I’ve been moving his money through London to Swiss accounts. He’s minting it!”’ Harold Smith found that little had changed. ‘The whole of the SIS, MIS and Nigerian Special Branch and related agencies were deployed during the independence elections to make sure that “our boys” won. The covert plan, which succeeded, was to deny the leadership of Nigeria to the two eminent nationalists, Dr Azikiwe (Zik) and Chief Awolowo (Awo), who ruled respectively in the East and the West.’ ‘Dr Zik was robbed by the British at Independence of the power that he had fought for. If it seemed that in the election of 1959 it was his fellow nationalist, Awolowo, who was targeted by the British - as he was- it was only because Zik had been set up and neutralised three years earlier. Zik was nobbled by the Bank Enquiry of 1956, which simply sprang a trap elaborately prepared by British intelligence.’ In 1962, having clipped Awo’s wings in the 1959 election, the same trick was pulled on Awo by the Coker Commission, as had been used on Zik six years earlier. The Senior Resident in the West, as he told Smith in 1960, had for years had a safe full of evidence against Awo. ‘The timing was crucial. Nipping an offence in the bud can lead to a minor breach being corrected. Left to develop into a major misdemeanour and tragically times, the same office can be devastating.’ ‘Zik and Awo, were thought to be fiercely anti-British, which was nonsense, but compared to the feudal backward Northerners headed by Balewa, to whom we handed power on a plate, they must have seemed wildly rebellious. Balewa was a smoothie and a creep who was happy to have the elections rigged for him. He was surrounded by British advisors and quite simply did as he was told. Zik and Awo were liberals, or right-wing labour and both were bookish and very Fabian like.’ ‘If the Brits select a friend they are very good to him and will overlook every weakness, failing or blemish, so long as it does not affect the central performance.  Balewa was a party to the rigging of the North’s population statistics and did his best in his off-duty hours to increase the Northern population in a catch-up exercise He was known to have at least nineteen children. He had several wives and many casual partners. The British approved of his crusade and laid on a supply of very young girls when he was in Lagos and had no access to his usual suppliers. In 1960 Balewa was Nigeria’s Prime Minister.’ Harold Smith was still concerned by the campaign and the part played by the British and made his views known to those who were prepared to listen. There followed an unpleasant meeting with the Governor General, Sir James Robertson.  ‘This was very unhappy experience, as I was subjected to continual threats and bluster in an effort to obtain my silence. When it became clear that I would not be bullied the tactics changed and soft words were used and rapid promotion offered, all to no avail. Even at that stage, I still hoped that somehow I had got it wrong, that the whole squalid mess was some awful mistake, but it seemed Sir James read my mind because his opening remarks dashed any remaining hopes I had. “I want to make it absolutely clear at the outset,” he said, “that I issued the orders you will not accept.”’ ‘The Governor General admitted that he had known the result of the election before a vote had been cast. Many senior British staff had taken part in the election rigging some of which was complex, ingenious and deeply laid. He went on to lay responsibility for the whole thing on the ‘wallahs’ in Whitehall and on Harold Macmillan, the then Prime Minister. He stated that this whole covert operation had involved many senior British officers and I was the only one to protest. “Your position as a senior officer is exactly the same as if you were in the army,” he proclaimed. Harold Smith was then offered, on condition that he gave his word never to reveal the election rigging, ‘a brilliant career ahead of you’ in the Colonial Service. He would not, however, be allowed to work in the UK. If he did not agree, he would never work again, later qualified to ‘in a responsible position ever again’. Means would be found to silence him. Smith felt that he had no alternative but to return to the UK in disgrace. Before he left, Smith was warned by an M15 officer to get out of Nigeria before they killed him. They’ were M16’. The Colonial Service had been M15’s territory but as Independence loomed, the Foreign Office boys from the Sudan took over the positions and M16 moved in with them. More planning went into covert action before Independence than into training people to take over from the Brits. The con was to get “our boys” - pliable, corrupt Nigerians - into key positions.’  When Harold Smith later discovered that Porton Down had a nerve gas station in Nigeria and that poisons had been developed which mimicked tropical diseases, he began to wonder what lengths the intelligence services might go to silence him. From 1960 until 1972 he suffered the sever wasting of coeliac sprue and then the maddening itch of dermatitis herpetiformis, followed by the awful effects of the leprosy drug Dapsone which was meant to cure it. His medical records covering twelve years also mysteriously disappeared. Back in London: ‘For months I frantically tried to alert government circles to what was happening in Lagos. I spoke to eminent lawyers, top civil servants and was in touch with the Prime Minister’s son-in-law, Julian Amery, who was Minister at the Colonial Office. Everyone was incredulous as what I told them. The Permanent Under Secretary at the Colonial Office told Amery I had never served in Africa and that I was mad. When Amery, who was very perturbed, persisted, he was told it was a mistake. Of course they knew who I was but sadly a fire had destroyed all my papers. Only a file cover with my name on it had survived.’ There followed thirty years of media indifference, evidence of telephone tapping and the kind of official obstruction familiar to ‘dissidents’ such as Cohn Wallace and others. ‘The public relations job is not confined to some historians. As an administrator, I drafted and edited many reports which gave a rosy picture of the Labour Department and its work. My aim was to present my Department as efficient and hard-working in an effort to encourage it to be like that, and anyway I would not have been allowed to write the depressing ‘truth’ emphasising all the faults and negative aspects. Henry Bretton, an American scholar, realised all this in 1962 when he wrote that most articles and books on Nigeria did not shed light on its problems. The majority paraphrased official reports written by bureaucrats (like myself) “whose purpose it is to conceal rather than to reveal. Bretton goes on to say that for this reason no real insights should be expected from studies based on official reports of elections in Nigeria. Bretton was very perceptive. If the ‘official’ story, history or report is not the whole truth, how can one find out what really happened?  For the officials who know the secrets risk their jobs, promotion and pension rights if they reveal those dark secrets. Where law breaking is concerned it is my personal belief that the civil servant’s true loyalty must be to the electorate and not to criminals who happen to be civil servants or politicians. In the United States civil servants are positively encouraged and ordered to blow the whistle on criminal activity. In Britain the establishment regards the public, the taxpayers who pay their salaries, as the enemy who must not be allowed access to secrets, for the simple reason that if they knew what was going on they would put a stop to it.’ ‘The official story, that the British handed sovereign power in Nigeria over to a democratically elected group of party leaders was written and stage managed by officials. The true story must not be revealed to the public. Keeping these two scenarios going was no problem for the experienced bureaucrat. Even what appeared to be an absolute truth, the granting of Independence in October 1960 is not as well founded as it appears.’ ‘The Regions already had considerable powers of self-government and became independent in 1957. British influence and power continued unchecked in the most vital areas of Government after October 1960, and to some extent, so successful have British policy and the machinations of British Governments been, even to the present day. A secret defence pact, which Nigeria’s leaders had to agree to sign before Independence was granted, is but one small example. As the elections were not fair and above board, the legitimacy of the Government was doubtful. The British Government determined beforehand to whom it would be handing the keys of the Nigerian kingdom. They were the rulers of the North, who had been long favoured by the British. When the British invaded the Moslem North and realised that a stable, feudal and authoritarian system of government was already in place, they decided to rule through the Emirs. This system of indirect government which has probably always been the stock-in-trade of conquering powers became almost a religion or a fetish and attempts were also made to apply it in Southern Nigeria with disastrous results. The basic idea was that the Northern rulers could do as they pleased so long as they did not offend the British. The restrictions placed on the Emirs were not arduous and so long as taxes were collected and there was no disorderly behaviour, the Emirs not only had a free hand but were assisted by British administrators and, if necessary, by the force of the British army. Missionaries were disliked by the British and only allowed into very restricted areas. As the Northern Region covered most of the area of Nigeria and arguably the majority of Nigeria’s population, only a minority of Nigerians had access to the civilising influence and the schools, hospitals and Christian message of the missionaries. ‘Sir Alan Burns, an acting Governor of Nigeria and historian, asked after Independence what British rule had done for the Nigerian people. He said the chiefs had little to complain of, their positions were assured and their incomes more certain. As for the common people, no attempt was made to force upon them “all of the doubtful advantages of modern civilisation.” Dr. Robert Collis was also in Nigeria at that time. He wrote, ‘The children of Nigeria are suffering unbelievably. I have seen nothing like it since Belsen. Death and pain stalk beside them. Out of every two born one must die... often suffering the greatest agony as they go.”’ After Independence, Okotie Eboh’s opportunities for corruption greatly increased and were one of the main causes of the military coup which took place on 15 January 1966. He was dragged from his ministerial palace and gunned down. His body, riddled with bullets, was thrown into the jungle outside Lagos. In the Civil War which followed up to one million Nigerians lost their lives. Read more-BRITISH CONSPIRACY by Harold Smith;*Lobster 1993 (Editor: Robin Ramsay),The Covert Origins of the Biafran War.Lobster 1994 (Editor: Stephen Dorril) ),  Nigeria Election Rigging and Dirty Tricks .‘New African’  (Editor: Baffour Ankomah) , May 2005: How the British Undermined Democracy in Africa. “You know, Mr Smith, they have treated you like an African”.A Lesson to African Journalists . November 2008: A Squalid End to Empire. ADDEDUM For anyone who still nurse an unholy-utopian-(hope) as per the enigma called -Nigeria, all the above articles by Smith  are worthy of the penny spent on it ,not to talk of  the sweats of the last (sincere, bold  and ) honest Brit alive. The British governments thru several of its apparatus have refused to allow Mr. Smith’s works to see the light of day, all attempts by him to publish all these secrets in a ‘book form’ had been frustrated. However, it is obvious from the little that have surfaced that the Zik/Awo imbroglio and the subsequent East/West divide or the eventual acrimony in the south, was master minded by the British in what Smith termed ‘Divide and rule’ to keep the North perpetually in power. And then, the civil war came, the same British turned the other eyes as millions of civilians (not combatant soldiers) were hacked down by Russian’s Il-28 BEAGLE (ILYUSHIN), one of the most brutal weapons of mass destruction known to man by the mid 20th century. Yet such people could run and run after a small ‘devil’ of Idi Amin, or Saddam and weep more than the bereaved over Rwanda. In other clime, it is the little man of Zimbabwe that is being given all sorts of doggy names so as to banish him for all eternity into a political Siberia. The gruesome murder of almost all the first generation leaders on January 15th and the subsequent 'revenge mission (apology to Danjuma), the bitter acrimony and suspicion among the various ethnic groupings, the North/South dichotomy and the unending bitter dialogues that continue to bedeviled the nation till date, could all be traced back to this singular act of history perpetuated shamelessly by an unrepentant world power. The oil concessions, given to the multinationals during the civil war via the dictate of the British as an instrument of blackmail to support Nigeria against a determined foe known as ‘Biafrans’, still hunt the nation and its people till date. Going by the statement of Tafawa Balewa, Awolowo, Ojukwu etc  quoted initially -is the appendage ‘Nigeria’ or ‘Nigerians’ not an illegal one ? Is that not the reason (why) a 50 year ol’ man in few days is still a baby …? Is that not why the nation has all its best brains living outside its shores, a sparkling, living glory of other nations that appreciate their acts and arts..? Is that not the reason (why) nothing works and princes are banished from the palaces, while ‘area boys’,’ area fathers’ and ‘abokis’ live in palatial palaces? And corruption is like an endemic and pathological second nature to every one called or named Nigerian.  'ex turpi causa oritur non actio': any legal action arising from illegal action is also illegal.  One day the people shall be bold enough to stand on their feet and speak out!!!!!!!! Then, they will need no more Ganis, Asaris, Soyinkas, Bola Iges, Tunde Bakares of this world to ginger them to stand ....”