FROM THE DESK OF CHIEF PROF. EPIPHANY AZINGE, PRESIDENT GENERAL, ASABA DEVELOPMENT UNION WORLD WIDE (A.D.U W-W)

FROM THE DESK OF CHIEF PROF. EPIPHANY AZINGE, PRESIDENT GENERAL, ASABA DEVELOPMENT UNION WORLD WIDE (A.D.U W-W)

Good afternoon.

Ahaba Igwe Igwe nu.

Happy Sunday to everyone.

I am obligated to speak on behalf of Asaba Development Union World Wide on this day.

Firstly to thank Asaba people all over the world for your magnanimity, generosity and clear demonstration of our common humanity.

You have reinforced my confidence in our people and your capacity to rise up to challenges, I Thank you all.

How many times have I been drawn to tears as you inundate us with donations all over the world.

The donation yesterday from New York moved me to tears again.

Who does not know what is going on in New York?

Yet you spared your thoughts for your Kiths and kins in Asaba, God bless you all, God guide and guard us throughout this perilous time.

Yesterday, our outstanding Committee informed me that they have formally ended their assignment.

While I expect their official report which I promise to disclose publicly to all, May I on behalf of Asaba thank them for the sacrifices made in the service of our people. Again I pay public tribute to them for their selflessness and their love of our motherland.

When this story is told in years to come, we will remember them with love and fondness and history will be very kind to them.

I am impressed with the appreciation from stranger elements in Asaba. It has been effusive and gratifying. So also the appreciation of AHABA people of all stations in Life.

We drew a lot of strength from these and are emboldened to serve our people with all our strength and all our hearts.

We are certainly not infallible and must have made mistakes unknowingly, please find it in your hearts to forgive us.

We are human after all and susceptible to human frailties. We will learn from our mistakes and improve in the days ahead.
                                                         
Recall that we initially send 8 million naira to the committee for both the Vulnerable groups and the Ebos. This was followed with 3.5millon Naira for hand sanitizers, facemasks, Okwulagwes , Umuada Ntas , other Vulnerable groups earlier omitted and of course, the non-natives of Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Igalla, Calabar/Ogoja, Ijaw, Ischekiri, Ndokwa, IkA, Isoko, Urhobo among others.

The church, orphanages and old people’s home were not overlooked either.

I am mindful of the fact that the money available would not suffice and considering that we have difficulty transferring money from Abuja, we gave a verbal undertaking for the committee to incur expenditure on our behalf.

They have forwarded  a statement to the effect that incurred additional expenses of N896, 500 .

As at now we have a balance of N3,765, 811.

By the time Abuja opens up tomorrow after the May1st public holidays, we will transfer N896,500 to the committee and our balance after all expenses will be N2,869.311.

We are now confronted with the challenge of how best to proceed.

Perhaps, we may tarry a while and observe whether there is need to intervene in the near future.

Second is to seek approval of late donors to channel their donation to other public interest requirements in Asaba.

Example is a crying need to drill a borehole in Umuagu.

We certainly cannot touch the donations for foodbank unless we are authorized so to do.

All said, we are happy that through Your instrumentality, we made intervention when it was most auspicious to do so.

Thank you Umu AHABA.

Please Do not your back on Asaba Development Union World Wide.

We will never disappoint you.

My solemn pledge Finally, I want to thank His Royal Majesty Asagba AHABA for his support and solidarity in all we have done.

We are eternally grateful.
Nna Agu! Agu!!Agu!!!..

Long May you reign your majesty..

May God continue to bless Ani AHABA.

WPFD 2020: Salute to Courage

Media Release



Every year, 3 May is a date which celebrates the fundamental principles of press freedom; to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media  from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.

 This year, the NUJ joins the rest of the World in observing the day with the theme, "Journalism without Fear or Favour", to focus on taking action to secure independent journalism which is one of the fundamental principles of the Windhoek Declaration.

We Salute Nigerian Journalists for their courage and professionalism and call on them to sustain and improve on their professional calling.

It is worth reiterating that no democracy can grow and flourish without a vibrant independent media that will be a catalyst for good governance and rule of law. It is in this regard that today, we celebrate Nigerian Journalists for promoting independent journalism practice despite myriad of challenges.

We continue to note with disdain the issue of safety and security of Journalists in the country which have not significantly improved but rather continued to impact negatively on good journalism. It is regrettably that politicians and political office holders and agents of the state are increasingly initiating actions against Journalists which include physical assault and detention all with the sole aim of inducing fear, thus restricting quality independent practice.

We enjoin journalists on this auspicious ocassion of the 2020 World Press Freedom Day, to work assiduously towards promoting ethical journalism without fear and without any favour.

Chris Isiguzo
National President
Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ)
May 3rd, 2020

MY DADDY, MY BEST FRIEND

By Aisha Abba Kyari

On 17th April, 2020, my world came crashing down and my heart shattered into a billion pieces. Upon receiving the news of my father’s passing, I immediately felt the most excruciating pain – a pain I would not wish on my worst enemy. My biggest fear in the world had materialised.

Most people knew my dad as the Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari. As it is with many public servants, there was much more to him than the signature white kaftan and red cap by which he came to be recognised. He was a most remarkable husband to my mother (HauwaKulu), and father to myself and my three younger siblings (Nurudeen, Ibrahim, and Zainab). Completely irreplaceable.

Growing up, my dad doted over us. He was extremely protective and his role in raising us with my mother was as complimentary as it was distinct. His main focus was our education, and my mother’s was etiquette and religion! He was stern, and Ammui (as we call her) was playful. It was a perfect balance.

He was always working. My dad reminded us he worked hard so that he could give us all that we needed to excel at whatever we chose to do. And as far as I remember, my siblings and I lacked nothing; we had all we asked and more. That said, the asking part was hard! It often would come with a lecture and many questions as to why we would even ask for things. In the end, we would get what we wanted as long as a compelling case could be made for it.

He had a hard exterior but a heart of gold and a quirky sense of humour. He had zero tolerance for mediocrity: A no-nonsense man in every sense of the word. He expected excellence at all times and when it came to time, my father was Swiss-German – for him, arriving on time was arriving late. To this day, my friends always tease me about how and why I get to airport hours before a flight. It is what my daddy instilled in me.

Daddy’s biggest obsession was education. He truly invested in us the best education. In 1996, I recall as a nine-year-old when he told me that he and I would be leaving for London the next day. He didn’t say why we were going. For the first three days, he took me to three different schools to take entrance exams. I remember being so lost as to why anyone would have to go all the way to England just to take exams. I passed all three and he picked his favourite school of the three. The day my dad dropped me off at the school dormitory, all the other students and their parents were hugging, smiling, and getting settled in.

My case was different, in true daddy style, he said: “Well Ammi, you are here to study and not play. The rules in this country are different, if you fail a single class test or school exam, they will revoke your visa and send you back to Nigeria and as you know, I don’t have space for failures in my house.” He then patted me on the back and left.

As a little girl in a foreign country, I panicked but also believed him. My mum called the school the next day to check up on me and I cried and told her what he said. It didn’t help matters that I hadn’t understood what they taught me in class that day because I couldn’t understand my teachers’ accents. She reassured me that what he said was not true. Thank God for mothers!

My dad never missed a single parent-teacher meeting. Even when he had daunting schedules as chief executive of a bank, he would take the first flight out of Lagos to arrive in London for those meetings. Upon arrival, he would go to the hall to meet with my teachers. Typical of kids, we would peep into the hall to see which teachers our parents were talking to at the time and whether they looked angry or not.

My friends would always ask “Aisha why is your dad taking notes?” I really had no idea. All I know is that I was always embarrassed. He would come out, take me to a corner and run through his notes and tell me what every teacher said about me and places I needed to improve, and then he would make sure I was okay and happy.

He would get in the car and drive straight back to the airport to catch a flight back to Lagos. As busy as he was, his family was always his top priority. He made these exact efforts with my mother and every one of my siblings. That is the kind of man my dad was!

Whenever we visited relatives, my dad would call their homes several times a day to ask how we were. Many of them took offence to that as it suggested that he didn’t trust them with his children but that never stopped him from calling.

For as long as I can recall, my dad and I spoke every day of my life until the very end. No matter where anyone of us was in the world, we spoke every day. My friends would often tease me after every call: “I can’t get over how often you and your dad speak, you’re such a daddy’s girl”.

This was something I heard all my life and I was proud to be my daddy’s girl. Even with his very busy schedule as `Chief of Staff, he would make sure he came home and have dinner with us and discuss our days even if it meant him going back to the office afterward. On days that he couldn’t make it back on time, he would ALWAYS call and say, “don’t wait for me.”

My dad had almost everything that most people yearned for. Professional success, financial security – his needs were basic – and towards the end, political influence albeit nowhere near as much as many Nigerians think. But the true measure of a man particularly in the eyes of God is in his kindness, selflessness, loyalty, generosity, and humility. And with all these virtues as yardsticks, he truly was immeasurable.

I was always in awe of his intellect, his moral compass, his sense of integrity, his dedication to duty, and his honesty. My dad was a walking encyclopedia and a thesaurus. Countless times I would say to people in the middle of debates: “Hold on let me call my dad, he would know”. And I would confidently put him on the speakerphone because HE ALWAYS KNEW.

My dad’s attention to detail was next to none. I would often read texts and emails to him twice or three times over before sending them because he would first respond with corrections to any typographical or grammatical errors before responding to the actual message itself.

I have always seen myself as an extension of my father. I was his right-hand man (yes! I said man because my father raised me just as he would have if I was a man). I was the person he called when he was angry at someone, I was his PA and his friend, and he was my everything. Most of my life, just by how much I looked like him, people would see me in random places and ask if I was Abba Kyari’s daughter. As a little girl I hated it so much. I saw my mum as the most beautiful woman in the world and I desperately wanted to look like her and not him. Now, as much as I have many of her excellent attributes, I could not be more proud to look like my dad.

In spite of my dad’s busy schedule while we were growing up, he always tried to make time for family holidays. He would pick a new country for us to visit every year and even if he could only join us for just a few days, he would make sure he was there. He literally showed us the world. His favourite place to visit was the Maldives where he went with my mum for a week annually for six years. Just 10 days before they were to take their annual trip to the Maldives in 2015, he was appointed as Chief of Staff to the President. He kept postponing the trip and was never able to find the time. His time was no longer his.

My siblings and I often asked my dad what he planned to do when he was no longer Chief of Staff and without hesitation, he would say: “I’m going to Bora Bora with a suitcase full of books.”

He really looked forward to that. We would often try to convince him to take a two-week break from work and just go to Bora Bora and not wait until he was no longer Chief of Staff but we were never successful, and he never took the trip. They say Bora Bora is paradise on earth. Daddy, Insha Allah you are now in the most genuine of paradises!

My dad was first-class material. He had a Sociology degree from the University of Warwick and a Law Degree and Masters from the University of Cambridge. He later attended International Institute For Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland and Harvard Business School’s Program for Leadership Development but he didn’t flaunt them as many others do. He began his career as a journalist before moving on to a career in banking where he reached the top as the MD/CEO of United Bank For Africa (UBA). He was a thoroughbred professional and gave his best at whatever he engaged in. Most people don’t know that he had retired for ten years before taking up his appointment as Chief of Staff to the President. He saw it as his patriotic duty. Not many people reach the top of their career in the private sector, take a ten-year break and return at the top of the public sector in one lifetime. He was pretty fortunate and spectacular. Was he, really? This may sound odd but my beloved daddy couldn’t drive a car! He never learnt how to drive for a day in his entire life.

My dad was highly principled: for nearly five years as Chief of Staff, he was first to arrive and last to leave the office – seven days a week; and demanded the same from his staff. He had impeccable moral authority and the capacity to always focus on the greater public good over individual gain. Businessmen and politicians have been known to leave his office in shame or tears after having had their bribes refused. He was passionate about protecting poor Nigerians. He would say “any policy that does not benefit the vast majority of Nigerians – many of whom are poor – should not be considered a policy of government.” For example, when increases in electricity tariffs were suggested, he sat through planning meetings – weekend after weekend – to ensure tariff increases were segregated and that the poorest Nigerians were protected.

My dad was terribly misunderstood and arguably mischievously misrepresented. Even his age was never gotten right from the day he became Chief of staff till the day he died. My dad died at the age of 67. He was often mistaken for the late Brigadier Abba Kyari who was indeed in his 80’s.

At this time of mourning, I should be holding things together for my family as I know my dad would expect me to, but I have instead found myself having to defend his memory against vile and malicious comments that have left me questioning the very humanity that should unite us all in difficult times.

One of the books I found on his bookshelf by Author Chris Whipple is ‘The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.” Like a huge part of Nigeria’s 1999 constitutional democracy, the concept of the “office of the Chief of Staff to the President,” was also copied from the office of the President of the United States. A central theme of that book is that Chiefs of Staff are mostly never liked for numerous reasons: mainly due to access granted to the President and the lack of it. James A. Baker III, President Ronald Reagan’s long-serving Chief of Staff said: ‘The chief of staff usually walks around with a target painted on his front and on his back. Your job literally is to catch the javelins that are intended for the old man.’

True to that statement, my dad as Chief of Staff was an accomplished javelin catcher. But he was also much more than that. He was also a lightning conductor, bomb-proof and bullet-proof vest combined. For many Nigerians, if waves from the Atlantic Ocean claimed an inch of Victoria Island, they were sent by Abba Kyari or if a child fell off his bicycle, it was Abba Kyari!

My dad was fiercely loyal to his boss and refused to entertain “business as usual.” He wanted to do the right thing. This meant he stepped on the toes of several people and in their fightback would smear his name in the media in the hopes that he would be pushed out of their way! Clearly, they had no knowledge or any understanding of the man. He usually knew exactly from whom the attacks came but that never got in his way of pursuing what he considered to be the right path.

Like many others, I tried unsuccessfully to get him to respond to the more preposterous and spurious allegations but he never did. He refused to take on the character assassins. The only time he came close to responding was when I got personally attacked and he felt the need to defend me. You could attack him but not his family! He was ready to fight!

For clarity, my dad was more than capable of defending himself. The reason he didn’t is that it would have distracted him from his primary assignment of serving his principal and by extension, his country. His passion was to help his principal modernise Nigeria’s infrastructure and grow the agricultural sector. In his office, hanging on the wall, are large framed renderings of the Second Niger Bridge, Abuja-Kano and Lagos-Ibadan Expressways; after decades of these projects being under development, he wanted to have them finally completed. With the President’s backing, he successfully fought to revive and build 34 existing and new fertiliser blending plants all across Nigeria – except in the northeast, where he was from, due to concerns of urea (a component of fertiliser) being supplied to terrorists to be used as bombs.

My dad was a Shuwa-Arab man from Borno State and he saw far beyond religious and tribal divides. Most of his best friends were not even from the Northern part of the country nor were they Muslims. He had friends from all parts of the world and from different walks of life. His network was vast and wide; the tributes written since his passing can attest to that. He always dreamed and truly believed in one Nigeria.

In his tribute, President Muhammadu Buhari said “Mallam Abba Kyari was the very best of us” and he truly was. Geoffrey Onyema, one of my dad’s best friends said in his tribute “Nigerians will look back in years to come and see that he was truly the Best Man”. No lies there, he truly was THE BEST MAN!

When all is said and done, Daddy has only gone to meet his maker at the appointed time as we all shall. In the last two weeks, people have told me to be strong but it certainly feels like my source of strength is gone. Losing a father is hard, but having it happen on the world stage with everybody having a say and offering their opinion(some kind, others not) has been a completely different emotional rollercoaster. But I guess, he didn’t just belong to us his family. He belonged to Nigeria as well. This is something he often apologised for.

Now to my dearest daddy, although you have gone the way of all flesh ahead of the rest of us, please take this message: Ammui, Nurudeen, Ibrahim, Zainab and I will do everything in our power to live by your example and carry on your legacy for as long as we live. I love you and miss you with every atom of my being.
May Allah grant you the highest station in Jannah.

•Aisha is the eldest child of the late Mallam Abba Kyari

Murtala Mohammed: Africa has come of age

Murtala Mohammed: Africa has come of age @Extraordinary meeting of O.A.U - 1976


11 January 1976, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This speech was a response to a letter from President Gerald Ford opposing the Soviet backed M.P.L.A. which had assumed power in Angola.

The South Africans were fighting with the opposition factions to M.P.LA.

General Murtala objected to Ford siding with the South Africans, and against African self determination.

Concluding part of speech:

Mr. Chairman, when I contemplate
 evils of apartheid, my heart bleeds and I am sure the heart of every true blooded African bleeds. . .

 Rather than join hands with the forces fighting for self-determination and against racism and apartheid, the United States policy makers clearly decided that it was in the best interests of their country to maintain white supremacy and minority regimes in Africa

Africa has come of age

It’s no longer under the orbit of any extra continental power.

It should no longer take orders from any country, however powerful.

 The fortunes of Africa are in our hands to make or to mar.

For too long have we been kicked around, for too long have we been treated like adolescents who cannot discern their interests and act accordingly.

For too long has it been presumed that the African needs outside ‘experts’ to tell him who are his friends and who are his enemies.

The time has come when we should make it clear that we can decide for ourselves, that we know our own interests and how to protect those interests; that we are capable of resolving African problems without presumptuous lessons in ideological dangers which, more often than not, have no relevance for us, nor for the problem at hand.

Murtala Ramat Mohammed was killed 34 days after making this speech, OBJ became Supreme Military Head of State after his death.

General Muritala Mohammed, our late head of state, suddenly agreed to travel to Adisa Ababa in Jan, 1976 to deliver at the OAU conference, the  great Speech  Africa has come of age, written by speech writer, Amb Oluyemi Adeniji, when Murtala and Obasanjo felt the previous drafts written by other scholars was not good enough for the mood of Africa.

Amb Adeniji born in 1934, and obtained his BA hons degree in history in 1956 from the university of Ibadan; he joined the foreign service in 1960 and was in the foreign ministry in Jan 1976, when OBJ invited him to draft this speech; when General Murtala read it, he opted to go deliver it, since he liked the speech, instead of OBJ, his deputy who was billed to have gone, says Adeniji.

 Amb Adeniji died in  Nov, 2017, after a meritorious service to his country, including his stints as foreign affairs minister between, 2003-2006;and internal affairs minister, 2006-7 under OBJ.

RE-ENGINEERING OF THE HUMAN DNA

What is coming is not a vaccine.

What is coming is genetic malpractice.

1. A vaccine is a weakened or inactivated whole germ or a part of the germ. The principle is that on introduction into your body, mobile white blood cells will eat up and destroy the weak or inactive germ and then present the fragments to stationary white blood cells that will study it as a foreign particle and then produce antibodies against it. Those antibodies will circulate in the blood and bind to any cells infected by that foreign organism making it easy for mobile white blood cells to bind to the infected cell and destroy it.
This is called immunization.

2. But the technology being used to create a vaccine for corona will not bring a weakened form of the virus to you. It will bring a piece of genetic code (mRNA) which will insert itself into your cells and hijack the cells to produce antibodies or what else it is programmed to express in the same way a virus hijacks the cell to replicate itself.
But this pathway has the potential of tampering with the human being in a fundamental way.

It raises the issue of tampering with the genetic infrastructure of the human race.

3. The science of vaccines is to expose the human body to dead or inactivated particles of disease-causing organisms which the body’s immunes system uses to generate antibodies. But an insertion of genetic material directly into human cells is not vaccination.
It is human re-engineering to create a super-race of species; completely out of the natural order. It is the ultimate attempt to pirate humanity; and health is a good excuse.

4. For this reason, in 2005, the world placed a ban (moratorium) on stem cell research and any attempts at editing the human genome, in order to preserve the sanctity of the human species from genetic re-engineering. It is not as much that the technology of genetic re-engineering is bad, but that it opens a pandoras box of wild possibilities that cannot be managed. The case against it was the possibility of a biological arms race to weaponize the human genome, shifting military power to those with the best breed of X-Men.

5. Immunization by genetic re-engineering raises some troublesome questions;

a. Questions of Power & Control: If I introduce patented genetic material into my cells to beat ageing and live forever? Do I belong to myself or to the firm? Does my body belong 50% to me and 50% to the genome supplier? If so, can they decide how my body will be disposed if I choose to die? Peradventure that these cells containing the foreign genes are transmitted by sexual intercourse, am I liable to get sued for introducing foreign genes into another person? If I have received genetic therapy from Company A, can I donate blood to someone with genes from Company B without adverse reactions or legal complications?

b. Questions of Race & Identity: William Shakespeare wrote, ‘a rose by another name, is still a rose’. I ask, is a rose carrying mango genes still a rose? Or an X-rose? Am I still qualified to say I am human if my genes have been fundamentally altered? Or am I now a hybrid of some sort? Does this introduce a new class into society of pure breed vs hybrid? To add to the already fractious divisions in human society?
Let me illustrate, Monsanto produces genetically modified corn, and a farmer whose pure breed corn crop gets cross fertilized with pollen from genetically modified corn by birds migrating across the country can be sued for copyright infringement if his corn is found to contain strains of Monsanto’s modified genes. This is how the name Monsanto became a curse word among farmers all over the world, for their use of patents as legal cover to pirate natural resources.

6. Vaccines are largely ineffective for viruses that mutate often. By the time you are halfway through the population with one vaccine, another strain pops up and you need to repeat the entire process of recreating another vaccine. Imagine the public health mess. Thus, the vaccine route to health is a veritable cash cow that keeps giving milk eternally for those who hold the patents and an eternal drain on health resources for those who don’t, and cannot. The common flu virus mutates every year and so requires a new vaccine every two years. Yet every year at least 150,000 people worldwide die from the complications resulting from the common cold. Within the last two months, three strains of the coronavirus have been discovered. Does this mean that we will need a vaccine ‘update’ every three weeks? Shouldn’t we reserve scarce funds for antigenically stable diseases? Or is this the new business model to enslave humanity by mandating people to live perpetually on injections? I would rather find the nearest COVID patient and gain natural herd immunity for myself (with Chloroquine, azithromycin and zinc in hand), than subject myself to living like a Microsoft Operated system that requires software updates every two weeks.

I am a free human being, and I will choose my own destiny, therefore healthcare or any ‘care’ whatsoever cannot be by force.

7. Vaccines and medicines require at least two years of animal testing before they are deemed safe enough for trials in healthy human volunteers. Then why hasn’t this due process been followed before the current push for human trials and mandatory vaccination? Afterall we had been assured that vaccines were at least 18 months away, how come they are now ready for human testing ‘one month’ after the outbreak. Wonders shall never end. Is this preparedness or premeditation?
For a technology as controversial as genetic re-engineering, this rush to market is very suspicious and dangerous. It appears contrived to stifle the crucial debates around the ethics of genetically modified human beings and kickstart a new biological arms race where first to secure control of vast human populations by forced subscription is the new public health.

8. A lockdown for public health reasons provides the perfect excuse to stifle the debate on genetic re-engineering of human beings, and smuggle mandatory vaccination into law thus side-stepping the development of an ethical framework around the use of these technologies.
We are being played. By totalitarianism masquerading as philanthropy.

WRITER: Arinze Ekwem, a Pharmacist, from Manchester.

THE PROPOSED BILL FOR THE PROHIBITION AND CONTROL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES; AN EVIL AND SATANIC LAW INITIATED TO DESTROY CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS OF NIGERIANS, UNDER THE GUISE OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES CONTROL: AN OVERVIEW

BY SENATOR DINO MELAYE (SDM)

Nigeria, as a democratic society, is built and run on the values of civil rights and democratic principles. Consequent upon this, fundamental rights which are codified in numerous international treaties, are accepted as inalienable to every human. These rights are enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is the grundnorm of the land.

Among these fundamental human rights are; rights to life, personal liberty, freedom from degrading and inhuman treatment,  private and family life, privacy, right to acquire and own property, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, etc. These rights are held sacred and inviolable except on clearly defined occasions as provided for, by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.Thus, the courts in Nigeria, on numerous occasions, have struck down Acts of Parliament and legislation, including executive orders of government, which do violence to any of the fundamental rights provided for in the constitution.

With the above understanding, and looking at the contents and provisions of this proposed Bill, one wonders whether our lawmakers or indeed the sponsor of the said Bill, who swore to protect and uphold the constitution of Nigeria, are interested in keeping the pledge they made. A critical assessment of this Bill and the timing of it’s tabling before the green Chambers, makes one wonder what the true intention of the promoters of this Bill, and what they are truly after. Certainly, the promoters of this Bill are not interested in any sincere control or prohibition of infectious diseases in Nigeria.

The world is presently battling a virus that has devastated several nations with no officially announced cure yet. Palpable fear has been stirred up in the minds of people across the globe, by the media, about the destructive effect of this disease. It is this fear that the agents of darkness who are behind this Bill wanted to ride on, in their celerity to pass this Bill into a law. After all, it ought to be a highly sellable proposition, to present the Bill as a legal instrument that will help Nigeria fight and defeat the COVID 19 pandemic. Behind this seemingly laudable objective, is the sinister objective to subjugate Nigerians by this instrument, to forceful vaccination in respect of a disease which has no known cure yet. Why the rush in passing a bill in the middle of a pandemic which has no known cure? Why make provisions for the forceful injection of unknown vaccinations for unknown diseases in the Bill?

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PROVISIONS OF THE BILL

In the first place, apart from the first 3 sections of the Bill, which made mention of declaration by the president of Nigeria, of public health emergency, like the Covid 19, all the other over 77 sections of the Bill talk about matters and or issues that are not of any urgent public importance now. It is therefore shocking that the elected members of the  National Assembly, would break the lockdown order, with the attendant risks to themselves and their immediate family members and their various communities at large, to gather in Abuja, to surreptitiously pass the law without any input by public health workers and other stakeholders in Nigeria.


SOME STRANGE PROVISIONS OF THE BILL.

1. Section 3(8) of the Bill which empowers the DG of NCDC by himself or any officer under him or a police officer on his direction, to enter into any premises or gathering of people in an area declared by the president as  a public health restricted zone, without a warrant is clearly in breach of the right of Nigerians to freedom of assembly, right to liberty, etc. This kind of power in the hands of an overzealous police officer or NCDC official can cause serious civil unrest.

2. Section 5(3) of the Bill empowers the DG to compel any person SUSPECTED by him, of having an infectious disease, to take medical examination or test he(DG) prescribes and allow the DG to take blood or other samples from the person for purposes of public health surveillance. This, of course, is in breach of the constitutional right of every Nigerian to his privacy and right to respect of the dignity of his human person. It must be noted that this section, like the other provisions of this Bill, has nothing to do with whether there is a public health emergency or not. It is meant to be the permanent provision of the law exercisable at any time at the whims of the DG, even the minister of health. A person who refuses to allow the DG to take his samples or do the prescribed test is guilty of an offence. Sect 6 also has a similar provision. This is dangerous. Even in the developed world, testing for COVID 19 is voluntary despite the ravaging effect of the deadly virus on the health and lives of people. These Developed nations, which are by far, worst affected by this pandemic, are yet to pass any such devilish legislation as now being introduced by our own lawmakers in Nigeria.

3. Section 8 makes it obligatory for health personnel treating anybody to release to the DG, his client’s medical details and records, without any regards to the age-long norm and professional code of confidentiality between a doctor and his patient. It is a crime to refuse to release the information requested. This is against the ethics of medical practice and an infringement upon the fundamental rights of Nigerians and must also be resisted.

4. Section 13 EMPOWERS THE DG UPON MERE SUSPICION, NOT INFORMATION, that a person is infected with an infectious disease and or recovered from an infectious disease, to arrest the person and detain him for as long as he deems necessary without a warrant or court order at any isolation centre of his choice. It is an offence to resist the DG. Again this section infringes on the fundamental rights of Nigerians.

5. Section 15 of the Bill,  empowers the Minister of Health, to declare any premises whether public or private as an isolation centre and the moment this declaration is made, nobody is allowed to enter or leave the premises without the authorization of the minister. The right to property of Nigerians is thereby taken away without compensation as required by the constitution. This provision too is in conflict with constitutional provisions.

6. By section 16 of the Bill, the DG can declare any building or gathering as overcrowded and without any court order or warrant, enter the premises using such force as he deems necessary to disperse the group and may also close the building. A similar provision is in section 17. This section gives the DG unlimited powers to make such declarations any time it wills. These unlimited powers are prone to gross abuse.

7. SECT 19 empowers the DG to close any meeting or public gathering or event he considers to likely increase the spread of infectious disease without any court order.

8. Section 23 of the Bill authorizes the DG or an enforcement officer of his agency or police, to seize anybody walking on the street whom he SUSPECTS of having an infectious disease without any warrant. This also portends danger to the fundamental rights of Nigerians.

9. Section 30 of the Bill makes vaccination, for no known specific disease, compulsory if you are either leaving or arriving in Nigeria.

10. Section 47 of the Bill Empowers the DG to direct compulsory vaccination in an outbreak or a suspected outbreak.


OTHER POINTS

1. Throughout the different sections of the Bill, any failure to comply with the directives of the DG of NCDC is a criminal offence. THE ESSENCE OF THIS IS THAT THE BILL SEEKS TO TURN THE AVERAGE NIGERIAN into a Criminal on a sensitive issue of health.

2. The Bill, specifically in section 9, will make the donation of blood a very difficult issue in future,  as it criminalizes blood donation tainted with so-called misinformation or misleading information. This section is notwithstanding the fact that any blood donated by donors, is subjected to screening.

3. The Bill gave so much power to the NCDC Director -General with the attendant risk of gross abuse by the occupier of that position and the officers of NCDC.

4. The Bill fails to take into consideration the federal status of the country with the overbearing powers given to NCDC DIRECTOR -GENERAL and the Minister of Health on all issues without any form of control or checks by either the legislature or the judiciary.

5. The Power to take over the PRIVATE PROPERTY OF NIGERIANS and turn into ISOLATION CENTER in Section 15 of the Bill  at the instance of the DG and the Minister of Health in any part of the Federation is a banana peel and potential abuse of the rights of Nigerians to property and also an abuse of the powers of states government and Local Government as guaranteed under the constitution.

LASTLY, THIS LAW SAYS THAT ANYBODY WHO IS AGGRIEVED WITH ANY DECISION OF THE DG OR HIS ORDER CAN ONLY APPEAL TO THE MINISTER AND THAT THE MINISTER’S DECISION ON THE MATTER IS FINAL. THAT IS TO SAY, LIKE DECREE 4 THE JURISDICTION OF THE COURTS ARE OUSTED.

The conversation we don’t want to have about Biafra

By David Hundeyin

Ten years ago, when I was a 19 year-old fresher at the University of Hull, I met Ify. She was, at that time, probably the most beautiful girl I had ever set my eyes on. I immediately tripped, hit my head and went into an infatuation coma. Ify was the quintessential social butterfly – witty, friendly, distinctly intelligent and culturally Nigerian, with a few notable modifications like her South London accent and a slight tomboy streak.

I think my eyeballs actually turned into heart emojis everytime I saw her, and within a week of starting university, my mission in life was to get Ify to be my girlfriend. The problem was, it didn’t matter how much time and attention I dedicated to her – Ify was not interested in me. We were very good friends, but as time went on, it became clear to my great dismay that she and I as an item, was just never going to happen. Eventually, I gave up on Ify and retired to lick my metaphorical wounds, completely assured in my 19 year-old wisdom that I would never love again.

Same Country, Different Worlds

Then one day, I happened to stumble into a conversation with our larger group of Nigerian friends, about what brought their families to the UK. Unlike the others, I was not an immigrant, so as a full fee-paying international student, I was effectively not part of the conversation. Our friends with names like Timilehin and Tunde all had similar stories – born in Nigeria, parents wanted more out of life, family moved to the UK. It didn’t occur to me or anyone that Ify – normally the life of the party – was not talking.

Then Ify spoke.

She was also born in Nigeria – Kaduna to be precise, and she lived there until 2000. That year, a religious crisis broke out in the city, and the Hausa natives embarked on a frenzied pogrom of their Igbo neighbours. According to her, a Mercedes-Benz lorry filled with the dead bodies of slaughtered Igbo people was dispatched from Kaduna to Onitsha. Ify and her family had to hide from their neighbours whom they grew up with, until her dad was able to sneak them out of Kaduna and on a flight to London, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. That was her “immigrant” story.

When she finished her story, a kind of dead silence followed as our small group of 17 to 20 year-olds tried to process probably the heaviest thing our ears had ever listened to. Suddenly I understood why Ify would never be interested in me, despite seemingly sharing every interest and identity in common – we came from two different worlds. I came from a Nigeria that I spoke of with pride, based on a privileged background and a Lagos-centric worldview. She also came from Nigeria, but her Nigeria was a place of fear, darkness and dread where the kids you grew up playing hopscotch with could at a moment’s notice become your executioners for an offence none of you understood.

I remember hearing of the corpse-filled truck incident in Onitsha as an 11 year-old, but it seemed as distant to me as a bombing in Lebanon. “Kaduna” and other exotic places like that were just names I heard in the news. Listening to Ify’s story was the first time any of it felt real. It was the first time the word “Igbo” – pejoratively thrown around in Lagos as a sort of light-hearted insult took on a new meaning to me. It was the start of my struggle to engage with the word “Biafra.”

Biafra is a very dirty word

Prior to meeting Ify and a number of friends whose experience in Nigeria substantially broadened my worldview, my only knowledge of the Biafran war was a book called ‘Sozaboy’ by Ken Saro-Wiwa, which I found in the family library. The book was written from the point of view of a barely pubescent protagonist thrust into a war he did not understand, and forced to witness acts of incredible violence. He returns home at the end of the war, only to discover that his hitherto innocent sweetheart now has a child conceived through rape. Amidst all the death and carnage, this for him, is the biggest tragedy of the war. I grew up thinking of the Biafran war as this huge, avoidable playground fight between two sets of silly boys who have now learnt their lesson.

My parents – like many other Nigerian parents – hardly ever spoke about the war. Occasionally, when someone like Ralph Uwazuruike, the MASSOB leader, appeared on the news, one of them would drop a dismissive comment about “omo Ibo” and that would be that. It never occurred to me that Uwazuruike and his group were not just some asshats on the TV talking about something that happened in 19-gboboro, or that the “omo-Ibo” thing, was a term that carried a certain weight with it.

When you grow up and go to school in Lagos, you and your mates all wear the same clothes, speak only English – because your parents won’t speak their language to you at home – listen to the same music, watch the same movies and read the same books – “Igbo,” “Yoruba” and “Hausa” are just annoying subjects at school taught by frustrated teachers with anger issues. You also learn nothing about Nigerian history beyond a few vague soundbites about Herbert Macaulay, Ahmadu Bello and Obafemi Awolowo. The word “Biafra” is completely absent from your syllabus from Primary 1 through to SS3.

Even the maps on the wall of my dad’s study which had a water body called “Bight of Biafra” were later replaced with maps labeling the same body of water as “Bight of Benin.” Absolutely nobody wants to talk about Biafra, what came before, what happened next, and how it connects to our modern Nigerian reality. This goes to the heart of Nigeria’s cultural problem – a belief in using silence and hope as a strategy instead of engaging in the messy process of working out a solution. As a country and as a civilization, we believe that if we don't look at a problem hard enough, it will get tired and go away.

As we know all too well, that is never going to happen.

Civil War or Genocide? Why It Matters

Why is our awkward silence on the subject of Biafra extremely problematic? There are several reasons, but to begin with, I think it feeds into our lack of historicity, which manifests itself in our national decision making. If it was general knowledge for example, that a certain Muhammadu Buhari was involved in the so-called counter coup of 1966 – essentially a horrendous massacre of Igbo army officers that directly led to the general pogroms that started the war – even the best efforts of marketing communications agencies in Lagos back in 2015 might not have sufficed to convince Nigerian voters that he was a suitable presidential candidate for the 21st century.

But I digress.

The Nigerian civil war took place between 1966 and 1970. The Kaduna pogrom mentioned at the outset happened in 2000. What connects the two events and why is it important to break the suffocating silence and delineate what happened as a war or as a genocide as many now say? Well for one thing, it’s the same people who died in both cases – innocent civilians whose crime was being born within an ethnicity called “Igbo,” which didn’t exist 200 years ago. Assuming these “Igbos” as a group genuinely did something to warrant furious retribution – that included having their children poisoned with rations laced with rat-killer – were they again doing that something – whatever it was – in Kaduna in 2000?

Since the evidence would suggest not, that points to another motivation for the constant and continued need to massacre a specific group of unarmed civilians. Whatever that motivation is can only be identified by those who hold it – a harmless, eyeglass-wearing Lagos yuppie like myself cannot possibly answer that question. The point however, is that to begin with, “Igbos” did nothing as a group to warrant their wholesale slaughter – both before 1966 and after 1970.

If a group of five army majors, including a man named Adewale Ademoyega, carried out a coup, and the response was to slaughter Mama Nneka the rice seller in Sabon Gari market, along with her entire family and thousands of others, then the question is not “What did Mama Nneka do?” (And for the love of God, don’t say that Mama Nneka allegedly sang a song about somebody shooting somebody because if that is a capital offence, then we might as well just throw the whole country away.) The proper question is “Who felt a need to kill Mama Nneka and why?” It is a similar situation to that of a rape victim in Nigeria who is asked what she did to provoke the aggressive penis, rather than directing a question to the penis-owning rapist. Victim-blaming is a product of our toxic cultural silence – which has been fed by our 49-year silence about Nigeria’s most momentous national event.

When we ask the right questions and determine that Nigeria’s historically dreadful treatment of one of its three biggest ethnic groups is neither deserved nor justified, but is actually genocidal and irrational, then we can start making progress in our national discourse. If we admit that something is not fair, then that makes us commit to changing it. If we forever continue rationalizing stuff like this, we are merely ensuring that Nigeria will never change the record and dance to something new.

The usual saying makes it seem as if when two elephants fight, they get to walk away unscathed while the grass groans in distress. In reality, grass regrows rapidly, but the elephants sustain severe injuries when they use their tusks on each other. In Nigeria’s case, one such severe injury is the moribund, obsolete and miserable Ajaokuta steel mill. At the planning phase, consultants recommended siting the steel mill just outside Onitsha for reasons of proximity to iron ores, cutting down the need for imports.

The Nigerian elephant delivered what it thought was a huge blow to the Biafran elephant by moving the mill to Kogi state for purely political reasons. That was over 30 years ago. Today in 2019, Ajaokuta steel mill remains as unused as the day it was commissioned, but with thousands of salary earners and pensioners on its books who have sat there for decades without a single productive day’s work. Nigeria still imports every kind of steel product it needs, and the technology used at Ajaokuta is at least 20 years out of date, making Chinese steel imports cheaper than whatever it could theoretically produce today.

Oh, and guess which group of people control that import industry? Yes.

Clearly, it wasn’t only the grass that suffered.

Now let’s do a quick mental experiment. Inside your mind, picture the map of Nigeria. Shade the parts of the map where Igbo pogroms have been commonplace over the past 70 years. Now select a different mental colour and shade the parts of the map that are currently suffering from near-total breakdown of security due to violence from non-state actors. Notice how you end up shading the second colour almost exactly over the first. Precisely.

This is not because of some dead-mans-curse/karma hocus pocus. There are of course numerous political and economic factors contributing to the toxicity of such spaces which cannot be explored in this article. However, a key reason is that after decades of the Nigerian state allowing human beings to be slaughtered at the drop of a hat in those places – because said human beings are named “Chukwuka” instead of “Aliu” – the people there have internalized and normalized such violence. Long after Chukwuka and Odinanka have fled or died, the sense of total impunity and the feeling of power associated with unpunished violence remain firmly rooted in those places. Inevitably, such people turn their weapons on each other and continue acting out what they first practised on “Igbos.”

Southwestern Nigeria, which has managed by and large to restrain itself from such orgies of violence, is unsurprisingly Nigeria’s safest, wealthiest and most stable region. This is not rocket science. As Chinua Achebe eloquently put it: “We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.”

An Igbo proverb expresses this thought more starkly as “Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya,” which means: “He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”

Pain Gives Birth to Strength and Resilience

Back when I worked in Marketing, I had a boss, Ayeni Adekunle who was fond of the Yoruba proverb “Ninu ikoko dudu l’eko funfun ti’n jade,” which means “White eko comes out of a black pot.” After 49 years of painful, injurious silence about Africa’s biggest-ever genocide, the cleansing effect of finally speaking up will be a great thing. These conversations will be painful. My good friend Charles Isidi is a good person to talk to if you want to get an insight into how raw, pervasive and real the pain still is, after all these years.

I remember being gobsmacked when he informed me that he knows people whose birth certificates read “Republic of Biafra,” because they were born during the war in a country called Biafra. “Nigeria” to them, was simply this big bully next door trying to kill them for no reason – which by the way, is pretty accurate. So what do we do when confronted by stories that we don’t really want to hear, and that we don’t know what to do with?

The first thing is probably to listen. Just, listen. Really listen. Don’t interrupt with “Ehn, but you know they couldn’t have known that…” It’s not your story, and it’s not about you. Listen and let people tell their story. Nigeria is not going to fall down and die if we listen to one-third of our population telling us: “You know, dropping bombs on my daddy’s head because some guys we never met did something that had nothing to do with us in a place we never saw wasn’t really called for.” It’s a difficult conversation, but not a world-ending one.

Ultimately, the Igbo ethnic group is now probably Nigeria’s most widely-recognised and diffused ethnicity, with the vast majority still holding on to their Nigerian identity. My friend Ify whom I mentioned at the outset still identifies with Nigeria and visits from time to time. Despite all that has happened, what binds us all together is still more powerful than what sets us apart. We may have a troubled relationship across ethnic lines in Nigeria, but it can still be salvaged.

Like all troubled relationships however, the first and most important step is to have the conversation.

** Published May 31, 2019 by The Scoop

** David Hundeyin is a writer, travel addict and journalist majoring in politics, tech and finance. His work has been featured in the New Yorker Magazine and the Washington Post. Hundeyin is a US Department of State nominee for the International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP).