Lamentation in a week of anomie

Kune gishirin duniya; Idan gishiri ya rabu da zakinsa; Da me za shi gyaru?Sai dai a yas; A tattakeshi karkashin sawun mutane Matthew 5:13-16 King James Version (KJV): Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but […]

Kune gishirin duniya; Idan gishiri ya rabu da zakinsa; Da me za shi gyaru?
Sai dai a yas; A tattakeshi karkashin sawun mutane

Matthew 5:13-16 King James Version (KJV): Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
Let’s start with TB Joshua’s collapsed guest house.
It’s typically Nigerian. A building collapsed, killing over 50 people. A crime has been committed. Someone has been negligent causing the death (untimely) of many. Let us have a professional and legal enquiry into the collapse of the Synagogue Guest House – was an aircraft in our airspace hovering over the church on that day? Is there forensic evidence of explosives etc, etc, etc. Must the President say this? What are the institutions in charge doing meanwhile? Lagos State Government, waiting till Police allow conta-mination of a crime scene that since the incident, has been swarmed over by men and bulldozers, with the invariable destruction of the evidence of what must tentatively constitute a prima facie case of corporate mass murder, or manslaughter or even both.
Then a $10m dollar shop-ping goes awry
According to a South African tabloid, a high-level investigation is under way after a mysterious business jet, registered in the US and carrying nearly $9.3million (R102million) in cash, landed at Lanseria International Airport, northwest of Johan-nesburg, two weeks ago. According to the tabloid, the cash, unused $100 bills, was packed in three suitcases and was apparently meant for buying arms for the Nigerian intelligence service.
The plane, a Challenger 600, had a Nigerian flight crew (Pilot named) on board, along with two Nigerian citizens and an Israeli and the flight had come from Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
The passengers according to the report, “apparently told officials they were acting on behalf of the Nigerian intelligence service”, and “provided documentation confirming they had come to South Africa to buy weapons.
So far, mum is the word from authorities. May be they did not lose any money. And as long as mum is the word, wait for it. The case will get cold, like all similar cases.
Wherever $10m is in cash, America knows! So you need really to wonder what the US is doing keeping a blind eye on $10m in a Nigerian hired private jet, till it turns up in South Africa. I mean seriously this is no bomb in a diaper. It rings bells.
And, oh, the bells tolled for Black Scorpion!
He was lost in the crowd of baby boomers, not given to our civil war history. He could have been incognito, eating fried groundnuts mixed with bambara nuts, also fried dry. It was at the Bauchi NITEL Phone centre near the Police Headquarter where we were in a queue to make phone calls. He was lean framed, wearing a pair of trendy jeans, a round neck dark brown T-shirt and khaki brown hat. Black Scorpion Benjamin Adekunle it was. And who from where I come everyone knew. I walked across to him and greeted casually.
“You are certainly a bloody civilian!”
“Yes Sir”, I replied raising my foot and coming to attention hard on it, with the best military salute I could muster.
“Wrong, you idiot”, he barked, pulling hard on his cigarette. “Right leg up, and hard against the left!” Then broad smile with smoke billowing out, he tapped me on the shoulder, and I introduced myself as a TV producer and had admired him from childhood and would have loved to be as hard and tough as him.
“Where are you from? He demanded.
“Numan, I told him.  “I am Bachama”.
Now he tapped me harder, open palmed on my shoulder, as if checking the health and strength of recruit. Small diminutive man, but was an awesome scare.
“You are already like me”, he bellowed, and went on to tell me how proud he was, that his mother was Bachama, a princess of the Nomupo clan, whom his father met and married in Kaduna. We shared the same blood, he noted. I stared in amazement at a hero who did not seem aware that by tradition, if he had witchcraft, he got it from his mother’s genes, and to the Bachama, the maternal relations own you only when you are a brave heart. In prosperity and fame, you are your father’s person.
The defeat of Biafra is owed to Adekunle’s lion hearted command of the war. Brigadier Adekunle conducted Africa’s first ever amphibious troop landing in a war, a classical war study case. Adekunle was tasked to lead two new battalions (7th and 8th) – to conduct the historic sea-borne assault on Bonny in the Bight of Benin on 26 July 1968 Adekunle’s boys  whom he unilaterally named 3rd Marine Commando, recovered Escravos, Burutu, Urhonigbe, Owa and Aladima. To them also fell, Bomadi, Patani, Youngtown, Koko, Sapele, Ajagbodudu, Warri, Ughelli, Orerokpe, Umutu and Itagba” a far larger and more difficult area than all other friends.
I am told that the one request Adekunle made to General Sani Abacha was for him to create Bayelsa State, to fulfil one of Major Adaka Boro’s purposes in his command of the amphibious assault under Black Scorpion.
Then I have this clip that involved a relation, Lt. MacCauley Lamurde, whom General Adekunle court-mart-ialled, found guilty and executed to appease the international media, then accusing Nigeria of genocide in view of the nature of the conduct of the war.
John Barnes, reporting for Newsweek (Sept. 9, 1968) had witnessed the “final offensive” against Biafra, “watching a battery of 105-mm. howitzers pounding the town of Ogwe, and recorded vividly how Lt. Lamurde had turned up an unarmed lad (Mathias) whom he charged for being one of the Biafran soldiers that had laid ambush.
“Terrified and trembling, he said he had come back to look for his parents. ‘You are a rebel soldier,’ screamed Lt. Macauley Lamurde…….. ‘My God, my God,’ moaned the lad, seeming to know what was in store for him. Hoping to save his life, I said to the lieutenant: ‘You can- not kill this man. Your code of conduct prohibits it. You will not kill him, will you, lieutenant?’
Lamurde replied: `No’. But then he bellowed at the boy: ‘Attention!’ And when the young Ibo did, MacCauley shrieked, ‘Look, he is obviously a rebel soldier!’
“Another officer tied Mathias’s hand to his leg and kicked him over. The boy pleaded: ‘I’m not a soldier. Sweet Jesus, save me!’ Leaning casually on his swagger stick, Lamurde pumped three bullets into the body, then another into his neck. Then one of Lamurde’s men dragged the corpse across the road and heaved it into the bushes.”—Newsweek, Septem-ber 9, 1968.
Lt. MacCauley Lamurde was Adekunle’s maternal cousin. He had him executed before the world press. I, another Mathias, years later, stood to attention that gave away my civilianhood. Adekunle survived our fratricidal war only to be consumed by the misery brought on by the victory in which we are losers all. Or so it seems.