Malami and the analogy of killer spare parts

Southern governors have banned open grazing. There goes an opportunity for geneticists to start cloning Southern cows for the consumption of unfriendly parts of Nigeria. This must be a chest-thumbing time for vegetarians and environmental activists worried about climate change. Cows are bad for the environment for the methane they emit to the atmosphere. Grass-fed […]

Southern governors have banned open grazing. There goes an opportunity for geneticists to start cloning Southern cows for the consumption of unfriendly parts of Nigeria. This must be a chest-thumbing time for vegetarians and environmental activists worried about climate change. Cows are bad for the environment for the methane they emit to the atmosphere. Grass-fed cows are preferred to their industrial counterparts for their organic meat but that’s too much grammar!

Remember, when you ask for a Southern daughter’s hand in marriage, you are presented with a bride service. In the conjugal language, cows are often conspicuous. Now, imagine an owambe without cow meat? The number of cows slaughtered measures the success of burials. No one is exempted, not even the direct descendants of Amadioha, Oduduwa or the Chief Imam or General Overseer of one-man cathedrals.

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Knock on wood; Southerners do not eat Northern cows. If they did they’d die of constipation, dysentery and diarrhoea. This is a fact backed by science. The last time someone checked the DNA of Southern governors, they were all allergic to cow meat. That is why they reason better than their Northern counterparts who tend to care less about those who herd cows as they do the cows themselves.

If all Northern elites have cows and employ herders to take care of them, you can understand their reserve to support ranching as some critics opine. Truth appears to be that even Northern governors have outlawed open grazing (yes, they did), except that they were only joking!

Southern children are a tad displaced from their elite governors. They do not mind patronising suya spots, especially if they have ever been poisoned by the shawarma from an elite eatery that is now a status symbol.

As the chancellor of our justice system, Abubakar Malami has been following these things. Forgive the illiterate who think that the S.A.N behind his initials stand for – senior advocate of nonentities. The Nigerian Law School and the Body of Benchers could identify a learned silk from a totem pole. Our Malami is an exceptionally gifted lawyer with additional gift of clairvoyance.

Every act of brigandage ever-committed in the South is attributed to herdsmen. That includes ritual killings and the evil spirit of yahooze. If a woman in a fit of jealous rage stabs her husband with a butcher’s knife as happened somewhere in the South lately, it is attributed to the spirit of a herdsman transferred from contact with cows.

While daily inundating us with the atrocities of herdsmen and their cows, the Nigerian press and their foreign counterparts have turned their blind eyes to the unimaginable number of casualties caused by spare parts in Nigeria. Malami has done the census and we’ll all be scandalised if he releases the numbers.

But for love of the fatherland, our learned attorney general would have sanctioned a national spare parts ban to reduce the deaths they cause. This Malamized reasoning targets the source of spare parts especially because, unlike cows that contribute to internally generated revenue, spare parts selling contributes nothing.

Yet every day you look with a malamized eye, you see weaponized carburetor on its way to cause havoc. Ask Malami and he’ll tell you he has seen second-hand spark plugs on their way to becoming weapons of mass destruction especially killing Northerners in hundreds. Visit kwakwace or any mechanic village and hear the gory tales of the number of Nigerians killed by brake cables. Second hand engines obliterate entire anguwa or neighbourhoods from Kutiwenji to Sabon Yelwa. Brake pads wipe out entire communities and after market shock absorbers have sent people to hospitals and IDP camps and entire families have been killed by spare parts.

This is why we Northerners must insist that if open grazing is banned in the South, the sale of spare parts should be banned in the North! Anyone who is blind enough not to recognise this logic has never seen a SAN losing a simple case to a charge and bail lawyer. Why compare apples with oranges when there are yams?

Therefore, it stands to reason that when Southern governors sit at their meetings and ask that grazing, a Northern livelihood, be banned, it is apt that the nation’s chief law officer retorts that is akin to prohibiting the sale of spare parts. Ignore the political acyrologia and examine the innuendo and you see the trouble with Nigeria. Education is also not synonymous with knowledge anymore than a degree confers wisdom.

Foreigners have no idea that in Nigeria, a federal minister is not a public officer representing the nation. They present views aligned to the one who appoints them. They do not have to shed their clannish toga or their ethno-religious cleavages if it aligns with the boss’s. They do not need to consider the whole nation as their constituency. Above all they are not expected to respect the disposition of those who gave the president only five per cent of the votes during elections.

Minister Malami reacts to an open grazing law by Southern governors as a threat to his perception of Northern interests. He uses ad hominem argument to respond to a critical matter of security concern. With a man like that in charge of law, God bless the legal disposition of the regime he represents.

Pay bandits, go to jail

According to the independent firm, SB Morgan, kidnappers made $18 million within the first nine years of their illicit business. For a wealth-obsessed nation, this money could have eased the social tension ravaging Nigeria. In the eyes of our lawmakers, this is non-budgeted expenditure that circumvents the usual padding at the National Assembly.

The legislature is supposed to use this information to put security chiefs to task on how they utilise their allocated funds. The news is supposed to testify to the high turnover of security chiefs. In Nigeria, indolence is rewarded with ambassadorial positions.

So, while wailers are filling their buckets, our reactively proactive legislators are busy skimming solutions. Some members with brain wave could not see this as a security lapse. They imagined beneficiaries of this para-legal business perhaps as potential opponents in elections in which only those with the biggest stomach infrastructure projects win votes. They met and came out with a law criminalising the payment of ransom.

In other words, if your ward is kidnapped, it’s your fault. You have a natural duty to secure their release without paying ransom. If your haggling does not work and you pay ransom – a 15-year jail term awaits you. Unconscionable lawmakers expect heartless kidnappers would stop demanding ransom because they care that nobody goes to jail.

The way things are going in this country, we are all damned. Security agencies make sure that if there are only a dozen publicly paid security left in Nigeria, they’d be ADC to politicians. The manpower required to secure all whole nation secures a privileged class. Kidnappers hardly pick politicians bloated on our common wealth. They go for the ordinary citizens. Now, hapless as they are, they’re to pay for their contribution to the conspiracy of silence – if the law pleases.