Once again, have your say!

Alhaji Bello Kirfi knows the North East very well, that was why he threatened the secession.  Tell me what an average man in the North-East benefits from NIGERIA? Ponder over it!  The North-East can provide all it needs without being a parasite to NIGERIA. You need to travel through it to know what I mean. […]

Alhaji Bello Kirfi knows the North East very well, that was why he threatened the secession.  Tell me what an average man in the North-East benefits from NIGERIA? Ponder over it!  The North-East can provide all it needs without being a parasite to NIGERIA. You need to travel through it to know what I mean. We have great intellectuals in various fields of life. Just as you mentioned about the fallen heroes from this sub-region, we still have them earning their living modestly. The truth is that we in the North-East have been abandoned for so long by the Federal government, so let’s solve our problems ourselves. What do Biafrans have that they want to break away? They don’t have the kind of resources we have here so we will definitely survive and will be the better for it’

I don’t think we have any option than to have our country or region where we can live in peace than be part of a country where people enter our houses forcefully to beat and kill innocent citizens in the name of dislodging terrorists. As for our governors, count them out!  They are not concerned with the fate of their citizens so they will not take measures to halt these barbaric acts.

Hamidu Ahmed

You’ve said it all. They are just a bunch of spineless people, full of ego and nothing else. This goes to show that they really have nothing to offer. And this is true of most governors and the general elites in the north. We really don’t have anyone ready to fight for our collective good. I am sorry to be using this kind of language but honestly I am just sick of their attitude and lack of concern. They just can’t see beyond their myopic little titles that at the most will last no more than eight years and then they will become like the rest of us, fearing for their lives and irrelevant. What a shame about their inability to use this opportunity given to them.

Rakiya Idi

Aliyu Shuaibu: my GCFR

It was interesting to read about the civil servant (Mohammed T. Zakari) who was awarded a national honour for returning money that was erroneously credited to his account on pay day in the same edition with your report on Malam Aliyu Shuaibu. This goes to show that there are a lot of us that will not willingly and consciously consume what is not legitimately ours despite the perceived craze that seems to be increasingly visible in our society today.

I commend your interest in this kind of positive behaviour known to be found among good people in a country where ill gotten wealth easily finds its way into even so called religious institutions. There was a reported case years back that despite knowing later that stolen money was donated to a religious organization the founder was not ashamed of retaining the donation. Though attempts were made to retrieve the money and return it to the owner.

May the ink in your pen never cease to write about good deeds in our dear country. I will however call on you to kindly consider encouraging all men and women of good will to support, encourage and reward good deed instead of leaving or pushing responsibilities to big-wigs of our society all the time. It has this corrupting tendency and in a way it makes us to over look crooked big men due to their perceived financial assistance at such times.

The tendency to push most monetary demands to big-wigs is a deficient approach. It does not encourage collective efforts nor does it foster a sense of collective responsibility in advancing the good cause for our societal growth. You can encourage the setting up of an NGO that can raise funds to reward such good behaviours by encouraging people like us to donate according to our means. I am sure 1000 Nigerians donating N500 Naira each out of over 80 Million adult Nigerians will not hard to accomplish. Many may even give more. Please consider this.

Sani Sabiu

Your article on the money changer who found #3.4 million and returned it to the owner really touched me. When I showed it to my friends they too were moved. In my own little way as an ordinary civil servant I will only pray for him and perhaps donate my widow’s mite. What you did is commendable and an act of sunnah, that is seeking succour for a weak person. Please feed us with his progress so far.

Yours faithfully,

Muhammad Sani Garba

Re: Cry, my beloved North East

Innaa lillahi wa Inna ilaihi raji’uun. May their souls rest in peace. The narration you did was very touching. All the stories in your write up were about the inhabitants of Maiduguri, the title of your article should have been “Cry my beloved Maiduguri.”

We here in Maiduguri have borne the brunt of this huge talk of “insecurity” faced by this country but when it happens to us, our news is not worth the headlines. For instance the killing of four in Port Harcourt over shadowed the killing of over 30 in Maiduguri. When allocations are made to take care of insecurity, the money is not used in any way to provide employment to the thousands of unemployed youths who hitherto earned their living through okada or had their roadside kiosks destroyed by the JTF, rather, it is used to award contracts to politicians who buy more guns and patrol vehicles and send more soldiers to our homes to cause mayhem. Hasbunallahu Wani’imal Wakil!

Ali Baba, Maiduguri

As you put it “we need a concerted effort to address the root cause of the problem” but Madam it has to be identified first. What is then the chief source of worry? Unfortunately it is religion. Exactly the type dispensed in Baba. Goni’s school with a “rigorous study regime” spewing hate speech and bigotry against non Muslims, particularly Jews and Christians.

What is hate speech?

Hate speech is a communication that carries no meaning other than the expression of hatred for some group, especially in circumstances in which the communication is likely to provoke violence.

What is bigotry?

Bigotry is a complete intolerance of any creed, belief or opinion that differs from one’s own especially in religion.

The scenario unfolding in the North East can best be summed up in the ancient adage that says; Anybody that rides the back of a tiger ends up in its belly. The elites of the North East as elsewhere in Nigeria obviously lack an enlightened self- interest for largely alienating the underclass to the point of desperation. The accumulated “good reciters” and “memorisers” are merely finding a convenient religious self expression in paroxysms of rage and destruction since other avenues of the legitimate pursuit of happiness and sustained economic well being have been foreclosed by you, the Northern Yan’ Boko with the active connivance of their Southern confederates.

The regional elite that include your good self prefer to bury their heads in sand and make fall guys of the JTF though fully complicit aware of the reason why the JTF had to be massively deployed to the North East in the first place.

A few months back a retired Army chief TY Danjuma called out about the growing “Somalization” of the region only to be shouted down by a babel of prominent voices the likes of the late Muhammad Amin’s uncle whom you described as “an influential retired soldier”. Indeed what goes around comes around.

As you so succinctly put it – “Though they are fond of denying it, most of the deaths and destruction visited on the innocent residents of the city are the handiwork of the JTF”. Now wait a minute Madam, what of the other guys that blend so seamlessly in to the local populace? Is your criticism against the JTF a form of Taqiyya? Or an offshoot of circumstances the Umma is allowed to “deny truth” to advance its interests?

No doubt there are JTF excesses, as in any military engagement where a legitimately deployed force does not hold a monopoly of firepower but more worrisome is the lack of principled stance against the main perpetuators of the insurgency by the likes of you, Borno Elders and the larger Northern stakeholders, who know better but choose to play the ostrich.

Cry crocodile tears, our beloved North-East.

Ahmed Yahaya-joe

I stand by my Kansas Senate Prayer

One reader wrote to protest how I added so many lies into the prayer once made by Minister Joe Wright at the opening of the Kansas Senate in January 1996. I do not have the stomach to reproduce here his accusations and insult, but he apparently reached this conclusion after reading what was a version of the prayer on the internet and viewing a 3-minute video on You-tube. I got my version of the prayer as a photocopy from an American newspaper ten years ago. When I checked the internet too, the three links I opened all had versions of the prayer with slight variations, no two were identical. In the introduction to one of the versions, the website actually admits that the prayer was modified recently. In my reply to my accuser, I had told him that it was possible that the newspaper I got it from did the addition or the original prayer was tampered with and portions of it were edited out. Whatever the case, I did not add a word to what I knew as the Kansas Senate prayer for a decade.

The safe, sanitised internet versions are probably edited to make them more palatable to those indicted by Joe Wright as being behind America’s problems and immorality. In any case, if the prayer was as lame as the current internet versions are, how could it have elicited the uproar it did way back in 1996? It was reported that lots of politicians walked out of the Kansas Senate while the prayer was being read. Then thousands of requests for copies of the prayer were made to the senate by the general public in the days following the incident. So I hereby stand by my version of this prayer, believing it to be the original, unedited piece from Minister Joe Wright.