Showing posts with label Jos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jos. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

The Insensitivity of President Muhammadu Buhari and First Lady Aisha Buhari

The Insensitivity of President Muhammadu Buhari and First Lady Aisha Buhari

It is heartbreaking to hear that some of the 156 abducted girls of the Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School, Tegina in the Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State have died in the den of the bandits since they were kidnapped on May 30, 2021. The girls,including some as young as 5 years old spent the Eid- el-Kabir festival in the den of their abductors.

Since January, there have been over 111 tragic incidents of kidnappings with more than 1, 520 people killed in different states in Nigeria, with the worst cases in Zamfara, Borno, Kaduna and Katsina, the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari. But it is really shocking that while these horrifying incidents of kidnappings and killings have been increasiing, President Buhari and his wife, Mrs. Aisha Buhari who pretends to be humane were busy pampering their own children in their safe havens in Nigeria, the UK and Dubai when the parents of the abducted children have been harrowing in sorrow over their missing children and others mourning the tragic loss of the precious lives of their sons and daughters in the hands of the evil and wicked bandits and terrorists. The mother of one of the kidnapped children of the Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School collapsed and died from heartbreak.

In the gloomy atmosphere of insecurity in the country, President Buhari and his wife were using the wedding of the arranged marriage of their son, Yusuf Buhari and Princess Zahra Ado Bayero, the daughter of the Emir of Bichi in Kano State for boosting their public relations and distractions of gullible Nigerians from the terrifying occurrences of kidnappings and killings in the Middle Belt and northern Nigeria. And at the same time, there was a big ceremony televised live for the draws of the innaugural Dr. Aisha Buhari Cup's Invitational Women’s Football Tournament for selected countries in Africa, that will be hosted by Lagos from 13th – 21st September 2021.  Simply, an image laundering event for the promotion of her public relations.

The millions of dollars spent on the glamorous state wedding attended by Nigerian millionaires and billionaires who flew on dozens of private jets to Kano would have been more than enough to pay the ransoms to free the hundreds of unfortunate underprivileged children suffering and dying in the dens of bandits. But the insensitive President Buhari and his wife Aisha and their fellow egocentric elites of the greedy ruling class don't care, because none of their precious children has been kidnapped or murdered by bandits and terrorists on rampage in Nigeria.

The insecurity in Nigeria is caused by corrupt and incompetent government administraton and not by poverty.


Timeline for Kidnappings in Nigeria

https://www.trtworld.com/africa/nigeria-s-mass-kidnappings-a-timeline-44619



Friday, September 9, 2011

OHCHR press briefing note / Nigeria

9 Sep 2011 10:03 Africa/Lagos


OHCHR press briefing note / Nigeria

GENEVA, September 9, 2011/African Press Organization (APO)/ -- OHCHR press briefing note / Nigeria

We are concerned about the renewed violence which has flared up in Nigeria's "Middle Belt" in recent weeks causing death, injury and destruction. Reports suggest that up to 70 people have been killed since the beginning of August, in ethnic and religious violence in the area.


Ethnic and religious divisions have affected the Middle Belt region, particularly in and around Jos, for many years now and a cycle of violence has emerged in which each incident almost invariably provokes deadly reprisal attacks. The High Commissioner has previously called for a concerted effort to tackle the underlying causes of such repeated violent outbreaks. Such underlying causes include discrimination, poverty and land disputes.


We encourage the authorities at national and local levels to take effective preventative measures against such violence, including by curbing hate-speech and working with civil society, including human rights NGOs, religious leaders and academic institutions, to attempt reconciliation between the various communities. It is of utmost importance that justice is done and is seen to be done by prosecuting the alleged perpetrators of violence and ensuring remedies for victims and their families.


We are also concerned about the activities of Boko Haram, whose tactics have included attacks on civilians, security forces and government institutions. The group has claimed responsibility for the recent bombing of the UN building – yet another deadly and cowardly attack.

otherwise they risk making the situation worse.


In response to a request for details of recent violence and killings:


According to reports:

- From early to mid-August, 10 people were killed in a number of clashes between Christian and Muslim youths and the military in Jos. At least two more were hacked to death, and four others seriously wounded in a village near Jos.

- On 29 August, Christian youths allegedly attacked Muslims going to prayer in Jos. Unofficial reports suggest that 13 were killed, 106 wounded and that a lot of damage was done to property. Then, on 1 September, at least 23 were reportedly killed in clashes between Christian and Muslim youths. At this point, it is not clear whether or not this was a revenge attack linked to the earlier incident.

- On 4 September, a family of eight was hacked to death, and seven more people were reported killed that evening in attacks by youths on a village near Jos.



Source: United Nations - Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

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10:03 OHCHR press briefing note / Nigeria


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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Dear Karl Maier, This House Has Not Yet Fallen





It's not easy to state who started it or how many died. But the horror for those affected is clear
.
~ Craig S. Keener


Dear Karl Maier,

This house has not yet fallen, but it is shaking.

Our house is full of strange bed fellows of lunatic fringe elements of the black sheep of a dysfunctional family.

One is turbaned and goes round the bend bowing to the crescent moon and star suffering from a very contagious Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of his mad cows. The other one has gone loco from sniffing too much hydro carbons in his littoral states at the bottom of the river Niger.

Imagine living in the house of nightmares, cast between the devil and the deep blue sea and caught in the snares of the sirens.

Our house is like a home full of Wole Soyinka’s "Madmen and Specialists", swimming in the whirlpool of the vicious circle of the same ethno-religious conflicts that precipitated us into the catastrophic internecine civil war of the late 1960s. The same ethno-religious crises are recurring now with incessant attacks by homegrown terrorists plunging Jos, Maiduguri and Abuja into chaos with carcasses of burnt-out vehicles and razed houses, mosques and churches and the charred remains of corpses littering the streets with acrid smells attacking our nostrils and leaving us ill from the nausea.

Religious fanatics of the lunatic fringe on rampage have murdered hundreds of innocent compatriots in reprisal attacks.

Brothers of that lunatic Farouk Abudul Mutallab the al Qaeda "Underwear Bomber who failed in his satanic attempt to blow up the Northwest Airlines Flight 253, en route from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan, on December 25, 2009, have unleashed their terrors on us as they sighted the moon on Christmas Eve of 2010 at about 7.15 pm in Jos and Maiduguri, and struck again on the New Year’s Eve in Abuja.
These terrorist bombings have now confirmed our worst fears as Sunday Dare concluded that the final script of the terrorists is unfolding now.

The Maitatsine uprising in Kano in 1980 whilst I was a high school pupil in Lagos could be called the genesis of what is now known as the Boko Haram uprising.
The first ethno-religious crisis began in Jos on September 7, 2001, but the ethno-religious indigene/settler dichotomy is deep-rooted in the history of Jos as explained in “Sliding towards Armageddon: Revisiting Ethno-Religious Crises in Nigeria” by Gwamna Dogara Je’adayibe, Ph.D. and Amango Kudu A., Ph.D.

You should also read “The Truth About the Religious Violence in Jos, Nigeria” by Craig S. Keener published in Christianity Today and posted on
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/januaryweb-only/13-42.0.html

How and when it started is good to know, but in the present state of emergency as our house is on fire, who started it, what started it or when it started is not the most urgent thing, but to put out the fire by all means possible and at all costs to save our home from being destroyed by these conscienceless elements of the lunatic fringe on rampage. This is the responsibility of our government.

Our President was more concerned about his egocentric presidential election campaign and forgot to put his house in order until his kinsmen bombed the Eagle Square venue of our 50th Independence Anniversary in the Federal Capital city of Abuja. That was the first time such a catastrophe would happen to us since our freedom from the colonial British Empire on October 1, 1960. But he failed to correct the terrible mistakes of his security agencies and intensified his presidential election campaign gimmicks until the turbaned lunatics of the Boko Haram sect set off their deadly bombs in Jos, Maiduguri and Abuja over the holidays.

The devastating terrorist bombings have rocked the foundation of our house and put us all at risk, because it may collapse if we fail to get rid of these lunatics in our house.

We do not have enough specialists to handle these madmen. Our elites are disillusioned and as the madmen are raising dust in the north and blowing embers in the south our children are in fear and trembling in the premonition of another civil war.

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?"
~ << Psalm 11:3 >>

The righteous should not give up!
The righteous can do a lot to salvage it, no matter the collateral damage that has been done.

Karl Maier, our house is a house of wonders.
Our children are still full of dreams as they are going on with life with tall ambitions and many of them with their heads in the clouds reaching out for the stars. As the lunatics were exploding deadly bombs of destruction in the north, our ignorant children were exploding firecrackers of celebration in the south.
No Karl, it is not funny. It is the irony of life.

You cannot live in denial of the agonies of the ironies of life in a hostile universe.

Yes, we have our dreams and those who have dreams, also have their nightmares.
This is the burden of humankind.

We all must experience the checkered fortunes of the vicissitudes of life.
You have come across what the Chinese said about our fate on earth.
悲歡離合 .Joys and sorrows, partings and reunions are daily occurrences in the vicious circle of life. Both our joys or sorrows do not last forever, and life goes on.

Our worst enemies are not even these terrorists, but the corrupt looters in the corridors of power and their accomplices, the political contractors and their cronies and hypocritical beneficiaries. These kleptomaniacs are the anathemas of our nation. They have done worse things to us than all the bomb blasts and ethno-religious riots since 1960 to date.

Do you know the casualties of road accidents on the nightmarish roads they have failed to repair after their embezzlement of the revenue allocations of the ministry of works?

Can you count the millions of lives lost since these kleptomaniacs rigged their way into the corridors of power?

Pensioners have collapsed while waiting for the arrears of their unpaid gratuities.
Patients have died from bad health care and when doctors went on strike, because of bad conditions of service.

Have you forgotten the 60 students of Loyola Jesuit College, Abuja and others who perished in the ill-fated Sosoliso plane that crashed at the Port Harcourt airport , because.fire service had no water to put out the fire?!

Thousands of students have been driven to crime and prostitution in frustration and desperation caused by collapse of our educational system.

We have lost count of their casualties of corruption.
Corruption is the systemic destruction of our nation by these devils posing and posturing as humans in our midst and they are breeding their kind daily.

We have to take out the lot of them to end the systemic rot plaguing our nation.

No matter how shaken we are by these horrors of terrorism, even if all other things fall apart, we shall remain one nation under the sun and like the Leaning Tower of Pisa that has survived many upheavals over the centuries, we shall remain standing and towering over the enemies of our progress and as long as God helps us to bear the pillars thereof, our nation will never fall.

So, as they sing in Croatia,"Još Hrvatska ni propala", we shall sing in our dialects that our house has not yet fallen and will never fall.


~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima, from the new book “Nigeria: This House has not fallen” to be released this summer. It is a revived version of the The Nigerian Fools Who Think They Can Fool God..










Monday, July 19, 2010

Nigeria Today: Kidnapped Journalists Released, Religious Violence Continues in Jos

Nigerian police arrest four over kidnap of journalists‎- AFP


LAGOS — Nigerian police have arrested four suspects in connection with the kidnapping of four journalists freed after being held for a week in the country's ...Nigerian Police Arrest Four Suspects in Kidnapping

Nigeria: Seven Killed in Fresh Jos Attack‎AllAfrica.com - Gonji Palang
... bows and arrows as well as amulets with which they unleashed terror on the unsuspecting residents The pastor of the Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN), ...

Muslim attack on Christian village in Nigeria kills 8: army‎ - AFP

Nigerian machete-wielding attackers kill 8 people‎ - BBC News

Priest's family killed in Nigerian violence‎ - ABC Online





Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Chinua Achebe: "Acting President Goodluck Jonathan is Weak"


Prof. Chinua Achebe

The most lionized African writer, Prof. Chinua Achebe, 79, has said that there seems to be no legitimate government in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and where his literary genius sprouted and blossomed until an auto-accident on 22 March 1990 left him paralyzed; and disappointment in Nigerian political leaders made him to relocate to the United States of America, where he has been teaching at the David and Marianna Fisher University and as a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.

Chinua Achebe said Acting President Goodluck Jonathan is weak in his reaction to the horrifying massacres of native Christians in Plateau state and blamed the spread of Islamic extremism for the recurrent ethno-religious crisis in Jos and other parts of the middle belt and northern Nigeria.
“He suddenly doesn’t seem to bring good luck. He is weak. A strong man in any position in Nigeria should be horrified by what happened in Jos. Shamed is what we should feel. We don’t seem to have any government. People don’t know where their president — before the present acting president — where he went or where he is,” Achebe said.

He was speaking in an interview he granted Deborah Solomon for The New York Times on his historic Things Fall Apart which has been translated into over 40 different languages worldwide and sold over 8 million copies.
"That would be possible. I’m not grumbling; I have done well. But don’t imagine I’m a millionaire," Achebe said.

Prof. Achebe also spoke on the Nigerian Al-Qaeda underwear bomber, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, saying what he attempted was insane!


~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima


Read Books by Chinua Achebe:

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (the author of Things Fall Apart)






Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Government is Responsible for the Jos Crisis and other Crises in Nigeria

The Government is Responsible for the Jos Crisis and other Crises in Nigeria

~ Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima

I have been reading many childish and foolish posts and comments by tribalists and religious bigots on the Jos crisis and other crises plaguing Nigeria.

The reality is, the Nigerian government has failed woefully to protect precious lives and properties in the country.

If we have a good government, there will be security for all the citizens no matter your location, creed, or class.

If the security agencies in Plateau state were active, the perpetrators of the massacres would not have been able to do so.

Solution?
Sack the incompetent government before it is too late.

Nigeria will not survive another civil or uncivil war.


Related:
Nigeria: A Sick Nation with a Sick President

More news reports and features on Nigeria and the rest of the world by Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima.


UN Human rights Chief says New Approach needed to halt Cycle of Violence in Nigeria

9 Mar 2010 18:39 Africa/Lagos

UN human rights chief says new approach needed to halt cycle of violence in Nigeria


GENEVA, March 9, 2010/African Press Organization (APO)/ -- The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Tuesday that she was appalled by the latest massacre of hundreds of villagers in the region around Jos in northern Nigeria, and urged the national and local authorities to make a concerted effort to tackle the complex underlying causes of the tension and violence in the region.


The High Commissioner extended her deepest sympathy to the families of the dead and to the wounded from both this weekend's attacks, which some reports suggest may have killed as many as 500 people in three mainly Christian Berom villages, and the earlier attacks in January which also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people in the Jos region, mostly from the predominantly Muslim Hausa Fulana people.


“In both cases, women and children and elderly people were among those who were viciously slaughtered,” Pillay said. “After the January killings, the villages should have been properly protected.”


The High Commissioner noted the efforts of the authorities to put in place a comprehensive security strategy. “Better security is clearly vital,” she said, “but it would be a mistake to paint this purely as sectarian or ethnic violence, and to treat it solely as a security issue. What is most needed is a concerted effort to tackle the underlying causes of the repeated outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence which Nigeria has witnessed in recent years, namely discrimination, poverty and disputes over land. The Government needs to address these issues head-on.”


Pillay also noted allegations that local politicians may have exploited socio-economic, ethnic and religious divisions. “This is an aspect that needs be scrutinized, and if necessary acted upon, if further bouts of violence are to be deterred,” she said.


The High Commissioner stressed that it was essential that the forces of law and order in the Jos region act in a visibly even-handed fashion, and that justice is seen to be done by all sides.


“The job facing the security forces and the judiciary is extremely sensitive,” she said. “It is important to avoid stimulating new resentments, while at the same time ensuring that those responsible for these atrocious acts do not escape justice. This is the third round of deadly violence in the Jos region in three years, leading to a total number of deaths that may exceed 1,000. Clearly, previous efforts to tackle the underlying causes have been inadequate, and in the meantime the wounds have festered and grown deeper.”

Source: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Nigeria: Fears of Reprisal Attacks Loom in Northern Nigeria

Nigeria: Fears of Reprisal Attacks Loom in Northern Nigeria

The fears of reprisal attacks are rife in northern Nigeria after the gruesome religious mayhem in Jos and other parts of Plateau state left hundreds dead, with scores of corpses dumped in wells and toilet pits. Intolerant religious fanatics are using cell phones and other means of private communication to instigate members of their sects to mobilize for reprisal attacks to avenge the deaths of those they lost. The law enforcement agencies have been alerted and warning everyone in the middle belt and northern states to beware of Islamists who are already planning to launch widespread attacks on non-Muslims.

Unidentified men armed with guns and other weapons were arrested and detained Saturday night in Kaduna by the Nigeria Air Force.
Police officers of the Operation Yaki in Kaduna state are patrolling towns and villages to ensure the security of lives and properties.

Many indigenes of Abia, Bayelsa, Edo and other Southern states are already leaving the northern states for the safe havens of their hometowns. Some private schools in Borno and Yobe states turned back pupils, because they cannot guarantee their safety in the tensed atmosphere of insecurity.


Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Over 100 Killed as Religious Riots Rage On in Northern Nigeria

Over 100 people have been killed in fresh bloody religious riots raging in Plateau state, as of Tuesday.

Local and foreign journalists in Nigeria have failed to report the facts on the reoccurrence of religious riots in Jos. Many reports said that the violence started after an argument over the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the 2008 clashes, but eyewitness accounts confirmed that fringe elements in the Muslim community attacked the St. Michael's Anglican Church in downtown Jos Sunday morning. The church was set ablaze with worshippers trapped inside. The aggrieved Christians rose up in self defence. The indigenous Berom have gone on rampage in retaliation.

The police have declared a 24-hour curfew after a dusk to dawn curfew on Monday failed to stem the spread of the clashes as gangs of irate Muslims mobilized at midnight before resuming attacks on Christians in the early hours of Tuesday. Churches, mosques and homes have been torched and thousands of residents and visitors are fleeing to police and military barracks for saftey.


(Additional reports by Mainasara)