Ibadan, Okija, Abuja and the deathly fate of mekunus

By Tunde Olusunle

Our ambassadors in the national parliament on Wednesday, December 18, 2024, spontaneously broke into a chant, serenading Bola Tinubu Nigeria’s President when he presented the 2025 draft budget to the bicameral body. On your mandate, we shall stand* gained ascendancy ahead of the 2022 presidential primary of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Today, it is probably at par with Nigeria’s national anthem in the circuit of the ruling political party. Recall the viral video of the Minister for the Federal Capital Territory, (FCT), when he performed to the rhythm on one occasion of his visit to the office of the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila a few months ago. The reflex resort of the congressmen to the “mandate” tune on that occasion was in reaction to Tinubu’s joke at the presentation of the budget for 2025. The President had erroneously announced that he was presenting a draft expenditure proposal to the “11th” assembly! He was promptly reminded that we are still in the 10th assembly in 2024. Tinubu quickly humoured that it could just as well mean that the entire parliament had been reelected for the 11th assembly, which begins in 2027.

Tinubu’s budgetary presentation had to be staggered by 24 hours for undisclosed reasons. Reports after the Wednesday December 18 eventual outing, however, suggested that the executive arm of government needed the 24 hours between Tuesday December 17 and the eventual presentation, for very robust, backstage engagements with the legislature. There were feelers to the effect that Tinubu’s budget would be expressly shut down because of his recent propositions on tax reforms, which has not gone down well with sections of the country and their representatives. There are purported reports to the effect that while Members of the House of Representatives were advanced one billion naira each to augment the budgets for their “constituency projects,” Senators allegedly received a minimum of over 100 per cent more under the same nebulous heading. Such largesse should of necessity merit some singing.

While our parliamentarians decked in billowing robes and skyscraping headgears were clapping and caterwauling, giggling and guffawing that Wednesday, December 18, 2024, deathly disaster struck in Ibadan, capital of Oyo State. The plan by a nongovernmental organisation led by Naomi Silekunola, a former wife of the Ooni of Ife, Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi which proposed to put smiles on the faces of a number of people this yuletide season, had gone awry. Silekunola and her team intended to gift 5000 children below 13 years of age with a cash gift of N5000 each and offer each of them a food pack. There was a stampede at the venue of the programme at Islamic High School, Bashorun District, Ibadan. Poor planning, which precluded adequate security cordon, the absence of a standby medical team, among others, precipitated the death of 40 children. Many injured people are still hospitalised.

As though an angel of death was on a yuletide prowl, Okija in Anambra State was its next destination. A magnanimous well-to-do, Ernest Obiejesi, under the auspices of his *Obi Jackson Foundation,* availed the community of a rice consignment to be shared amongst the womenfolk in the morning of Saturday December 21, 2024, for the commemoration of Christmas. The raw ration came in 10 kilogramme bags of rice, out of which many people received just handfuls in bowls and cups. In the ensuing melee, 36 lives were lost, bodies littering the scene. Many limbs were bruised and broken, they are being patched up in various hospitals.

Despite popular assumptions that the streets of Abuja are paved with gold, the Okija tragedy was replicated, real-time, right at the very heart of Maitama, abode of the *nouveau riche.* Still in the spirit of the season, the Holy Trinity Catholic Church arranged to distribute food items to the less privileged as Christmas knocks on doors. The Abuja Command of the Nigeria Police confirms that 13 people, including four children, died from the surging and trampling at the scene. Over a thousand people have been evacuated from the church, and many of the wounded receiving medical attention at the proximal Maitama Hospital just metres away from the church. Hunger for sure is a deconstructor of geography. Within four days in Nigeria, this harmattan season, over 89 lives, have lost while foraging for what to eat.

Instructively, a day before the Ibadan tragedy, loyalists and former aides of former President Muhammadu Buhari flew to his hometown in Daura to accord him an 82nd birthday surprise. Former Ogun State Governor, Ibikunle Amosun; Secretary to the Government of the Federation, (SGF), in Buhari’s regime, Mustapha Boss; Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, all visited a man largely credited with plunging Nigeria into its seemingly irrecoverable abyss. Femi Adesina, Buhari’s media minder also sang his boss’ praises on the occasion. He described him as *ore mekunu,* a friend of the poor, an ascription I found totally out of sync with the realities of his boss’s stewardship. Let’s hope Adesina is seeing on the streets, the hordes of Nigerians, instalmentally transmogrified into pitiable sub- *mekunus* by Buhari’s eight-year dysfunctional leadership. About 100 Nigerians perished in four days not because of a natural disaster, nor at the theatres of insurgency and military curtailment. They died looking for just that measure of rice to placate their growling stomachs. They died just hours and days after Buhari’s beatification by beneficiaries of his prodigal rulership.

Nigeria has been plunged into the worst economic situation in a whole generation since the advent of the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the centre. Poverty has never been as grim and piercing as we’ve witnessed beginning from Buhari’s coming in 2015. Poverty has been ruthlessly weaponised, the poor ready to dance to the drum of a currency note, even a scoop of peanuts. The indicators have determinedly and consistently pointed southwards these past decade. Inflation is spiralling towards the 35 per cent mark, the unaffordability of basic food items driving *mekunus* to assured Golgotha in cross-country scrounging, scrambles and stampedes The same way Nigerians hustle to scoop petroleum products when a tanker falls to the ground, is the same way they throw decorum through perimeters when they are being insulted with sachets of pasta in the name of “palliatives” and “stomach infrastructure.”

The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, (NBS), is allegedly being bullied by the state to recant on its former announcement that *N2.3 Trillion* was paid out as ransom to bandits, criminals and kidnappers in the first 10 months of this year. The NBS, which has belatedly announced that its systems were hacked, is in good company with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). INEC’s servers and terrestrial equipment are perennially compromised when election figures tend towards victory for the opposition. The President recently hailed the peaceful and transparent conduct of the presidential election in Ghana, recommending it as a model for Nigeria. Sadly, it should be the other way round. Other countries should take inspiration from the way we conduct our affairs in Nigeria.

Nigeria prides itself as the giant of Africa. Many African countries look up to Nigeria for guidance, for leadership. Our exploits in the liberation of countries like South Africa from apartheid and the restoration of peace and democracy to neighbouring Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are well documented We recently offset our outstanding dues to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), totalling over N150Billion. We do well at bragging and flexing our muscles, but fail where it matters the most. An essential characteristic of Ghanaian elections over the years is the fact that the ruling party can be displaced by the opposition today. This allows the party so ousted to go re-strategise for the future. What do we do in Nigeria where election results are predetermined, where the electoral process is wholly corrupted, where true winners are intentionally dispossessed of their mandates and encouraged to seek redress in the judiciary? Didn’t a senior government official say in relation to Ghana’s exemplary election that a sitting government cannot be unseated in Nigeria? The stories of the backstage electoral thieveries anchored by INEC over the years will be told someday.

President Tinubu cancelled his official engagements for Saturday, December 21, 2024, in honour of victims of the Ibadan, Okija, and Abuja tragedies. Nigeria’s leadership must transcend the culinary indulgence and the merry-making occasioned by the yuletide to undertake very imperative introspection. There must be less dangerous, less dehumanising, and less deathly avenues for lifting up the poor and indigent in our ranks. The President is celebrated as some economic whiz kid. Enough of the demeaning, insulting, and dubious handouts always purportedly passed on to the less-endowed by ways of very opaque “cash transfers” and the “lorry loads of palliatives.” Can someone please show me a register of transfers to my constituents back home in my community? That scheme is wholly and totally a scam. Nigeria is not Somalia or Chad and similar countries ravaged by war and hunger, where the United Nations, (UN) and the Red Cross, drop dry rations from hovering helicopters into the hands of starving populations. Nigerians deserve a much, much better deal away from the most despairing *status quo.* Nigeria is too endowed to wilfully preside over the sustained pauperisation of its people

Tunde Olusunle, PhD, Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors (FANA), teaches Creative Writing at the University of Abuja