Category: Opinion

Fellow Nigerians, I finally returned to Port Harcourt after over two years of absence. It is strange how time flies and how it changes everything. Port Harcourt had always been one of my favourite cities in our dear beloved country. Once upon a time, Port Harcourt was known and referred to as the garden city because of its blossoming flowers. The good people of Rivers State are particularly warm and affectionate and I really enjoyed their generous hospitality which is so lavish and sincere. I will never forget the wedding of one of the daughters of the great Chief and former Minister, Alabo Graham-Douglas. Port Harcourt, and Rivers State in general, was so peaceful that I flew in our European photographer, Dragan Mikki, to cover the epochal event for us. Security was not even an issue as we boarded a speedboat to go to Abonema, the ancestral home of the Graham-Douglases. There was no fear of our Oyibo photo-journalist being kidnapped. We also flew Dragan from Port Harcourt to Abuja to shoot pictures of our dear First Lady, Mrs Stella Obasanjo, now of blessed memory. Wow, I feel so nostalgic about those good old days.
I made so many wonderful friends in Port Harcourt. Ovation International magazine has had one of its biggest fan base in that fun-loving city till this day. I remember and treasure the evening I was hosted by the big boys of the garden city and I was treated like a visiting President. I saw enjoyment at its best. I was given the title of O-talk-na-do of Port Harcourt and the whole place reverberated powerfully as a result of the Ovation invasion. I was received at the Government House by the Deputy Governor Sir Gabriel Tamunobiebere George Toby, on behalf of the Governor, Dr Peter Odili, who was out of the country when I visited.
I would later meet and become inseparable friends with the then Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly and later Governor, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi. I visited whenever I was chanced or invited by Amaechi. Our relationship blossomed when he left his Peoples Democratic Party and joined All Progressives Congress. We worked actively and passionately for the success of Major General Muhammadu Buhari, now President and Commander-in-Chief. While Amaechi’s stupendous efforts won at the Federal levels, he could not replicate the same on his home tuff. His Governorship candidates and other aspiring legislative ones failed as they were roundly and soundly defeated by the opposition party. I doubt if my friend agrees till this day that his candidates were truly humbled but that is a matter for the courts as events unfolded.
I don’t know, and may never know, what happened in Rivers and how Amaechi the physician could not heal himself after fixing Abuja admirably. That is another story for another day. All I know is that Rivers has not been the same. I read a lot of blistering attacks on the new Governor, Nyesom Wike, who used to be one of the closest friends of Amaechi before things fell apart between them and the center could no longer hold. Since life is about perception, I did not look forward to going to Rivers anytime soon.
All that changed when I least expected. A phone conversation with the great man many of us refer to as “the godfather” in journalism circles, Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua, changed all that. He had called while I was in Ghana to personally invite me to the 2017 Nigerian Guild of Editors Summit in Port Harcourt. He informed me he was also talking to Nduka Obaigbena, Chairman of Thisday newspapers, as well as Kabiru Yusuf, Chairman of Daily Trust newspapers. I was indeed honoured by the invitation and I agreed to return to Abuja and fly from there with these distinguished personalities to Port Harcourt.
The journey to Port Harcourt was smooth as the four of us flew from Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja on a small chartered plane and landed under an hour. Everything was in place for our arrival including, cars and security provided by the Governor. We drove straight to our hotel, checked in, freshened up and rested a bit before going to join the Governor for dinner. I had not seen Governor Wike since he moved into that Government Lodge where I used to visit my dear friend, Hon. Rotimi Amaechi. As we walked in, the Governor rose to salute “the godfather”, Alhaji Funtua: “my father welcome…” he said. He turned to Nduka Obaigbena, “my boss, how are you?” To Kabiru, “how are you Sir?” And to me, “my brother, I can’t believe you came. I told Alhaji you won’t come…” I smiled and we hugged briefly. I immediately understood why he felt that way but I love peace and would always work for peace.
Wike appeared extremely happy to see us. I saw firsthand why he is regarded as a consummate politician, regardless of what side of the political divide you belong. He understands the game of reaching out to friends and foes. He did not hold any grudge against me for being one of those who fought tooth and nail to sack their Federal Government from power. As we walked to the garden where he hosted us, he held me at a stage and recollected how I dealt him some heavy blows in my column one day when he was still Minister. He said his whole body was vibrating with emotion as he read my article. As he spoke, I remembered a Yoruba adage, “the man who used the toilet can forget but the one who cleaned the mess would always remember.” We both laughed over it.
We spent several hours with the Governor who regaled us with exciting tales from behind-the-corridors of power. Believe me, the man knows so much about Nigeria and sure knows how to navigate the murky waters of power as dished up by the political class. He’s a powerful networker who has no bounds or restrictions. His biggest assets are his disarming smiles, raucous laughter and general affability. It is impossible to sit with Wike and not laugh. He had many of his friends and political associates around. It was obvious that he enjoys a grip on the major political actors in the State, including a former Governor, a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, a former Party Chairman in the State and several others who sat with us. They were all there to testify to Wike’s ability to unite them. Also with us were senior journalists, Eric Osagie, Managing Director of The Sun and Louis Odion, former Commissioner for Information in Edo State.
We took a walk round the beautifully refurbished State House, including the spanking new Presidential Lodge for visiting Presidents. Everything was tastefully done. The Governor looked confident and very much at home. He walked us back to our cars and we said goodnight. We drove back to our hotel at about 1am. It was quite an experience. As I prepared to dive into bed, what kept ringing in my head was that I hoped our leaders could unite for the sake of their people and disagree to agree but it seems a tall order and mere wishful thinking. There is nothing wrong in fighting about principles but there is no need to do so on the basis of personalities. What we often have in Nigeria are personality clashes which do us no good as it detracts from good governance through the unhealthy and unnecessary distractions that it causes.
The occasion of the Editors Conference was superbly put together. We arrived in good time and took our seats. We met Chief Olusegun Osoba, former Governor of Ogun State and certainly one of Nigeria’s greatest journalists of all time. I was delighted to see him because he was still recuperating from a recent surgery, but still made the sacrifice nonetheless. There were so many greats of our industry on parade and I was proud to be a member of the fourth estate of the realm. The speeches were awesome.. Our Chief host, Governor Wike spoke from his heart during his welcome address. He berated those he saw as busybodies maligning the State of Rivers.
He asked rhetorically, why everyone is coming to host one event or the other in Port Harcourt if there was total breakdown of law and order as being peddled by certain sections of the media. The discussions on the media itself were revealing, especially the one on the media as business. This is because it will always be a pertinent topic if our media houses are to stay focussed and relevant in the development of our great country. I enjoyed the contributions of media icons, Azubuike Ishiekwene and Kabiru Yusuf. I came in briefly as one of the commentators. I spoke on how to stay relevant in the media business. I had no regrets attending the landmark event and I’m grateful to Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua for the kind invitation extended to me and the entire arrangements made for the trip.

How the Yahaya Bellos Are Fighting Cerebral Palsy
In most African societies, children born with cerebral palsy are often victims of social stigmatization. Superstition holds it that these children are either descendants of the gods or children who have been offered by their parents for rituals or other nefarious spiritual purposes. For most of these children, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to be admitted into any school just like other children. In many homes and neighbourhoods, they are separated from other children, treated with contempt and ridicule and eventually pushed to the fringes of society as outcasts. Indeed, it is a most gruelling and traumatic experience for these children, their parents and other loved ones, many of whom are now forced into a journey of hopelessness, having tried all means possible to find help, to no avail. Not for the Yahaya Bellos.
The story of Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello and his wife, Amina Oyiza Bello, a lawyer, is a remarkable tale of hope and resilience in the crusade to de-stigmatise cerebral palsy, educate people and bring hope and love to the children who are the most affected. The hand of fate dealt the Bellos an unkind blow in 2007 when what began as celebration with the birth of their son Hayatullah Onoruoyiza Bello was soon cut short upon discovery that their new bundle of joy was stricken with cerebral palsy. It was a pain too hard to bear. Defying the odds, they hit the ground running. From one hospital to another, from country to country and continent to continent, they travelled with Hayatullah in search of a resolution.
In the midst of this crisis, Hayat Foundation, a special intervention foundation that focuses on issues dealing with persons living with Cerebral Palsy and other Disabilities was born. The objective of the foundation is to bring succour, support and improvement to the lives of persons, children, parents and siblings alike, living with cerebral palsy and other disabilities. By this singular gesture, the Bellos have not only confronted their challenge headlong but also stretched out their arms to the less privileged in our society who may not be as lucky as their son. “Because I experienced and felt loved while I was growing up as a child, I became convinced that I have same responsibility to my son and therefore would not abandon him by hiding him in an obscure corner of the house where people will not see him”, Mrs Bello affirms.
Putting words to action, the Bellos will launch the Hayat Foundation on Friday October 13, 2017 in Abuja. Through this foundation, they hope to set up a Pan-African institute for children with special needs in the mould of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Already, several well-meaning Nigerians have united behind this noble non-political, non-profit initiative. They include Toyin Saraki, Folorunso Alakija, Abah Folawiyo, Florence Ita-Giwa, Ben Murray-Bruce, Ademola Adeleke, Abike Dabiri, Mo Abudu, Sade Okoya, Laja Adedoyin, Daisy Danjuma, Osasu Igbinedion, Aisha Falode and Adesuwa Onyenokwe. Others are still calling in to support this humble and highly courageous lady who has refused to be cowed or intimidated into hiding her son from the public just because he is physically challenged.
I seriously salute her for this worthy project.. She needs our prayers and support.

What Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, sees when he recalls the Biafran War.

My first glimpse into the horror and beauty that lurk uneasily in the human heart came in the late 1960s courtesy of the Biafran War. Biafra was the name assumed by the seceding southern section of Nigeria. The war was preceded—in some ways precipitated—by the massacre of southeastern (mostly Christian) Igbo living in the predominantly northern parts of Nigeria.

Thinking back, I am amazed that war’s terrifying images have since taken on a somewhat muted quality. It requires sustained effort to recall the dread, the pangs of hunger, the crackle of gunfire that once made my heart pound. It all now seems an unthreatening fog.

~~~

As Nigeria hurtled towards war, my parents faced a difficult decision: to flee, or stay put. We lived in Yola, a sleepy, dusty town whose streets teemed with Muslims in flowing white babariga gowns. My father was then a postal clerk; my mother a teacher. In the end, my father insisted that Mother take us, their four children, and escape to safety in Amawbia, my father’s natal town. Mother pleaded with him to come away as well, but he would not budge. He was a federal civil servant, and the federal government had ordered all its employees to remain at their posts.

My mother didn’t cope well in Amawbia. In the absence of my father, she was a wispy and wilted figure. She despaired of ever seeing her husband alive again. Our relatives made gallant efforts to shield her, but news about the indiscriminate killings in the north still filtered to her. She lost her appetite. Day and night, she lay in bed in a kind of listless, paralyzing grief. She was given to bouts of impulsive, silent weeping.

Then one blazing afternoon, unheralded, my father materialized in Amawbia, stole back into our lives as if from the land of death itself.

“Eliza o! Eliza o!” a relative sang. “Get up! Your husband is back!”

At first, my mother feared that the returnee was some ghost come to mock her anguish. But, raising her head, she glimpsed a man who—for all the unaccustomed gauntness of his physique—was unquestionably the man she’d married. With a swiftness and energy that belied her enervation, she bolted up and dashed for him.

We would learn that my father’s decision to stay in Yola nearly cost him his life. He was at work when one day a mob arrived. Armed with cudgels, machetes and guns, they sang songs that curdled the blood. My father and his colleagues—many of them Igbo Christians—shut themselves inside the office. Huddled in a corner, they shook uncontrollably, reduced to frenzied prayers. One determined push and their assailants would have breached the barricades, poached and minced them, and made a bonfire of their bodies.

The Lamido of Adamawa, the area’s Muslim leader, arrived at the spot just in the nick. A man uninfected by the malignant thirst for blood, he vowed that no innocent person would be dealt death on his watch. He scolded the mob and shooed them away. Then he guided my father and his cowering colleagues into waiting vehicles and spirited them to the safety of his palace. In a couple of weeks, the wave of killings cooled off and the Lamido secured my father and the other quarry on the last ship to leave for the southeast.

~~~

Air raids became a terrifying staple of our lives. Nigerian military jets stole into our air space, then strafed with abandon. They flew low and at a furious speed. The ramp of their engines shook buildings and made the very earth quake.

“Cover! Everybody take cover!” the adults shouted and we’d scurry towards a huddle of banana trees or the nearest brush and lay face down.

Sometimes the jets dumped their deadly explosives on markets as surprised buyers and sellers dashed higgledy-piggledy. Sometimes the bombs detonated in houses. Sometimes it was cars trapped in traffic that were sprayed. In the aftermath, the cars became mangled metal, singed beyond recognition, the people in them charred to a horrid blackness. From our hiding spots, frozen with fright, we watched as the bombs tumbled from the sky, hideous metallic eggs shat by mammoth mindless birds.

One day, my siblings and I were out fetching firewood when an air strike began. We threw down our bundles of wood and cowered on the ground, gaping up. The jets tipped in the direction of our home and released a load. The awful boom of explosives deafened us. My stomach heaved; I was certain that our home had been hit. I pictured my parents in the rumble of smashed concrete and steel. We lay still until the staccato gunfire of Biafran soldiers startled the air, a futile gesture to repel the jets. Then we walked home in a daze, my legs rubbery, and found that the bombs had missed our home, but only narrowly. They had detonated at a nearby school.

~~~

At each temporary place of refuge, my parents tried to secure a small farmland. They sowed yam and cocoyam and also grew a variety of vegetables. We, the children, scrounged around for anything that was edible, relishing foods that in less stressful times would have made us retch.

One of my older cousins was good at making catapults, which we used to hunt lizards. We roasted them over fires of wood and dried brush and savored their soft meat. My cousin also set traps for rats. When his traps caught a squirrel or a rabbit, we felt providentially favored. Occasionally he would kill a tiny bird or two, and we would all stake out a claim on a piece of its meat.

While my family was constantly beset by hunger, we knew many others who had it worse. Biafra teemed with malnourished kids afflicted with kwashiorkor that gave them the forlorn air of the walking dead. Their hair was thin and discolored, heads big, eyes sunken, necks thin and scrawny, their skin wrinkly and sallow, stomachs distended, legs spindly.

Like other Biafrans, we depended on food and medicines donated by such international agencies as Catholic Relief and the Red Cross. Sometimes I accompanied my parents on trips to relief centers. The food queues, which snaked for what seemed like miles—a crush of men, women, children—offered less food than frustration as there was never enough to go round. One day, I saw a man crumble to the ground. Other men surrounded his limp body. As they removed him, my parents blocked my sight, an effete attempt to shield me from a tragedy I had already fully witnessed.

Some unscrupulous officers of the beleaguered Biafra diverted food to their homes. Bags of rice, beans and other foods, marked with a donor agency’s insignia, were not uncommon in markets. The betrayal pained my father. He railed by signing and distributing a petition against the Biafran officials who hoarded relief food or sold it for profit.

okey_w_bro_lo_cap.jpg

The petition drew the ire of the censured officials; the signatories were categorized as saboteurs. To be tagged a saboteur in Biafra was to be branded with a capital crime. A roundup was ordered. One afternoon, some grave-looking men arrived at our home. They snooped all over the house. They turned things over. They pulled out papers and pored over them, brows crinkled half in consternation, half in concentration. As they ransacked the house, they kept my father closely in view. Then they took him away.

Father was detained for several weeks. I don’t remember that our mother ever explained his absence. It was as if my father had died. And yet, since his disappearance was unspoken, it was as if he hadn’t.

Then one day, as quietly as he had exited, my father returned. For the first—and I believe last—time, I saw my father with a hirsute face. A man of steady habits, he shaved everyday of his adult life. His beard both fascinated and frightened me. It was as if my real father had been taken away and a different man had returned to us.

This image of my father so haunted me that, for many years afterwards, I flirted with the idea that I had dreamed it. It was only ten years ago, shortly after my father’s death, that I broached the subject with my mother. Yes, she confirmed, my father had been arrested during the war. And, yes, he’d come back wearing an unaccustomed beard.

~~~

Father owned a small transistor radio. It became the link between our war-torn space and the rest of the world. Every morning, as he shaved, my father tuned the radio to the British Broadcasting Corporation, which gave a more or less objective account of Biafra’s dwindling fortunes. It reported Biafra’s reverses, lost strongholds and captured soldiers as well as interviews with gloating Nigerian officials. Sometimes a Biafran official came on to refute accounts of lost ground and vow the Biafrans’ resolve to fight to the finish.

Feigning obliviousness, I always planted myself within earshot, then monitored my father’s face, hungry to gauge his response, the key to decoding the news. But his countenance remained inscrutable. Because he monitored the BBC while shaving, it was impossible to tell whether winces or tightening were from the scrape of a blade or the turn of the war.

At the end of the BBC broadcasts, my father twisted the knob to Radio Biafra, and then his emotions came on full display. Between interludes of martial music and heady war songs, the official mouthpiece gave exaggerated reports of the exploits of Biafran forces. They spoke about enemy soldiers “flushed out” or “wiped out” by gallant Biafran troops, of Nigerian soldiers surrendering. When an African country granted diplomatic recognition to Biafra, the development was described in superlative terms, sold as the beginning of a welter of such recognitions from powerful nations around the globe. “Yes! Yes!” my father would exclaim, buoyed by the diet of propaganda. How he must have detested it when the BBC disabused him, painted a patina of grey over Radio Biafra’s glossy canvas.

~~~

In January 1970, after enduring the 30-month siege, which claimed close to two million lives on both sides, Biafra buckled. We had emerged as part of the lucky, the undead. But though the war was over, I could intuit from my parents’ mien that the future was forbidden. It looked every bit as uncertain and ghastly as the past.

Our last refugee camp abutted a makeshift barrack for the victorious Nigerian army. Once each day, Nigerian soldiers distributed relief material—used clothes and blankets, tinned food, powdery milk, flour, oats, beans, rice, such like. There was never enough food or clothing to go around, which meant that brawn and grit decided who got food and who starved. Knuckles and elbows were thrown. Children, the elderly, the feeble did not fare well in the food scuffles. My father was the sole member of our family who stood a chance. On good days, he squeaked out a few supplies; on bad days, he returned empty handed. On foodless nights, we found it impossible to work up enthusiasm about the cessation of war. Then, the cry of “Happy survival!” with which refugees greeted one another sounded hollow, a cruel joke.

okeyparentsGroup_lo_cap.jpg

Despite the hazards, we, the children, daily thronged the food lines. We operated around the edges hoping that our doleful expressions would invite pity. Too young to grasp the bleakness, we did not know that pity, like sympathy, was a scarce commodity when people were famished.

One day I ventured to the food queue and stood a safe distance away watching the mayhem, silently praying that somebody might stir with pity and invite me to sneak into the front. As I daydreamed, a woman beckoned to me. I shyly went to her. She was beautiful and her face held a wide, warm smile.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Okey,” I volunteered, averting my eyes.

“Look at me,” she said gently. I looked up, shivering. “I like your eyes.” She paused, and I looked away again. “Will you be my husband?”

Almost ten at the time, I was aware of the woman’s beauty, and also of a vague stirring inside me. Seized by a mixture of flattery, shame and shyness, I used bare toes to scratch patterns on the ground.

“Do you want some food?” she asked.

I answered with the sheerest of nods.

“Wait here.”

She went off. My heart pounded as I awaited her return, at once expectant and afraid. Back in a few minutes, she handed me a plastic bag filled with beans and a few canned tomatoes. I wanted to say my thanks, but my voice was choked. “Here,” she said. “Open your hand.” She dropped ten shillings onto my palm.

I ran to our tent, flush with exhilaration. As I handed the food and coin to my astonished parents, I breathlessly told them about my strange benefactor, though I never said a word about her comments on my eyes or her playful marriage proposal. The woman had given us enough food to last for two or three days. The ten shillings was the first post-war Nigerian coin my family owned. In a way, we’d taken a step towards becoming once again “Nigerian.” She’d also made me aware that my eyes were beautiful, despite their having seen so much ugliness.

~~~

Each day, streams of men set out and trekked many miles to their hometowns. They were reconnoiterers, eager to assess the state of life to which they and their families would eventually return. They returned with blistered feet and harrowing stories.

Amawbia was less than 40 miles away. By bus, the trip was easy, but there were few buses and my parents couldn’t afford the fare anyway. One day a man who’d traveled there came to our tent to share what he’d seen. His was a narrative of woes, except in one detail: My parents’ home, the man reported, was intact. He believed that an officer of the Nigerian army had used my parents’ home as his private lodgings. My parents’ joy was checked only by their informer’s account of his own misfortunes. He’d found his own home destroyed. Eavesdropping on his report, I imagined our home as a mythical island of order and wholesomeness ringed by overgrown copse and shattered houses.

The next day my father trekked home. He wanted to confirm what he’d heard and to arrange for our return. But when he got back, my mother let out a shriek then shook her head in quiet sobs. My father arrived in Amawbia to a shocking sight. Our house had been razed; the fire still smoldered, a testament to its recentness. As my father stood and gazed in stupefaction, the truth dawned on him: Some envious returnee, no doubt intent on equalizing misery, had torched it. War had brought out the worst in someone.

My parents had absorbed the shock of other losses. There was the death of a beloved grandaunt to sickness and of a distant cousin to gunshot in the battlefield. There was the impairment of another cousin who lost a hand. There was the loss of irreplaceable photographs, among them the images of my grandparents and of my father as a soldier in Burma during WWII. There was the loss of documents, including copies of my father’s letters (a man of compulsive fastidiousness, my father had a life-long habit of keeping copies of every letter he wrote). But this loss of our home cut to the quick because it was inflicted not by the detested Nigerian soldier but by one of our own. By somebody who would remain anonymous but who might come around later to exchange pleasantries with us, even to bemoan with us the scars left by war.

~~~

At war’s end, the Nigerian government offered 20 pounds to each Biafran adult. We used part of the sum to pay the fare for our trip home. I was shaken at the sight of our house: The concrete walls stood sturdily, covered with soot, but the collapsed roof left a gaping hole. Blackened zinc lay all about the floor. We squatted for a few days at the makeshift abode of my father’s cousins. Helped by several relatives, my father nailed back some of the zinc over half of the roof. Then we moved in.

The roof leaked whenever it rained. At night, rain fell on our mats, compelling us to move from one spot to another. In the day, shafts of sunlight pierced through the holes. But it was in that disheveled home that we began to piece our lives together again. We began to put behind us the terrors we had just emerged from. We started learning what it means to repair an inhuman wound, what it takes to go from here to there.

In time, my father was absorbed back into the postal service. My mother returned to teaching. We went back to school. The school building had taken a direct hit, so classes were kept in the open air. Even so, our desire to learn remained strong. At the teacher’s prompting, we rent the air, shouted the alphabet and yelled multiplication tables.

Okey Ndibe is the author of Arrows of Rain, teaches fiction and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and is finishing work on foreign gods, inc. Ndibe has also taught at Connecticut College in New London, CT. He was for one year on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant and, from 2001-2002, was a Fulbright professor at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

To comment on this piece: editors@guernicamag.com

By Obafemi Babajide

I had never given a chance to knowing or studying what nemesis really is, except the conventional bible teaching, referencing and perhaps, stories and myths related to the play of nemesis handed over through tales and folklores.

While I was having a fruitful discussion with a group of progressives yesterday, the word nemesis popped up and I had a rap on my brain to know what it deeply means.

Simply put, nemesis to me summarily means the inescapable agent of someone or somethings downfall! It could be through a friend or foe; most times through ones rival, arch-rival, arch enemy, antagonist and even protagonist in varied cases.

In the ancient Greek, nemesis is known as Rhamnousia or Rhamnusia .Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning “dispenser of dues.”

Rhamnousia is the goddess of Rhamnous who is believed to be in charge of indignation against and retribution for evil deeds and undeserved good fortune. She was the personification of the resentment aroused in those who committed crimes with apparent impunity, those who have inordinate ambitions and uncouth good fortune.

Nemesis i.e Rhamnousia, is believed to be responsible for checking excesses or undue luck, favour gotten through tricks and pranks, especially at the detriment of persons or group of people through the back door; little wonder she was seen as an avenger or punishing divinity.

Another swift but interesting meaning of nemesis as researched, is a person or thing that is very difficult for someone to defeat or conquer. In other words, people one helped bring in through the back door could just be ones bad luck, antagonist or nemesis.

One of the things that caught my attention was the fact that nemesis has a symbol; Like justice, her symbol, like that of justice is also a measuring rod or scale, “osuwon” in yoruba. Does it now mean that nemesis is justice? If not, does it mean justice and nemesis are Siamese twin conjoined with no option of separation? This I believe is debateable probably in another discussion sometimes later.

If the questions raised in the paragraph above seems true, then it will be just apt to say that Sanator Dino Melaye has met or he is about to meet his nemesis in his protégé and once hurriedly arranged mentee.

When the rumour of recalling him started, I took it with a pinch of salt not knowing that the actors involved have beautifully mastered their act perfectly and are ready to unleashing the terror continuously until the targeted is captured. It looked as if they left no stone unturned as reality began to unveil itself on the recalcitrant Senator.

Again, my research showed me that nemesis doesn’t fight a no just cause, meaning that you must be involved in a particular act before she strikes.

Moving forward, was Dino involved in enthroning Yahaya Bello? Yes! Was he offered incentives in kind and otherwise? Absolutely!!
So what caused the crack, the fight and the war? He Dino, wants to have absolute control of Bello. Does it look like greed, undue fortune or influence or impunity? Totally yes!!!

Not even the court that Senator Dino ran to could safe or halt this recall process as it where as all is really looking set for the home coming of SDM the “ajekun iya” crooner. This further confirms the adage that advices anyone who wants to dine with the devil to please make sure they have a very very long spoon.

Of all the past Senators produced from kogi West senatorial district, none of them had the luck of been badly battered, bruised and boxed to the corner like the present Senator Melaye who happens to be youngest among them to have taken a senatorial seat from that axis. Painfully so is that, the man pioneering his exit, is the same man he foisted on people has God’s will for the state. If Yahaya Bello as purported by SDM is God choice for the state, then whatever he does (including sponsoring Dino’s recall) is God’s will and must be accepted by all without questioning.

Another lesson learnt from this episode is that, as much as you help outsiders, please extend same to your kinsmen because when outside becomes too hot, you won’t have an option than to return home. Just imagine that SDM was not overtaken by self aggrandizement, he would have thrown his weight at the emergence of Faleke his kinsman; today, this unnecessary bickering and show of strength wouldn’t have turned so messy before it is nipped in the bud.

Though Senator Melaye characteristically felt, he could cause GYB a sleepless night but more than the proverbial child that won’t allow her mother sleep in the night, he himself will not only keep vigils but will also be deprived of taking a nap at day time.

My breif research into nemesis, got me the conclusion that, Yahaya Bello sadly, is the “dispenser of dues” to Dino Melaye. He is the male version of Rhamnousia who is assigned by destiny to avenge Dino’s wrong doing to the entire state because of present and personal gains. But who now is GYB’s “dispenser of dues”, who is Yahaya Bello’s nemesis?

*Babajide Obafemi writes from Lagos, Nigeria.

Femi Fani-Kayode did what is similar to what he is doing now during GEJ. Only that GEJ couldn’t stand his lunacy long enough till he invited him to “come and chop”.
Unfortunately, Buhari can never do that. He’d allow him to degenerate into full blown lunacy, and if possible, substance abuse overdose.
It has always been a sort of practice to reward meaningless babblers and disgruntled element with a decadent culture of “come chop”.
How GEJ would have even invited FFK who called him unprintable names, including being a man without balls in the most debasing light really highlights him as a weakling of some sorts.
It is so easy and cheap to finish the likes of FFK. Simply ignore them till they self-implode. FFK is not a critic. He is an invalid. .
Genuine critics are rewarded with correction or success, lunatics are ignored and allowed to self-destruct. Arm-chair critics can sometimes and randomly be deployed into the arena to play some parts. Their experience will