A Vile Murder in the Social Media

Before you post your next FB comment on the unfolding Ese tragedy, here's an objectivity test, and it applies to all, whether you are a northerner, a wailer, an Ijaw, a Christian, Muslim or a traditional religionist. Ask yourself: "If this thing had been done to my little sister or daughter, what will I write and how?"

In other  words, cast any favorite relation of yours who is 13 in Ese's place and then write about the child undergoing psychological torture in Kano. I know this is difficult but try it; I guarantee  you will quickly sober up and curb your current excesses.

We have murdered an underage girl using the social media. For a start, the guy who took her to Kano is either 18, 20 or 22. Whichever it is, he can vote and can be jailed if convicted of an offence. He is an adult. However, this adult is being treated by the police, society, and the media as if he is a minor; no one has seen his face, no one knows what he looks like. The minor, on the other hand, is being publicly humiliated every step of the way; her photos are everywhere. The latest gossip about pregnancy ensures that she will leave the rest of her life a miserable human being and might even consider ending it all at some point.

I still see many losing their heads and continuing to write this girl into ignominy and life-long agony, while cleverly hiding behind our legion of parochialisms.

With the social media, we are increasingly losing our sense of decency, empathy, and our very humanity. Think of the human person; stop and consider what we are getting excited about - a girl who is only 13, which is a primary or junior secondary school age.

For fathers who deploy sociological disquisition to further diminish the worth of this girl child, she could have been your daughter.

I'm ashamed of any woman or girl that has ever written anything against this girl.

I feel a sharp pain each time I read the jaundiced opinions that are being served against this girl - for the simple reason that she is the daughter of a roadside food seller. We have seen that she was in school and we now know that her father is unemployed, so where was her school fees coming from? Does she have a choice other than to help her mother serve food at the roadside eatery?

I feel the pain of the poor when I read the magisterial interrogation of the morality of female roadside food sellers, while conveniently ignoring the reality that their poverty (and beauty) are the attractions for the army of depraved male patrons who prey on them.

Answer me, roadside sociologist: Given the situation at hand, is it possible that this 13-year old schoolgirl would have gone out of her way to seduce the man or the reverse is more likely to hold true?

What a country we have. Lord have mercy on our poor souls.

LAST LINE

While the Sunday Punch has finally ignited a national outrage over a 13-year old girl lured from her school and her parents and taken to the north to be converted to Islam and married off, the Premium Times has been persuaded to tell tales that cast the 13-year old as a girl of easy virtue.

The question I would like to ask Premium Times as it breaks it's exclusives is this: Have you considered the critical question whether Islam allows a young muslim boy to chat up an underage muslim girl and then whisk her off to an Imam who will then marry them without reference to her parents? Or is this possible because Ese is not a Muslim girl?

Premium Times, this journalism you're doing sucks. I thought editors are supposed to be thinking on their feet and doing things to help alleviate if not abolish the abominations that privileged people heap on the poor, the vulnerable, and defenseless in our society.

Shame dey catch me.

A headache called Judiciary

The judiciary is not the major problem with the anti-corruption crusade in Nigeria; the biggest headache is the MO of corruption investigations.

President Muhammadu Buhari at a town-hall meeting in Addis Ababa reportedly told Nigerians living in Ethiopia that the judiciary is his “main headache” on the current fight against corruption in Nigeria. Unfortunately, the newspapers did not offer much on the nature of this headache, beyond the three unfavourable judgements that Buhari obtained after tortuous trials duing his prior quests to become president. It was therefore difficult to judge from the reports whether the president was railing against unduly long court processes, whether he was implying that the those unfavorable judgments he received were corruptly influenced, and indeed whether this is about the ongoing corruption cases being prosecuted in our courts.

Whatever may be the case, we quite agree with the President on one thing: there is popular perception that judicial officers are being corrupted in their efforts to dispense justice. The justices are not alone; this perception pervades the entire public service space. It is a common experience that a good number of Nigerian service providers not only expect but also gently remind those they serve to part with some cash for the same services they are being paid to render. Since our judges are service providers and Nigerians, it would not be out of place to expect that there are bad eggs among them. It is also not a peculiar Nigerian problem. Ours is but a matter of degree. Is there a country in the world where a rotten judge has never been found?

There is one thing about the Nigerian judiciary that attracts popular perception as a major headache - the laws as they apply to the rich and the poor. To illustrate, we have read reports that a man who was caught selling weed under the Ojota bridge in Lagos State was sentenced to life imprisonment! There was also the story of a young man who stole a governor’s phone and used it to defraud people of less than N5million and was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison without an option of fine. On the other side of the social divide, we read of an ex-governor who was fined N3million for stealing N25billion from his state and the period he spent in detention was taken as sufficient punishment for the crime. A top civil servant was recently sentenced to serve six years in jail but was given an option to pay a fine of N750,000 for stealing N32.8 billion from the Police Pensions Fund. To lay people like us, all of this give the impression that the rich and the poor are judged by different standards in the application of our criminal law.

Thinking about it is enough to give any moral being a headache. If these are therefore the basis of the President's headache, he is justified. But we suspect, based on the newspaper reports, that the president is adverting his mind on something else which the common man does not see as a headache - election matters in court and the elite suspicion that judgments can and are being bought. The politicians are entitled to their court headaches and should leave us out of it.

We would like to see as our headache, the current war against corruption that our president is waging. The main headache as I see it is not the judiciary; the trouble is with the modus operandi of corruption investigations. Contrary to the government’s narrative that “corruption is fighting back,” following public and social media outcry on the tenor of investigations, specifically its human rights abuse dimension, the reality is that the quality of investigations of public officials who allegedly looted the state is not top class. Investigators should not be seen to be issuing bulletins or perceived to be authorizing leaks during a large-scale project such as recovering massive funds looted from the treasury by serving or former government officials. This is what Bishop Kukah likens to drumming and whistling in a bush where one hopes to catch a monkey. In civilised climes, such investigations are conducted quietly, unobtrusively and thoroughly and, when done, all confirmed collaborators are arrested at the same time and charged for multiple offences that lead to easy recoveries of the stolen money. This will not give room for other culprits to try other methods of hiding their loot. None will be given the opportunity to jump into the APC ship where they hope to avoid prosecution. It will be impossible to negotiate with investigators to prepare a watery case that will lead to slap-wrist judgements. Judges will not be presented with loopholes that smart lawyers will exploit to assist those who are destroying the nation to escape justice.

Why do the DSS and the EFCC elect to do their work in this manner? My suspicion is that the federal investigators are merely trying to help the president give us the impression that the war on corruption is being fought vigorously. No worse strategy could have been contemplated. Imagine what a difference it would have made to the image of the country - and the government - if 50 persons, for example, were to be arrested across the country in one day and charged to court for stealing a specified amount of money – after a thorough investigation! The present method is what my people liken to an impetuous farmer who breaks the yam while standing to harvest only to squat thereafter in a bid to carefully dig it out.

Rev. Fr. Mbaka's Lemon

The news is that Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka, the stormy petrel of the Catholic Church, has been transferred from GRA Enugu to a parish at Emene as a resident priest.

For the record, a resident priest is an official guest in a parish where he is posted to carry out a special assignment. The resident priest is not involved in the running of the parish to which he has been posted but is enlisted to say Mass in the parish.

I presume that Rev. Fr. Mbaka's special assignment is the development of his Adoration Ministry's permanent site for which he had acquired hectares of land at the same location.

What then is the issue here?

His transfer is good for the church because it restores discipline. No active priest is ordinarily allowed to stay for more than 10 years in one parish - that luxury is reserved only for Bishops and the Pope. Father Mbaka reportedly stayed 20.

His transfer is a good omen for residents of Abakaliki Rd GRA who have had to endure his ministry's boisterous weekly spiritual events in a residential neighbourhood .

The transfer is good for Rev Fr. Mbaka himself as he is freed from parish duties for now in order to concentrate on developing his Ministry.

He can immediately deploy bulldozers and, in a matter of days, open a temporary adoration site and structure therein. He may even deploy free buses to ensure that the faithful get to the event ground.

In other words, if Fr. Mbaka feels he has been handed a lemon, nothing stops him from making lemonade from it.