Tag Archives: Nigerian Activists

#KakandaTemple: In Defence of Sadiq Abacha

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Abacha, our Abacha, the last of the true Generals and defenders against western imperialism, is dead and Nigerians, whose cowardice is both genetic and legendary, have become activists united against his ghost.

You see, our activists only pick a fight with the dead, they pick a fight with this dead soldier, because they lack the “street credibility” to mobilise the people against living politicians—merely to prove their bravery to their white sponsors who, they pretend they don’t know, are just manipulative imperialists exploiting the poverty expressed in their demonstrations of patriotism. Even those cockroaches who remained in the dark, unspeaking all through Abacha years, have now gained baritone voices, fabricating stories of their “involvements” and “engagements” in “pro-democracy struggles”, as they queue behind a frail old man, Wole Soyinka, to vilify Abacha and even us.

Yes, every family that didn’t use “Abacha stove” in those good years are now seen as accomplices in the fall of this country.

But why is everyone hating on us? When is it a crime to be an ajebota? So because our colleague, Sadiq Abacha, finally condescended, after persistent persuasions, to lecture your role model, Wole Soyinka, an asylum-seeking common writer whose schizophrenia is no longer a rumour, you’re calling for our heads? Is it our fault that your parents are not smart enough to get rich? That you used “Abacha stove” in those years was because you were poor and your father was broke. Your improved conditions today is a testimony that Abacha had given you opportunities to secure education, though understandably substandard, but still better than what’s obtainable at your schools now, which made you smarter than your parents.

It’s so interesting that Nigerians who were in their panties, all below age 10, in Abacha’s regime, are the most outspoken critics of his government today. They didn’t really experience the time, but are critics now, having been indoctrinated by the famously biased media representations of the South-romanticising Lagos-Ibadan press who are ever quick to vilify northerners that refuse to offer fat brown envelopes to their owners. Do not mistake your childhood naïveté for history, little tigers. You may consult your senior colleagues who were part of the two-million youths march organised by Daniel Kanu-led Youths Earnestly Asking for Abacha, that tampered with the blood pressure of CIA-controlled media moguls in the West.

Lazy journalism is responsible for all the Abachas have passed through in these past horrible years, and despite all he has done for the country. Is it not true, as Sadiq highlighted, that Inflation went from 54% to 8.5% under Abacha? Is it not true that our foreign currency reserves increased from 494 million dollars in 1993 to 9.6 billion dollars by the middle of 1997? Is it not true, also, that our peacekeeping operations were the hope of this continent? Things fell apart after the death of Abacha.

Today, you say that Abacha stole money, but can you tell me any Nigerian president or head of state, living or dead, that didn’t do the same? Abacha didn’t expect his death, which was why he couldn’t tie the loose ends of his offshore accounts. The others, before and after him, were lucky. How is the present any different from Abacha’s days? Did the presidency, under Goodluck Jonathan, not steal $20 billion? Did the security personnel, under Goodluck Jonathan, not kill unarmed protesters during the fuel subsidy removal protests? Did the presidency, in a democratic system, not suspend a CBN Governor by decree? You even say that Abacha killed Ken Saro Wiwa, but he was not the Judge who headed the tribunal set up to try Wiwa. You don’t even know what Wiwa did. If Justice Ibrahim Auta who tried Wiwa had no conscience, he wouldn’t have become the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court. See? History is already pulling Abacha out of this lake of propaganda designed by NADECO leaders, former exiles-turned-politicians, who only succeeded in teaching us how to loot national resources with wisdom – through ownership of newspaper houses to counter political witch-hunts and vilifications.

The judiciary has cleared Major Hamza Al-Mustapha of trumped up charges of responsibility in the killings of the pro-NADECO, so why are we pointing finger at the ghost of Abacha still? Our soldiers who were the toast of every pop singer and apple-offering Indian dame in Abacha days are now being used for experiments in guerrilla warfare by ordinary Aboki terrorists. Shame! And if Abacha were a bad person, General Muhammadu Buhari, the only morally upright elder in the country right now wouldn’t have served under him, overseeing implementations of populist projects as head of Petroleum Trust Fund.

See, let me tell you something, those miserable countrymen overseas, who have turned Abacha vilification into a career, in their campaign to defeat him, his ghost that is, are not honest with you. They’re doing so to justify their continuous stay, long after the death of the General, in those grand European and American cities where, from washing dead bodies of lower-class white people, they have acquired education and even managed to secure small jobs, validating their claims of “living large”. I have seen them, misery wrinkled in their faces, in my many holidays outside Nigeria.

Everyday they upload photos on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram with accompanying captions “Chillling tinz”, “YOLO” and even “Life is Good…” to introduce us to their realities which are blurred by photoshopping. Those tax-evading asylees and migrants are everything but comfortable. Their life is a lie, a fraud that gets them attacking the Abachas. They were there on claims of persecution by Abacha. One, a famous novelist, has been going from campus to campus, Harvard to Princeton, telling the white people that he, an incomparable genius, was on death row in Nigeria and that he had seen prisoners nailed on ceilings from their penises, thanking his gods, the white men and their liberalism, for rescuing him, away from Abacha, away from Babangida, away from Buhari, and making him a better person. But, wait for it, unholy shame, my good friend, a freelance investigative blogger has exposed him: your novelist has never ever been anywhere close to a police counter, let alone a maximum security prison. But he still vends those fabrications to make a living in America, to demonise you and your country. Yet you celebrate him!

I know, my dear countrymen, you do not understand the game of this army of pretend activists overseas, who have scammed us all, used you as foot soldiers of their fabrications. This is not fault of yours, I blame it on your schools. Did you actually know the three classic laws of thoughts before reading Sadiq’s powerful letter to Soyinka? Instead of thanking Sadiq for that free tutorial, you’re cussing us. For what? Is it also our fault that, having graduated from schools where you shared classrooms with lizards, the laws of thoughts seem like obscure lines from Shakespeare’s unpublished play – The Incomprehensibiliad? Why must we always be the scapegoats of your failures? Were you there when our parents were looting your treasury? Who are your witnesses? Those silly things you see in the media are sponsored. Not that I expect you to believe me, anyway. You’re all incapable of thinking without those abstruse rants of your sadistic journalists and columnists, which is why we’re organizing a party to celebrate brother Sadiq’s victory this weekend.

Sadiq didn’t address his letter to you for a reason. He knows you lack the intellect to comprehend the microeconomics of government, and even the Nobel laureate himself was correctly taught elementary philosophy to enhance his cognitive abilities, before he was intellectually taken to the cleaners. I love how Sadiq deconstructed your Soyinka, an overrated professor who has no PhD. Shame. Our friend, a certified ajebota, Salihu Dasuki Nakande got his PhD at age 24. The paragraph below, a necessary education for you and your amnesiac professor, is what we call knockout in boxing:

“You say, with the weight of your sense of history and the authority you possess on national issues that ’a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out‘ referring to my late father, you must be growing old, or you would rightly recall that that president elect you refer to did not die while my father was alive.”

Busted. This historical revisionism alone is enough for the forfeiture of his Nobel Prize. Thank you, Sadiq. Let’s re-educate these emotionally petty, ignorant, hate-mongering, angry young men being played by the Establishment. See you in Miami shortly. We love you, bro!

Gymber Cacandah,
CEO, Cacandah Oil & Gas.

Ps: If you think I was not an ajebota in Abacha years because you knew when Ya-Kulu was sending me to go get chaff at Dogo Mai-Injin’s place, God is watching you. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda on Twitter

#KakandaTemple ~ Nigeria: Of Rights, Patriotism and ‘Briefcase’ Activism

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It was a sad day.

I was sad for the innocent kids murdered in Yobe, just a few days after 20 girls were abducted in Borno, by the same bloodthirsty insurgents. I accepted an invitation to hang out with friends, which turned out to be a wrong move. They are from Borno; from the heart of the wrecked towns and villages. I was challenged by their lecture on the genesis and complexity of the radical ideology that has evolved into this irrational insurgency. I was dejected, and emotionally defeated!

Earlier in the day, I listened to the President, and his indirect concession of defeat in another of his promises to “prosecute (the) war against terror.” It dampened my spirit. His ‘threat’ to withdraw soldiers stationed in Borno to prove a point to Shettima was a extraordinarily dumb wisecrack, because I don’t think Shettima was actually being ungrateful; I think he was only crying, that the soldiers are exposed to undermined danger, yet ill-prepared.

Of course, I’d be similarly devastated and even suspicious, aware of how trillions of naira were obviously cornered in Abuja without me. The Borno issues were badly handled in that chat. They gave away Mr President’s wicked sense of humour. For that, he shouldn’t make any more effort to be funny outside his bedroom. There’s no honour in chuckling at a funeral!

Yet Nigerians remain in their bedrooms and offices tweeting at perceived injustice and incompetence, and expecting such cyber-venting to change the system. What I realise about us is, nobody wants to take the first bullet. Everybody just wants to queue behind you. We need to stand together as citizens, with our demands harmonised in the quest to reclaim the country.

My experience in organising #OccupyNigeria in Minna has taught me a lesson – that you need more than private citizens for an orderly demonstration of rage. The politicians, who have successfully scammed us, know this. Which is why they created so many forums and associations to remain powerful – for, divided they fall. Even a politician in his 90s is a member of a relevance-seeking “elders council”. I renounced membership of a writers association, a supposed intellectual powerhouse of the country, when it refused to be a part of OccupyNigeria protests in January, 2012. The absence of unions, which are ever not willing to hurt their financiers, the government, is always a predication that a proposed peaceful protest may be hijacked, and thus the authorities would give us a bad name just to use us for experiments in brutalities. This was why our OccupyNigeria campaign in Minna was the most destructive in Nigeria. It became a riot, checked only when a 24-hour curfew was imposed. At the end, the state government set up 13-man committee to assess the damage, and their reports will shock you. So, to check violence, we need unions, and all those dormant NGOs in Nigeria misleading, and, sorry to say, swindling, the West in the name of human rights advocacy.

This week, out of frustration with the massacres in the north-east, without a convincing assurance of an end soon, I reached out to some people for a possibility of a protest, to occupy, as they say in the streets of dysfunctional countries, this headquarters of political failures; there is no better time to face these remorseless clowns at Three Arms Zone, Abuja.

But the funny thing about these Abuja-based activists on Twitter is, when you call them and inform them that a certain ambassador or politician wants to have a lunch with them, they’ll be available. None will be in a meeting. None will be on the road driving. None will promise to call back when s/he’s done – with ongoing imaginary events. But, tell them of the possibility of a protest, you hear pim, a very loud silence. This is what we call “Briefcase” activism. Yes, the policemen could be on alert, and they will, as usual, announce on NTA that “all forms of protests are banned”; but, listen, we don’t need such censoring if we’re a team, unions, associations, organisations, and forums, not some cowards exhibiting hypocritical patriotism from air-conditioned offices and rooms.

Still I’m more betrayed by NGO owners and members of civil society organisations who, in the name of rights advocacies, receive huge grants to cover the miseries and protect the sanctity of the people they abandon in times of crises. Anytime you attend social events, you hear rich and pot-bellied Nigerians say, “My name is X, our NGO is into peace-building…” In which country?! I think we need a list of all NGOs and civil society organisations in Nigeria with sources of their funding in order to expose their frauds.

What do they do? You can’t be receiving grants from western institutions and governments to promote peace and human dignity, and we don’t hear or see you. That is fraud, uppercase fraud!

We need the unions, NGOs and rights advocacy groups in times like this because it’s very difficult for nonunion citizens to lead a protest, without a few elements losing their minds or having it hijacked by uncontrollably angry people. Nigerians are very angry right now, and if we must take to the street, we need to harmonise our demands – to check possible violence. We’re all stakeholders in the campaigns to understand the complexity of Boko Haram, and this defeat of our troops.

In this dilemma, we saw a public notice calling Abuja residents to converge at Unity Fountain on Thursday (27th February), just beside the city’s biggest hotel. I couldn’t authenticate the source of the unsigned broadcast. But as much as I’m wary of involvement in knee-jerk reactions to unpopular government (in)decisions, I thought it an opportunity to meet and discuss strategies to adopt in getting the government’s attention.

There was fear, the usual, especially when the police announced that “all forms of protests are banned in FCT” on NTA. And for that, they intercepted us, threw a canister of tear-gas at us, but we defied the threat. At the end, they had to arrest us and had us crammed inside their van. This is the beauty of our democracy – government of the powerful. But we were released, for the obvious reason: the fear of technology, the social media sensationalism, which, they have realised, can ruin their reputation and career with a tweet!

Though the protest ended much too soon, with hope of converging again when our strategies are better harmonised, it introduced me to the patriotism of fellow Nigerians in spite of the armchair critics to whom fault-finding is a permanent job. Whomever initiated the Unity Fountain protest is a genius. The intent was clear: to embarrass guests, from different countries, coming to Transcorp Hilton Hotel for the Centenary jamboree.

Still a mystery remains: even at the venue no one claimed authorship of the broadcast that had us converge- which means the initiator didn’t participate. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)