Nigeria is a crime scene!

But that’s a cliche. 

So thought the editor of The Economist too, when the British newspaper described Nigeria as “The crime scene at the heart of Africa” in the headline of its special report last year.

Because its editors thought the description of Nigeria in the headline was already trite, they gave a disclaimer to their international audience, thus:

“Readers who do not follow Nigeria closely may ask: what’s new? Nigeria has been corrupt and turbulent for decades. What has changed of late, though, is that jihadism, organised crime and political violence have grown so intense and widespread that most of the country is sliding towards ungovernability. In the first nine months of 2021, almost 8,000 people were directly killed in various conflicts. Hundreds of thousands more have perished because of hunger and disease caused by fighting. More than 2 million have fled their homes.”

Before now, Nigerians endured crimes prevalent among the aberrant poor and struggling masses, but now they perish daily under the present elitist crime regime that has institutionalised violence and monetised terror through the various realms of the state and deep state.

Then, some try to retreat from the sordid crime scene that the country has become. A majority of them subscribe to one of the two Crimean options – to either leave the country as a collective ethnic group through a referendum or leave the crime scene individually to associate with a less savage state – hence the slang japa (meaning, to escape from harm with frantic speed).

However, those who want to stay on in Nigeria’s widening crime scene are soon implicated, summarily impaled, and savagely cremated in a macabre execution-style… And the country moves on. 

Some more are abducted and auctioned for money, and where they delay in paying the ransom, they are offered as blood sacrifices to Mammon, the arch-demon Nigerians worship quietly and openly. The mutilated bodies of these oblations are later found or never found again.

Then follows recriminations between a government who blames murdered farmers for going to their farms, between clerics who blame roasted women and men for deserving their widely supported lynching and cremations, between legislators who blame people who paid ransoms to rescue their family members from pampered savage killers, between all these agents of the state and the few sane observers at the national crime scene.

Crime: From Top to Bottom!

President Buhari finally got a chance to see Abba Kyari, his government’s most decorated top cop, who has finally been reduced from top to bottom, when he visited the remains of the Kuje Prison last Wednesday. 

Abba Kyari, a Deputy Commissioner of Police, accused of money laundering and narcotics offences was one of the 111 loyal prisoners that remained in the prison when the other 879 criminals walked out on the subdued corrections officers at the Kuje penitentiary.

Other top inmates who remained there include Reverend Jolly Nyame, the former governor of Taraba State and Farouk Lawan, a former National House of Assembly member.

ISWAP claimed that its brave fighters successfully crushed the defences of the Kuje Custodial Centre, in a commando-style invasion, freeing 64 Boko Haram members and several others Tuesday night.

Earlier in 2019, when Mr Buhari repeated his mantra, “from top to bottom!” during his “Next Level” campaign, some believed he meant to finally redistribute the largesse that the people close to his government at the top enjoy to reach the citizens at the bottom rung of the societal ladder.

Not at all.

For Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, Buhari’s slogan was a subtle promise to lower people from life on top of the ground to the bottom of their grave. And the statistics support this morbid view of the President’s campaign slogan.

Today, some wonder why they just could not see then that Mr Buhari actually meant to reduce all the country’s fortunes from top to bottom, as he completes his second and last term of 4 years.

Thus, to avoid such misunderstanding of the goodwill of a presidential candidate like Mr Buhari, or to avoid voting in 2023 for a candidate who subtly informs the crowd of the ill will that he has – to lower his people from top to bottom in grinding poverty and mass graves, it is better for the electorate to require presidential candidates (and other candidates) to quantify what they intend to achieve and simply state it clearly in figures.

Cremations: From North to South!

“Across the north and south, to kill and lynch, light the fire”, to disembowel Sade Adu’s evergreen lines in Smooth Operator.

But lately, lynching and burning of the victim moved to the next level in Nigeria.

On one hand, Nigerians are used to people meting out jungle justice or carrying out extrajudicial executions on perceived criminals, especially, armed robbers, ritual killers, and kidnappers of kids on the streets in full public glare. Somehow this crime is popular and the people just move on.

Anyone could suffer the same fate if some one simply shouts that you stole a loaf of bread. The motions are: a crowd gathers around, who are not privy to what really happened, who don’t listen to what you say. Each moral retard begins to experiment their morbid impulses on the hapless victim, hitting with sticks, stoning with heavy objects, stabbing with knives, baying for blood. 

In fact before you know it, they soak the hapless offender with petrol, and affix used vehicle tyres on her/his body to ferry the next legally innocent human being in a cloud of fire to Gehenna, northsouth of Nigeria. They just love to watch the victim run and burn.

Some believe the crime of killing people without official trial was normal because they don’t trust the police when they arrest both criminals and innocent people. They also don’t trust the country’s judicial process for justice to be served. The Nigerian Police scored lowest among public institutions with regards to people’s trust.

52% of respondents have “no trust at all” in the Police, followed by 51% of the sample population having not trust in “the Government of President Buhari”. Next, 46% have no trust at all in the National Assembly, and 41% have no trust in the judiciary. 

Such is Nigeria’s endemic crime culture that crime is punished by crime, whether mob lynching or police extrajudicial killings.

Recently, it ran from the filming of the lynching and burning of the body of a school girl in Sokoto, Northern Nigeria, by her classmates, to the shock of the world but to the cheer of the masses in that city. She was proudly and publicly killed because of a text she shared in her class chat group that supposedly bordered on faith. 

None of the leading 2023 presidential candidates condemned the act. They all appear okay with the crime.

Then this crime wave ran through Abuja, the centre of the country. A young man was killed by a proud mob in Lugbe, within the Federal Capital Territory also for allegedly expressing his own faith contrary to others.

Again, none of the 2023 Presidential candidates mentioned or condemned the crime – a promise they would countenance such brazen criminality as it progresses to the next level during their reign, post 2023.

Finally, this crime arrived the country’s southern coast of Lagos. A humble commercial sex worker was impaled and burnt by her suspected fraudulent customer because she possessed her own religious book in her own room. 

As expected, all the 2023 presidential candidates said nothing. Yet, the presidential candidates have spoken thrice with a resounding silence that this crime would continue from north to south.

So, as many more people now see, like Kole Omotosho saw in 2017, that Nigeria is “a giant crime scene enclosing other sub-scenes”, they seek several options to escape from this perennial crime scene.

The Crimea Options: From East to West

Crimea seceded from Ukraine in 2014, exactly 60 years after the region was transferred from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. And Russia defended the wish of some ethnic Russians in Crimea to leave Ukraine.

This was effected with despatch through a referendum in which 97% of the Crimean populace voted to secede from Ukraine and be annexed by the Russian Federation. Some doubted the outcome of the referendum, but like many rigged elections that recycle civilian despots and corrupt governors in many parts of the world, including Nigeria, the Crimean referendum results too have not been proven yet by any law court to be false.

The world barked, initiating some weak sanctions, and moved on.

For Nigeria too, going by the increasing insecurity and instability in Nigeria, especially arising from the 10 most vicious criminal groups (listed in table, “Buhari’s Presidency”, below), many minority ethnic groups, as well as major ethnic groups, believe the best option is to lead their ethnic group out of the Union called Nigeria.

This option is not recent. In fact, it dates back to the days of some of the founding fathers of the country. Delving deep into Nigeria’s roots, the UK-based journal, The Economist, wrote:

“Little more than six decades ago, as Nigeria was nearing independence, even those who were soon to govern Africa’s largest country had their doubts about whether it would hold together. British colonists had drawn a border around land that was home to more than 250 ethnic groups. 

Obafemi Awolowo, a politician of that era, evoked Metternich, fretting that “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression.” 

From the east of the country to the west, the Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination (NINAS), continually attempts a referendum to decide the future of those in various parts of the country.