It is the best of times to be a Nigerian again; Birds turn cartwheels mid flight, a tiny smile breaks flittingly on the stiff upper lip of Mr President; as Mr. Vice President dropped his handset on the side table, his demure and beautiful wife, listening in to the just ended phone exchange between her husband and the Department of State Security (DSS) boss, wordlessly reached out and hugged him with joy unbridled. In her hotel room in the chill of pre-dawn California, a former Minister of Education of the Federal Republic bursts into hymns of Praise to the Almighty who hath made a way when there seems to be none, out of Sambisa.

Jubilations rent the air for our girls are back! The Chibok girls, symbols of the legacy of insecurity from our immediate past, are home! Not en masse, but the return of 21 of them is enough to rekindle our flagging hope in this piece of God’s earth. Yes, our girls are back and we are exultant with joy. Even Ayisha Yesufu, that sour-puss, fire-spitting she-dragon that wailers love to like and APC e-rats hate to love, is returning to the fold. Well, hers is a story for another moonlight.

The biggest winners in this whole Chibok girls’ abduction saga are the spouses of those #BringBackOurgirls campaigners who’d endured many an evening without them, no thanks to their daily sit outs at Unity Fountain. Full marks for their consistent advocacy, something as evanescent in Nigeria as electricity supply. The APC government dodged a bullet there, for the girls returned in time just when we heard from authoritative but conveniently anonymous sources that the said spouses were planning on starting their own #BringBackOurSpouses campaign. Thank God for little mercies, and no, I’m not talking about Stanley Okoro.

You should be happy with the return of these 21 heroines except you are Governor Ayo Fayose, Deji Adeyanju and the Wailing Wailers Association (of which I’m a proud member) who have always insisted that no girls were missing. How can girls be missing when we see our angelic daughters romping in play every day and sleeping sound and safe each night before our eyes? As a tithes-paying member of the Wailers Association, I hitherto hold firmly too, under pains of excommunication, that no girls were missing in Chibok, Konduga, Wareke or anywhere in Nigeria but, ahem, on this one I choose to tread on the path of humanity and join the #BringBackOurGirls people in their joyous celebrations.

The Book Haramites, shell-shocked from the constant shellacking they have been receiving from the Nigerian military are finally seeing the folly of their way and have started reading old copies of African Concord, to underline their burgeoning love for western education. See now, they have released 21 of the Chibok girls and this goes to show what sustained aerial bombardments can do to even the most hard-hearted of terrorists. Maybe Vladimir Putin has borrowed a leaf from our military, hence the constant bombardment of Aleppo by Russian jets. Who knows, those Syrian dissidents might decide too, to release the original copy of the Communist Manifesto that has been in their custody since they took over large swathes of Syrian territories from Assad, and supply Putin with the missing piece of the puzzle in his bid to become the 21st Century Fuhrer, Tzar or whatever tickles his armpits.

Truth be told and it is galling to admit this as a Wailer but, the Nigerian military has really tried in the fight against insurgency. Granted, the first half of the match belongs to the Book Haramites. Surely you remember now, don’t you, those days when one of the prerequisites to be a Nigerian soldier in the North-East is to be able to perform complex military manoeuvres that involves running, full metal jacket, to the nearest Cameroonian border away from the avenging bearded warriors from Sambisa? Well, the Nigerian military, fresh from the hair-dryer treatment received during half-time from President Muhammadu ‘Ferguson’ Buhari have since emerged from the dugouts, and taken the battle all the way to the opposition penalty box in Sambisa. Its minute 88 of the match and the scoreboard reads 7-1 in favour of the Nigerian Military.

There is no way Brazil can overturn a 6-goal deficit against a smooth, motivated and purring German Nigerian machine in the few minutes remaining, plus added time (Kindly replace Brazil with Book Haramites if your football knowledge is limited to Teslim ‘Thunder’ Balogun).

It is vexing though when these APC supporters claim it is Buhari’s coming that effectively changed the tide of the counter-insurgency war in the North-east. Who told you? Former President Fortunato Jonathan would have done all these and more, but you were all shouting “Change, Change, Change” like constipated hyenas. Now, where is the Change? Who is laughing now? When last did you eat rice, common rice in your homes? Can you afford it? Rice that was so common during the time of our Hero that it was all but the staple food of the very poor! Who cares if the Book Haramites were trying then to bomb us into oblivion and shrink our territory to the size of Otuoke as long as we can eat rice, Nigerian jollof rice to our fill? This is the price of Impatience and I’m glad we are paying it together.

We warned you, Reno Omokri, Femi Fani-Kayode, Doyin Okupe and I; of the fate that awaits you if you voted our Hero out, but you did not listen. The way these APC people made so much song and dance about CHANGE, one thought Nigerians would be given N1million each, on May 29 2015 by the new APC government. All we got was ‘I belong to nobody, I belong to everybody’.
LOL.

In a land ravaged by economic recession and hunger, we are proud to note that one of our own is presently blazing the path with a state-wide programme of sustainable end to hunger. We implore every APC State governor presently facing challenges of paying workers’ salaries to forget party divide and borrow a leaf from our Patron in the Wailing Wailers Association, Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State.
With the full enforcement of the ban on illegal grazing and cattle-herding in the State, and the carte-blanche order to Ekiti indigenes to slaughter, kill and eat any recalcitrant cow caught flouting this law, our dear Governor have just stumbled on the greatest solution to the problem of hunger now ravaging our land. Do not be surprised then if you come across a posse of Ekiti workers on a Monday morning, armed with machetes, cutlass and other cudgels, on the hunt for stray grazing cattle.

Until President Muhammadu Buhari releases the 5-month arrears of Statutory Allocations he has withheld from the State on account of our Patron’s hoarse opposition to his government and civil servants paid, Ekiti workers will witch hunt, kill and eat the cattle of Buhari’s Fulani kinsmen. No beef intended.

This brings me to the small matter of the DSS raids on some allegedly corrupt judges. As you are well aware, we of the Wailers Association were totally against this unfortunate crackdown on the judiciary. Heck, we are against everything this APC government is doing or intends to do. Period.

I have read these APC goons on social media lauding the raids on the judges, and likening it to Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. I laugh in parentheses. Somebody should please tell these APC boys on Twitter, especially ‘Mekunu Twitter lord’ Jagbros or something, to cool down and count his teeth with his tongue. That nocturnal raid on judges by the DSS is an assault on the judiciary and we protest most vehemently against it. Imagine, our honourable judges disrobed and made to appear groggily in their silk grandpa’s boxers in the night. How humiliating!

Please don’t ask me where I kept this self-righteous indignation when Justice Ayo Salami was hounded into retirement by our Hero’s government.
It was on Sabbatical.

My point is, even if these judges are guilty of taking ‘bribes for judgements’, we should not blame them or adopt this irritating sanctimonious attitude. Do you know how hard it is to be a member of the Bench in Nigeria? Do you know how depressing it is to sentence a phone thief to 20 years imprisonment and set free a corrupt politician accused of embezzling billions of Naira? These things have a knock-on effect on the otherwise steely nerves of judges that can only be relieved by periodic injections of Procash, sorry Prozac from willing litigants.

Oh, so you do not think our judges should feed fat too like those senators sitting on a N115billion annual budget that despite the #OpenNASS campaign by Seun Onigbinde and his I.T(oo-know) crowd, is as vague and opaque as the numerous interlocutory injunctions from Nigerian courts? I haven’t seen the DSS raiding NASS principal officers in the dead of night, have they? What really is the crime of those judges? That they aspire to fill their judicial robes as portly as those smiling Senators in their agbadas? We should quit the double standards abeg!

I pity those APC e-rats celebrating the judges’ arrests like it is the first day of Christmas. You might be next. If you doubt me, ask Abu Siddiqi. This President truly belongs to nobody and we, Wailers and APC supporters alike, must be wary and look out for ourselves lest his anti-corruption bulala lands on our head, just as we are laughing at the contorted agonized faces of the latest victims.

The truth of the matter is Nigerians are “fantastically corrupt” as David Cameron puts it in his last private policy statement before #Brexit fantastically dumped him in the dustbins of British political history. All of us are corrupt in Nigeria; men, women and children alike. Corruption is the god we worship, and Bribery is the burnt offering through which we make supplications and render worship. This is what we have been trying to tell President Buhari but we don’t know the right ear to whisper it into yet: you can’t just hoick us out of the worship of a god that we have served so well for the past 50-odd years without replacing it with at least something better.

And believe me, nothing tastes better than the mouth-watering, oily, greasy, stomach-distending broth of Corruption.

And so while Mr. President and his wife argue wordlessly into the night on what constitutes Change, and Reuben Abati and his demons from Aso Rock continue their merry-go-round in his dreams, let me pour cold water on this notes and see if I can persuade the wife to leave the living room and the re-runs of Lekki Wives she is engrossed in, and join me in the “Other Room”. Winks.


Muhammad ‘Din Shehu, is a retired blogger and occasional writer. I sit on a throne on twitter: @dinstots. Follow me blindly

Writer should stay retired

Someone pls summarize....



Cant read that epistle....











Can u c me

TeleboiZ005:
Someone pls summarize....




Cant read that epistle....












Can u c me

That your hero & his cohorts

Ruined our country

sarrki:



That your hero & his cohorts

Ruined our country

And ur hero is "changing" the country into a paradise ....



Am really enjoying the "changed" Nigeria....


kudos to PMB!







Morning Sir.

This is cool. It provides the needed comic relief for the morning.

TeleboiZ005:
Someone pls summarize....



Cant read that epistle....











Can u c me

ipods don't read, we know.

Iamwrath:
Writer should stay retired

NO, he should write more. I'm sure u did not read the piece. You retired from reading too early than the writer. Read!

Caseless:
ipods don't read, we know.

hmmmm