meth – Nigeria’s Rebirth Begins?

Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.
2 Chronicles 7:14 NLT

Since the second half of 2021 a very unusual thing has been happening in Nigeria. A section of Nigeria, a major subnation for that matter, the Igbo nation, has begun looking in the mirror and speaking some truth to itself. Not the whole truth yet but, very unusual in Nigeria, some truth that is self-critical, self-indicting. Igbos at community and even state level have begun speaking up about the pure evil that meth (MM), seed of water, methamphetamine, constitutes to them. Suddenly, in the face of thousands of precious family and community members losing it all to this cheap synthetic drug, Igbos are rising up and saying enough is enough. Those addicted to the drugs are being flogged, some to repentance and others to death. Drug pushers are being banished from communities but not flogged yet and not handed over to the appropriate law enforcement agency, the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).

Communities are not leading the NDLEA to the meth factories yet. The NDLEA is not being invited to look closely at suspected drug barons and their assets yet. Drug business is no longer business as usual but it is still business. It may no longer be acceptable to manufacture and sell MM to fellow Igbos in Igboland but there is no opprobrium yet if you bring in container loads of illicit codeine destined for other lands beyond the Benue and Niger rivers. Even now many are still looking for outsiders to blame for MM’s devastation of the homeland while others are insisting nothing significant is wrong and the plague is exaggerated or no worse than evils blighting other parts of Nigeria. A sickening version of whataboutism.

To the North of the Benue and Niger rivers we are witnessing similar strangeness. The Sultan of Sokoto and other eminent and not so eminent voices, the owners of the land and people, have joined the people they own and impertinent outsiders to say the North is at risk of being consumed by growing terrorism fueled by religion and social inequity which only breeds iniquity. These stakeholders are beginning to feel the heat of the bonfire that others have raised alarm about for decades now and we no longer hear anyone, apart from a very few fringe elements and agents provocateurs, asking that the various stripes of militancy in the North be treated with kid gloves. In the North too we are only hearing part of the truth. We are not hearing about the age long social inequity that created the intractable iniquity we now see all over the land. We are not being told of the mollycoddling by regional stakeholders that attended the initial stirring of violent extremism in the North over a decade ago or the weaponization of religion via the ‘political Sharia’ laws that greeted this republic almost two decades ago.

The South East and the North are however well ahead of the curve in Nigeria. They are beginning to introspect and have stopped seeing only imported trouble. They are beginning to accept that they are their own worst enemies, the demons they need to pray against can be seen in their mirrors. The South West and South South regions on the other hand remain totally sold to the idea that all their afflictions emanate either from other ‘enemy’ tribes or the wrong people in federal and state offices. Ritual killings, cultism, kidnapping, illegal bunkering (theft of crude and refined oil product), political thuggery, armed robbery, baby factories, drug pushing and drug usage are all prevalent across Nigeria but particularly prevalent in the three Southern regions with some of them like ritual killing, cultism and illegal bunkering entrenched most in the South West and South South but, as the two other regions begin to introspect and ask some of the right questions, the South West remains too ‘sophisticated’ to be bothered about the endless tales of crude butchery emanating from charnels like Soka in Ibadan and now even a substantial hotel at Ile Ife while the sense of entitlement of the South South to its ‘oyel’ seems unshakeable by even the now years old black soot phenomenon that has turned the Garden City, Port Harcourt, to an environmental cautionary tale.

Who is going to ring the alarum to wake up these still slumbering regions to the fact that all the issues listed above and more besides have become existential threats to them and the entire nation? What forces within each of the four regions will convoke the necessary stakeholder summits that will look with honest eyes at these bloodcurdling deviations from social norms and rules that we all mostly glossed over and continued to excuse until too many of the victims began bearing names we recognize? Who will hold the feet of these summiteers to the fire and ensure the whole truth is spoken and this entire truth is then disseminated to those who generally echo the voices of these opinion shaping stakeholders? How will our regional and national confession and repentance start from such summits and then cascade to the churches and mosques so that the priests who have been sleeping at the wheel are shamed into action and start preaching rectitude, repentance and return to the religious ideals the vast majority of us mouth every waking moment?

Nigeria is in deep trouble but its problems are multi faceted with each region more afflicted with certain vices than others. This has given most of us the luxury of always having something we consider worse happening in other regions that we can point at and say ours are not the worst region in Nigeria so why is a specific critique about us? Other times we claim that a specific party, tribe or religious group’s domination of power is the entire reason even age-old vices have become existential challenges. At various points in time terrorism in the North, for example, has been said to have been sponsored by the Jonathan regime, the US, as a tool for pushing out the Goodluck regime, General Buhari as a challenger, French and other forces caging Nigeria, then President Buhari even as an incumbent etc. For every evil that bestrides any region we have a dazzling selection of malevolent external forces that excuse the messes we have allowed to fester and our lack of action to overcome those problems and clean house. When all else fails we elevate relatively small problems above the major issues that should occupy us and you thus would find in the South West a lot of heat and noise generated over a putative Fulani colonization agenda to which hundreds of kidnappings and deaths had been traced. A Yoruba proto army was even created by South West state governments under the guise an interstate security outfit named Amotekun. In all the statements explaining the reason for its existence and arduous birth I struggled to find any sentence tasking it with taking on the challenge of rooting out the ritualists and their dens that had claimed thousands of lives in the South West over the last few decades. I couldn’t understand why it was so easy finding and chasing Fulani herdsmen out of our forests while ritualists and organ traffickers hiding in those forests and even in town where not a priority despite the much greater human toll.

In a similar way every unearthing of baby factories in the South West raises more ire among Yorubas than discoveries of ritualist dens even if more corpses are found in the dens than babies in the baby factories. The otherwise inexplicable misdirection of greatest ire is understandable once we realise that the names of the demoniacs in charge of the ritual killing den would typically be Yoruba while the equally possessed baby factory entrepreneurs would typically be from the South East. The same way we excuse our corrupt fellow tribesmen we have for decades minimized the atrocities of our violent criminals and the crimes that are typical of our tribes are described as ‘businesses’ while crimes less typical of us are the atrocities the law enforcers and the nation should focus on. Even when we have the exact same offence happening we always find excuses and justifications for those carried out by kith and kin while we reserve our moral outrage for those perpetrated by others. You will for example find the same friend who groans about the unending carnage in the North reassuring you that security officers and civilians being roasted and eaten in the South East is an insignificant and exaggerated matter. Indeed such a friend may go as far as reassuring you that the South East is the most peaceful part of Nigeria so other Nigerians should tend to their own hellholes and not give the South East an underserved bad name. Yep. In the face of evidence of large scale cannibalism you still get such mindless defensiveness. Apparently not enough names of the victims of the cannibals are known or resonate with the opinion shaping elite for even a halfhearted purge of the evil to commence. Maybe if the police do their job and publish the full list of victims who have become dinner in Orsu we shall be jolted to repudiating this too even if only as halfheartedly as the ongoing inchoate mpkuru mmiri campaign.

I began writing this piece before 2021 yuletide and, as I come back to it to wrap it up this first week of 2022, I find the owner of Rivers state, Governor Wike, has suddenly realised that the black soot inducing illegal bunkering isn’t just a federal problem or even a badge honor. He has proscribed all illegal bunkering in his kingdom. Also the Ezes and priests in Imo state have found their voices and are now speaking, still in muted tones, about the onslaught of kidnappers in the state. Maybe this is because the Ezes still standing can recognize the names of too many peers among those who have not only fallen but been turned into dinner in Orsu. My prayer for every part of Nigeria in 2022, as we rev up towards the 2023 general elections, is that we all begin to recognize names and faces we know among the thousands of victims of all the heinous crimes that now pervade our regions and nation. I pray that our hearts be cut to the quick and we are forced to humble ourselves, pray, seek God’s face and turn from our wicked ways so that He hears from heaven and brings genuine healing and rebirth to this great and consequential nation in Jesus name.

Abraham Idowu
January 5th, 2022

What a long epistle of hate against the Igbos as usual.

Idowudiot, face your region where fulani kidnappers are moving hundreds of your farmers. Have your kinsmen who fled to Benin Republic returned? What about Sunday Igboho and his watery beans plight?

vanbonattel:
What a long epistle of hate against the Igbos as usual.

Idowudiot, face your region where fulani kidnappers are moving hundreds of your farmers. Have your kinsmen who fled to Benin Republic returned? What about Sunday Igboho and his watery beans plight?

What does one say to people like you? Maybe you are literacy challenged because Igbos are actually being held up as an example to other tribes including Yorubas in this essay

biodunid:
meth – Nigeria’s Rebirth Begins?

Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.
2 Chronicles 7:14 NLT

Since the second half of 2021 a very unusual thing has been happening in Nigeria. A section of Nigeria, a major subnation for that matter, the Igbo nation, has begun looking in the mirror and speaking some truth to itself. Not the whole truth yet but, very unusual in Nigeria, some truth that is self-critical, self-indicting. Igbos at community and even state level have begun speaking up about the pure evil that meth (MM), seed of water, methamphetamine, constitutes to them. Suddenly, in the face of thousands of precious family and community members losing it all to this cheap synthetic drug, Igbos are rising up and saying enough is enough. Those addicted to the drugs are being flogged, some to repentance and others to death. Drug pushers are being banished from communities but not flogged yet and not handed over to the appropriate law enforcement agency, the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).

Communities are not leading the NDLEA to the meth factories yet. The NDLEA is not being invited to look closely at suspected drug barons and their assets yet. Drug business is no longer business as usual but it is still business. It may no longer be acceptable to manufacture and sell MM to fellow Igbos in Igboland but there is no opprobrium yet if you bring in container loads of illicit codeine destined for other lands beyond the Benue and Niger rivers. Even now many are still looking for outsiders to blame for MM’s devastation of the homeland while others are insisting nothing significant is wrong and the plague is exaggerated or no worse than evils blighting other parts of Nigeria. A sickening version of whataboutism.

To the North of the Benue and Niger rivers we are witnessing similar strangeness. The Sultan of Sokoto and other eminent and not so eminent voices, the owners of the land and people, have joined the people they own and impertinent outsiders to say the North is at risk of being consumed by growing terrorism fueled by religion and social inequity which only breeds iniquity. These stakeholders are beginning to feel the heat of the bonfire that others have raised alarm about for decades now and we no longer hear anyone, apart from a very few fringe elements and agents provocateurs, asking that the various stripes of militancy in the North be treated with kid gloves. In the North too we are only hearing part of the truth. We are not hearing about the age long social inequity that created the intractable iniquity we now see all over the land. We are not being told of the mollycoddling by regional stakeholders that attended the initial stirring of violent extremism in the North over a decade ago or the weaponization of religion via the ‘political Sharia’ laws that greeted this republic almost two decades ago.

The South East and the North are however well ahead of the curve in Nigeria. They are beginning to introspect and have stopped seeing only imported trouble. They are beginning to accept that they are their own worst enemies, the demons they need to pray against can be seen in their mirrors. The South West and South South regions on the other hand remain totally sold to the idea that all their afflictions emanate either from other ‘enemy’ tribes or the wrong people in federal and state offices. Ritual killings, cultism, kidnapping, illegal bunkering (theft of crude and refined oil product), political thuggery, armed robbery, baby factories, drug pushing and drug usage are all prevalent across Nigeria but particularly prevalent in the three Southern regions with some of them like ritual killing, cultism and illegal bunkering entrenched most in the South West and South South but, as the two other regions begin to introspect and ask some of the right questions, the South West remains too ‘sophisticated’ to be bothered about the endless tales of crude butchery emanating from charnels like Soka in Ibadan and now even a substantial hotel at Ile Ife while the sense of entitlement of the South South to its ‘oyel’ seems unshakeable by even the now years old black soot phenomenon that has turned the Garden City, Port Harcourt, to an environmental cautionary tale.

Who is going to ring the alarum to wake up these still slumbering regions to the fact that all the issues listed above and more besides have become existential threats to them and the entire nation? What forces within each of the four regions will convoke the necessary stakeholder summits that will look with honest eyes at these bloodcurdling deviations from social norms and rules that we all mostly glossed over and continued to excuse until too many of the victims began bearing names we recognize? Who will hold the feet of these summiteers to the fire and ensure the whole truth is spoken and this entire truth is then disseminated to those who generally echo the voices of these opinion shaping stakeholders? How will our regional and national confession and repentance start from such summits and then cascade to the churches and mosques so that the priests who have been sleeping at the wheel are shamed into action and start preaching rectitude, repentance and return to the religious ideals the vast majority of us mouth every waking moment?

Nigeria is in deep trouble but its problems are multi faceted with each region more afflicted with certain vices than others. This has given most of us the luxury of always having something we consider worse happening in other regions that we can point at and say ours are not the worst region in Nigeria so why is a specific critique about us? Other times we claim that a specific party, tribe or religious group’s domination of power is the entire reason even age-old vices have become existential challenges. At various points in time terrorism in the North, for example, has been said to have been sponsored by the Jonathan regime, the US, as a tool for pushing out the Goodluck regime, General Buhari as a challenger, French and other forces caging Nigeria, then President Buhari even as an incumbent etc. For every evil that bestrides any region we have a dazzling selection of malevolent external forces that excuse the messes we have allowed to fester and our lack of action to overcome those problems and clean house. When all else fails we elevate relatively small problems above the major issues that should occupy us and you thus would find in the South West a lot of heat and noise generated over a putative Fulani colonization agenda to which hundreds of kidnappings and deaths had been traced. A Yoruba proto army was even created by South West state governments under the guise an interstate security outfit named Amotekun. In all the statements explaining the reason for its existence and arduous birth I struggled to find any sentence tasking it with taking on the challenge of rooting out the ritualists and their dens that had claimed thousands of lives in the South West over the last few decades. I couldn’t understand why it was so easy finding and chasing Fulani herdsmen out of our forests while ritualists and organ traffickers hiding in those forests and even in town where not a priority despite the much greater human toll.

In a similar way every unearthing of baby factories in the South West raises more ire among Yorubas than discoveries of ritualist dens even if more corpses are found in the dens than babies in the baby factories. The otherwise inexplicable misdirection of greatest ire is understandable once we realise that the names of the demoniacs in charge of the ritual killing den would typically be Yoruba while the equally possessed baby factory entrepreneurs would typically be from the South East. The same way we excuse our corrupt fellow tribesmen we have for decades minimized the atrocities of our violent criminals and the crimes that are typical of our tribes are described as ‘businesses’ while crimes less typical of us are the atrocities the law enforcers and the nation should focus on. Even when we have the exact same offence happening we always find excuses and justifications for those carried out by kith and kin while we reserve our moral outrage for those perpetrated by others. You will for example find the same friend who groans about the unending carnage in the North reassuring you that security officers and civilians being roasted and eaten in the South East is an insignificant and exaggerated matter. Indeed such a friend may go as far as reassuring you that the South East is the most peaceful part of Nigeria so other Nigerians should tend to their own hellholes and not give the South East an underserved bad name. Yep. In the face of evidence of large scale cannibalism you still get such mindless defensiveness. Apparently not enough names of the victims of the cannibals are known or resonate with the opinion shaping elite for even a halfhearted purge of the evil to commence. Maybe if the police do their job and publish the full list of victims who have become dinner in Orsu we shall be jolted to repudiating this too even if only as halfheartedly as the ongoing inchoate mpkuru mmiri campaign.

I began writing this piece before 2021 yuletide and, as I come back to it to wrap it up this first week of 2022, I find the owner of Rivers state, Governor Wike, has suddenly realised that the black soot inducing illegal bunkering isn’t just a federal problem or even a badge honor. He has proscribed all illegal bunkering in his kingdom. Also the Ezes and priests in Imo state have found their voices and are now speaking, still in muted tones, about the onslaught of kidnappers in the state. Maybe this is because the Ezes still standing can recognize the names of too many peers among those who have not only fallen but been turned into dinner in Orsu. My prayer for every part of Nigeria in 2022, as we rev up towards the 2023 general elections, is that we all begin to recognize names and faces we know among the thousands of victims of all the heinous crimes that now pervade our regions and nation. I pray that our hearts be cut to the quick and we are forced to humble ourselves, pray, seek God’s face and turn from our wicked ways so that He hears from heaven and brings genuine healing and rebirth to this great and consequential nation in Jesus name.

Abraham Idowu
January 5th, 2022

Idowu stop talking rubbish and read this thread.
https://www.nairaland.com/6928431/okorocha-uzodimma-killer-squad

Orsu people are not ritualists like yoruba skull mining people.