Month: April 2017

….And my phone was snatched

By Abdulmumin Giwa
This generation of youth in Nigeria, especially in the north, is the most unfortunate of all generations indeed in the history of the country. They are so neglected and left to wallow in all forms of delinquencies especially community crimes. It is so unfortunate that more than fifty percent of the youth could be said to be out of school and be engaged in one form of delinquency or the other.
It is indeed very easy to locate youth who could not read or write nor could they even comprehend how hopeless their future is as a result of neglect, exploitation, socio-political deception by leaders and lack of life’s basic amenities. They are more of a wasted human resources who when properly managed could produce millions of professionals in the fields of medicine, science, technology, arts and humanity. But nay, they are left to waste away by the self-acclaimed leaders and elites whose only basic feature is looting of public funds.
Local communities have become very delinquent that even women engage in stealing. It is no more a surprise when women are caught stealing phones, textiles, jewelries and others during marriages and naming ceremonies in homes. But it will be surprising to hear that I was once invited by Kaduna Police Public Relations Department as a crime and judiciary journalist to see married young Hausa women, two of who were breastfeeding babies that were caught breaking into a house, stealing two plasma TVs, about 30 textiles materials and other items. I had the shock of my life that day. What is worse is how such crimes have become rampant. This is not talking about women that are into drug abuse, including married women and young girls who mostly deal in heavy cough syrups.
In the case of delinquent young children whose activities are more of amateur in nature, they engage in stealing household utensils mostly metallic objects like pots, plates, spoons, buckets and others which they sell to metal collectors who buy at a price per kilo. If one dares leaves his house unattended he would return to frustratingly find those house utensils missing. These are young small thieves growing to become bigger thieves or even robbers.
Coming to talk of the teenagers and other youth is even worse. They are into stealing of motor cycles and phones and also raping of women. These delinquencies are so rampant in the communities. In a lot of the cases they do such things at ‘knife point’. They would injure a person and take away his phone or his motor cycle. In milder cases they snatch away phones and run away on motor cycles.
I was a victim of this phone snatching recently. Two young boys riding on a motor cycle came by the side I was sitting in a tricycle just after I had finished answering an important call. The one on the rear just snatched the phone from me while the other sped off with them on the motor cycle. We chased them shouting “Barawo, Barawo” (Thief, Thief) and other motor cyclists joined in the chase. Before we could get to them they had reached a dead end where there was no bridge and they abandoned the motor cycle at the river bank. More people joined in the chase and went after them and were able to catch the one riding the motor cycle. He managed to get his life saved by the vigilante who stopped the people from killing him. The actual phone snatcher had escaped but we got the motor cycle and the rider and were handed over to the police.
The police conducted their investigation and the other culprit was also arrested but the phone was said to have been given to someone else who the DPO identified as a young man he had sent to the headquarters for armed robbery after snatching a phone from a man making call in his car threatening him with a knife.
Immediately, the DPO invited the boy’s father who bailed his son earlier from the headquarters to sign an undertaking to produce his son which he did and even promised that he would make sure the phone was brought back. The phone was indeed brought back to the police who invited me and handed it over to me.
I lost everything on the phone which was placed on factory settings by the thieves, I lost two of my lines and a very rich 8-giged memory, but I regained my phone anyway.
These boys that engage in these delinquent activities in the communities are always supported and empowered by politicians, elites and leaders who use them as political thugs and others. The government uses them to promote its propaganda and political activities. They use them during their campaigns and even arm them and drug them to achieve their personal whims. They are mostly the children of the poverty stricken Nigerians most of who hardly feed two times daily especially since the inception of this horrible regime.
They are the same youths the government used in Zaria during the massacre to kill members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN). They were the same youths that scavenged corpses of IMN members and stole phones, pocket monies, rings and other belongings of the IMN members under Army protection.
They are the same youths that would chant ‘Sai Baba’ and harass anybody that speaks ill of their hero. They are the same youths that the state government used in attacking IMN members and loot their property and were given police protection in the dirty acts. I remember when they attacked my wife’s chemist and destroyed everything in it and drank all the cough syrup and stole away the electrical wirings of the entire house during the planned Ashura attack on IMN by the APC government. The youths were escorted by heavily armed police as they looted property belonging to IMN members in a lot of the states in the north of Nigeria.
They are the same youths sponsored by government to stage anti-IMN demonstrations and rallies in most cases of which they end up in fierce fights resulting from sharing of the money.
They are the same youths the government sponsored to harass IMN members when President Buhari returned from his 51-days medical trip in London. They went about street by street chanting all sorts of hate speeches that could ignite bloodshed while the government and its security operatives pretended not to be seeing anything. They went about saying that it was the IMN members that cursed President Buhari and he fell ill and that now God had disgraced the IMN as Buhari had returned back to Nigeria healthy.
They are the same youths that have in the past attacked and killed Christians and PDP members in 2011 during post-elections crises when President Buhari lost to President Jonathan. I remember watching them broke open, looted and ate everything in one eatery along Nnamdi Azikiwe Way in Kaduna claiming they were doing Jihad then for Buhari who lost to Jonathan in the presidential elections.
What would one expect of a country in which the best the government does to its potentially rich future generation, is to exploit it for personal and sectarian whims? These youths are completely neglected by the government without any access to any form of education or good civility. Any time the leaders remember the youth is when they want to use them for their propaganda and politics. Otherwise they have nothing to do for them.
These are some of the social, political and economic misdoings perpetrated by those in authority that the revered leader of the IMN Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky had always spoken against. It is because he had always called for fairness, justice and good civility that those in authority have hated him. He remained steadfast calling for emancipation of the communities from exploitation by the leaders. He is seeking true freedom and independence to all irrespective of tribe, sect, section or religion and is raising awareness towards real nationalism and patriotism for developmental progress of the country.
But the wicked politicians and Nigerian leaders who feed on the citizenry see him as their arch-enemy who will bring an end to their religion of corruption and exploitation. Very wicked people, see how they have turned the leaders of tomorrow into, thieves, phone snatchers, robbers, illiterates, rapists and innocent people like us in the communities into victims. Shame on these wicked leaders, shame on them!

El-Rufai: “The animal we are dealing with”

By Abdulmumin Giwa
There is no surprise whatsoever because Governor Nasir El-Rufai displays the peak of disrespect and lack of dignity through the shameless use of vulgar language on a revered leader of millions of people claiming that it was an idiomatic expression. Every responsible and right thinking person knows the right idioms to use in the right place. Only fools misuse language in display of their stupidity.
Definitely with Gov El-Rufai’s records of betrayal even to those politicians like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former President Olusegun Obasanjo that brought him to limelight says a lot about him.
This even led the former President Olusegun Obasanjo to describe him as a pathological liar and of recent his betrayal of his party members, his crises with all the three Senators from the state, political segregation of the Southern Kaduna and inability to fulfill the promises he made to the state. This is not talking about his inability to condone criticisms in such a way that he uses clause like ‘hate speech’ to descend on those who criticize him or his personal interest especially journalists. Meanwhile, every project he embarked upon in the state has been abandoned halfway.
What is worse is that since the role he played in the Zaria massacre of December 12th to 14th 2015, in which he became a potential candidate of the International Criminal Court (ICC) he has been looking for ways to falsely implicate the IMN and initiate cropped up charges on the leader of the Movement and some of his lieutenants. The IMN he is now describing as an insurgent group is the same IMN he visited during his campaign and on which he even used the clause murderous “Jonathanian Army” to condemn the killing of 34 IMN members including three sons of the leader Sheikh Ibrheem Zakzaky by the Jonathan regime. Yes Jonathan apologized and was sorry for what he did.
Gov El-Rufai is now part of the team that extra-judicially murdered over 1000 innocent unarmed civilians including women and children. His government publicly and shamelessly announced mass burying 347 people that were not necessarily confirmed dead.
He deceptively used state resources to establish a Judicial Commission of Inquiry (JCI) in which IMN members were sidelined and refused a fair hearing and many people were sponsored by the state to go before the commission to concoct lies against the IMN. He produced a whitepaper that is at variance with the findings of the inquiry reference to which he violated the Nigerian Constitution and declared the IMN an unlawful society.
He also declared why he nurses prejudice against IMN claiming that they did not vote for him and telling lies to the public that IMN members don’t vote. He accused the IMN of being an insurgent and terrorist group without any evidence but his personal greed claiming that the IMN does recognize the president as president and him as the Kaduna state governor. This is foolishly in attempt to justify why he joined in the killing of innocent IMN members.
He played an active role in the genocide by using the state resources in destroying all possible evidences of the brutal killings of the IMN members. As the Nigerian Army murdered IMN members in cold blood, burned some of them alive including women and children, used heavy weapons on innocent unarmed civilians and even molested women, they cordoned off the area and washed off blood stains and picked away all bomb and bullet shells to hide evidences of state terrorism. Governor El-Rufai joined in the mischief and demolished all the sites, packed the rubbles to unknown destinations and buried over 1000 IMN members in mass graves some of who were buried alive by him. Here also he violated all known laws in the country as well as the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute.
As if all these were not enough, Governor El-Rufai used his office to engage in contempt of court through the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) where the court issued an order for the release of the IMN leader Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky. The court also ordered that he be compensated, provided a residence and police protection. The Federal High Court judge in his judgment condemned the attack on the IMN leader as an abuse of fundamental human rights which he described as a mischievous attack by a Sunni majority in power on a Shiite minority. He condemned the massacre as a national embarrassment. He is now seeking to take over the illegal detention of the IMN leader under the pretext that he was going to investigate the ‘terrorist’ activities of the IMN in the past 34 years as he claimed.
He is seeking by all means to justify the genocide, state terrorism and mass murder they have jointly perpetrated. He also killed tens of IMN members that protested against the Zaria massacre in Kaduna on the 15th of December 2015 and during the Ashura activities. Some of his known advisers were among those identified among the sponsored rogues and thugs that attacked the houses of the IMN members and looted and even killed some of them.
These animal tendencies of aggression against fellow human beings perpetrated by the governor and his team are so glaring. They are a display of brutal animal behaviors and inhumanity that makes him part of the team that perpetrated the worse human rights abuse ever in Nigeria. This is the first time out of sectarian sentiments that Nigeria has witnessed government engaging in genocide.
On the other hand the revered leader of the IMN is known for peace, justice, fairness and unity among all humans irrespective of religion, region, sect or race. He is known to be seeking for a better future for Nigeria and has spent all his life striving to achieve this goal. He has set a benchmark that people with animal tendencies like Gov El-Rufai can never achieve even if he has to live ten life times.
This golden life by Sheikh Zakzaky had drawn millions of people to him from all social strata and is highly respected across the world as a leading cleric. It is these qualities that earned him recommendation by a past government.
It is even these qualities that made El-Rufai to pay the revered leader a condolence visit when three of his sons were killed by what the governor described as ‘Jonathanian Army’ only for him to now belong to the ‘Buharian terror team’ that killed over 1000 innocent, unarmed, women, children and men. At the time of that visit the IMN leader was not a terrorist and the IMN was not an insurgent group. They became terrorists and insurgent groups after the massacre. It does not require any talents to identify who the animal is between the two and the animal we are dealing with.

PRESS RELEASE – Nigeria: IHRC condemns police attack on pro-Zakzaky protestors

IHRC strongly condemns yesterday’s unnecessary use of violence by security forces against protestors marching to demand the release of the leader of Nigeria’s Islamic Movement.

Police used tear gas, water cannon and dogs to disperse the peaceful demonstration in the capital Abuja

The demonstration was called to draw attention to the ongoing illegal detention of Sheikh Ibrahim el-Zakzaky and his wife Zeenah.

Photographs taken by participants show police deploying water cannon against protestors holding aloft a banner depicting Sheikh Zakzaky.

Although Nigeria’s High Court ordered the release of the pair on 2 December 2016 after a period of detention of almost a year the order has yet to be implemented.

The Zakzakys have been held without charge and mainly incommunicado following their arrest during a savage military assault against the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) in December 2015. Both were shot during the attack in Zaria in which at least 1000 IMN supporters, including three sons of the couple, were killed and many properties and religious spaces belonging to the IMN and its followers destroyed.

The demonstrators also called for an independent investigation into the massacre and subsequent killings of IMN supporters in Arba’een commemorations.