Funke Aboyade
10 March 2008
column
Lagos — Inspector-General of Police, Mike Okiro, was recently quoted as saying he was ready to die for President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.
Really? Well, maybe he should go right ahead and carry out his threat or is it promise; he's not of much use to the Nigerian citizen whose life and property he is sworn to protect.
It appears we have entered another era presently. The era of brigandage and lawlessness. Armed robbers have taken over; they are the ones in charge now. And government it seems - including the fawning IGP - has succumbed to them. For a government which touts its law and order/rule of law credentials incessantly, this is a tragedy of the worst kind.
Hardly does any day pass now without some attack or the other, each more brazen than the last. Hardly does any week go by without one getting one SMS or the other forwarded by concerned friends about attacks taking place in one's locality; it's as if the gates of hell have been flung wide open to release these outlaws from its pits to terrorise an entire nation. As I sit writing this column, I have just received two messages, each warning about two different on-going armed robbery attacks, all within my radar. One is effectively a prisoner in one's own home. A few days ago, a major eatery in my neighbourhood became a target of armed robbers. Passersby had to seek refuge in a nearby Church where a wake keeping service was going on, but even that was no guarantee of safety. The week before that, a major link road in Lagos, near a major shopping centre which attracts families in droves 24/7, near where I live became a no-go area on a Sunday afternoon.
Most terrifyingly, a good friend of mine who has had to be in England for the past year undergoing extremely painful treatment for a virulent form of cancer was allowed a short respite home recently by her doctors. She returned joyfully for her brief visit, only to have it cut even shorter in a rather unceremonious manner. Armed robbers came calling one afternoon. She, despite her obvious poor state of health, was thoroughly beaten up and hit (on the very part of her body which was undergoing treatment) with gun butts by the hoodlums and her terrified teenage daughter made to strip and taunted with the spectre of rape for the duration of their visit. They took their time ransacking the entire house and eventually left, as providence would have it without carrying out their rape threat. Her entire family, traumatised by that chilling attack, fled the house that same day to spend the night elsewhere, barely stopping to pack a few essentials. She was on a plane back to England the next day.
And just two weeks ago, on my way back from Obafemi Awolowo University where I'd gone to deliver a lecture, I went through the most harrowing experience on my return journey. The journey was smooth and uneventful until we arrived Ogere on the Ibadan-Lagos expressway. We'd noticed a few cars parked on the perimeter, whilst at a filling station on the other side of the expressway were some obviously agitated people. No one needed to tell us to pull over immediately. The time was 3.45pm; broad daylight on a Monday afternoon. Barely a few hundred metres down the road, an armed robbery attack was in progress. Within seconds, other vehicles had pulled over and none was coming from the Lagos direction. Moments later, the entire stretch of road was chock blocked; cars were stopping indiscriminately and parking right in the middle of the road. We were all sitting ducks if the robbers decided to come our way. A few passengers made a beeline for the bush, some jumped into a nearby ditch, some prayed and others simply awaited their fate. For a good stress filled half an hour we waited, unsure of what would befall us. During that period, a police patrol van passed by on the overhead bridge just ahead of us. There were people on the bridge who were also unable to proceed but could only watch the armed robbery operation helplessly. Their attempts to frantically wave the passing patrol car down would have been comic had it not been so tragic. The Police refused to stop! Rather, they accelerated and zoomed off, leaving us to our fate! And this is the same Police that want to die for the President? Well, please they should be my guest. In any event, the President may be the only person left to die for when everybody else has been killed by armed robbers.
And if the Inspector-General of Police is overwhelmed by the insecurity in the land, what about the President? Is he also overwhelmed? Or is the President unaware of the rampaging lawlessness in the land occasioned by daredevil armed robbers? Is he so cocooned in Aso Rock that he has lost all touch with reality? What, if anything, is he doing regarding securing the lives and property of the citizenry? Practical steps, not yet another committee to rehash what we already know and dust up what previous reports have already said. Why is he silent in the face of this unprecedented upsurge in armed robbery? Where is his rule of law? Very soon he may well have no one left to govern; his citizens would have all been killed, maimed or relocated to safer climes, Ghana for example.
If ever there was an issue requiring government's rule of law intervention, it's the insecurity of lives and property which currently pervades the land. The primary duty, before all else, beyond all else, above all else, of government is security of life, limb and property. When that cannot be secured that government is an abysmal failure, undeserving of being in governance. The Nigeria Police, in the absence of state Police, is strictly under the Federal Government's purview and control. The ball is therefore squarely in the Federal Government's court.
Mr. President, it's time to do something drastic. Now.
I first knew Matthew Olaiya when I gained admission as a first former to International School, Ibadan in 1973. Matthew was then in Form IV I think. ISI was a close knit school then and everybody either knew or knew of everybody else. In Matthew's case, he stood out and was easily recognisable. Matthew, you see, was blind.
I never ceased to admire how he got around the school on his own, his white-tipped walking cane always ahead of him. He played the clarinet and as I also played a wind instrument, the flute, our paths crossed sometimes even though he was my senior and even though we were in different houses - he in Benue and I in Ogun.
He left ISI in 1975, a term into his year in Lower VI, having spent over five years at the school. It would be some 24 years before our paths would cross again.
Upon leaving ISI Matthew headed for the United States, having secured admission to Marquette Jesuit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He took a history degree and subsequently went on to law school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He remained in the United States for over two decades where he got married and had two children, a boy and a girl. During his stint in the US, he kept up his interest in music, playing in a fusion jazz band and also taking up the saxophone.
About 10 years ago, he returned to Nigeria and I was able, through another blind colleague, my good friend Danlami Basharu (who was profiled in THISDAY LAW a few years ago) to re-establish contact. The contact was sporadic however and I soon lost contact again with Matthew but re-established it a year or so ago.
Although not called to the Nigerian Bar, his work occasionally gets him involved in our court system. Matthew now runs an immigration service which helps people appealing one decision or the other by some of the Embassies and High Commissions in Nigeria. He also has a placement agency in Canada which places skilled trade's people such as plumbers, welders, etc.
In the last two years he has tried to break into commodities trading, linking buyers and sellers of copper, crude old, refined crude products such as diesel, jet fuel, mazut and the like.
I've never ceased to admire his can-do spirit. It's humbling - and I'm not by any means being patronising, far from it. Rather than whine and whinge about his visual impairment plus the challenging environment here, he simply just gets on with it.
With very few memories of being sighted (he began to lose his vision at 3, after a bout of measles, and by 7 had lost it completely), Matthew Olaiya today has a career that even the sighted aspire to. He certainly doesn't need pity but seeks opportunity. For him, blindness is a challenge that can and has been surmounted.
Law Personality of the Week is Matthew Olaiya.
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