Clay Richie

  If you ever come across the phrase, “nasty, brutish and short,” then you would remember the book titled “Leviathan,” in which Thomas Hobbes expressed his views about the nature of human being and the necessity of governance and societies. Leviathan itself is a sea monster. Hobbes used it as a metaphor for absolutism, which is the political doctrine and practice of unlimited centralized authority and absolute sovereignty as vested in a monarch or dictator.

  Poom! And the man fell facedown, causing pandemonium, disrupting the bubbling sunny afternoon in Oshodi Lagos. A crowd gathered and carried him off to the roadside. They brought a bag of pure water (sachet water), and the people didn’t waste time emptying it on the man who’s now lying supine. He didn’t move a hand, only that he had a pulse.  

  Last week, I recounted my family’s twin ordeal of an armed robbery attack and COVID-19 infection in my column, ‘Gunman, COVID-19 and My Family’. Unfortunately, the publication came on the day we had to move my son to the National Hospital Isolation Centre where he spent Christmas and subsequent days before his eventual discharge. That was why I couldn’t pick (or return) many of the calls or reply to messages I received that day. I am grateful for them all. Paired in a room with a distressed man placed on oxygen, my son experienced considerable trauma and made life difficult for my wife due to his constant updates on phone. But there was nothing we could do to help him. His recall makes him eligible to co-author, with ‘Twitter diarist’, Mr Gbenro Adegbola, an interesting book that would put the fear of God in the hearts of all Covidiots!

  Let me paraphrase the holy prophet Isaiah who said: “For Jerusalem (Nigeria’s sake), I will not be silent until her vindication shines forth like the dawn…..No more shall people call you forsaken, or your land desolate, but you shall be called my delight and your land espoused.” (Is. 62:1,4).

  The 2020 challenge took the world by a storm and crashed economies around the world. The outbreak of covid19 otherwise referred to as “the pandemic” is a foretaste of the 2021 challenges and beyond. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that covid19 was created by China as a response to Donald Trump’s trade war with China, but scientists have established the existence and occurrence of pandemic patterns over time since the Spanish flu of the 19th century.

  Who is Luis Farrakhan? That was the very first word that reverberated from an old TV set when justice was being done to a nice meal. Hardly do I get distracted when tending to a meal. But not on this occasion. Louis Farrakhan was a lousy brand, polished in eloquent language, but screwed up in bigotry. He was ekking a living and gaining global attention. 1998 was his loudest. He got paid from Nigeria's Oil money, without any value added to our nation and even got a street named after him. Eleke Crescent for that matter! In a bid to get even with the American Government who immortalised Kudirat Abiola's memory on American soil, the junta Government Buhari served threw our pearls to the swine. Little or nothing was known about Louis Farrakhan.

  Individuals, groups and sometimes nations often look above and from without causes to their economic predicaments; however, it is usually from below (neglect of things within reach) that economic predicaments emanate from. The situation in Nigeria is a case in point, as our problem did not as it were, fall from above; rather, the neglected, abused and raped Local Government System in the country gave space for the decrepit nature of the Nigerian state.

  On 28th October 2019, Pastor Tunde Bakare said the following, "Tinubu will give account for all his deeds. He should not be seen as a generous man, he is an integral part of the rot in Nigeria". 

  My favourite end-of-the-year quote, which I have shared with many others, is the following passage from Chapter 3 of the inimitable Chinua Achebe’s Things Falls Apart, a novel of monumental, evergreen relevance, translated into over 50 languages, a product of pure genius, a milestone in world literature. Achebe wrote:

  After what seemed like eternity, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) called off its nine-month old strike. At a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday December 23, 2020, Biodun Ogunyemi, President of ASUU, announced a “conditional suspension” of the strike. Nine months is a long time for students to be at home doing nothing – it is the equivalent of a full academic session and a baby can be born after nine months from conception. This is not the first time ASUU will embark on a long industrial action. In 1988 when the body was 10 years old, ASUU declared a nationwide strike that lasted for about 21 months which led to its proscription on August 7 that year by the military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida. Two years later, ASUU bounced back but another strike was again banned on August 23, 1992.

  Before 2015 like many Nigerians if someone walked up to me and said that Nigeria under the tenure of a President Buhari would experience the kind of desperate situation we are now in, I would consider the person a Looney and proceed promptly to give him a verbal roasting. And if another were to tell me that Nigerians would come to get so fed up with President Buhari as to call stridently for his resignation, I would probably be moved to deliver a solid straightforward answer to the bridge of his nose.

Governments spend money on acquiring goods and providing services for the public. The spending is usually planned in an annual budget which is signed into law. However, there might be some off-budget spending that requires no legislative approvals. Such expenditures, known as public sector spending, can include education, healthcare, social protection, and defence.

  Some of the reactions to Senator Kashim Shettima’s recent explosive interview on Arise TV, which have been trending on social media, betray the authors’ faded memories of the former Governor of Borno state. At the time an echo chamber was built by the Jonathan administration to isolate the government from public opinion, Shettima’s was the voice that rippled through. He called attention to the costs of that dereliction of duty, which enabled persistent cycle of explosions in urban centres, indiscriminate and targeted killings, and loss of vast territories to the Boko Haram, as the decision-makers weaponized pedestrian conspiracy theories to polarize the citizens left for death. 

  What a year. WhatAyear. What. A. Year. Muddled and fragmented. Masked up and washed up. It was a tasteless year, the year we could barely smell the coffee, the year humanity was severely fatigued. It was the year that soaked our hands in an ocean of sanitizers and distanced us from each other. It was the year that mercilessly coughed up the sick and the elderly, raising their temperature and taking their breath away. We cannot even cough in peace; we will start suspecting we have caught the virus. Someone, or some people, ate bat in Wuhan, China, and the rest of us — who did not as much as have a bite of the weird mammal — started washing our hands all over the world.

  On Tuesday, December 23, 2020, General Muhammadu Buhari made what has perhaps become the most irresponsible speech of his presidency when he said, inter alia, that “we share more than 1,400 kilometers of border with that country (Niger), which can only be effectively supervised by God”.

  “He also noted that the President’s decision not to honour the House was due to the utterances of the lawmaker calling for his impeachment, and concerns that the President would be embarrassed If he honoured the invitation.”

  Joe Biden has pledged that one of his first acts as President will be rejoining the Paris Climate Treaty – which gives China a complete pass on reducing emissions until at least 2030. Even Biden’s designated “climate envoy,” former Secretary of State John Kerry, says the existing treaty “has to be stronger,” but then claims China will somehow become an active partner, instead of the competitor and adversary it clearly is. His rationale: “Climate is imperative, it’s as imperative for China as it is for us.”

  Pastor Tunde Bakare’s trending video on Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for which he is receiving caustic flak from the Nigerian online commentariat, isn’t the deodorization of Tinubu’s smelly underbelly that many people say it is. It is, on the contrary, an effective denunciation of Tinubu and a deep, lasting, strategic delegitimization of his “omo Eko” bona fides.

  It is a platitude to characterise the year 2020 as significantly abnormal. In this characterisation, Nigeria and the United States of America are in a class by themselves. For the latter, keeping bad company is the exception but it is mostly the rule for the former. This is the difference that one individual can make in the life of society. The peculiar lesson that Americans have come to learn in the past four years is that with a president like Donald Trump, that terribly abused country has no need of enemies especially Russia. What the 45th democratically-elected president represented for American democracy is the equivalent of a one man demolition squad. Of late, hardly a day goes by without the president committing or contemplating a felony often of the treasonable genre.

  It is December 24 -the eve of Christmas, but the usual merry of the season is lacking. Usually by this time, the festive feeling is in the air with preparations for Christian faithful’s symbolic celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.