An undergraduate student of the University of Abuja, Abiodun Allen, has been sentenced to death by a Lagos State High Court for stabbing his younger brother, Wale, to death over their father’s property.
Abiodun was convicted of one count of murder contrary to Section 221 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2011.
It was gathered that 33-year-old Abiodun had killed Wale with a broken bottle at their family house on Oritse Street, Imude, in the Oto-Awori Local Council Development Area of Lagos State during an argument over the property.
Our correspondent learnt that Wale, a serving naval officer in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, had visited the family home to settle a dispute over their late father’s property which was allegedly taken over by Abiodun.
Abiodun, who stabbed Wale several times in the neck, dragged his body to a bush and covered it with leaves.
During the trial, the prosecutor, O. R. Ahmed-Muil, called four witnesses, including the suspect’s landlord, Mr Sunday Abogunrin.
Abogunrin told the court that the convict was a troublesome fellow who fought his siblings at every slight provocation.
He added that he caught the convict dragging the deceased’s body into the bush after killing him.
The landlord said, “I have known the defendant since he was a child; I know his entire family.
“On February 20, 2013, around 2am, I heard dogs barking and people around were afraid to come out to see what was making the dogs bark for fear of robbers. Later, people came out and I came out as well.
“I later went to investigate the cause of the noise. I noticed someone dragging something into a nearby bush. I initially wanted to raise the alarm, but instead, I turned on my torch and the person ran towards the defendant’s house.
“I immediately followed to see who it was, only to see the defendant washing his hands, which were covered in blood, near a well. I quickly alerted the baale of the community, who then ordered youths to apprehend him.”
He noted that the convict broke his sister’s hand and smacked his elder brother’s head while attempting to escape, adding that he was later apprehended by some Oodua People’s Congress members who took him to the baale’s palace.
The Investigating Police Officer, ASP Uthman Lamidi, told the court that he saw the deceased’s body at the scene, adding that upon interrogation, the defendant admitted to killing his younger brother with a broken bottle and that he was about to bury the corpse when he was intercepted.
He said, “I handcuffed the defendant and took him away. The defendant followed me willingly and confessed to killing his younger brother. His confession was read to him and he signed it, while I countersigned. In the course of investigation, we also discovered that the defendant had threatened to kill his late brother several times before actually carrying out the act.”
Delivering her judgement on Monday, Justice Raliat Adebiyi held that the prosecution had proved a case of murder beyond reasonable doubt against the defendant and consequently sentenced him to death.
She said, “The defendant is hereby found guilty and convicted of the murder of his brother, Allen Wale.
“You, Allen Abiodun, is hereby sentenced to death. May God, the giver of life, have mercy on you.”
The development came amid a closed-door session the acting Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, had with the Senate, where he was grilled on the worsening level of insecurity: killings, banditry, arson, kidnapping and armed robbery. He told the lawmakers that underfunding, lack of equipment and personnel shortage were vitiating the efficiency of the police. He also admitted that strategies were being reviewed, which includes “community policing” introduction at the behest of the President. Additional recruits of between 10,000 and 25,000, he stressed, would be engaged this year in line with the annual incremental policy to beef up their numerical strength.
Integral to the state police structure is community policing. Implementing this element in isolation, under the existing monolithic and corrupt policing template, will render it ineffective and inoperable. Therefore, the President should ditch his well-known disdain for state police and put machinery in motion for decentralising policing as it is done in the United States, Canada, Australia and other federal states. Even the United Kingdom, a unitary state, has 43 autonomous police forces for efficiency and effectiveness.
This paradigm is the only way the envisaged community policing will be meaningful. It was the failure of the present system that compelled the 2014 National Political Conference to recommend the creation of state police. Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution, was expected to be repealed.
While the country muddles through the extant system, there is the overarching need to increase the police budget, targeted at high-tech deployment in solving our security puzzles. Intelligence-driven policing, serious crime-mapping of states aimed at identifying the most problematic zones and correspondingly deploy personnel and equipment for effectiveness, are imperative now. A former IG, Solomon Arase, canvassed this recently. Drones, CCTV cameras, body-worn cameras and telecommunication gadgets combine to keep the police ahead of criminals in the US and other countries in the West. But these resources are effectively deployed in an environment where some police officers are not confederates of criminals who supply them with weapons and intelligence for their nefarious activities; and where corruption is not rife among the hierarchy and rank and file.
The IG should get it right: the 10,000 new police recruits, if done on the basis of the 774 LGAs, which the Senate insisted on in 2016, instead of being on equality of the states, no area will get more than 13 constables. This will not in any way help the cause of community policing as some areas in the North are so expansive. It means that the system, which allows almost 200,000 police personnel to guard public officials, the wealthy and organisations at the expense of the larger society, has to be dismantled. Every IG before now had promised a reversal of this anomaly, but never did. Adamu should dare to be different to make his job easier.
Abuse of police deployment contributes in no small measure to turning the country into the morbid landscape it has become. On Thursday, a news report claimed that 34 people were killed in Sokoto, Taraba, Edo and Borno states, as bandits, cult groups, herdsmen and Boko Haram insurgents went on the rampage. Such deaths have become a recurring decimal to the point that the citizenry and the government have become inured to them. If the Boko Haram war in the North-Eastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe created internally displaced persons camps, it is inexplicable that a country that is not at war should have similar humanitarian tragedies in Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Niger, Zamfara, and Sokoto states.
Senseless killings by bandits are ravaging states in the North-West. Some rural communities are sometimes levied as much as N5 million and failure to pay results in an invasion that begets carnage and burning down of houses. The situation is so awry that even in the President’s home state – Katsina – the Emir of Katsina, Abdulmumini Usman, cried aloud to the visiting Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh, that farmers and herders had abandoned their farms for fear of either being killed or kidnapped. Usman, therefore, implored him to tell Buhari: “Nobody is safe now, whether in your house or road, wherever you are. Every day, I receive reports of kidnapping and killings from district and village heads… how do we live like animals?”
In the decade to 2018, the 36 states had spent over N2 trillion to fund the police, according to the Chairman, Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Abdulaziz Yari. This shows their relevance in internal security. However, it is a trend not likely to continue with the hollowness of their chief security officers of their states status. The position is one of responsibility, which they can exercise fully with control of their own security personnel. The fear of its abuse expressed by some critics is jejune and not in the national interest, given the incalculable damage Nigeria has suffered so far by not embracing it.
Amnesty International has confirmed that the non-presence of security personnel in remote areas makes communities vulnerable to attacks in its investigation of the killings in Zamfara State last year. It said security forces were present mainly in the state capital, Gusau. In gunmen attacks that led to the death of 42 people, 18,000 villagers who were displaced took refuge in the local government area headquarters. A total of 18 villages in Zurmi LGA were affected.
By accepting community policing, Buhari should go the whole hog and embrace state policing, which the governors are in agreement with. The three military operations in Zamfara State that he had ordered, which failed to restore order, are enough for him to shift from this unrewarding grip of internal security maintenance from Abuja.
Diagnosing the problems confronting Nigeria, Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora have consistently accused the military’s long stay in power as a major cause. The same factor created behavioural loopholes which birthed impunity. The military carry the blame of socialising Nigerians to entrenched lie, corruption, sectionalism, favouritism among others. To some extent, this standpoint is accurate. Still, post-military governance has democratised impunity across actors and social institutions and the problem is assuming a national character. What is even worse is when you ask Nigerians what they believed to be the cause of our problems; many adopt the technique of neutralisation by shifting blame and pointing accusing fingers to the leadership of the country. Most of us forget that there is a thin demarcating line between the leadership in Nigeria and the following. It appears that, as Lagbaja says, “all of us na the same”.
It is now 20 years into this democratic dispensation. By now, we ought to have a government that is people-initiated, people-driven and people-focused. The government is supposed to provide a level playing ground for all actors, ensure that the rule of law remains supreme, engender equality before the law irrespective of place and language of birth and enforce the fundamental human rights of the people. Unfortunately, these expectations only exist on paper with Nigerians suffering. As if good news has been banished from our land, nothing seems good enough to read in the dailies. What are shared on social media are oddities happening Okorocha’s mushroom universities
To foreground this thought, I employed Bisade Ologunde’s (Lagbaja) song, ‘200 Million Mumu’ to argue that the misfortune that Nigerians encounter on a daily basis is caused by the ‘wicked 80 per cent’ who carry the label of ‘ordinary Nigerian’. Highly active in making reference to and accusing the leadership as bad, Lagbaja, like myself, reappraised and substituted the top-down analysis, which only constructs Nigerian leadership as bad, unfeeling, corrupt, and criminal, for a bottom-up analysis that placed Nigeria’s following at the centre of the precarious conditions facing Nigerians and Nigeria. After all, the majority of followers, rather than the leaders, participate actively during elections. We are the ones electing monsters and excessively selfish characters who deny welfare to the people but enthrone elitism as a way of life. My position points to a wickeder following cohort who is not fundamentally different from the leadership being accused. In Lagbaja’s words, ‘mumu plus mumu… the same, the same. Leader is wicked but follower is wickeder’.
We, as callous followers, blame Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha as ‘dealers’, but absolving ourselves as co-creators of Nigerian realities. In that song, Lagbaja sees no difference between the blamers and the blamed. Characterising the blamers within the microcosm of their influential spaces, the musician spotlights the hypocritical critics whose behaviours are ‘the same the same’. Clothed in his symbolic faceless attire which represents the voice of the unheard, Lagbaja recalls how Nigerians asked him to lampoon those in government claiming they are all thieves. In a conversational tone, Lagbaja replies, ‘Na you be them, na dem be you, you and them na the same’. In other words, ‘We’ are the thieves we asked Lagbaja to lampoon. Lagbaja after years of castigating the leadership, reflected and realised that the leaders and followers possess a difference of a cup half empty and half full.
By ‘minority na exception, majority na corruption’, Lagbaja depicts why Almighty Formula has refused to solve the mounting structural problems and normalised acts of corruption. Sociologically, the family begets unto the society a nurtured conformist or deviant/criminal. In Nigeria, mothers and fathers dupe other persons to send their children to school. Now in private school, the children enjoyed no failure as practised in such settings to retain patronage. To cross into the university, they need to pay to get solution centres where the child will get over 300 marks. The 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted by JAMB where over 100 are being prosecuted for examination malpractices including professor accomplices tell the tale of ‘the same the same’. How can parents who failed to cater for their homes accuse the leadership of lacking human feeling? Marginalisation starts from the home when a wife gives her husband meat more than the children who need it to grow. Irresponsible parents cannot produce responsible children; they cannot support or vote responsible persons into leadership positions except their cronies who are dealers, traders and wasters of destinies.
Besides, do you wonder why professors of political science, medicine or whatever the specialities hardly make any headway in government? One, they are overwhelmed by the majority who pilot to corruption aircraft of the country. Two, most of them leave science behind but go with politics. Their families expect returns, favour and opportunities while their son or daughter is there. Churches and Mosques do special thanksgiving on appointment. They call them to make donations to build mansion as mosques and monuments as churches. Their schoolmates pay courtesy visits; they receive favours in contracts and others; the rest suffers. These social relations of corruption are the German floor upon which corruption and impunity foundations have been built and watered. Like the professors, activists fight tyrants in power. When they get into office, they beat Hitler’s records. Unionists who fight for freedom of expression and student rights while in school become lecturers and heads of institutions only to shut down dissent voices from students. Yet, we hypocritically claim we no longer have vibrant student unionism when indeed we make them go astray as sheep without shepherd.
Developing a mumucracy thesis, I argue that the foundation of depreciation of Nigeria is laid by the common, ordinary man who populates geopolitical spaces and enthrones the minority who trades with the cheated but unperturbed majority. The way Lagbaja puts it, ‘na common man dey do common man pass. Before we dey shout na military, na military now wey civilian government dey, no be our people dey inside?’. Common man in police uniform shoots another common man’s child dead. Is it not the common man who sold votes during elections that has now started complaining of bad leadership? We have laid this bed anto make money from home
So, if the foundation is faulty, what shall the righteous do? The overwhelming majority are corrupt while the minority exceptions do not have the wherewithal to pull through. Hence, Nigeria’s trend of five steps forward, 10 steps backward. From ought-to-be paradise, Nigeria’s political, economic, religious and social realities are a paradox. The leadership in Nigeria are playing out a script written for them by the unthinking majority. Mumu people can only promote mumucracy and still be living in denial as the harbinger of the negative realities which they face. Unless the common man do the uncommon thing by realising their errors and reset themselves and then the polity.
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