By Abraham Ogbodo
I do not even know what to write about today. Nothing stays fresh in the news for more than 24 hours in Nigeria. There is always something fresh to consider. It is not freshness in the positive sense. In the first place, real news is more in the oddity of the occurrence. And there is a ceaseless stream of real news in Nigeria. It derives from official missteps that come at a breath-taking frequency. There is hardly a recovery time. One misstep rolls into another in a bazaar of official buffoonery. Doing the wrong thing has become normative. It is such that any right step in government is seen largely as an aberration and registers as a surprise on the people. Getting it right is wrong. And that is official.
For instance, nobody has been able to explain what went wrong on the last Independence Day. Although memory loss or selective amnesia has strengthened into a culture in our part of the world, I will still go ahead to refresh our memories. On that day, specifically October 1, 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who had been robustly described by admirers as very generous, decided to take that generosity a shade higher. He exercised his prerogative of mercy as allowed by the Constitution, to pardon unconditionally, almost every known ranked criminal in Nigerian prisons. Nothing was explained before the announcement. The explanation came after the announcement. And that was because a few Nigerians found the courage to ask some tough questions.
They picked the courage to ask, for instance, if it was not more profitable to stay outside the law and become an outlaw than stay within it and become law abiding. This was also when Prince Lateef Fagbemi remembered that he is the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice and needed to say something urgently on the matter. Even at that, President Tinubu was clear enough in his proclamation. He told some 175 people in prisons for offences ranging from terrorism, murder, kidnapping, economic sabotage to financial crime, to go home to their houses and sin no more.
Yet the AGF sounded as if there were ambiguities in the President’s speech that needed to be cleared by his office. He explained that what the President said was not the final position. Really? The buck no longer stops at the President’s desk. It rolls on to the AGF”s table. According to Fagbemi, the pardoned prisoners needed to be further processed to determine the degree of clemency that each was entitled by the Presidential proclamation. It was an afterthought to reorder the disparate thoughts of the President into mainstream thinking in the streets of Nigeria. It was quite interesting. After a Presidential misstep, a somehow inattentive AGF, who is part of the Presidency, stepped in to correct the wrong step of Mr. President.
While the President was proclaiming wholesale pardon for convicted criminals including murderers, other murderers that go by various names; jihadists, bandicts, Fulani herders and so on, were sacking mainly Christian communities in Benue, Plateau, Nassara and Niger States and sending many to early graves. Amid the anguish, authorities casually announced (mis)steps taken to track the killers and bring them to face justice. As always, they also announced to leave no stone unturned to avert recurrence. Finally, they claimed to be on top of the situation. The killings have continued in spite of all the steps taken. Mass killing has become a fact of life in most of Northern Nigeria and the Southeast. It remains for the Presidency to say so. This refusal to perceive the obvious was what got President Donald Trump of America very angry the other day. He is in White House in Washington DC but able to see clearly what Nigerian leaders are unable to see from Aso Rock Villa, Abuja. The man is the self-appointed defender of the Christians worldwide. The situation in Nigeria is of particular concern to him. He communicated this to President Tinubu. He also dropped a disturbing message of what might follow, if the Presidency continued to feign a deep sleep and do nothing.
Immediately, steps were taken to engage the message from Washington. Again, the right steps were lacking. Perhaps, it would be the first time in the whole wide world that a diplomatic team was headed by a retired Assistant Inspector General (AIG) of Police and one without background in diplomacy. Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the National Security Adviser, was at the head of the Nigerian team to the US whichever comprised Yusuf Tuggar, Minister of Foreign Affairs, former Minister of Defence, Abubakar Badaru and Minister of Internal Affairs, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo. Others were Bernard Doro, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Gen. Olufemi Oluyede, Chief of Defence Staff, Mohammed Mohammed, Director-general of National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Kayode Egbetokun. These people, under the leadership of Nuhu Ribadu, constituted the Nigerian side of a Joint Working Group of Nigeria and the US to discuss and bring Donald Trump to see the killings in Nigeria the same way that the Aso Rock Villa have been seeing them.
The results of the joint efforts are being awaited. The Nigerian team has since returned home and waiting for another day and a new round of estacodes to return to Washington to continue the engagement. On the side, the team, according to reports, was only able to speak with one non-ranking American legislature on the matter. The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio and other key American officials central to the subject matter, are still far-fetched. It was a tailed mission, to put it mildly. This is what happens when every public appointment becomes a delivery van for political patronage to privileged persons. It happens when all the high offices in the land are kept exclusively for the ‘boys.’ It happens when loyalty ranks above competence in public administration and core governance. It also happens when politics drives development and not the other way round.
Meanwhile, national security is too important a subject to be determined on a political chessboard. As Adviser on National Security, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu has not done too well. He has not been able to come up with a strategy to contain the rising security challenges in the country. He may be doing his best but the situation has defied his best efforts. He should stop explaining things and start doing things. Where specific performance is required, rationalization or even explanation sounds stupid. And it is another glaring misstep to put Ribadu, who has offered no answers to the killing of innocent Nigerians by terrorists, at the head of a diplomatic team to engage Donald Trump and the US on the specific charge of killing of Christians in Nigeria. Even if leaders in Nigeria choose to see and hear nothing about the endless killing in the country, responsible world leaders do see and hear everything.
Let me advise. Trump is not God, but he loves playing God. That point should be taken seriously. He does not want his words to return empty to him. And so, anything he says, including, especially, the threat to attack us if we continue to see and hear nothing about killing of Christians in the country, should be taken seriously. Let’s not forget also that he is the American President with capacity to meet his purpose. Going forward, the set of steps to engage Donald Trump must be right and well choreographed too. I am only advising as a concerned citizen.
Even so, Donald Trump does not have to hang over us like the Sword of Damocles for the Presidency to take the right steps. Common sense should always remain common. It is a problem when common sense becomes scarce. Good decisions are dictated by common sense that looks far into the horizon to accommodate the common good and the future. They are not mystical derivatives. I have just talked about a diplomatic mission to US that failed to meet the bill. And now an ambassadorial list is out to tell the world that anything goes in Nigeria.
More seriously, aren’t there other ways to accommodate political jesters outside the serious business of governance? This title called ambassador should command a lot more than political horse-trading. In diplomacy, a country’s embassy is a slice of the homeland. The embassy sign posts what obtains in the homeland. What happens at the embassy in terms of structure, organization and human capacity gives deep insight into the state of affairs in the home country. An embassy is a microcosm of the macrocosm. It is not a zone for political marketing nuanced in intellectual gangsterism.
I am eagerly waiting to see the country that Reno Omokri will be posted for his ambassadorial duties. What President Tinubu is saying is that, given everything, Reno Omokri is among the best to represent Nigeria at whatever level of international engagement. The ascendance of Omokri as well as others in his mould, has followed a pattern. A pattern that places a premium on a caustic tongue and naked vulgarity over a thinking head. To get appointed by President Tinubu, invent unspeakable adjectives and invectives to rain on his political enemies and you are on board with him. This is not difficult to do. The young ones are learning and getting to understand fast that bad character is equally an asset in the survival game in Nigeria.
I will only add that since Washington is proving difficult to manage, Reno Omokri should be sent there to outperform Donald Trump in vulgar communication and secure a reprieve for Nigeria. At this moment, the country is seeking to score diplomatic points with the top nations of the world which hold doubts about it. This is actually the time to push into the ambassadorial line-up, persons that can split and dissolve their character and personality at will to rest all doubts about Nigeria. Persons through whom other nations can at least understand the bizarre thinking that form decisions in high places in Nigeria.
