EDITORIAL: Taxpayer ID Trap — Tinubu Squeezing Blood from Stones. Nigerians Must Rise Against
Tim Elombah (This Dawn Media)
https://thisdawn.com/editorial-taxpayer-id-trap-tinubu-squeezing-blood-from-stones/
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Cornelius Hamelberg
On reading or misreading “Tinubu Squeezing Blood from Stones !”
Re- This sordid, sinful allegation : “Tinubu Squeezing Blood from Stones “
Just for the record, a little slice of history, where I’m coming from. As the good Saro People used to say back in the mid-sixties of the last century, and I still don't know from where these elders, pissed off orators flexing their rhetorical muscle were usually quoting these cliches, platitudes, piling them on, they were most probably translating directly from the oral tradition, some of the proverbial standard Yoruba wisdom, because whenever something outlandish occurred, such as back in the day, Albert Akpata Margai’s Mende-i-zation policy, you'd hear some learned Saro Creoles erupt, “Provocation is next to madness !” after which you’d hear some of the same old learned Saro Creole people cursing Akpata Margai - and as a preface to the forthcoming malediction, they’d say (with their mouths) “da mot wae dae eat pepper ehn salt” ( the mouth that eats people and salt) - and then proceed to curse Akpata Margai, roundly, “In the Name of The Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” - in true missionary style , as some kind of righteous, Divinely Sanctioned holy fire to the ire, prayerfully adding to the venom their most ardent wish of that moment : “God go pay Margai! “ (meaning “May God Almighty punish him”) - and this would occur when any Permanent Secretary Ayodele Johnson had been unceremoniously booted out of office and replaced by one of Margai’s ethically closer Mende buddies - just like that. Ayodele Johnson would have done no wrong but it was now Mende-i-zation time, by hook and by crook, at all costs the Mende-in-zation of the Sierra Leone Civil Service was then in the works.
Being neither a “tribalist” nor an ethnic jingoist by birth, by necessity or by inclination, more than fifty-six years after I was last in that country - and only for ten days ( April 20 - April 30, 1970) like the late Leonard Cohen (Canadian) , "I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean”, and that’s why I’m free-ly & hope-fully still wondering if the Mende-i-zation tendency is still part of the current SLPP’s government indigenization agenda, these days
Not right now, but a little later, in your more quiet, sane & tranquil moments, away from the noise from Upon the straits...The Sea of Faith unto the Straits of Hormuz
you might well deem mine a mega-reaction, and if you wanna pronounce it correctly you had better spell and understand it as Re-X-tion, most populous Black Nation
Somebody is pissed. Pissed off. Some lumpenproletariat is. If he is not, then he's supposed to be. He or she, he and she and they are supposed to be a part of the lumpenproletariat at heart - and angry, like Wofa Akwasi - belated happy birthday to thee, once upon a time - as he says, exonerating “Sir TOYIN “ for being “in the trenches” - where we all ought to be ( in the trenches) or shaking the barricades down to their foundations., angry, pisssed, as in the opening lines of Amiri Baraka’s Somebody blew up America :
“They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn’t our American terrorists It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row It wasn’t Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn’t The gonorrhea in costume The white sheet diseases That have murdered black people Terrorized reason and sanity Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say?) Who do the saying Who is them paying Who tell the lies Who in disguise Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa?”
For some time now, I have been thinking that sooner or later, somebody is bound to react.
The more usual expression is “ squeezing water from a stone”
as in
"Hey mister, can't you see
that I'm as dry as a bone
I think I'll spend some time alone
Yes, unless you've found a way
of squeezing water from a stone."
It’s as clear as daylight ( as natural as black and white ) not some weak light or some hapless student reduced to reading by candlelight shining in the Naija darkness) it’s even more clear than the latter, that by all intents and purposes, This Dawn Media outlet is an opposition paper mainly focused on criticising and bringing down the Tinubu Government.
Well, it’s a free country / territory, whether it’s Nigeria, or USA Africa Dialogue Series being hosted in somebody's undisputed nobody's land known as LAGOS, or in Nobodaddy’s Jerusalem or in cyberspace
What is all the more surprising is that they are being given ample space - almost a news monopoly in this forum - without - for balance - any counterbalancing regular media rebuttals issuing from the government’s side to at least occasionally set the record straight. Islamically speaking, a man is judged by his intentions. Jesus is reported to have asked rhetorically, "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?”
The sad reality is that whenever the spurious claims being made in poison pen articles and reports are not challenged, their contents are thereby allowed, so to speak, to pass uncontested as some “Gospel truths”. If we should go back to the kinds of headlines emanating from This Dawn the past couple of months since they first started posting here, you’d think that Dear President Tinubu JAGABAN, the economy wizard wants to be re-elected because he “has perfected the art of turning suffering into policy.”
This is not a tribalism Yoruba-i-zation or Igbo-i-z-ation (“I-GO-Before-Others” ) thing - the masses - of all ethnicities are all basically united by or in poverty.
Therefore, for balance, I’m looking forward to John Onyeukwu’s conscientious take on the necessity, wisdom or folly of President Tinubu’s Taxpayer Identification scheme which should normally - in accord with sound Social Democratic principle, I suppose would aim at basically, taxing the rich, some kind of Robin Hood tax-a tion
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1aUk4XJFUq/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Cornelius Hamelberg
A very important correction, so that The White Man either disguised as as the friendly missionary or wannabe great colonial emperor himself doesn’t misquote my error
“and as a preface to the forthcoming malediction, they’d say (with their mouths) “da mot wae dae eat pepper ehn salt” ( the mouth that eats people and salt) - and then proceed to curse…”
and use (invoke) that error and his own many misunderstandings, Racism and other prejudices, to go around talking about “Cannibalism in Sierra Leone “ as a sufficient motive to wanna send more clergymen and women on a new round of the civilising and salvific mission….
The standard expression is “ da mot wae dae eat salt ehn pepper” ("the mouth that eats salt and pepper” -pepper, not people) ought not be used in cursing anybody. What is not clear is whether the curses from such a mouth are more effective or efficacious…
You would have thought that the saying should be more in line with “ The mouth that’s used for praying to the Almighty and praising Him , should not be also used for cursing any of the Almighty's creations.
According to Surah Al-Hujurat (49:12) and Islamic tradition / Hadith, back-biting and evil gossip is akin to Cannibalism, akin to “eating your brother's flesh “
Left unanswered, The Doctrine of Transubstantiation, the idea supporting the ritual consumption of The Holy Eucharist
Cornelius Hamelberg
BTW, I think that it all has to do with the concept embedded in “The Blood of Jesus” - the whole idea of sacrifice , anthropologically speaking in so called primitive religion , and in the case of the Christian mission, the great idea about “the perfect sacrifice” - in this realm of reality (Spinoza, Nietzsche, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the death of god, nihilism, ,Dr.Oohay, Marxist philosophy) the theological case that has been made and is still being made for Jesus as the perfect sacrificial lamb, the “O Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us !”
Indeed, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” and you too probably have great difficulty imagining Peter Obi/ Alhaji Atiku or better still, Donald J as a sacrificial lamb sacrificing himself - not for all mankind but his chosen people,” America First” having already given the standing order that if he is assassinated then Iran should be bombed !
Sometimes it cuts, has cut both ways - so back in the Day we had Malcolm X at the 1963 Harlem Black Unity Rally telling the good folks there about old blue eyes, “They like their meat rare - They are cannibals !”
Historically, the unpleasant subject of Christians and Cannibals has to be cleared up and not just left to dwell in the fog of prejudiced popular imagination - just as by assiduous rejection, the defamatory blood libel has not been left to rot in the antisemitic imagination.
Norman Mailer’s Christians and Cannibals comes to mind as a misleading title for quite another type of political subject matter. This new American century, what would Mailer, the iconoclastic master of chutzpah not have been chirping about idolatry and today’s expanding American Empire under the largess of one, big, fat, naked American emperor leaning on his trumpet, pissing words from his tower of babble, his Trump Towers, twin towers, tower of Pisa, currently all set to erect his own arc de’triomphe, the United States’ wannabe emperor who wants to make his 21st century version of Rome, Great Again by incorporating , Venezuela as the 51st State, and in his earlier dreams, Canada, Greenland, The Bay ofMexico , and of course also in his pipeline, Greater Israel!
Dr. Oohay
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Dr. Oohay
Certain “Errors” Corrected:
On Friday, May 22, 2026, 3:11 PM, 'Dr. Oohay' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Nietzsche STRONGLY rejected the Enlightenment for its own ironic dogmatism and belief that in scientism (aka “idealism”) lies the opportunity to realize the ultimate freedom of “man” —- tho understand Nietzsche requires one to READ him (his body of texts) intra-textually and inter-textually). “Gott ist tot AIN’T” an ATHEISTIC claim. Hence, he declares, I love Jesus but hate “Christ”. “Christo” AIN’T a personal name BUT a crown associated with dogmatizing of a faith that tries to show how to live a life. But note the paradox of Jesus as FULLY human AND FULLY non-human — aka KENOSIS in Greek.By banning religion, the Enlightenment’s desire or banishment of religion became a BIAS itself and thus this knowledge movement failed. All western philosophy does now amounts to dangling between questions regarding PROBABILITY (inductive logic) and CERTAINTY (aka DEDUCTIVE LOGIC — either X is certainly false OR certainly TRUE. Today we move back and forth between these two phenomena, perhaps, ETERNALLY again and again. Nietzsche’s concept here AIN’T a cosmological claim. I regard it as a “mereotic” position (my own lingo). Marx, a former follower of Hegel. turned Marx turned Hegel upside down. Materialism became the song or refrain of Marx which means Marxism, aka “communism” —- now sugar-coated as “socialism”. When Marx died only about 4 or so people appeared at the funeral, today it would be multimillion people. The oppressor and the oppressed. My dearest comrades, Marxism AIN’T an answer and religion AIN’T necessarily your enemy. My dear brotha and sistha comrades of this wild whole world, MarxISM AIN’T an answer but the ability to accumulate capital constitutes what makes one a capitalist. But do NOT turn this ability into an ISM. Now many of these attackers have become millionaires themselves —— but now draw a fallacious distinction between millionaires and billionaires. The KAPITAL also means THE AMERICAN dream —— the magnet that attracts millions to the USofA periodically. Hence No other recognized or recognizable dream so far. Of course, no dream (perhaps, has lived for ever). Any Naija or UK or Australian Dream with same “attraction“ as Uncle Sam’s? Well, note ALLL that glitter AIN’T gold.
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Shabbat Shalom ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yfXZasMdgI
Post Spinoza, and Dark Bible Secrets, the Enlightenment, Nietzsche and all that,
Mister Dylan was still on the road, with When you gonna wake up - singing
“Counterfeited philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts
Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger's got you tied up in knots.”
#The Surprising Origins of Judaism Before Jesus
#The Jesus Hustle: The Origin of the Greatest Scam on Humanity
Fast forward :Dr Oohay and his aversion to ism , as if in a denigration mode, substituting Christianism for Christianity implies a change in the contents of its mysticism or the genealogy of the son as an indivisible part of the Godhead for 1.3 Billion Christians.
Van Morisson :Let's go into the mystery vs Bob Marley’s i-manity : “Almighty God is a living man” versus he who was crucified as a heretic : Mansur Al-Hallaj, Mystic and poet
Of course there is a similar distinction to be made between the term Islamism of recent coinage - and often linked to “ terrorism” ( another ism that Dr Oohay does not like) to cover what the critics refer to as “ political Islam” - whereas adherents of that great religion insist there is only one Islam/ “there is only one Islam” …..
Completely out of context, some pacifistic Chrsitian apologists love to make these kinds of vile contrasts:
And Judaism - another ism , the mother of all isms?
Of course, that ism also has its holy alphabet and its genealogy:
History of the Hebrew God ; concretely, Mark S. Smith : The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
Wherever we may be, we all have our moral obligations and if "Think globally, act locally" means anything at all then now that the world’s people of conscience are avidly listening to what Pope Leo XIV is saying, in the Nigerian sphere, I’m also looking forward to be hearing from Bishop Kukah who has been quite for some time now….