The FCT Minister’s Battle against Roasted Fish, Beer and Women
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 8th July 2022
The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Bello Mohammed, is engaged in a battle to stop the sale of roasted fish and alcoholic drinks in parks and gardens in Abuja. Some persons might think there is no greater battle to fight in Abuja at this time in spite of the rapid degradation of infrastructure and rising insecurity in the city. That for me is misguided.
Tuesday was an important date. The advance convoy of the President was attacked enroute to Daura. That night, gunmen who later identified themselves as terrorists organised a commando attack on Kuje Correctional Facility with significant fire power and explosives where they broke in and released prisoners including detained terrorists. A total of 879 inmates “liberated” from the facility during the attack and just over half of them were recaptured by the next day. According to the defense minister, Bashir Magashi, were among those who escaped and were still at large. The attack took place with 38 military personnel on ground in addition to personnel of the Nigeria Police Force, Civil Defence, DSS and the armed squad of the correctional facility. What then was the strength of the attackers in personnel and fire power? With such serious challenges in the FCT as kidnappers start taking over the suburbs, one would think focusing the Minister’s attention on who is drinking beer in gardens and why they must be stopped should be his least worry.
It was Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, who, as minister of the FCT, brought to the consciousness of Nigerians the distortion of the original master-plan of the federal capital city. He had said that green areas were allocated to people to build houses, while sewage lines were blocked with buildings. To correct this anomaly, El-Rufai had set out to pull down structures erected where they should not. In his 'operation restore Abuja master-plan,' churches were destroyed as well as private buildings. Also, hotels and other sundry buildings were pulled down. With that, some green areas were restored, sewage lines were freed and Abuja started having a breath of fresh air. Those to who gardens were leased were required to landscape it, plant trees and flowers and make it beautiful to behold. That was the context in which Abuja’s fish garden culture developed and residents and visitors frequently visit the gardens for fresh air, roasted fish, small chops and some drinks. I am a stakeholder and frequently take my international visitors to such gardens and precisely because of the atmosphere, they have come to love Abuja. It is a great asset to the city and God bless Nasir El-Rufai for his insight.
However, since the exit of El-Rufai from the FCT Administration, Abuja is gradually returning to the old era where the master plan is ignored. Green areas and sewage lines appear to be giving way, again, to buildings. Indeed, structures are beginning to emerge in green areas. Mostly affected are private operators of gardens, who use the green areas, on the approval of the FCT administration, for recreational purpose. Successive Ministers have sought to close down the gardens and many think they are interested in allocating the land for new construction. The Aliero FCT administration in fact allotted some gardens for the issuance of certificate of occupancy (C of O). Indeed in 2009, Minister Aliero was taken to court for his ban on parks. He then argued that the parks had to be closed because robbers and prostitutes were flooding the places. I remember my response to him at that time was that the real robbers who steal billions from government coffers retain suites at Hilton Hotel, a well-known and notorious den of iniquity in Abuja. Why was the Hilton not closed down by Aliero at that time and why has the current Minister allowed Hilton serve alcohol for 24-hours each day?
I think Minister Bello of the FCT is too decent a person to seek to allocate the lands parks are situated in but it is clear he has been sold a dummy in terms of the moral argument that people should not be allowed to drink beer after 7pm. Abuja is a multi-cultural, and indeed international city and it is a great disservice to Nigeria to seek to impose provincial values on a cosmopolitan city. The parks and garden owners have sued the FCT Minister on the issue and he should not have imposed and implemented the early closure ban. The minister should uphold the rule of law and call his aides to order and stop the enforcement of the closure of parks and gardens by 7pm in the Federal Capital Territory.
The other moral crusade in Abuja is against so-called prostitutes but not their male customers, who are apparently considered as the moral pillars of contemporary Nigerian society. For decades, raids have been organised in different locations, leading to the arrest of hundreds of women by agents of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) Joint Task Team. The team goes around night clubs and arrest all the women in them for prostitution. The task force has been systematically arresting women in the streets after 10 p.m. and any woman seen outside is assumed to be a criminal and prostitute, and treated as such. Independent Nigeria has therefore fully restored the colonial rule of arbitrarily arresting people in the streets for “loitering and wondering”, but this time the targets are exclusively female. This enforcement agency has made complete nonsense of our Constitution, which protects the human rights of all Nigerians, including the right to walk in the streets, day and night.
Over the years, concordant reports indicate that some of these women were sexually assaulted and released after the “moral policemen” had sex with them. Others paid bribes and were released and it was the few who refused to be blackmailed that were taken to court and charged with prostitution. It is really shameful that this would occur in the capital city of Nigeria. The charge of prostitution has become an instrument for committing terrible crimes against women. All the clubs had men and women in them but they pick on only the women, in a blatantly discriminatory approach. Some of the women were professionals, AND YES, RESPONSIBLE PROFESSIONAL WOMEN ALSO HAVE THE RIGHT TO GO AND ENJOY THEMSELVES IN CLUBS, JUST AS MEN DO. The women who resisted arrest and made the argument that they have the right to go to clubs are often thoroughly beaten up for daring to stand for their rights.
The Abuja authorities justify their war on women on the basis of the implementation of the Abuja Environmental Protection Board Act 1997, which is a statutory act applicable in the Federal Capital Territory. The law gives them powers to: “Keep owned or occupied tenements clean, neat, keep grass low and trim, cut and trim flowers; keep drainage running through the tenement free from blockage. Provide adequate dust bin and sanitary convenience … must not use residential premises for the sale of alcoholic drinks or as a restaurant or for other commercial activity.” Out of all these responsibilities, their only focus is to arrest women. No, Abuja does not need fake moral policing.
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kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Apologies, Ken.
I was not reading that read, after the initial posting by Jibrin.
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kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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The history of antisemitism in Europe
I should have responded earlier but I've spent the last three idyllic days at Torö, circa five English miles North of Baba Kadiri's residence ...
Baba Kadiri's major weaknesses in this thread are his innate tendencies towards exaggeration, his penchant for naive over-simplifications and for taking some extreme positions with his overgeneralizations which are plentifully in evidence here.
For example, he argues that to the best of his knowledge before the white man came, there were no words for prostitute (the world's oldest profession) , no words for concubine, homosexual , Sodom and Gomorrah and allied sexual phenomena that are indeed older than the Bible and much older than the uncreated Quran, to be found in the Yoruba Language, and that the non-existence of such nouns, adjectives, or even euphemisms in the pre-colonial, pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Yoruba Language is solid proof that such actions were never a part of Yoruba human nature or Yoruba culture.
A sceptic could readily agree with Baba Kadiri’s idealism, that maybe during the Golden Age of the Yoruba, to a very limited and perhaps hidden extent such ( from his point of view) immoral practices were never glorified or viewed as an ideal part of what a Yoruba cultural chauvinist would like to promote or exalt as exemplary pre-Colonial and pre - foreign religious missionary Yoruba Civilisation and the academic studies available on the sexual mores of the pre-missionary / pre-colonial Yoruba Civilisation may or may not bear Baba Kadiri out on this.
Like you, my main beef with Baba Kadiri is his tall, absurd and unfounded claim that
“Historically, the idea of marriage and the institutionalisation of husband and wife were introduced into Europe by the Jews. In fact, a major reason why European men in particular developed deep hatred for the Jews was the establishment of marriage institutions resulting in husband and wife. The English men complained bitterly about their life being marred because of being forced to become husbands by getting to marry to women who became wives.”
I have battled with him - in vain over this on the telephone, but he is as stubborn as Soyinka's proverbial goat. I have argued with him that at no time in history did “the Jews” impose their marriage traditions on others - not even the wisest King Solomon who had so many wives and concubines.
Here’s an ethically very un -Yoruba Bertrand Russell sounding off on sex and marriage
So, one would have thought that it was the Christendom of Paul that started it all ( the moralising about one man , one woman, one Adam, one Eve, and the beginning of the doctrine of Original Sin
For our perusal ;
The history of monogamy in Europe
Christianity : monogamy was recommended for bishops
The problem with Baba Kadiri is that he would like to have his cake and eat it too.
Baba Kadiri has to finally make up his mind exactly where he stands on this issue.
On the one hand he would like us all to believe him when he concedes that “The Jews” did not impose their marriage traditions on hapless European males , but rather they “ introduced” the idea of marriage - so he alleges, his exact words: “ the idea of marriage and the institutionalisation of husband and wife were introduced into Europe by the Jews.”
Introduced by “the Jews”, he says, not by the Christians.
Exactly when this idea was introduced, he does not say, and if this idea supplanted or displaced earlier ideas and practices, such as so called “ pagan” practices he does not tell us.
In Upper Six under the tutelage of our English teacher Mr. Bankole Thompson, we studied John Dover Wilson’s Life in Shakespeare's England to get an insight into among other things his Sonnet 116 , Banky’s favourite Shakespearean Sonnet. But that sonnet was written 62 years after King Henry V111, the serial monogamist, had already blessed the Hereafter. Which means that the practice of monogamy / serial monogamy was already well established long before that date.
Fast forward to living history, it should interest you to know that in the wonderful Swedish countryside, Professor Bernard Porter’s beautiful summer residence is located at Anne Boleyn Avenue. We ( Better Half & I) spent a few glorious summer days there with him and his Better Half, two years ago and I swelled with fond memories about this today as I read his latest blog entry.
Anyway it is Europe and not the UK in particular that is of such great concern to our monomaniacal Baba Kadiri who still stubbornly persists, babbling on with his diatribe ( dribble) :
“Only a metaphysician would believe that after Europe was ravaged by bubonic plague in the 14th century, children fell like rain from heaven to flood Europe with overpopulation which had nothing to do with uncontrolled sexual intercourse perpetrated by European males on their females”
Perpetrated? Babbling on as if unaware that it’s a general commandment in the Bible, and is addressed to all mankind : Be fruitful and multiply
It is a commandment that is not to be taken less seriously after e.g. the population decimation caused by e.g The Holocaust.
It should be interesting to hear what others have to say about the condom. I think that it’s the kind of unexpected ( maybe a rather indecorous) question that should have been tossed at Sunak & Truss when they debated ( I think that Liz Truss won the debate hands down. And she was more likeable, also showed such civilised self-restraint , forbearance , calmness and poise, being rudely interrupted in mid-sentence ( a cardinal sin in Sweden) time without number by the terribly excited and excitable Rishi irrepressibly, supposedly playing the role of whizz kid…
Corrections:
Mr. Bankole Thompson earlier referred to is none other than
Justice Rosolu John Bankole Thompson of Blessed Memory
The debate in question :Liz Truss vs Rishi Sunak
Cornel West: has defined it : “Justice is what love looks like in public”
There are debates and there are debates.There’s also the basic decorum that is to be taken as for granted. More on this Sunak.-Truss debate should it surface on a separate thread. Suffice it to say that there were several agonising occasions when the moderator should have insisted that the presumptuous Sunak hold his peace until Liz Truss had finished saying what she was saying; even if there was no way of knowing whether or not she was in the middle of a periodic sentence. Time after time Sunak insisted in shooting himself in the leg and maybe that’s why the moderator thought that it was OK to keep on giving him enough rope with which to hang himself in public. The besserwisser is no charmer like Brother Obama, the UK’s Tory Party is not anything like Uncle Sam’s Democrats and with all the tittle-tattle about taxation of course more Republican than mere Thatcher’s apostles, which they both claim to be. I thank God that the very likeable Liz Truss is nothing like the dreadful Mrs Hillary Clinton, and of course the UK is definitely not the United States of America…I’m getting sick and tired of the auto correct: Why should it be “ dribble” when “drivel” is intended?
As far as British Foreign Ministers go, one of Liz Truss' predecessor William Hague was a good example...
This snippet from today’s New York Times, Morning Briefing:
"Each candidate has tried to adopt the style of Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister whose right-wing policies remain popular among the Conservative voters that Sunak and Truss hope to win over. They are casting themselves as the heir to Thatcher’s free-market, low-tax, deregulatory revolution at home and her robust defense of Western democracy abroad.
But experts on Thatcher say the candidates are cherry-picking the legacy of the woman known as the Iron Lady. They are emphasizing the crowd-pleasing elements while glossing over the less appetizing ones, like tax increases in 1981, during the depths of a recession, at a time when she was determined to curb runaway inflation
Sunak: He kicked off his campaign over the weekend in Grantham, Thatcher’s birthplace, and described his agenda as “common-sense Thatcherism.” His approach echoes Thatcher’s belief in balancing the books and her dislike of borrowing, which she viewed as a burden on future generations.
Sunak served in Boris Johnson’s government and is responsible for some of the economic policies he now proposes to sweep away.
Truss: She is channelling Thatcher in a more stylistic way and has modeled her appearances on the international stage closely on the Iron Lady’s. Truss has copied famous images, including one of Thatcher at the turret of a tank in West Germany.
She has even taken to wearing a silk pussy-bow blouse, a familiar Thatcher look, which could risk self-parody. Truss has rejected the comparison, which she casts as gendered. “
If that upstart Sunak’s supremacist and near-oppressive /bullying.positions in that first head- to- head debate is all too depressing let’s take some respite at Oxford Union for a refreshing, down-to-earth, amicable one of our own Anthony Joshua not in the boxing ring or the debating ring , not a Professor Chicken wings big grammar, but a cool calm and collected Anthony Joshua | Full Q&A at The Oxford Union
Baba Kadiri, the Judgmental,
Let’s be real.
My conscience will not rest unless I squeeze some more concessions from you.
Really you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You are still preaching against what you see as the “immorality” of “overpopulation :
“Only a metaphysician would believe that after Europe was ravaged by bubonic plague in the 14th century, children fell like rain from heaven to flood Europe with overpopulation which had nothing to do with uncontrolled sexual intercourse perpetrated by European males on their females.”
In this context, think again : don’t you think that “perpetrated” is too strong a word? Imagine , if our fathers had used condoms then it’s possible that none of us would have been born. None of us would have been penetrating or “ perpetrating”,,,
What about Nigeria `, all set to be the third most populous nation on planet earth by 2050
And what do you have to say about India which is more populated than Africa.And China?
Surely it’s not marriage that’s driving population growth? ( BTW, in Sierra Leone, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments “ was the sonnets usually reeled off by the old stiff-upper lip CMS Creole gentleman , at weddings, with liberal sprinklings of erudite phrases in Greek and Latin, and, of course, a good dose of relevant passages from the King James Version the Bible - 1st Corinthians Chapter 13 in particular and of course, the final warning which Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey has made famous : “What God has joined together - let no man put asunder” ( There are a good number of mistakes, misunderstandings etc but for its Yoruba contents alone, Chapter 4 of Abner Cohen’s Politics of Elite Culture - about Sierra Leone Creoles, should make it a worthwhile read)
By now, Malthus is probably “ old hat”. Seriously, in 21st Century Europe the lamentation is about negative population growth - the reverse of the export of excess populations in Europe, to Africa, to the America’s and to form penal colonies in faraway places like Australia, and other colonial and unethical matters that you have been complaining about..
Talking about numbers, it’s reported here that Rishi Sunak interrupted Lis Truss 31 times during their 1st head-to-head on TV two days ago . Interrupting someone who is speaking / cutting him/ her off in mid sentence - especially in a debate, is the height of bad manners. Why the moderator did not bring him to order from his very first interruption, remains a mystery. Of course, Liz could have insisted each time, “ Can I please finish what I’m saying?” - even in his state of self-absorption he would have got the message….
That’s one of the most extraordinary things about the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam : he never - at no time whatsoever did he interrupt someone who was speaking -in fact he would ask - have you finished what you are saying before he himself would start speaking ( I have read Sahih Muslim through and through)
Of course, such was the prudishness and hypocrisy in Victorian society - we gather that much from the social history and the literature of the Victorian era, that even the legs of tables were covered / hijabed by tablecloths, to conceal the supposed indecencies of legs carved in wood.
Whilst at it, in support of his own personal bigotry, anti-imported religions, anti-colonialism and anti-postcolonialism, since he takes a special delight in illustrating his own homegrown Yoruba & universal truths through proverbs, Baba Kadiri could have quoted Blake of the Romantic, pre-Victorian age: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” ( but for the fact - so he tells us, that there were no brothels and no ashawoes renting out their treasures / plying their trade before the white man, Missionary Christianity and al-Islam invaded Yoruba land and turned Yoruba culture and society upside-down and corrupted eveything
Typical:
In his survey of possible suspects in the Jack the Ripper case, since it seems that it is mostly high-profile Victorians that he is interested in nailing, Baba Kadiri does spare Prince Albert Victor, and does not hesitate to rope in “79-year-old Prime Minister of England at that time, William Gladstone” who he tells us “ was well-known for his unquenchable thirst and unlimited appetite for prostitutes.”
Since he was not there, from where did Baba Kadiri imbibe the calumny that dear old Gladstone who is laid to rest at Westminsiter Abbey, “was well-known for his unquenchable thirst and unlimited appetite for prostitutes”?
Is this not tantamount to bearing false witness against thy neighbour?
Has Baba Kadiri not told us in this forum that it is a Yoruba tradition not to speak ill of the dead, especially when they are not here to defend themselves?
William Gladstone, Jack The Ripper? :
“More than most parliamentarians of the time he proved an ability to connect with the Victorian working classes. Famous for his spirited debates with Disraeli, there was no friendship between them throughout their long political lives, and for his attempts at fighting the social evil of prostitution, he would invite prostitutes home for tea, in the hope of persuading them to change their ways. This practice caused him much ridicule and the risk of possible scandal throughout his political career. Some writers have suggested that he took this reforming zeal a little further than he should, and was in fact Jack the Ripper. In 1888 at the time of the Whitechapel murders, Gladstone was almost 80 years old, and therefore could not possibly have been mistaken for someone of 28/35 years of age, which is the age many of the eyewitnesses described Jack the Ripper. Gladstone died from cancer at the age of 88 on 19 May 1898 at Hawarden Castle Flint, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.”
Those were some very fanciful conjectures Ogunlakaiye dressed up in his latest contribution to this thread, quoting the likes of his Mighty colonial Lord Lugard the less than omniscient and his limited field of observation, in support of some vain idealism, that the world’s oldest profession was not practised in Africa which was a veritable Garden of Eden before the white man came with his Bible to Africa and mucked up everything with his Christianity and his civilisation.
Another non-sequitur and calumny from you: ” the 16-year-old Prince Albert Victor became prime suspect and he was sent on foreign voyage whereby murder by Jack the Ripper stopped.” Really? Your open and shut case of cause and effect? Then you had better examine the other suspects
In other areas, Baba Ogunlakaiye demands very high standards of proof of the sort that even the exhibitions of ancient Egypt that were featured the first week in August at the British Museum, and the African exhibition - ( including a lot of art treasures from Nigeria that were on display in room 24 of the British Museum - formerly a part of the museum of mankind which is now being housed in the British Museum) cannot provide.
2. That in the pre-colonial period there was no what Baba Ogunlakaiye refers to as “recreational sex” what you would refer to as “perfidy of words and coprolalia associated with them” as described here - that it was all to beget children, and even more contentious than that
3 - and Africa is still a big continent - yet, in spite of the evidence suggested by the varieties of sexual diversity among all humankind - including “ Africans”, you still insist that in pre-colonial Africa homosexuality was non-existent. And you want this kind of “African” exceptionalism to be taken seriously. It reminds me of Ahmedinejad famously announcing that “ In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country.” (USA) - as if he has never been to Qazvin where the joke is that you can’t even bend down to pick up a coin that fell from your pocket, as if he’s not familiar with some of the decadence described by one Peter Lamborn Wilson. And as if it’s all okey-dokey in Iran for the LGBT communities there
Last night, I listened to Jiddu Krishnamurti deliberating on homosexuality. I wonder on what grounds you would like to categorically dismiss what he has to say.
Talking about “ condoms” it might interest you to know the Prophet of Islam’s answer to a query about coitus interruptus , in short, coitus interruptus or no coitus interruptus, the child that is destined to be born will be born…
Any news about who has won the Presidential elections in Kenya?
And I suspect he is the same person as Kadiri Ogunlakaiye, so he engages in dialogue with himself, a binary that juxtaposes. Last May, I planned to go to Sweden to knock on his door without notice but….
Like Toyin Adepoju, his knowledge crosses the lines to a genius state, half normal, half eccentric, but all three are the crabs in a rock—in the strength of calmness they flourish.
TF
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