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
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