Who are Alhaji Sa’idu, Alhaji Ashiru?

(Link on DailyTrust site)

Around 2017 I learnt of a dramatic arrest of a Dubai-based Nigerian unlicensed currency exchange operator. Though I initially assumed that it was just a typical incident involving some Nigerians engaged in currency exchange without appropriate licenses, eyewitnesses’ accounts of the dramatic way the arrest was made left me suspecting other possible more serious reasons behind it; yet I never suspected anything close to what I recently learnt. 

Not long after the arrest, a “big man” elder friend of mine from Kano who had been approached by the suspect’s relatives in hopes he might be of some assistance to the suspect on account of his perceived experience with relevant procedures in the UAE contacted me in turn and introduced a brother to the suspect to me who had come to Dubai to follow up on the case.

And even after I met with him in Dubai, I was still under an assumption that the case was, at worse, a money-laundering case, which such unlicensed currency exchange operators perpetrate knowingly or unknowingly on behalf of some Nigerian home and foreign-based Internet fraudsters who capitalize on the naivety of such unlicensed currency exchange operators to implicate them in money-laundering crimes while they (fraudsters) get away with it.

Interestingly, a typical case in this regard plays out when an Internet fraudster in, say, Lagos manages to scam his victim in, say, London, however, due to the scrutiny that a Nigeria-bound money transfer particularly attracts from money transfer operators and authorities across the world on account of Nigeria’s particular notoriety in Internet fraud, the fraudster contacts a typical greed-driven but naïve Dubai-based mostly Hausa unlicensed currency exchange operator offering him a share from the money if he agrees to collect it in Dubai on his behalf.

He, (i.e. fraudster), then advises the victim to transfer the money to the Dubai-based fellow citing bogus reasons why he cannot receive it directly. The Dubai guy then receives the money, takes his share as agreed, and transfers the balance to the fraudster in Nigeria who ends up collecting the money without leaving any trace behind while the poor guy remains the actual receiver of the money according to the official records and therefore ends up being eventually traced and arrested in Dubai whenever a victim reports being scammed. 

Anyway, recently a friend of mine familiar with the arrested Dubai-based Nigerian unlicensed currency exchange operator’s case sent me a 24-page Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal’s conviction and sentence against the fellow and asked me for a favour to translate it from Arabic to English as, according to him, it would be presented to a top government official who had been approached by the convict’s relatives to facilitate the Nigerian government’s intervention in hopes of securing his release by the UAE authorities.

After going through it, I discovered, among other things, that the fellow in question was actually one of a 6-man network of accomplices convicted and sentenced respectively. What, however, shocked me was the discovery that the case is entirely different from what I had assumed all along. I discovered that the convicts were, in fact, tried and convicted for funding the Boko Haram terror group in Nigeria.

However, due to the amount of workload and having concluded that there is hardly anything that the Nigerian government can do for them, I only made a one-page summarized English version of the original 24-page court file, which is full of details of many Boko-Haram funding transactions that the convicts had perpetrated at least since 2015.

I also observed that almost all the transactions were initiated by one Alhaji Sa’idu based in Nigeria who, according to the file, is a senior undercover Boko-Haram member responsible for facilitating the group’s access to funds from its sponsors. His name appears many times throughout the file.

Equally, one Alhaji Ashiru was mentioned in some of the transitions; and he is, according to the file, a Nigerian government official and yet a senior undercover Boko-Haram member who facilitates the transfer of misappropriated public funds to the group. 

The pattern of a typical transaction is that Alhaji Sa’idu would arrange an unidentified or vaguely identified Arab person on a visit to Dubai from Turkey to hand over an amount of money in US Dollars to one of the convicts who would, in turn, advise his Nigerian-based business partners to hand over the Naira equivalent of the amount to Alhaji Sa’idu. 

Though the convicts, or at least some of them, could be victims of manipulation by Alhaji Sa’idu and Alhaji Ashiru who had capitalized on their gullibility, the court file maintains their involvement anyway and, accordingly, two of them were sentenced to life imprisonment while the remaining four got a 10-year jail sentence respectively. 

Now, shocked by those discoveries, and wondering whether Nigerian authorities are aware of this case, I checked with a Nigerian diplomat friend of mine here in the UAE who promised to check in turn and get back to me.

Meanwhile, in case the Nigerian government isn’t aware, which is quite probable, it means that the duo of Alhaji Sa’idu, Alhaji Ashiru and perhaps others are probably carrying on their Boko Haram-funding facilitation activities through other accomplices and/or by manipulating other home or foreign-based Nigerian hustlers oblivious of the actual purpose of the informal financial transaction services they are providing. 

In any case, considering the sheer implications of this case on Nigeria’s security and stability, the Nigerian government doesn’t have any reasonable excuse whatsoever to justify its unawareness of it. After all, it maintains a diplomatic mission in the UAE, which is manned by supposedly trained diplomats as well as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) operatives who are particularly responsible for preventing foreign-linked threat against Nigeria and its interests.    

Besides, regardless of whatever military measures Nigeria takes against Boko-Haram terrorists, its ability to defeat the group for good depends on its ability to identify and eliminate all its sources of funds, which can only be achieved through painstaking intelligence-gathering, accurate intelligence analyses, and proactive measures accordingly.  

The dynamics behind Beirut blast

 (Link on Daily Trust site)

The Lebanese capital, Beirut was last Tuesday rocked by the most devastating blast in the history of the country. It was so massive that the associated shockwaves were felt in Cyprus 240 kilometres away. It left more than 130 dead, more 5000 wounded and extensive destruction particularly in and around the seaport facilities where it occurred.

According to the Governor of Beirut, Marwan Abboud, the blast could be compared to the United States nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during World War ll, which were the first and so far the only incidents of nuclear attacks in the world. He also estimated the cost of the resultant damage to be between three to five billion US Dollars, which is too much to bear for a desperately struggling economy like the Lebanese economy.

The country’s President, Michel Aoun was quick to attribute the incident to an accidental explosion of “2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (which) had been stored unsafely in a warehouse for six years.” However, it’s widely believed among informed observers and analysts on Middle East affairs, and, of course, within intelligence communities in the region and beyond that the blast was never accidental, and, instead, it was just one of the similar “mysterious” incidents that characterize the Israel-Iran tensions over the past several years.

Of course, as far as those with little or no understanding of the intricacies of the underlying politics of the Israel-Iran tensions are concerned, the incident remains as officially explained by the Lebanese authorities, or it’s simply mysterious in the absence of any definitive contrary official narrative about the alleged party responsible for it or the targeted party. 

Whereas, the incident was never accidental or even isolated for that matter. It was actually one of the series of surgical clandestine missile or aerial strikes that Israel has been conducting over the past few years on Iranian military facilities and factories within Iran and its military bases and sponsored militia units and their logistics facilities across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is though Israel has never officially admitted nor denied responsibility for any of such attacks, while the Iranian authorities, which even though know deep down that Israel has always been responsible, have never held it responsible either.

That further explains the confusion of casual observers who are not familiar enough with the relevant politics involved especially considering the aggressive rhetoric that the two countries always trade against each other.  

Over the past two months, in particular, Israel has intensified its attacks on various military targets and facilities within Iran including its Natanz nuclear project complex, gas pipelines, military factories and other sensitive facilities. Also, for several years, Israel has been attacking Iranian military sites and its sponsored militia units across Syria, of course with the covert approval if not overt connivance of the Russian military in the country, which is supposed to protect the Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and its Iranian allies. (I may address the dynamics of Russian “betrayal” of President Assad in this regard in another piece).

Likewise, across Iraq, various Iranian military units, bases of the Iranian-backed militias and armouries have been the targets of Israeli attacks. Also, in addition to Israel's intermittent attacks on the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, it has equally conducted covert and sometimes more devastating attacks on some secretive or disguised facilities of the militia within the country.

Even the recent attack in Beirut wasn’t targeted at the state of Lebanon per se, after all; it was instead believed to have been targeted at a massive alleged Hezbollah armoury disguised as a seaport facility.

By the way, by manipulating the false pretext of resisting the Israel occupation of Palestine, Hezbollah militia, which is believed to be stronger than the Lebanese military itself, is the only armed political player in Lebanon, which enables it to hold the country to ransom and dictate state policies according to the dictates of the militia’s Iranian sponsors in faraway Tehran.

Now, understanding the logic behind Israel’s reluctance to admit responsibility for such attacks and Iran’s pretended obliviousness of Israeli’s responsibility requires looking at the underlying tactical and strategic considerations of both parties.

On the part of Israel, in order to keep the support of the global powers that it has always enjoyed and manipulated at the expense of Palestinians on whose confiscated territories it was created in 1948, and even though it’s the strongest military power in the region, it feigns vulnerability in the face of the persistent, albeit actually empty, existential threats from Iran since its transformation into a theocracy following the Khomeini-led revolution in 1979.

While on its part, Iran’s bogus commitment to eliminating the state of Israel, which its leaders have always chanted has been its most effective political capital among the gullible across the Muslim world; it, in fact, partly owes its survival to it. To maintain it, therefore, it has to keep making threatening but empty rhetoric against Israel and to also keep sponsoring purported anti-Israeli militias e.g. Hezbollah and Hamas and manipulating them to conduct reckless adventures in the name of attacking Israel, which in turn retaliates with disproportionate force to kill as many vulnerable Palestinians or Lebanese as possible and destroy their properties and infrastructure. This is even though it (i.e. Iran) has a supposedly strong military, yet it has never targeted Israel and won't' dare to; obviously, its military is actually only intended for the pursuit of its expansionist agenda at the expense of Muslim nations.

Israel, therefore, capitalizes on these dynamics to undermine Iran and its sponsored militias through such “mysterious” attacks knowing that Iran would rather continue to feign obliviousness of Israel's responsibility for the attacks and continue to suffer in silence than to hold it responsible, for it realizes that, by so doing, its largely gullible fans would rightly expect it to retaliate while, in reality, it's never and indeed has never been serious in its threats against Israel in the first place.

Corruption: The invincible

(Link on Daily Trust site)

In his last Monday’s Monday Column titled “Which tactic is there left to try?” Malam Mahmud Jega chronicles and assesses the performances of the anti-corruption policies and measures introduced by successive Nigerian governments since the country’s independence in 1960. 

Going through the piece and seeing how every initiative and set of measures failed in the face of human manipulation, one cannot but conclude that corruption is simply invincible in Nigeria. Its invincibility, however, is never inherent; it’s, instead, due to the pervasive manipulation of the bureaucratic process, which has always rendered the anti-corruption measures ineffective; and also the manipulation of legal and judicial technicalities that have always enabled culprits to get away with cases of brazen misappropriation of public resources.    

With the involvement of almost everybody from the lowest-ranking employee to the highest-ranking officer of all government establishments, departments and institutions as well as across the organized private sector businesses and informal enterprises, the invincibility of corruption in Nigeria cannot be overestimated. 

Everybody abhors corruption and wants it eradicated but only to the extent where his own acts of corruption and those of his benefactors wouldn’t be stopped. Also, everyone wants to see the corrupt exposed, prosecuted and punished but only to the extent where he and his benefactors wouldn’t be affected. Some would sometimes even betray their respective accomplices to claim the credit of exposing corruption thereby “earning” cheap recognition, which they would then manipulate to build or promote their political careers with an unearned reputation of honesty.   

Besides, every corrupt fellow compares the amount of public resources he misappropriates to what those above him in position misappropriate thereby grossly underestimating his ill-gotten wealth in total disregard to the extent of the devastating implications of his acts on people’s lives and the lives of the future generations.  

Also, while against the backdrop of the pervasive culture of impunity in the country, more and more people right, left, and centre continue to join the ever-intensifying struggle to partake in the plunder of public resources using all conceivable and inconceivable tactics to outmanoeuvre one another, others opt for various “smart” ways to manoeuvre themselves into the corridors of power, or to somehow secure uninterrupted means of securing their shares through various supposedly legal ways.    

For instance, apparent passionate criticisms of corruption and the corrupt elite in the media, enthusiastic anti-corruption activism and a pretended commitment to religiosity and moral values are some of the “smart” ways through which many unscrupulous elements always have their ways only to become exactly, and sometimes even worse, then the very corrupt people they have always criticized. 

Equally, the National Assembly, state Assemblies and other departments with oversight powers over ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) at national and state levels manipulate their oversight powers in blackmailing the MDAs to share in the systemic misappropriation of public funds. This is notwithstanding the charades they occasionally perform in the name of the public probe of some MDAs that culminate in getting rid of some MDAs’ officials not because they are corrupt to the exclusion of others but only to present them as sacrificial lambs to serve as evidence of purported transparent oversight.     

Likewise, in the name of pushing for the legitimate entitlements of their members, various professional bodies, trade and labour organizations have effectively turned themselves into “cartels” of blackmailing the government into facilitating it for them to have their shares from the public resources constantly misappropriated at various MDAs, and to also have a free hand to perpetrate further misappropriation on various pretexts.    

Socio-culturally also, corruption isn’t only tacitly accepted as a norm but is actually celebrated as well. As a fact that everybody in the country knows deep down, almost everybody with access to a portion of public resources or serves in any public service delivery position shares in corruption and/or takes advantage of his position for personal gains. Many live clearly beyond their respective legitimate earnings yet they are recognized as “successful” and “role models” in the society, and are, in fact, celebrated according to their respective amounts of “success”.  

Whereas, the extremely few who resist temptations and pressure to share in corrupt activities are detested and sometimes even persecuted at their respective workplaces especially when their cooperation is necessary to facilitate misappropriation of public resources. The general public also looks down at them as “stupid” and inherently “wretched” who are referred to as “wadanda ko a garwar mai aka tsoma su haka zasu fito a bushe”, which literally means even if they were to be dipped into a barrel of oil they would still resurface dry anyway.

Now, with the foregoing in mind among other things, which highlight the underlying dynamics behind the invincibility of corruption in Nigeria, one would find the explanation behind the persistent failure of all the anti-corruption policies and measures introduced by successive governments in Nigeria over the decades. This also includes the failure of the modern technological mechanisms being increasingly adopted since a decade ago even though they work quite perfectly in other countries.   

The bottom line here is that no matter the sophistication of any technology-based anti-corruption and transparency enhancement measures, its effectiveness depends on the commitment of its handlers, which underscores the imperative of profound ethical and attitudinal reorientation in the country. 

Sub-Saharan African elites

(Link on Daily Trust site)

Following the current affairs on the global stage and happenings in countries across the world, and amidst all the distressing news of armed conflicts, natural disasters, political turmoil, social instability, economic challenges etc., there are also success stories in politics, international relations, economics, science, technology and other fields of human endeavour. 

Since the end of World War ll less than eighty years ago, there have been instances of dramatic transformations of desperate but ambitious nations into hugely successful countries. There have been remarkable instances of the renaissance of war-devastated countries in Asia, e.g. Japan, and Europe, e.g. Germany, which are today the world’s third and fourth-largest economies respectively. 

Also, over the period there have been equally instances of phenomenal transformations of some of the most desperate nations into some of the most stable and affluent countries on earth today. Perhaps, the most remarkable phenomena in this regard have been the transformations of some small-scale fishing and nomadic Arab communities in the inhospitable environment of the Arabian Peninsula into some of the richest countries in the world today, in less than fifty years. Countries like Kuwait, The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar as examples readily come to mind in this context.  

It also took China less than thirty years to become the world’s second-largest economy today, with India equally attaining its current status as an important world economic powerhouse within the same period. Other amazing instances also include the transformations of South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in Asia with other functioning and ambitious countries in wider Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa. 

Of course, along with the traditional global powers in the Euro-American axis, those are the countries that shape the global trend according to their respective influence on the global political stage, as they are also the focus of the global media accordingly. 

Now, it’s obvious from the foregoing highlights that with a passion, creativity and collective sense of responsibility, a twenty-year timeframe is enough to build a modern, functioning and ambitious country, while a thirty-year timeframe is enough to get it developed enough to compete with the traditional developed countries in many aspects of development and to, in fact, outdo them in many aspects for that matter. 

Besides, perhaps until 1990, the term “developed countries” used to refer only to a sort of an exclusive club of countries in Euro-American axis, Japan in Asia, Australia and New Zealand in Australasia. Ever since then, however, the “club” ceased to be exclusive as an increasing number of countries have been developing to that standard in terms of industrialization, economic strength, infrastructure, public services, quality of life and other standards of human development. 

In fact, some new entrants into the “club” and many other aspiring countries have actually outdone the traditional “club” members in many aspects of development. This is even though for some tactical reasons, the new entrants don’t want to be officially classified “developed” so that they could continue to enjoy the privileges given to developing countries in international trade under the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

Interestingly, China is particularly resisting moves to classify it “developed” for this reason while President Donald Trump pushes for it to be classified arguing that it's no longer a developing country and also accusing it of manipulating its “developing country” status at the expense of the United States in international trade. 

Anyway, though the conspicuous absence of a single Sub-Saharan African country even among the potential entrants into the “club” is quite disappointing, the fact that there is, in fact, no truly successful Sub-Saharan African country in the first place isn’t only particularly disappointing but shameful as well. Except for a few passionate and intellectually creative Sub-Saharan African politicians who have tried to put their respective countries on the path of sustainable development but got betrayed down the line at the hands of their respective supposed comrades, successive generations of Sub-Saharan African politico-technocratic elites should hang their heads in shame. 

Unlike their counterparts in a typical functioning country elsewhere who, in their policymaking processes, are strictly guided by the peculiar realities of their respective countries, Sub-Saharan African intellectuals and policymakers are largely literalist in their approach to leadership, managerial and development theories originally developed in and for completely different environments and cultures. 

Even after more than sixty years of independence, the average Sub-Saharan African intellectual and politician alludes to the purported persistent residue of the impacts of colonial exploitation in an attempt to deflect attention from his characteristic lack of creativity and justify his ineptitude.  

Besides, it’s by this attitude that he effectively albeit inadvertently lends some credence to the racist assumption that the Black race is inherently intellectually inferior; an assumption that a typical anti-Black racist particular holds on to. 

By the way, it's admittedly never easy to outargue a typical anti-Black racist against the backdrop of the largely miserable conditions of the Sub-Saharan African countries, and, in fact, the absence of a real commitment to changing the situations in the foreseeable future.  

After all, though I admittedly always wonder why there was never a single Black civilization anywhere in ancient times, I never see this as an excuse to justify the absence of a single truly successful country in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. For the sake of clarity, by maintaining that there was never a Black civilization in history, I am referring to the ‘real Black” to the exclusion of Ethiopians, ancient Egyptians and other relatively light-skinned Black nations, which had their respective ancient civilizations at various points of history. 

Anyway, though all is not lost, yet Sub-Saharan African elites and indeed the aspiring elites have a lot do particularly in terms of attitudinal change for them to be able to successfully present at least one model country to keep the little hope alive. 

Repercussions of toothless deterrence

(Link on Daily Trust site)

The recent outcry over the reportage of several child rape cases in northern Nigeria within unusually short intervals has highlighted the rampancy of the crime that mostly goes undetected or unreported, even when uncovered by chance, on the pretext of warding off the stigma unjustifiably attached to being a rape victim in the society. 

In addition to that, the absence of appropriate deterrence in the purported punishments handed out to the relatively very few convicted child rapists emboldens other child rapists out there to carry on their crimes. Besides, the effectively institutionalized culture of impunity in the country, which undermines the application of justice has also already bastardized punishment in the country and indeed rendered its supposed deterrence toothless. 

That, of course, explains the prevalence of capital crimes in the country, which, in turn, explains why, due to its sheer frequency, a typical incident of a capital crime in the country hardly attracts media headlines except when it’s particularly dramatic or particularly brutal. And even when it does, it only, if at all, provokes a momentary condemnation from who cares and, in some cases, the relevant authorities’ purported commitment to tracking down the perpetrators while the victim's relatives helplessly leave everything to God. 

In fact, people become curious only they notice a relative decrease in reported cases of, say, murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping, and banditry in a while. Even in the aftermath of a massacre incident that is recurrently perpetrated against communities, authorities and security agencies only respond with some measure of seriousness according to the amount of public outcry it provokes, which is often short-lived. And whatever measures the security agencies deploy ostensibly to capture or kill the perpetrators and prevent recurrence lose momentum in no time while the public outcry dissipates in the face of other equally or even more shocking incidents elsewhere, or gets overshadowed by the frustrating realities of life in the country.  

That has been the case in the unnecessarily protracted war against Boko Haram terrorists and the inexcusably lingering war against the marauding bandits in the northern part of the country. Interestingly, I, for one, no longer celebrate any purported military victory in a battle against Boko Haram terrorists or bandits having known from the past experiences that the momentum would most probably never be maintained and that the same purportedly rescued or protected communities or other vulnerable communities in the area or elsewhere remain vulnerable to more raids and massacres at the hands of bandits and/or Boko Haram terrorists; besides, that scenario has always played out in reality. I, therefore, reserve my celebration until when the bandits and the terrorists are crushed for good, or at least until when they are irreversibly contained. 

After all, there is hardly any cause for celebration in a country where more than 99% of the population is vulnerable, security-wise, in the sense that apart from those who enjoy adequate state-provided security protection among top former and incumbent political officeholders, top civil servants, other top government officials, the super-rich and other highly privileged individuals who collectively hardly constitute 1% of the population, everybody effectively counts on God-engineered coincidental circumstances to evade harm in the face of an imminent threat.  

Anyway, though perpetrators of capital crimes would continue to get away with their crimes thanks to the deep-rooted culture of impunity in the country, the culture of unjustifiable reluctance to execute the punishments duly handed out to the convicted ones on account of some flimsy technicalities would equally continue to bastardize the whole process and indeed undermine the supposed commitment to tackling capital crimes in the country. 

Therefore, and in the face of the growing audacity of the perpetrators of capital crimes in Nigeria, the authorities should get serious enough in, at least, their handling of the cases of the convicted ones by reintroducing public execution of duly condemned capital crime convicts to serve as deterrence to anyone committing or toying with the idea of committing a similar crime or any capital crime for that matter. This will go along away in reducing the rate of capital crimes in the country. 

It’s indeed ironical, after all, that capital punishment is no longer carried out in a capital crime-infested country like Nigeria. It must have been decades since capital punishment was carried out in the country. 

Even in countries where execution is carried out with a few selected relatives of the victim and the convict in attendance like the United States, the shock generated by the news suggests the effectiveness of the measure. This explains why the measure is more effective in countries where execution is carried out publicly like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where even the method per se, which is beheading with a sword, is particularly terrifying hence particularly deterrent. Interestingly, having witnessed a few occasions of public executions in the Kingdom, I gave a highlight of the protocol in “Drug trafficking and the Saudi sword” (Daily Trust, Friday, April 19, 2019).

Though capital crimes occur and would indeed continue to occur anyway, yet many individuals apparently quietly refrain from it thanks to the deterrence inherent in execution especially in public. 

While many Nigerians would certainly love to witness the public execution of convicted Boko Haram terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and armed robbers and rapists especially child rapists, the exercise will definitely deter many uncaptured and potential culprits out there.