‘The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things’
(Ronald Reagan)

It was in the light of the above powerful words of one of America’s greatest leaders, Ronald Reagan that I had joined good people three times here to encourage our outgoing leader, President Muhammadu Buhari to make history by getting good people around him to do one of the greatest things – signing the Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law to begin a clean process of leadership recruitment in our failing country. I had also then enjoined the President to embrace another critical issue that could enhance chances of making history: restructuring through return to federalism we lost since 1966. I had noted then that the lanky General from Daura could make history despite his apparently poor performance through restructuring of the electoral process and the polity.

I had then added that our leader should begin with calling the bluff of the retrogressive forces in APC, his Party and signing the Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law before the 2019 election, lest he would slip into the dark side of history. I had then written:

‘This is possible only with a sincerity of purpose as the driving force. This is what drives me to think that at the moment, the President needs encouragement more than condemnation from any quarters: He is surrounded at the State House, Abuja by only his kinsmen most of whom would not like to tell him what he could do to leave Nigeria better than he met it…’

As I was saying here too, specifically, in the beginning, the president didn’t have a great cabinet. It is beyond dispute that the presidential bureaucracy and the first cabinet in 2015 could not have helped him to make history. He failed then to realise that no leader could do well in office with a mediocre presidential bureaucracy and a cabinet of ordinary party supporters. After about six months of assuring the people that he was head hunting good and reliable thinkers, what he came up with was quite disappointing, after all. No insult is meant here, please. This is without prejudice to the few good ones in the cabinet who have been unequally yoked with mediocrities (not mediocres, please) that abound in the presidential palace. We are just discussing simple points in nation building within the context of the new world order that social and digital technologies daily disrupt.

Yes, only leaders who surround themselves with very smart managers can make history in the new world of business and politics.

What else can we deconstruct? Our president who curiously compressed his agenda to fighting corruption and insecurity in the last eight years has no remarkable baton to pass on to his successor. Can any honest observers today (apart from paid town criers) claim that our taciturn leader has really made history with fighting corruption and insecurity even in the North East Zone and North West zones where the evil ones are now permanently resident? Here is a piece of evidence: 98 out of 276 Chibok schoolgirls abducted on April 14, 2014 are still in captivity. Leah Sharibu, the only Christian schoolgirl left in Dapchi, Yobe state abduction captivity since 2018 is said to be giving birth to children by her unknown abductors in an unknown forest of the wicked. Despite all appeals she is still her captors’ den.

What is worse, the military establishment that we used to be proud of appears to have lost its mojo and myth under our out-going commander-in-chief. Even the presidency doesn’t believe in operational efficiency of the police force for internal security, anymore. We see the spirit of errors everywhere, especially in the North East and North West where the Air Force once erroneously bombed an IDP camp. We have lost so many officers of the Nigerian armed forces to insecurity in the North. That has since spread to all parts of the country. The other day, there was a supplementary budget of about one trillion naira to fight insecurity at the time university lecturers were gearing up for yet another industrial action. That is what happens when the illiterate of the 21st century are allowed to take charge as major state actors. That is the view of a writer on leadership and management, Alvin Toffler, who always muses on “rethinking the future”. According to the futurist, ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn’. This is why most modern leaders always strengthen their governments with strong men and women who can learn, relearn and unlearn even in office.

Let’s look at the machinery for fighting corruption. There are three agencies comprising the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB). The arrowhead here has always been the EFCC. But the President’s ruling party was once so disorganised that the first EFCC acting Chairman, Ibrahim Magu, nominated since November 2015, was not confirmed by the Senate dominated by the president’s party before he (Magu) was removed in 2021 over corruption allegations.
How else does one understand the politics in the presidency where the Secret Service chief executive twice wrote to the Senate that Magu should not be confirmed? Magu was somehow stranded for six years and even the influential Attorney General and Minister of Justice (who supervises EFCC) appeared to be at war with him throughout his turbulent tenure.

Curiously, Buhari’s presidency didn’t settle their rift. How can the president make history through his war on corruption when Magu too was once quoted as saying that he was losing the war? Even the ICPC chairmanship was once in a hibernation mode: a board member once acted as Chairman from July 2017 when the tenure of the Chairman expired in December 2018. Acting Chairman of EFCC since 2015. There was once an Acting SGF from May 2015; There were once so many ‘actors’ in office in Buhari’s presidency of anything is possible.

How could the president have made history with this kind of executive inertia and ad-hocism? I once noted here: ‘Can there be history making in fighting official graft without reforming the NNPC according to the new Petroleum Industry Act?Now there is a Petroleum Industry Act. But what has changed apart from the name of NNPC as a company limited by shares? Has NNPC changed its way in any fundamental sense? Again I once noted here: ‘That is why I feel we should begin to encourage the President to pay due attention to the Committee his party, the APC set up to prepare a blueprint on the hurricane called ‘restructuring’. There is some sense in that critical national assignment…’

Despite the fact that some president’s men may not like Malam Nasir el-Rufai’s face and politics, the Kaduna State Governor and chairman of the APC Panel on restructuring definitely has enough cognitive resources to handle the critical assignment. He gave the Party and the President a good document on restructuring since 2018. No deal till the present. The only trouble with the APC Committee may have been a vicious cabal around the President who might have been obsessed at that defining moment with politics of a second term without thinking about the implications of absence of major achievements in the first term..

In 2022, the President signed the Electoral Bill into law. That Electoral Act 2022 was to be a game changer in 2023 elections. But what game did it change despite the president’s repeated assurances that he would leave a legacy of free and fair elections? The 2023 elections that we should have hailed as the best in our history has turned out to be so controversial that even the winning party is still campaigning for validity and validation after elections. What is worse, even presidential mediocrity almost paralysed the country through a curious currency redesign on the eve of the elections. The scars even on our Supreme Court are sill there. What a legacy!
I also once wrote here:
‘But the president should note that if he continues to adopt I-don’t- care attitude to clamour for restructuring of the federation as most hawks around may advise, the consequences of the verdict of history may be harsh on him. He will go down in history as a military leader and politician who just wasted our time in office without any significant achievement…’

On June 7, 2020, I also wrote here about ‘Buhari’s presidency and near-success syndrome’. Then I quoted Socrates who said, ‘The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new’. I also quoted Abraham Lincoln who reveals to us that, ‘Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most’ to encourage our leader to be decisive.

It is quite important for us to understand what this enemy called ‘Near Success Syndrome’ (NSS) is all about. If several times, you have been so close to achieving a goal, dream or desire in your life but it seems like the moment you are on the verge of breakthrough, something comes and snatches it away from your grasp, you are welcome to the roots of this deadly syndrome. When this occurs, it can really hurt. That was the deadly virus that his party men were foisting on him in 2019 when they asked him to withhold assent from that significant electoral bill then. They won the 2019 election but lost the people’s organic mandate.

So, as the debate continues on all fronts about the place of the outgoing president Buhari in history, it is pertinent to remind the in-coming president that there is one fundamental objective he should adopt the morning after May 29: celebration of meritocracy! Buhari celebrated mediocrity for eight years. After 2023 elections, focus should shift to governance nurtured by nation building efforts. Doubtless, crass mediocrity nurtured by tribalism displaced Buhari from history making spots for eight years. That shouldn’t be an inheritance of a new government in Nigeria at this time.
First, the presidential bureaucracy comprising the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, (SGF), Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission, and the Chief of Staff to the President (imported into the bureaucracy) should be a solid foundation – for a ‘government of national competence’ as already desired. Then, there should be a Bill to the National Assembly on further dismantling of the behemoth called Exclusive Legislative List in the Constitution – to restructure the convoluted federation for a national culture of efficiency. President Buhari is still withholding his assent to a number of Bills on Constitution Review 2022. The alteration of the Constitution on the power sector is good but not enough for classic restructuring of the federation. Even the federal bureaucracy compounded by too many redundant agencies that carry unbearable wage bills is too burdensome for the nation. All told, there must be ‘Government of National Competence’ that has eluded us for so long. That is a part of Buhari that should not be found in Tinubu the morning after May 29, 2023.

The divorce epidemic in the world and its attendant crises in divorce property sharing assumed a different colour last week in the matter of Moroccan, Achraf Hakimi Mouh and his erstwhile wife, Spanish actress, Hiba Abouk. Hakimi is reported to be Africa’s sixth highest-paid player whose extreme popularity has stuck to him like a lapel since he led his home country, Morocco to the semi-finals of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

The French magazine, First Mag, had reported that in her claim upon the grant of the divorce by the court, Hiba had requested for half of Hakimi’s assets and fortune. However, the actress, reported the magazine, was shocked when her lawyer found out that Hakimi literally had nothing in his name as the beneficiary of his salary and wealth was his adored mother, Saida Mouh, to whom he transferred his wages for several years. The news reverberated across Spain, France and Morocco and indeed, the rest part of the world.

Hiba is of Libyan and Tunisian descent. Full name Hiba Aboukhris Benslimane, she was born in Madrid as the youngest of four siblings. Her parents, who migrated from Tunisia, had earlier settled in Spain. Hiba studied at the French Lycée, Madrid and graduated at age 18. She thereafter underwent courses in Arabic philology, graduating with a licentiate degree in drama. Renowned for her roles in television series, the most exampled being El Príncipe, in a 2012 show, she starred in comedy series for the first two seasons. She later appeared in a debut El Príncipe crime drama series which was featured on a Spanish free-to-air channel called Telecinco. Watchers of the drama series were estimated to be in the neighbouhood of five million. From 2010 when her acting career began, Hiba was on record to have featured in six movies.

Her husband is the 1998-born Moroccan professional footballer who plies his footballing trade with Ligue 1 Club of the Paris Saint-Germain. He is known to be friends with Kylian Mbappe and recently gained global attention in the reported unusualness which his divorce from Hiba took.

Indications that the marriage between the duo had hit the rock was given by the actress when on March 27 of this year, she took to her Instagram account to announce that she and Hakimi had separated and were waiting for the court to finalize their divorce proceedings. The marriage was blessed with two sons, Amín, 3, and Naim, 1 who were birthed in 2020 and 2022. There was earlier fear that Hakimi’s investigation in Paris on allegation of rape had fuelled the divorce. On March 3, 2023, Hakimi’s indictment was pronounced by a Paris investigating judge who, on the pending allegation of rape he was ensconced in, placed him under judicial supervision. Hakimi had been accused of raping a 24-year old lady right in his Boulogne home while his wife and kids had travelled on holiday. The alleged rape, which took place on the Sunday night of February 26, was broken to the world by the popular tabloid, Le Parisien. Though his lawyer, Fanny Colin, put up a spirited denial of the allegation, the proceedings went on nevertheless. Replying to Le Parisien, Colin had been quoted to have said, “The accusations are false. He is calm and is making himself available to the authorities”. Part of the legal proceedings was a ban placed on Hakimi never to contact the victim of his alleged rape binge. He was however allowed by the court to travel out of the French territory.

Details of the divorce proceedings between Hakimi and Hiba came to the full glare of the world last week, indicating that the couple had been working towards separating legally even before the alleged rape matter cropped up. Suspicions became rife when Hiba expunged her pictures and Hashimi’s from her Instagram page which took place almost immediately the Moroccan international got embroiled in the February rape case. From what was known about Hiba, she had a fortune of hers and probably made the claim to have her pound of flesh on her allegedly adulterous husband.

In comparison with her husband, Hadi is said to be worth the sum of $2million while Hakimi’s net worth is $24 million, eighty percent of which is in the possession of his mother. She is said to be responsible for all the purchases made by Hakimi which included cars, jewelry and clothes. Hakimi’s monthly earning from PSG is said to be $1million, sharing this high worth with Lionel Messi and Neymar da Silva Santos Jnr. The 20 per cent of his paycheck that he keeps is also said to be in the neighbourhood of about $215 weekly. Were the Moroccan defender’s wife to succeed with her claims in the divorce proceedings, she would have got a whopping sum of $8.5million awarded her.

While it was not an issue when they got married, the African conservative abhorrence of a wife older than the husband in matrimony was said to be one of the reasons that triggered the move towards the divorce. A sizeable age gap exists between the duo. While Hakimi is 24, Hiba is 36, a whole twelve years separating them. In an interview in March with El Cierre Digital, Hiba had said her decision to get married to Hakimi was her desire to have a home life, in concert with her husband and children but found out that Hakimi relished the life of a sybarite, partying and living the reckless life of a bachelor.

On the March 27 statement she released via her official Instagram account, Hiba defended her silence on the rape issue but doubled down on her divorce plans. The El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, had quoted her as having said, “After having taken the decision to legally separate and to stop living together whilst awaiting the divorce procedure, which you can imagine, on top of the pain brought about by the separation, as well as having to accept the sadness that a failed project, which I gave my body and soul, brings, I was supposed to face up to this disgraceful act? I needed time to come to terms with this shock. One must trust the legal process, especially considering the gravity of the accusation. Nonetheless, in my life, I always have been, and always will be, on the side of victims.”

Since the details of the divorce property sharing in the proceedings were made known to the world, stands have been taken by people from all walks of life for and against both Hadi and Hakimi. When a legal action is instituted to terminate a marriage, one of the issues that come out of it is how the property which was accumulated during the pendency of the marriage must be shared between the two parties. While this is alien to most of Africa where patriarchy is the order of the day, which is a major bequeathal from traditional African practices of centuries ago, in many other civilized countries, the sharing is pegged on a matrimonial property system. This depends on the particular type of system the parties chose when they were embarking on the marriage.

The African traditional system is in support of divorcing women, for various reasons. Ezinna E Enwereji of the Abia State University’s College of Medicine, Uturu, in her paper entitled Indigenous Marriage institutions and divorce in Nigeria: The case of Abia State of Nigeria, named these reasons as “infidelity, infertility/barrenness impotence, probing a husband’s sexual life inability to reproduce male children and/or large number of children, laziness in taking on assigned gender roles, including farming, cooking late and/or inability to cook delicious food, disrespect to husband and his kinsmen, deviant actions like stealing, prostitution, witchcraft, fighting, especially in public, cases of leprosy, tuberculosis, epilepsy and sexually transmitted infections.”

Though divorces were frowned at in Africa, whenever they occurred in the pre-colonial era, the wives lost totally, even losing the right to custody of the children of the marriage. In some societies of Africa, it was even a taboo for a wife to demand from her spouse whether he had extramarital sexual relationships, catching him red-handed notwithstanding. If she does, she might get divorced for this audacity. When such husband divorces the wife, he will return her to her parents and defrost her of all the resources she might have acquired during the marriage or even which they both labored for. He will then demand the repayment of the bride price he paid on her. It does not matter who initiated the divorce. When the bride price is returned, it is a signification that the marriage had come to an end. Even in the case where a marriage is dissolved by the order of the customary court, the court will still hold that “it is the refund of the bride price or dowry that puts to an end all incidents of customary law marriage and not an order of any court dissolving such marriage. Any order dissolving any customary law marriage without a consequent order for the refund or acceptance of the bride price or dowry is meaningless”. The woman thus divorced is visited financial hardship and most of them never recover from it.

While the customary law marriage pretends that there is Settlement of property in it, it is applicable in theory only as an available relief while, in practice, it is non-existent. Among the Igbo, for instance, wives are still viewed traditionally as one of the chattels and property or possession of the husband and thus, whatever she must have acquired while under the roof of the man, stricto sensu, is the man’s. In such a case, it is always very difficult to ascertain what property belongs to the woman upon divorce. Even when assets are singly or jointly acquired, they can only be ceded or parts given to the woman upon the “magnanimity” of the man. Thus, in settlement of property under customary law, it becomes a discretionary relief for the man to grant his exiting spouse settlement of property.

The above must be the reason many men, including Hakimi’s countrymen and women, were fuming at what they considered Hadi’s “legal ploy” to take a half of her husband’s wealth upon the dissolution of the marriage and their excitedness that Hakimi “outsmarted” the actress.

However, many jurisdictions are conforming to the advocacies of feminist activists who have argued that such system was too punitive against the woman and should be reversed. One of the countries that has tinkered with its own divorce property system is South Africa. There, the legal system is based on the inherited colonialists’ model and codified in the Matrimonial Property Act 88 of 1984. It controls the property sharing model. This Act spells out the different matrimonial property systems which are available to couples in the country, depending on the type of marriages or unions that they choose to bind them legally, from civil, customary marriages and civil unions.

In the civil matrimonial property system of South Africa, there exist three main matrimonial property sub-systems. They are, out of community of property and in community of property. The last is what is called the accrual system. In the out of community property system, if a divorce proceedings is instituted, the property in the marriage is very easy to share and the marriage easier to dissolve because each of the party owns its own estate and their individual assets and liabilities, from the beginning of the marriage, have been known and delineated by the two of them as held separately.

In the in community property system, the estates of the spouses are merged to become a single joint estate during the pendency of the marriage and thus, the husband and wife, during divorce proceedings, are forced by law to share all their assets and liabilities. In this system, when dissolution of the marriage is effected, the court will pay all their liabilities and the balance of this joint estate will be divided in equal measure between the spouses.

If the spouses got married through the accrual system, as their estates multiply during the marriage, they will equally share them but retain their individual estate. Whatever is the accrual from these estates will go into their individual separate estate. Another feature of this system is that spouses cannot be held liable for debts incurred and during divorce proceedings, this sharing method automatically governs the dissolution of the marriage and the asset-sharing system.

The Nigerian matrimonial divorce systems under the Act and Customary Law are both clones of the old traditional practice that sees women as chattels and undeserving of partaking in the property of their spouses, upon dissolution of marriage. It is why Nigerian men have been most vociferous in the celebration of the “feat” of Hakimi. There is no doubting the fact that the ordinary rules of property law which are applied in the determination of the property rights of spouses in Nigeria have wrought financial hardship on women who are seen as weaker vessels. It should be known however that, while men are perceived as ones who go out to provide for the home, no financial or material wealth can surpass the glue and hold that women provide for the family.

While the Hakimi case will look as if he was a Smart Alec, there are some pivotal issues that favour him against Haidi. One is that, the marriage was only three years old. Thus, if the request of the Libyan-born actress had been granted, she would have reaped from where she didn’t sow because the footballer must have been amassing his wealth before their marriage. The second issue, which would have availed that marriage, is the benefit of conciliation which Africa usually witnesses in matrimonial disputes but which, I guess, was not available to the ex-spouses due to the nature of the individuality of the west. Now that potential wives have seen the Hakimi case, subsequent men who try to be smart like Hakimi may not be lucky as potential wives will most certainly begin to poke their noses, with audacious scrutiny, into the process and procedure of the wealth of their future husbands.

All said, the Nigerian property sharing model during dissolution of marriage is repugnant to natural justice as it affects women. There should, as a matter of urgency, be a reconsideration of the matrimonial property rights arrangement among spouses that is operational in Nigeria today. This piece calls for a review of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1970, the main law that governs matrimonial relations in Nigeria. This should be done with the view that the concept of due and equitable sharing of “matrimonial property” can be made applicable and operational during the pendency of marriages, as well as the critical stage of divorce in Nigeria.

Mbabai, the village where Tarnongo Mike Utsaha was buried on April 1, 2023, used to be part of the municipality of Makurdi, the capital of Benue state. It only became part of the Guma local government area in Benue north-west in 1987. The current governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, also comes from Guma.

The LGA derives its name from River Guma, which empties into the River Benue, part of a network of freshwater sources that have historically defined that part of Nigeria as the nation’s food basket. With arable land drained by an abundance of freshwater sources on the foothills of the rainy season, this is a neighbourhood that should ordinarily bustle at this time of year.

The journey into Guma with Mike’s remains revealed the opposite. Mbabai and its neighbouring villages had long been drained of life by mass atrocity. Mourners to the funeral needed the forceful presence of a massive deployment of hundreds of well-armed soldiers along the route and in surrounding bushes to reassure them about their safety. The compound in which the burial itself took place was nearly desolate. A capacious country home belonging to Mike’s dad, a retired judge, had been burnt twice over in attacks reportedly perpetrated, the villagers said, by armed herders. All the mourners could do was linger in the village long enough for the body to be laid into the ground before everyone scampered, grateful that there were no atrocity incidents.

As the mourners left, it was impossible not to ask how the people of Guma, nearly all of whom cannot afford what it takes to secure the kind of martial deployment that accompanied Mike’s cortege, bury their dead. It did not take long to find out.

Mgban is a village also in Guma, not too far from Mbabai. Like Mbabai, Mgban has also been decimated by regular attacks from armed herders. Most of the village lives in internal displacement. By an arrangement involving the state government and the Benue State Emergency Management Authority, the Benue State Police Command deployed several police officers every evening to guard the Local Government Education Authority (LGEA) primary school in Mgban, so that those left in the community can go there to sleep at night.

That was until one week after the burial of Mike Utsaha. Shortly before midnight around Good Friday, according to survivors, the police officers deployed around the LGEA Primary School in Mgban all entered their vehicles and left the premises without warning. The villagers already at the school to pass the night had no place else to hide. Moments after the police retreated, armed attackers arrived, making game of every person in sight, mostly the aged, women, and children. The initial casualty count was over 43 killed by sunrise. By the end of the morning after the massacre, another 45 had also been evacuated to nearby hospitals in critical conditions. The dead got a quick and perfunctory mass burial.

Less than 36 hours before the Mgban Massacre, on Wednesday, also in the Christian Holy Week, another attack on mourners in Umogidi in Entekpa-Adoka District of Otukpo LGA reportedly killed at least 52 persons. Another mass burial was all that they could get. 48 hours before the massacre in Umogidi, a similar attack liquidated at least 47 unarmed persons in Ikobi village in Apa LGA, including the local chief.

Amidst this orgy of massacres, Benue state governor, Samuel Ortom, who has since lost the ability to safely visit his village in Guma, travelled to Port Harcourt, Rivers State, around April 6, reportedly to attend the commissioning of projects by his counterpart in Kaduna state, Nasir El-Rufai, both of them as guests of Rivers state governor, Nyesom Wike. It was a characteristically thoughtless journey by a man who had long ago lost any sense of what a governor exists to do.

The symbolism of the encounter in Rivers state between the governors of Benue and Kaduna states, once implacable political foes, was not lost on many. In Port Harcourt, they could have been mistaken for a compatibly contented political pairing. Less than two years ago, in May 2021, they were at each other’s throats exchanging choice epithets with the abandon of drunken sailors in a bar-room brawl.

Between them, these two men have presided over arguably two of the worst records of mass atrocity in Nigeria in the past eight years. In 80 days in the first quarter of 2023, Kaduna state reported at least 125 killed and 60 abducted. Those who specialise in tracking these incidents would swear that these numbers massage the reality. Over five days in the first week of April 2023, Benue state lost at least 134 persons in a killing spree. In the period since the end of the presidential election in February, over 400 have reportedly been massacred in Benue state alone.

The timing of these massacres is significant. On April 8, 2023, Daily Times reported that “[p]alpable fear pervades the entire horizon as renewed incidents of banditry, kidnappings, killings take centre-stage after a ‘cease-fire’ noticed in Nigeria ahead of the general elections in February and March”.

The previous day had witnessed the high-profile abduction of a law professor and former deputy governor of Nasarawa state near the Federal Capital Territory, Onje Gye-Wado. The newspaper also recounted a staggering rise after the election of mass abductions of children as well as massacres in many states around the country including Benue, Edo, Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Nasarawa, Lagos, Zamfara, among others.

Confronted with this trend, President Muhammadu Buhari, whose primary job is to guarantee the safety and security of all these people, had a statement issued in his name calling for “an end to extreme violence”. It was disconcerting to see the president mistake himself for a non-governmental organisation and be reduced to condemning violence and calling for something to be done about it as if he had forgotten that it was his place surely to do that something. The statement also seemed to imply that violence was alright if it was not considered “extreme”, but provided no criteria with reference to which to determine what extreme violence means. It was a very odd kind of thing for a president to say. But this Nigerian president has built his brand around toxic awkwardness.
Then, three days after issuing this statement, entirely in keeping with his habit of disregard for Nigerians over the past eight years, the president sauntered off to Saudi Arabia on April 11 for a nine-day long jaunt. What he went there to do was unclear, a fact not much helped by the desperate effort by his team of media handlers who were busy spreading false information about the trip.

While Buhari remained in Saudi Arabia, Samuel Ortom quickly announced the demobilization of the Benue State Livestock Guards, the militia group established to enforce the state’s anti-open grazing law. Many people read this to mean a suspension of the law itself. The governor begged to differ, claiming that the law still remained very much in force without explaining who will now help him to enforce it.

Those who wonder how these killings have lasted and deepened in intensity for as long as they have need not worry anymore. With a law without enforcers and a state rapidly turning into a cemetery, Benue state’s Governor Ortom probably knows one or two things most others may be unable to voice. First, the owners of the atrocity killings in Nigeria are back after the business of election rigging. Second, it is not difficult to know who they are.

When the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah, spoke in his Easter message about the urgent mission of helping Nigeria “recover from the feeling of collective rape by those who imported the men of darkness that destroyed our country”, he knew what he was talking about.