By Abdu Rafiu
What a relief! I was alarmed following a video making the rounds that another incursion into the Ogbomoso-Oriire axis by bandits was only minutes away and students began to flee their school. Women in panic headed frantically for the school, Are-Ago High School, Ogbomoso, to fetch their children. It turned out to be a false alarm as was discovered by the police who rose promptly to the occasion. The alarm was, however, not totally without basis. Some students sighted unfamiliar faces behind their school fence. This aroused suspicion and triggered fears in teachers and the larger body of the students. The suspicion spread like wild fire during harmattan within and without the school premises, predictably against the background of the horrifying kidnapping experiences in two schools simultaneously and the resultant deaths, at Oriire local government area only the preceding Friday. No fewer than 40 school children were abducted. My sigh of relief arose from the commendable instant response of the police to the development. The police said following their visit to the high school that there was no abduction threat to the school nor to the community at large.
Their conclusion, that is the Oyo State Command was that stories of an invasion by bandits in Ogbomoso and adjoining communities were not only a false alarm, but indeed misleading. The Command said panic erupted on Monday across parts of Ogbomoso and Ajaawa Town following rumours that suspected bandits had attacked the area around Are-Ago High School. An online publication, Impart News Network, at Ogbomoso reports the police as saying that upon receiving information on the incident, surveillance and patrol teams were immediately deployed to the affected locations. Preliminary findings, however, showed that the incident arose from suspicion raised after some students sighted unfamiliar persons behind their school fence. This triggered fear among teachers as well as the students. The school principal, Mrs. Ruth Akanbi, corroborated the report, saying the alarm spread after students circulated claims that strange individuals had been seen near the school premises.
The police were to identify the unfamiliar faces as an officer of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) from the Kwara State Command in Ilorin, and two civilians, travelling in a Toyota Venza SUV. They explained their presence in the area as a birthday celebration of a lady among them. The Ilorin office confirmed their identity to the police. But the teachers, not wanting to take anything for granted in these times, had challenged them, after all, Nigerians are constantly admonished to report suspicious movements around them. The challenge led to a misunderstanding and this further fuelled suspicion among students who took the story to town, to neighbouring schools and communities. The encounter, according to the police, provoked tension across Ogbomoso and Ajaawa before the facts were established. Now, armed with the facts, the police then went confidently to give the assurance that there was no cause for alarm as there was no security breach in any part of the communities. Indeed, as a mark of their assurance, the police have increased their visibility with patrols as a major display of their presence; stakeholders were engaged as well to reassure the communities and restore their confidence. The police statement reads: “The area remains peaceful while normal academic, commercial and social activities have fully resumed.” Police Commissioner Abimbola Ayodeji Olugbemiga urged residents in Oyo State to remain calm, law-abiding and vigilant; they should continue to support the police with credible and timely information
As the scale of insecurity is assuming a truly alarming proportion, ordinary citizens are asking where lies their salvation more so as the politicians and their allies and handlers do not seem to have that much time for now to face this most pressing problem in the land which, indeed, is the primary purpose of government: Security of life and property. For now, how to fetch tickets to return them to political offices at different levels and of different hues, is the uppermost preoccupation everywhere. Meetings and congresses are ongoing everywhere. Until the elections are over in 2027, not much can be done to wean politicians off the power permutations and power-struggle disease.
Those who remember the prowess and feats of traditionalists in the time of old are asking: Should there be recourse to traditionalists in the meantime to beam light on the encircling gloom in the horizon? There has been recognition and consensus that creation of state police is a clear and quickest way of resolving our security challenges because policing is local. The politicians fighting for their political lives have dimmed hope of state police coming into being until after the elections.
The traditionalists say they can rescue the kidnapped victims, but and but! Their spokesmen told an online publication in Ogbomoso that the emergency at the Old Oyo National Park arising from the abduction of school children and their teachers is within their capability to resolve but that they were never consulted nor officially brought into the picture. So that it would not be said of them that they are not state actors, and charges are not woven around their necks, they have advised themselves to stay away. OPC president Afolabi and Sunday Igboho spoke in the same vein.
The Oluode of Ibadan and Ajagunna of Yorubaland, Chief Moshood Kehinde Ege, and the Oluode of Onpetu in Ogbomoso South Local Government, Chief Adebayo Amos Abiade issued a joint statement in which they said: “It is unfortunate our children and teachers who shape our lives are being held captive. Traditionalists, particularly hunters, real hunters, are capable of dislodging the bandits and bringing the captives unharmed or with minimal harm but the government did not invite us and if we venture out when you are not asked to assist, you could end up in trouble. Though we allowed our (junior) members to join the rescue team, it is out of duty, we just allowed that for humanity’s sake. And let it be known that it was our members, because they are conversant with the forest paths, that led the soldiers and other security agents to uncover the base of the criminals, where the abductees are kept and not any conventional security operative. Our boys showed them the way.
“If we are consulted, we know how to dislodge the bandits, it is our speciality but no one has reached out to us and if we venture out just like that, we would become fugitives of the law. We all know what happened to Chief Sunday Adeyemo a.k.a. Igboho.”
When I read about the complaints of our herbal remedy practitioners as well as traditionalists, among them hunters, it occurs to me that we human beings will need to dig more into the knowledge of evolution and the development of man. Today, the modern man will have nothing to do with what lies behind this and what lies behind that, knowledge of the invisible world nor with the concept of infinity. Yet, when told, he readily accepts that plants convert carbon into oxygen through the process we know as photosynthesis. He does not know the entirety of the revealed knowledge which is that: The Elemental Beings also called Nature Beings see to it that they provide the oxygen we need every day, every hour, every split second. They convert the radiant energy of carbon-hydrates in plants. And in the process we know as photosynthesis, the energy of sunlight drives the reaction between carbon dioxide of the air around us and water to form carbohydrates. The complex chemical substances called carbohydrates are put in plant storage organs as in yam, cassava, potatoes — all roots and grains as in rice, maize and wheat. When we eat them the chemical energy in them is turned into a form we need for breathing, motion, thinking, speaking and writing. What all this means is that without the activities of the elemental beings, life on earth for any living being, man and animal, would have been impossible.
The knowledge of Nature Beings is ancient which in the words of Cicero: “For the belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom, or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them; but a belief which all men by nature share must necessarily be true; therefore it must be admitted that the gods exist.”
Since the Nature Beings tend plants; they taught our forebears what to plant, when the planting is to take place; then plants to eat and what plants with certain herbal properties with peculiar radiations to heal our ailing bodies, how can it then be outlandish to think that there would be no other set of helpers to guide those who are open to receive revelations on how we can protect ourselves outside the deployment of drones and Mr. Donald Trump’s arsenals? Hardly does the modern man want to believe anything that is not scientifically proven. Scoffers throw out of the window the guidance or warning of the inner voice. The modern man does not believe in things beyond earthly constraints, what are above the perceptive capacity of the brain, yet the brain is firmly bound to space and time. Those who run governments everywhere belong to the class of the modern man.
It is technological wonders that excite us. You punch some numbers on your phone in Lagos, and within seconds of its travelling at the speed of light, a voice responds at the other end in Tokyo! What may take an aircraft travelling in the direction no less than 23 hours to achieve, with turbulence and all that to the bargain. Yet, let us think of just a drop of water which contains millions of living organisms mercilessly fighting and destroying themselves which can only be seen with microscopes, and not with our naked eyes. Can we say they do not exist simply because we do not see them? There are those who also bear talents within them and who know what to do to help their people in travail like the school children and their teachers. The ability may have been cultivated; it may have come from what is handed down by forebears in family tradition. It may have been borne out of the unfolded ability to receive.
The technology is not invented by man, it is discovered, delivered to the blessed ones who are open. Is it not said that God reveals to His Own in their sleep? It was brought from a workshop from what is called the Plane of Medium Gross Matter. And even with the coming of electronics and the arrival of Mr. AI in our lives, we are told our master pieces are yet to come! Of course, there are false helpers in the Beyond as well, those that intercept genuine guidance and spiritual messages. So that the genuine medium is not contaminated, it stays clear of the approaching impure one. Nevertheless, we are never left alone helpless in the Love and Mercy of the Lord; we have our intuitive faculty to weigh and determine and separate right from wrong and vice versa. It is not everything that is in the invisible Realm that is valueless.
What the Oyo State Government may wish to do is to organize our traditionalists and hunters and register them so that they can be known under the law. By doing so, quacks can be quickly exposed. Lateef Jakande, the legendary action Governor of Lagos State, did something similar for the herbal medicine practitioners of his era, and Pa Lambo became the head of the formal organization.
It is unfortunate that the plea by the traditional group and hunters to be part of the rescue operation at the National Park was turned down. Their leaders, Chief Kehinde Ege and Chief Amos Ajibade alleged that they had been crying over what they described as “the looming danger for some time now…” According to an online newspaper, Ogbomoso Insight, they recruited some people recently to serve in a government local security to serve in a government squad “but our members were denied the opportunity, rather they recruited politicians, and our members were ignored. Politicians gave out motorcycles, vehicles in the name of empowerment but no one remembered us. Even in the ongoing rescue operation, when our members want to join the security patrol team headed for the National Park, most times they would say the vehicle is full, we are often treated with disdain.”
The state actors, police in which the modern man has confidence and over which there has been national consensus, there is foot dragging. I wrote in 2019 as follows: “The joy of the possibility of the establishment of state police being in the offing reverberated through the land. This is not surprising given the grave and yet worsening wave of insecurity sweeping across the land… Not a few threw up their hands in resignation that we have never had the security situation this bad. The most incurable optimists are confused. The security services have thrown themselves into the battle, stretching themselves thin. It is against this backdrop of this troubling milieu that the news broke that a Presidential Panel set up by President Buhari had come up with a report recommending among other issues, the establishment of the state police. Predictably, there is a sense of relief that, at last, there appears to be light at the end of the long dark tunnel. There is a rekindling of hope.
“House of Representatives Speaker Tajudeen Abbas came back from End of Year/ New Year Recess in January 2024 seething with rage, determined to give the setting up of state police unhindered and priority legislative attention. That was 2024, more than two years ago! President Bola Tinubu had made an enheartening policy statement in June last year, what in this column I described as commendably action packed. In his words, “State police is no longer an option but an imperative.” In November, he called on the National Assembly to begin reviewing the laws to allow states that require state police to establish same, what I described as Bola Tinubu walking his talk and that “That is how it should be.” June is only a few days away to make one year when he pumped the oxygen rays into the efforts to dismantle the debacle. There has long been a consensus in the land on this troubling issue to trigger an urgent action to kick start rescuing the hapless citizens! The Speakers of all our Houses of Assembly have spoken with one voice on the urgent necessity of state police. I hope all that has sounded we have realised the urgent imperativeness of this panacea to the devastating insecurity in Nigeria’s epic journey will not just be what William Shakespare’s Macbeth described in his enrapturing poem as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty face from day to day;
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!…”
The Guardian
