This lovely country of ours almost went to ruins last week just because of something that we did not create – mobile phones and social media. For a moment, anyone that has seen the scenes from the 2011 Somali famine would have concluded that the video clip of the 32 rebellious children paraded in court were victims of that disaster. They looked abhorrent, disheveled, discombobulated and totally disoriented.
The ones that were still standing looked like scarecrows in an anatomy lab while those without the strength sprawled on the court floor gasping for breath in the arms of their co-conspirators. All these in a country whose government has reduced poverty, tackled unemployment, increased power supply and grown an industrial farm for quitting multinationals.
Not many people knew that these nearly three months, these militant children were on their way to Aso Rock heavily armed with sticks, stones and dangerous verses of scriptures to overthrow our duly elected president, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
But for the proactive diligence of our very able security forces, especially men and women of the Nigeria Police, we would have gone down in history as the first nation to be overthrown by street urchins. The people that filmed the situation could not be patriots. I mean, at a time when the president has been junketing the entire globe, risking his life and the lives of his loyalists marketing Nigeria as a haven for investment and progress, these people broke NTA reporting protocol and sent the clips across the world.
- Stop castigating leaders, allow God deal with them – Sultan
- Group donates N13m Anti-Snake Venom to hospital in Gombe
Apparently, they were trying to embarrass the president just weeks after he went to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to favourably argue for Nigeria to get a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.
If these people are caught, I would personally suggest that they be banned from all the mobile networks in the country and blocked from using virtual private networks, VPN. Anybody sharing a clip that is not fit to be aired on NTA is an enemy of the state even if the law does not say so. It is very shameful that at this moment in our national history when the president is the chief marketer of Nigeria’s fertility as an investment hub should not be allowed to move freely.
The insolence by which everybody with an ugly phone chooses to broadcast video and take pictures without paying the mandatory NBC broadcast license fee. In fact, it is time that our legislature classifies any mobile phone with a camera as an assassination weapon.
These gadgets have the capacity to unravel the secret things that the people we have selected to ruin our lives want kept secret. Everywhere you go these days, people cannot even commit simple adultery without someone exposing their crimes on social media. People can’t make a threatening phone call to a quondam friend refusing to pay their debts without thinking that they are being recorded.
In the days when journalism dictated all the news that’s fit to print, pen pushers were warned that it is unprofessional to record a person without their consent. Not in the era in which our chinco phones are linked to search engines that constantly record our movements and our secret conversations. We cannot even take them to court to reclaim our rights because these phone companies and their manufacturers have mandated every subscriber to sign fine print contracts relinquishing the rights and privileges that legal experts spent so many man hours instituting into global human rights charters.
With a stroke of the pen, Olusegun Obasanjo signed a global protocol that introduced GSM thereby making the nought-nine-nought that distinguished the privileged from those that queue up at call centres a common right. Since that single act, neither Obasanjo nor people of his ilk have rested.
Just last week, Stephen Abuwatseya, a common e-hailing Bolt driver threw respect, honour and decorum to his phone camera while stripping a rookie mascot, Alex Ikwechegh of all the privileges that ranks him next to the gods.
Mr. Abuwatseya was privileged to go and deliver exotic snails from an exotic kitchen to the hallowed grounds of the House of Representatives’ member when the assault occurred. A normal common driver upon approaching the lawmaker’s house would have stopped his car, gotten out and crouch with the snails on all fours as he shouts – exotic snails for a distinguished lawmaker and wait until he is told to stand up, but what did he do?
He messed up the paved road with his unwashed and unsanctified vehicle until he was face-to-face with the demigod and instead of falling prostate in respect, had the temerity to ask the bearded sloth to come and take his meal. Not even after he heard the man make a call to the exotic cook about the disrespect, he called his entire family elders to come and apologise for his mistake, he kept recording. Two slaps and a threat to make him disappear later, he was still talking about some fundamental rights.
Thanks to the police who know that lawmakers are next to the gods. They showed up faster than they usually do when being requested to stop a robbery and whisked the errant driver into detention. Imagine the damage that the driver could have done to the over bloated ego of the privileged rep, his manicured moustache and the image of the House and the state he represents.
The insolence did not end there, this common driver who made a whole lawmaker forget his identity managed to rally the entire social media and human rights police until they reduced a demigod to a common lawbreaker. I mean, the man had to drop the toga of importance in the House, accept that he had just discovered that a common blood runs through his own veins and asked Nigerians to forgive him. He also announced that he was making a private settlement with Mr Abuwatseya instead of making him disappear as he was wont to do.
These things make anyone with a sense of loyalty to the shitstem wonder where we are going in our lovely country. It makes us wonder if these people read all of George Orwell’s Animal Farm to realise that the rule changed at the end of the novel – all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
How will our country progress if armed young adolescents would dare say that they are protesting bad governance in a country that even Donald Trump is jealous of the rights and privileges of its president?
Now human rights campaigners have woken up the Attorney General and Minister of Justice to ask for the file of the juvenile detainees. There are fears he might be arm-twisted into entering a nolle prosequi for the juvenile seditionists when even a notorious Bobrisky did not get state pardon for stomping on our currency, forcing it to lose value and exposing the dichotomy in the prison system. At this rate civil rights advocates might just make the exalted office election thieves look so valueless that none of them would agree to queue up to steal authority and what is left of the national cake.
Join Daily Trust WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You.
