Nuhu Ribadu’s Hell And Other Hellish Stories

By Festus Adedayo

Nigeria has just had one hell of a week. Like an evil spirit, hell hovered over Nigeria with fraught silence. To stave it off, Muslims will seem to have recited the Quranic verse of the Yaseen to keep the evil away. Christians banned and banished. Hell held on regardless. Hell was first let loose when a hellish temperament of the country’s National Security Adviser, (NSA) Nuhu Ribadu, escaped from its scabbard. Ribadu is ostensibly managing a loose, hellish temperament. In a moment of unguarded, loose hold on his temper, Nuhu declared that Canada could go to hell. Ribadu’s temper escaped while he was reacting to Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa’s open revelation that Canada refused him and some military officers visa. They were billed to attend a remembrance in honour of fallen soldiers. Ribadu was openly miffed by what he termed a “painful, disrespectful” visa denial.

Now, there is hell everywhere. As I said earlier, last week was indeed very hellish for Nigeria. In William Congreve’s 1697 play with the title, The Mourning Bride, one of Congreve’s female characters, Zara, a captive queen, had raised some hell. She told a prison guard, “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” Ondo State got caught in the hell narrative when the counsel of her ex-First Lady got scorned. Betty, wife of late governor Rotimi Akeredolu then stepped out to reify the hell discourse, lest Ondo State be let out of the hell loop. In an interview with a Star News, Betty would seem to have let all hell loose. Like Zara in Congreve’s. This time, however, her hell was reserved for spiritualists who wittingly or unwittingly kill their victims in the name of spirituality. Also, like Ribadu, she reserve a hellish space for those who made the cost of living this unbearable for the common man. A breast cancer survivor, Betty was against-method. She abandoned the African orthodoxy of not speaking uncomplimentary words about the dead. In doing this, Betty burst a closely guarded bubble of her home and in the process, perforating an over-a-century-old fake veneration of religion. Though not overt, orthodox religious belief, especially in Africa, is that diseases like cancer are caused by spiritual attacks.

“What came out of their mountain climbing, ‘blessed handkerchiefs, water, olive oil’, etc., from the G.Os and all the noisy prayers like people possessed by demons? If Aketi had listened to me, I wouldn’t be a widow.” She was obviously mocking the Prophet Jeros who, like a pestilence, suck the nectar of the vulnerable in Nigeria.

Hell was not done with Nigeria. In fact, you would imagine that Nigeria was Hell’s temporary habitation. That same week, one hell of a news crept into the information highway. It was the story of how Starboy Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Olayemi Cardoso, got his ladies-centric consultancy bubble burst in the CBN. Said the report, unsettling grunts had recently been reverberating round the apex bank’s 29 departments. Apparently, Starboy took the Yoruba aphorism of ‘the persistent grunts of a pig will inhabit its innards forever’ (hùn-hùn-hùn inú elédè l’ó ńgbé) extra-literally. So, he could not be bothered by CBN pigs’ grunts. He kept on with his Pín-yà job. Apologies to those who do not know the geneology of Pín-yà. Between January 1984 and August 1985 when he administered Ogun State as governor, all hell was let loose as Oladipo Diya reportedly inflicted so much pain on the citizens. It was such that, rather than call him by his ‘Diya’ surname, Ogun people (secretly, of course!) inflected it to an alliterative Pín-yà which literally meant ‘distributor of pain’. Like the biblical Rehoboam, Cardoso had recently doubled down on his peremptory chastising of Nigerians with scorpions. He did this through his new policy of having hapless Nigerians suffer deductions during cash withdrawals with their ATM card.

The hùn-hùn-hùn fuming and grumbling of the Senior staff members of the CBN however refused to reside inside of them. So they raised hell that the CBN was being bankrupted by an over-expenditure of beneficence they suspected was sexual. Hell! In his moment of impudence and audacity, Starboy had reportedly arbitrarily hired three female consultants mockingly christened “the Cardoso Women”. It was to these daughters of discord, apologies to Wole Soyinka, that Cardoso allegedly magisterially allocated “unbelievably high and obscene” salaries and allowances, massive enough to construct another Ibadan’s Cocoa House. The obscene salaries paid the three mystery women range from N50 million and N35 million monthly. The amounts are said to be higher than combined salaries of 10 directors.

The qestion now is, what gave rise to this apex bank’s strange contraption? Was it phallus-driven or taken from the playbook of nepotism, the bug that has bitten Nigeria’s current government? Whenever such unconscionable favouritism occurs, reference is always made to Middle Ages, up to the 17th century, where Catholic Popes and Bishops, because of their vow of celibacy, enthroned their nephews in positions that are usually accorded from fathers to sons. Many Popes of this period, like the Cardoso Women’s unbridled uplift, elevated their nephews and relatives into the Cardinalate, thereby instituting a Papal dynasty. A forerunner of Cardoso in this favouritism regard was Pope Callixtus 111. The Pope made his nephews cardinals, one of whom was Rodrigo who later became Pope Alexander V1. In Britain, nepotism is usually symbolized by the phrase, “Bob’s your uncle”. It became fashionable when the Third Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, promoted Arthur Balfour, his nephew, to the position of Chief Secretary for Ireland. But, we need more information on what drove this variant of nepotism of the Cardoso Women hue. Do we call it phallus-nepotism? It reminds me of a verse in an Ifa poetry chant which begins thus, “When they are favoured by the world, they act unconscionably…” (B’áyé bá ye wón tán, ìwà ìbàjé ni wón ńhù…).

We had hardly dispensed with the phallus-fear hell raised by the “Cardoso Women” when Tigran Gambaryan of the crypto finance firm, Binance raised a huge fireball of the size of the hell anticipated in Armageddon. You recollect that Gambaryan and his colleague were arrested for money laundering by the Nigerian state. Remember also that Gambaryan’s colleague’s escape raised some hell in the polity. A diplomatic compromise eventually got Gambaryan off the hook. Now, the most recent hell is that the American has started singing like the finch canary bird. In an X post last week, Gambaryan alleged that three Nigerian lawmakers demanded a whooping $150 million bribe from him to facilitate his escape, arrest and prosecution. In the X post, Gambaryan also set Ribadu’s feet on the road to hell. So, rather than Canada going to hell, our NSA is in one hell of a trouble. According to the latest canary, Ribadu and some other government officials were part of this well-orchestrated bribery roulette.

Now, let me embark on short responses to the multiple hell I mentioned overleaf. Yoruba Apala music legend, Ayinla Omowura, raising hell about misplacement of temper, had wondered why someone who cooks a soup that loses its savour would blame the plate on which it was served for their culinary misadventure (Bí’yò ò dun’bè, e ó se fì’kanra m’éwé?). Why do we blame those well-organized countries for refusing us visas? Rather than raising hell, the key lies in fixing our own country. Gen. Musa himself hit the nail on its head when he said the Canada visa denial was a clear prompting to Nigeria to “stand on its own, stand strong as a nation.” Many people have posited that unless western countries deny our peripatetic leaders visa to their countries, we would never fix Nigeria. Take for instance the bad example of our president who literally takes his breakfast in Abuja, lunch in Paris and dinner in any part of the world, many of the trips ostensibly to take care of his health. Why doesn’t he clone his Paris or UK hospice here in Nigeria?

And again, why would Ribadu and Musa blame Canada for denying Nigerian military officers visa to observe a social event as mundane as honouring fallen soldiers? Were those fallen soldiers Nigerians? If not, of what importance is the COAS’ attendance of such an event which on the surface looks like a jamboree? Methinks no greater honour could be given to gallant soldier fighters than upholding the cause they died for and keeping the family they left behind. Almost on a yearly basis, retired servicemen cry out due to their neglect by the military high command. How would Musa and his fat-epaulettes, fat-tummied officers’ travelling to Canada on a social junket memorialize these soldiers? I think, rather than ask her to go to hell, we should thank Canada for preserving Nigeria’s scarce forex that would have been immolated on this fanfare. I also think Alozie Ogugbuaja (police PRO during the IBB era’s) pepper soup theory is being inverted here. Ribadu is apparently taking too much pepper soup and its ancillary companion from the Police Officers’ Mess. They are likely responsible for this uncouth hell gaffe.

Now, to Betty Akeredolu’s hell. For once, let’s thank this Imo State-born woman for her against-method view. He who feels it knows it. For fear of raising hell and being accused of going to hell, Nigerians who suffer in the hands of christian and Islamic spiritualists have kept sealed lips on the havoc done them by the charlatans. Many had their loved ones dragged to death. It took Dora Akunyili’s son’s revelation in a viral video a couple of years ago for us to discover how G.Os lured the NAFDAC amazon to her death through their false assurances of healing. Betty is the one nursing the pangs of her husband’s loss and is one who feels the pain. Let us learn from her revelation and stop patronizing fraudulent spiritualists on ailments which science can cure. Betty herself is the best empirical example.

And then, the “Cardoso Women” in the CBN. My question is, why are men of power, at the apogee of their rule, always implicated in the hell that resides between their laps? This moment, I race for a copy of my Ligali Mukaiba vinyl. Mukaiba, another Yoruba Apala musical lord with a uniquely mellifluous and sleepy voice, was Lagos, Epe-born. In one of his 1970s tracks, he speaks to the pervasive influence of women in the lives of men, comparable only to drugs on addicts. Mukaiba sang, “I cannot see what a woman cannot fashion out with a man once she arrests his heart. If she orders him to go to Sokoto or Jos, off the man goes…” (Mi ò wá rí’hun t’óbìnrin ò lè fi’ni se/ t’ó bá ńwu’ni/t’ó bá ńj’àrábà eni/t’ó bá l’ó yá ní Sókótó/kùrù kere o…a ó tèlée l’éyìn ni/T’ó bá l’ó yá ni Jos o, a ó tèlé e lo ni…)

If you want to know the immense power of women and why men in power become captives of their own libido, please read an earlier piece I did with the title Atiku Abubakar and the sexual history of the Nigerian presidency (February 6, 2022). In it, using the story of Zimbabwean former Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, who suffered “a nasty blow from below,” an euphemism for impotency, as well as Nigerian leaders’, (Ibrahim Babangida, Atiku Abubakar, Olusegun Obasanjo) I traced the geography and history of libidinous rascality in Nigeria’s topmost power echelon. I also explored the centrality and virility of power, while attempting to show how men of power, through their libido, use sex as a locus of power. The lesson I came with was given by Prof Wale Adebanwi in a seminal journal article where he stated that, all of us, scholars, lay scholars and society as a whole, “need to pay greater attention to the ways in which obscenity can help explain the nature of power.” I used these men’s awkward exercise of their virile members to explain how libidinous politics and corruption cannot be divorced from Nigeria’s socio-politics.

Now, to the Gambaryan hell. Almost immediately he revealed the stenchy details of the bribe allegations, the Nigerian government attempted to douse the raging hell fire with officialese theatrics. Mohammed Idris, Minister of Information, made very feeble, and I dare say, unconvincing and puerile attempt to douse the bribery conflagration. In saner countries, these allegations are enough to get officials running helter-skelter. But, not to worry, this is Nigeria, home to fantastically corrupt governments notorious for crippling the country with bribery. Idris just needed to fulfill all righteousness. And he did. He obviously didn’t sound convincing and didn’t care. The press release merely went into the archives of similar rebuttals in the past and the playbook of governments’ appeal to patriotism. In the service to the god of cant, the minister merely made use of time-worn officialese which Nigerians know have always been used as diapers to cover government officials’ heists. It was same way a denial was put up to Femi Otedola’s allegation against House of Representatives member, Farouk Lawan, for receiving a $500,000 bribe. What happened in the end? I personally believe Gambaryan and hold that his allegation is consistent with a narrative of the Nigerian bigman in public service. He had a graphic and believable description of the scene of the alleged crime and the alleged dramatis personae. He is to me a witness of truth. We must not lose track of the fact that, whenever it is about corruption, Nigerian government officials’ notoriety for swimming in the puddle is worse than a swine’s.

Isn’t it an oxymoron that the Nigerian government, which should be eager to sacrifice corrupt cogs in the wheels of its progress is the one defending the accused? Nigerians would have expected each of those officials Gambaryan mentioned to be investigated by an impartial panel and not coming out to wax its sanctimony. Not to worry. Nigerians know who to believe over the Gambaryan allegation. The Binance executive’s home country, I am sure, must also be in possession of the hard facts of the transaction. The truths is that, the hun-hun-hun of alleged official and unofficial corruption allegedly traced to this government in the last 21 months is mind-boggling and concerning. If ever the baton changes hand, Nigerians must be ready to be treated to the most putrid display of swimming maggots in the history of Nigerian governance.

Oh, what a hell!