His mien betrayed his inner heart. There was no way anyone could miss it – Pain – anguish – sorrow – confusion – fear! – All registered in the face of Caleb Mutfwang, Governor of Plateau State, as each word tumbled out that Tuesday, April 8, 2025, while appearing on Channels Television.

Clearly, Shakespear obviously did not have the likes of the governor in mind when he wrote: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face!” For in this particular case, that popular expressions from Macbeth, one of the writer’s most celebrated epics, was proved as fallacy rather than true.

A guest on Politics Today, a public affairs programme on the popular television network, the governor practically placed a mirror to expose every bit and pieces as well as the intricate fibres of his inner soul, as he detailed the harrowing ordeals of how merciless terrorists, unleashed mindless onslaughts on communities in the state, decimating his people in the process.

The most pungent part of that account, was how, in Bokkos  local government alone, 64 communities were displaced, with the terrorists succeeding in chasing out original owners, renaming and occupying their communities.

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Hear him: “To be honest with you, these attacks are not new. They’ve been going on for the last 10 years or more. It is just that they were never brought to national attention. In Bokkos particularly, Bokkos is one of God’s gift to Plateau State – beautiful landscape, great mineral deposits – but it is a very treacherous terrain. These communities that were recently attacked were part of the communities that were attacked in 2023. But they survived it, they rebuilt themselves. The Ruwi community that was first attacked, lost about 17 people in 2023.

“But they bounced back to show you the resilience of the people. Now, if this sort of attacks has been going on for close to 10 years, it tells the story that there is a deliberate, conscious attempts to clean out populations and for what reason other than to reoccupy.

“As I’m talking to you, there are not less than 64 communities that have been taken over by bandits on the Plateau between Bokkos, Barkin Ladi and Riom Local Governments. They have been taken over, renamed and people are living there conveniently, on lands they pushed people away to occupy.

“These are things we’ve been trying to embark on dialogue to make sure that these people return to their communities. But because of the proliferation of arms, which has become quite alarming – and I’m talking now, not about arms, but real, sophisticated arms in the hands of non-state actors. It has become more challenging for communities to be able to live in peace.”

But, here then was the catch. In this horrible narrative, the governor never brought himself to name the culprits of these attacks. He could not summon the courage to do so, despite his ostensibly full knowledge of story. Every effort to pressure him to name them, was futile.

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See how he tried to dodge that bullet: “I can tell you in all honesty that I cannot find any explanation other than genocide, sponsored by terrorists. The question is who are the persons behind the organisers of this terrorism? This is what the security agencies must help us unravel. We must come to a point where we know the sponsors, because it is not just the work of ordinary people.”

Now, therein lies one of the major issues in the Plateau crisis and to a large extent that of Nigeria. No doubt, Mutfwang, not only knew the culprits, he also knew how and where to find them. But he would never bring himself to name them – he would never dare! The consequences would be too great for him. But, in place of clarity, he chose political correctness, while trading fear for courage and sacrifice.

In fact, Solomon Dalang, former Minister of Sports, who is also an indigene of the state and equally affected by the obvious siege, had some hours before, made the coast very clear. At a separate interview, he said the culprits were not only known, but their locations as well.

His take was that those who should arrest the crisis decisively – to pursue, decimate and wipe the killers out – had either deliberately refused to do so or were compelled to turn the other way. Otherwise, with the right intention and political will the menace would have since been over and forgotten.

What other evidence could have captured this audacious conclusion from the ex-Minister than the 64 communities Mutfwang spoke about?

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If, as the governor said, these communities are actually in existence, with those who took them over living in them undisturbed and unperturbed, what other evidence does anyone need to fathom the agenda for the mass killing and for the inaction by higher authorities?

Why then dance and skirt around the issue? Ordinarily, the expectation is that Nigerian soldiers would have moved in, dislodged the invaders and restored the land to the original owners, while those so extricated would be profiled, and the guilty among them brought to book according to the law.

So, why is this not happening? Could it be that the spiritual dimension many people have talked about is truly at play after all? Yes! Not a few people have raised the Igbo question in the entire saga. Voices, understandably, from the South East, adducing this interesting, but germane angle, point to the horrendous activities of the progenitors of today’s victims in creating the Nigeria where their children and grandchildren have been trapped.

They describe both physical narratives and mental pictures of the ghoulish massacre of Ndigbo during the pogrom in Northern Nigeria, particularly in those areas currently witnessing these bloodbath, as evidence of the connection of the past and present, showing obvious similarities in their graphic constructs.

From Borno to Adamawa to Zamfara and Katsina – from Kaduna to Plateau and Benue, horrible depictions of morbid decapitation of human beings, portend the same or similar imprimatur of the gory pictures being spread in the same areas today, even several decades after.

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The eerie images of young men with placid, emotionless faces – made so by years of carrying out the same task – making deep burrows in the ground and throwing what remained of the kits and kins, into them like dead animals killed by a deadly disease, replicate the same pictures of war-era Igboland after each bombing of markets, churches, hospitals and other public places while the dismissive and utterly bland, if not lame explanations by the military governments then to the wanton massacre, mimic the current stance of the Nigerian authorities to today’s persistent human carnages.

Indeed, many of the purveyors of this spiritual angle narrative, infer further, that the fact that those who supervised the bestial onslaught against Ndigbo, are alive today to see the same slaughter visited on their own kits, is evident that the current situation is a payback to atone the cries of the Igbo victims.

They contend that those loud cries and silent pleas of the victims – the pregnant women, whose bellies were torn open and their unborn babies ripped off – the young ladies corralled into leprosy colonies and forced to be raped by the inmates – the young children with their heads severed – their fathers pulled out from train coaches and vehicles and thrown into rivers – leave ghostly images of unsettled spirits refusing to rest until fully avenged.

There is no way of determining this spiritist angle. However, whatever picture or narrative – spiritual of temporal – the reality remains that the Plateau crisis is a very clear phenomenon. The essence, motive and impetus are captured in those 64 communities.

As the issue is neither complicated nor complex the solution is also straightforward. That it is not resolved yet and likely not to be soon, captures the sad story of Nigeria.

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When Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25, 2023 election told his host on Prime Time, a public affairs programme on ARISE NEWS Network, on Tuesday, that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has done exceedingly well in destroying Nigeria, it was taken as sarcasms, more or less or oxymoron at best.

The former Governor of Anambra State, was simply alluding to the comment of the President during his campaign for the job ahead of the 2023 election that he would continue where his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari – President 2015-2023 – stopped.

Buhari, the first to defeat an incumbent President in the history of Nigeria, achieved that historic feat on the platform of the All Progressives Congress and as many political watchers have acknowledged, on the back of Tinubu who was the alter ego of the great political movement that emerged to take power from then Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the behemoth that assumed power at the termination of military rule in 1999 and held it with vice grip for 16 years.

Now, Buhari, before he left power in May 2023, held the record of the worst leader in Nigerian history – military or civilian. He was not only the most underwhelming, listless and indolent, but the most idealess and clueless.

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So, for Tinubu, a presidential candidate to tell an electorate population, daily winching and twitching from the pains of such a totally bereft and insipid government that he would continue where the President who harboured such massive negative traits stopped, was the height of political hara-kiri.

But regardless the obvious implication of what ought to be a serious blunder that would have seen the electorates run with their legs touching their ears, Tinubu went ahead to emerge winner of the election – or was declared the winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Granted that many believed that Tinubu made that audacious statement, more out of necessity to placate and humour the former President, lest he did the unthinkable that could quash his take-over ambition – more of stooping to conquer – and not that he actually fancied Buhari’s outrageously disastrous performance, the picture of the last two years his presidency has lasted, seems to have proved the direct opposite.

If anything, Tinubu has bested Buhari in all departments to prove that he was not joking, but rather meant every word of his promise that he was going to continue where his predecessor stopped in punishing Nigerians.

That punishment started from the first minutes of signing off on his new job on May 29, 2023, when he made that notorious statement – subsidy is gone – that three-word phrase, considered a rash, impulsive and brainwave quip that had nothing to do with any sort of rigour or painstaking plan of action.

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From that moment and since then, Nigerians have known nothing but progressive physical and psychological torture that wraps their collective life’s experience in one word – PAIN!

Right from that particular moment, even before the ink with which he etched his signature on the dotted line proclaiming himself President, the price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), otherwise known as petrol, the life-blood of the Nigerian economy soared from N198 a litre to N550.

To complete the job, he also added the inglorious policy of the floating of the Naira that saw the local currency previously exchanging at $1 to N330 when he came on board, jump to an incredible, if not disgraceful $1 to N1,700 in a matter of weeks.

Today, the combined effect it that the Nigerian economy has been demobilised – shattered to smithereens, leaving the citizenry who picking food from the dustbins under Buhari going to bed on empty stomachs because those who threw the leftovers into those bins have now joined the daily-stretching queues of hungry population.

Now, Tinubu has upped the ante. Like Buhari who was a two-country President – spending his days in the UK and nights in Nigeria or vice versa, he has also adopted the model, only that he seems to fancy the beautiful city of Paris more, apparently for its rather relaxed life, compared to the knit-up, conservative, if not airtight London variant.

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For now, Tinubu is yet to spend a whole five months in France as Buhari once did by moving the seat of government to London, an act by which he virtually threw Nigeria into a Limbo. But he seems to be getting there. It will only be a matter of time. If he could pick up his bag and zoom off, what stops him from taking permanent residency in the French city and merely visit Nigeria? After all, are his aides not telling inquisitive Nigerians that their President could work from anywhere?

Of course, for Tinubu’s goons, whether at the Presidency, the APC or anywhere, the anxiety of Nigerians to the parlous situation in the country, is usually dismissed as hatred, and cast in either ethnic or political colours. It is even worse when it has to do with opposition figures like Obi.

For instance, Obi in that outing on Tuesday, once again reinforced his earlier position a fortnight ago that Tinubu and his APC have virtually demolished the country’s democracy, by personally capturing and pocketing all the structures – executive, legislature and judiciary.

But hear how Felix Morka, APC spokesman, on Wednesday, dismissed his intervention. To him, the concerns are nothing but frustrations coming from the pains of losing election. In other words, he thinks Obi, as a Nigerian has no other life outside the desire to be President. He thinks Obi would be loathing of Nigeria that mimics the same France or would be averse to its economy overtaking Germany, because a Tinubu is in power. To him, Obi, is that inconsiderate and wicked.

Hear him: “Even Mr Obi’s trademark opportunistic sensationalization of transient difficulties that Nigerians have endured in patriotic support of the President’s bold and transformative economic plan availed no respite, as he floundered on national television, framing himself as a portrait of frustration and political desperation.

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“Mr Obi’s favourite retort, ‘I would have done better as president’, must be a symptom of a protracted bout of election failure-induced hangover from which he has not awakened to the reality that he is not the president. Like an unlicensed back seat driver that thinks himself to be a race car driver, Mr Obi needs to tame his bloated and deluded imagination.”

Now, in which other country of the world where democracy thrives on the concept of government of the people, by the people and for the people, would their President whimsically pick up his bag, travel to another country and call it working-visit without prior knowledge?

Would it happen in France or UK, or Italy, or Germany or England or the US? Would it even happen in China that is not considered a democracy per se! Okay, these are developed nations. Let apples be apples and oranges be oranges. Would it happen in South Africa? Would it happen in Kenya or even Ghana, Nigeria’s backyard?

Again, would Tinubu pick up his bag and zoom off to Paris at the drop of a hat, if he actually believes that he was made President by Nigerians and holds same in trust on their behalf and at their behest?

Is it not because he knows that there would always be a variant of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), headed by Yakoub Mahmood that would hand him re-election on a platter, kneeling down that he could afford to spit, urinate and fart on Nigeria democracy from as far as the Eiffel Towers?

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Indeed, what remains? What separates Nigeria from Paul Biya’s Cameroun, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Yuweri Musaveni’s Uganda, where even the corpses could resurrect or their pictures placed at strategic places for them to continue in power after their death? Is this danger not clear for all to see? Tragic!

When Nyesom Wike, former Governor of Rivers State, now Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), beat his chest and pointedly declared that heavens would not fall if Siminalayi Fubara, his successor in office is impeached, he was not far from what eventually happened on Tuesday with President Bola Tinubu declaring a State of Emergency in the state. He was actually confirming what must have been discussed behind closed doors.

Let nobody be deceived. The action of the President is premeditated, direct as it is deliberate. The development is not only a way of testing the waters, but meant to send a clear message in the manner Ibrahim Babangida clearly spoke some 32 years ago during the June 12, 1993 saga – we are not only in government, we are in power.

Tinubu, in his opening statement, said: “Fellow Nigerians, I feel greatly disturbed at the turn we have come to regarding the political crisis in Rivers State. Like many of you, I have watched with concern the development with the hope that the parties involved would allow good sense to prevail at the soonest, but all that hope burned out without any solution to the crisis.”

Now, if anyone goes to bed with this platitudinous statement, believing it to be true, it means that the person is a stranger, who has just emerged from years of solitary life in a cave and thus unable to grasp the events in Nigeria, at least in the last three years or more or the person is completely bereft or an outright imbecile.

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All the President needed do if truly he is ashamed of what was happening in Rivers as he claimed was to tell Wike to mind his job and leave Fubara alone. In other words, he could have solved the Rivers crisis within seconds. But he did not do that because of an obvious hidden agenda.

We do not believe the President and we dare say, no sane Nigerian would believe him either. Instead, we see the development concerning Rivers is an elaborately crafted political façade – a well-choreographed scheme – a manipulative macabre dance – all aimed at proving how firmly the fate of Nigerian is now firmly in the hands of the power players in Abuja – pure and simple.

We believe those who infer that the State of Emergency option, is the joker being played as alternative to impeachment, which would be a tedious route, given the touted refusal by the Chief Judge of Rivers State to soil his name by acquiescing to the unwholesome plot of impeachment. It is even said that the route is harder because there is also a court order barring the group of 27 lawmakers led by Martin Amaewhule as Speaker from commencing Fubara’s impeachment, obtained since 2023, which had not been vacated.

The implication being that the order must first be vacated, before the process of removal could begin and from given the slow pace of the legal matters in Nigeria, it could take several months, if not years to discharge that order, given that it could move from the lower court to the Supreme Court. This would ultimately defeat the purpose of the ant-Fubara forces.

The sad reality is that the All Progressives Congress (APC), has since captured Nigeria. The phenomenon Nigeria is experiencing today started with former President, Muhammadu Buhari, who destroyed virtually all institutions of state. With his penchant for playing dump to all national issues no matter how serious, he had launched a devastating war on these institutions.

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To Buhari, the laws of the land meant nothing. He either pretended not to know or simply ignored it. So, it was under him that the tenures of Service Chiefs in the military, the paramilitary and the police, were extended well after the officially recognised retirement limits either by age or years of service.

Buhari it was who ensured that National Assembly practically became a lame duck. Yes, the same NASS of the late Chuba Okadigbo as Senate President and Ghali Umar Na’Abba as Speaker, who stood up to then President Olusegun Obasanjo – of Ken Nnamani and Dimeji Bankole, who effectively killed the much-touted Third Term Agenda of the former President – that was the same NASS that lay on the floor for Buhari to step on them.

Immediately the tenure of Bukola Saraki and Yakubu, who emerged Senate President and Speaker by default and gave a semblance of the ideal relationship of checks and balances, between the executive and legislature ended, it was a free fall for the most critical arm of government.

Shamelessly Femi Gbajabiamila, who took over from Dogara, had told the world that the House of Representatives under him, was all willing to be a rubber stamp for the executive, while Ahmad Lawan, as Saraki’s successor, on his part declared that the Senate was ever ready to approve whatever Buhari wanted, because – wait for it – he meant well.

They did not stop at the legislature. The judiciary also had the bitter taste of Buhari’s understanding of power and its use. He did so in a manner hitherto unimaginable. Judges, hitherto believed to be next to God, became his guineapig for demonstrating. Some of their Lordships, including Supreme Court judges, were practically pulled out of their beds in the wee-hours of the night, some in their underpants and others completely in their birthday suits.

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The operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS), that were sent to do the job, never got round to explaining fully the raison d’etre for such unimaginable heist on a class of humans not even the military dared touch, except for some puerile and spurious charges of corruption, which eventually died their natural deaths. Expectedly, most of the judges, so targeted did not live long afterwards, not being able to bear the pain.

But that was not even enough. The case of Walter Onnoghen, the Chief Justice of Nigeria even became the highpoint of the strange phenomenon the former President designed and unleashed against this highly revered institution. The removal of the CJN by no other person but the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, one of the lowest officers in the wrung of judicial hierarchy, was like that fatal blow by the dagger of Brutus, which killed Julius Caeser.

Since then, the judiciary, like other institutions, have become as Nigerians say – something else. Virtually all their decisions subsequently were delivered under one term – unanimous judgement. The era of dissenting or minority judgements are gone, as judges obviously fearing to be targeted know better than travel that route.

Out of the window went the courage, which saw their Lordships play their part in telling Obasanjo, who because he thought Rotimi Amaechi’s emergence as candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had K-Leg and so denied him the ticket that he did not have the final say. It was therefore due to this application of rare courage that Amaechi became governor in 2007.

Suddenly, the judiciary that made Andy Uba hold the record of an 11-day governor, when he was sent packing from the Government House Awka, for Peter Obi to complete his job, in the historic Tenure Interpretation Case, gave way to some strange arena from where issued some of the most outlandish pronouncements capable of making the devil himself flinch with envy.

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Invariably, because Nigerians, hit by some strange disease that drained their hitherto vibrant energy with which they confronted the moving train with bare hands during the years of the military, became mere onlookers, Buhari not only finished his disastrous, locust-eaten years, but successfully handed over to Tinubu, who has since upped the ante.

Now, from the first day, in fact, few minutes after his inauguration, Nigerians have borne the level of suffering they never imagined ever existed. From N198 a litre, the price of fuel suddenly jumped to N550. Yet, the same Nigerians who virtually seized the air and forbade Goodluck Jonathan from breathing in 2012 for removing subsidy, watched helplessly as Tinubu hiked the cost of the same commodity beyond N1,000.

They watched as the value of Naira plummeted from N300 to a dollar to N1,700 in just few months of Tinubu’s government. Even the little attempts they made at demonstration to protest their parlous situation, were brutally put down and many of those who were unfortunate to fall into the hands of the goons unleashed after them, spent months in detention with charges of treason, the highest crime in the land hung on their necks.

From the foregoing therefore, it is obvious that Tinubu, having developed the formula for dealing with Nigerians, is confident that this unconstitutional and immoral act in Rivers will come and pass without any form of resistance.

Yes! Tinubu knows that what he has done is not covered by law. He knows that he lacks powers to remove a governor or elected representatives under the 1999 Constitution. He knows because he even criticised Goodluck Jonathan when he took the same measure in some states in the North in 2013, even without removing the governors.

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But he has gone ahead, to stamp his authority, which is more important than any law of the land. Just like Buhari, he knows that nobody will challenge him. He knows the heavens will not fall. He has it all taken care of. Like he has conquered Lagos, Nigeria is now firmly in the hollow of his palms.

Unfortunately, Rivers will not be the only place. After it, will come the next and the next, such that by the time everything is counted, Nigerians will know that power, as Tinubu usually says, is not served a la carte. The proof of that will also be made manifest in 2027 when the tragedy will be completed. That will be the sadder part