Of suicide bombing and Charlie boy‘s candid camera

Posted on | juni 21, 2011 | No Comments

Nigerian ace entertainer and former president of Performing Musicians of Nigeria (PMAN), Mr. Charles Oputa (AKA Charlie Boy) is iconoclastic and does things in certain ways that may be considered weird by some people.

He has a programme that runs on televisions called Charlie Boy Show and one interesting aspect of it is the Candid Camera segment whereby a camera man films a person or some persons without the filmed knowing it.

On a particular day, Mr. Oputa’s team dropped a bunch of money on the ground and focused their camera at the spot. Obviously, they were trying to get hold of any person who would pick the money and one middle-aged woman did.

This woman has the typical appearance of a Christian mother, devoted Muslim woman or a faithful lady of any religion but upon questioning on whether she is the owner of the money she said yes.

She started rambling and defending her ownership of the large amount and how it fell off her handbag in a surprising manner that one would have been convinced if not that the money was dropped by the show producers.

All her seemingly frank explanations were to get hold of the bunch of money that doesn’t belong to her and that is the characteristics of Nigerian leaders.

Last week, suicide bombing which I had boasted in a past write-up was peculiar to the Middle East and Asia has taken place here. One of such used a car and detonated a bomb at the Nigerian police headquarters in his attempt to kill the police chief, Mr Hafiz Ringim. I had insinuated that no Nigerian had the liver to blow himself or herself up with a bomb while attacking others or government institutions and I have been proven wrong because I may have misread the scope of human dynamism.

I’m afraid that in past difficult situations like the bombing, we have seen government officials behave like the woman caught up in Charlie Boy’s candid camera.

As soon as those situations arose, we got the best types of urgent explanations and panaceas meant either to save ones’ job or to keep the tide going until the official loots as much government money as he could and disappear from the scene. Then the rot is left for the incoming person who also followed the same process if he encounters some new problems.

Because of this I was not impressed when I read on the pages newspapers that Nigeria would involve intelligence or security operatives from the United States, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to fight the new suicide scourge.

The very hazardous consequence of this type of grandstand is that if nothing is done, a deeper problem would arise and in some cases tracking or solving them become as complex as finding a solution to the AIDS/HIV scourge.

We’re all aware that terrorism and other crimes of international dimension like corruption, organized criminal elements, document fraud, drug trafficking, are fought in conjunction with foreign intelligence and security services.

Of course, we have benefited from this in the past and we’re still benefitting from such.

Mid-January, 500 police officers of the anti-terrorism and Insurgency Centre of the Nigerian Army School of Infantry (NASI) graduated after a counter-terrorism training in Jaji. They were trained were said to have been drilled on the employment of various techniques to stop insurgency.

As far back as 2001, military pilots and crew members attached to the presidential Air Fleet (PAF) the elite flying wing of the air force attached to the presidency, underwent anti-terrorism training.

Recently, instructors from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) commenced a trained operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on anti-money laundering and control of terrorist financing.
In a nutshell, we have heard much about counter-terrorism training and collaboration from outside that the size of this column will not allow me mention therefore such training should be localized and put to use to their fullest capacity.

Talking tough and doing little now in order to finish our terms as government executives and leave would expose all of us to harm.

AUTHOR: Paul Ohia
URL: www.paulohia.blog.com and www.paulohia.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: paulohia [at] yahoo.co.uk