A Jewish Boycott

A short time ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khomenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.
In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
“Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
“A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.
Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.
If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.
Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.
Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.
Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick” reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
“Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.
They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
“Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.
Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
“In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.”
Oh, and by the way, don’t call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.
Meanwhile I ask, what medical contributions to the world have the Muslims made?”
The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
1988 – Najib Mahfooz
Peace:
1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 – Elias James Corey
1994 – Yaser Arafat:
1999 – Ahmed Zewai
Economics:
(zero)
Physics:
(zero)
Medicine:
1960 – Peter Brian Medawar
1998 – Ferid Mourad
TOTAL: 7 SEVEN
The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
1910 – Paul Heyse
1927 – Henri Bergson
1958 – Boris Pasternak
1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 – Nelly Sachs
1976 – Saul Bellow
1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 – Elias Canetti
1987 – Joseph Brodsky
1991 – Nadine Gordimer World
Peace:
1911 – Alfred Fried
1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 – Rene Cassin
1973 – Henry Kissinger
1978 – Menachem Begin
1986 – Elie Wiesel
1994 – Shimon Peres
1994 – Yitzhak Rabin
Physics:
1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 – Henri Moissan
1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
1910 – Otto Wallach
1915 – Richard Willstaetter
1918 – Fritz Haber
1921 – Albert Einstein
1922 – Niels Bohr
1925 – James Franck
1925 – Gustav Hertz
1943 – Gustav Stern
1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 – Felix Bloch
1954 – Max Born
1958 – Igor Tamm
1959 – Emilio Segre
1960 – Donald A. Glaser
1961 – Robert Hofstadter
1961 – Melvin Calvin
1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 – Julian Schwinger
1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
1971 – Dennis Gabor
1972 – William Howard Stein
1973 – Brian David Josephson
1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
1976 – Burton Richter
1977 – Ilya Prigogine
1978 – Arno Allan Penzias
1978 – Peter L Kapitza
1979 – Stephen Weinberg
1979 – Sheldon Glashow
1979 – Herbert Charles Brown
1980 – Paul Berg
1980 – Walter Gilbert
1981 – Roald Hoffmann
1982 – Aaron Klug
1985 – Albert A. Hauptman
1985 – Jerome Karle
1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 – Robert Huber
1988 – Leon Lederman
1988 – Melvin Schwartz
1988 – Jack Steinberger
1989 – Sidney Altman
1990 – Jerome Friedman
1992 – Rudolph Marcus
1995 – Martin Perl
2000 – Alan J. Heeger
Economics:
1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 – Simon Kuznets
1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
1976 – Milton Friedman
1978 – Herbert A. Simon
1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 – Franco Modigliani
1987 – Robert M. Solow
1990 – Harry Markowitz
1990 – Merton Miller
1992 – Gary Becker
1993 – Robert Fogel
Medicine:
1908 – Elie Metchnikoff
1908 – Paul Erlich
1914 – Robert Barany
1922 – Otto Meyerhof
1930 – Karl Landsteiner
1931 – Otto Warburg
1936 – Otto Loewi
1944 – Joseph Erlanger
1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 – Hans Krebs
1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 – Joshua Lederberg
1959 – Arthur Kornberg
1964 – Konrad Bloch
1965 – Francois Jacob
1965 – Andre Lwoff
1967 – George Wald
1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 – Salvador Luria
1970 – Julius Axelrod
1970 – Sir Bernard Katz
1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 – Howard Martin Temin
1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 – Daniel Nathans
1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
1984 – Cesar Milstein
1985 – Michael Stuart Brown
1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 – Gertrude Elion
1989 – Harold Varmus
1991 – Erwin Neher
1991 – Bert Sakmann
1993 – Richard J. Roberts
1993 – Phillip Sharp
1994 – Alfred Gilman
1995 – Edward B. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino
TOTAL: 129!
The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.
The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants.
There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church.
There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.
Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask ‘what can they do for humankind’ before they demand that humankind respects them.
Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel ‘s part, the following two sentences really say it all:
‘If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”
Benjamin Netanyahu: General Eisenhower warned us. It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect: ‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’
Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred.
It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now more than 65 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.
Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED’ because it offends some Muslim in the United States?

ISLAM BURDEN AND JEWISH HOPEFUL MODERNITY

Why is the Muslim world so easily offended?
By Fouad Ajami
Washington Post
Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.
Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in search of greater opportunities in the Western world, modernity — with its sometimes distasteful but ultimately benign criticism of Islam — has sparked fatal protests. To understand why violence keeps erupting and to seek to prevent it, we must discern what fuels this sense of grievance.
There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand.
In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored — poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day.
If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book “What Went Wrong?” The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects of others.
The coming of the West to their world brought superior military, administrative and intellectual achievement into their midst — and the outsiders were unsparing in their judgments. They belittled the military prowess of the Arabs, and they were scandalized by the traditional treatment of women and the separation of the sexes that crippled Arab society.
Even as Arabs insist that their defects were inflicted on them by outsiders, they know their weaknesses. Younger Arabs today can be brittle and proud about their culture, yet deeply ashamed of what they see around them. They know that more than 300 million Arabs have fallen to economic stagnation and cultural decline. They know that the standing of Arab states along the measures that matter — political freedom, status of women, economic growth — is low. In the privacy of their own language, in daily chatter on the street, on blogs and in the media, and in works of art and fiction, they probe endlessly what befell them.
But woe to the outsider who ventures onto that explosive terrain. The assumption is that Westerners bear Arabs malice, that Western judgments are always slanted and cruel.
In the past half-century, Arabs, as well as Muslims in non-Arab lands, have felt the threat of an encircling civilization they can neither master nor reject. Migrants have left the burning grounds of Karachi, Cairo and Casablanca but have taken the fire of their faith with them. “Dish cities” have sprouted in the Muslim diasporas of Western Europe and North America. You can live in Stockholm and be sustained by a diet of al-Jazeera television.
We know the celebrated cases when modernity has agitated the pious. A little more than two decades ago, it was a writer of Muslim and Indian birth, Salman Rushdie, whose irreverent work of fiction, “The Satanic Verses,” offended believers with its portrayal of Islam. That crisis began with book-burnings in Britain, later saw protests in Pakistan and culminated in Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989. The protesters were not necessarily critics of fiction; all it took to offend was that Islam, the prophet Muhammad and his wives had become a writer’s material. The confrontation laid bare the unease of Islam in the modern world.
The floodgates had opened. The clashes that followed defined the new terms of encounters between a politicized version of Islam — awakened to both power and vulnerability — and the West’s culture of protecting and nurturing free speech. In 2004, a Moroccan Dutchman in his mid-20s, Mohammed Bouyeri, murdered filmmaker Theo van Goghon a busy Amsterdam street after van Gogh and a Somali-born politician made a short film about the abuse of women in Islamic culture.
Shortly afterward, trouble came to Denmark when a newspaper there published a dozencartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad; in one he wears a bomb-shaped turban, and another shows him as an assassin. The newspaper’s culture editor had thought the exercise would merely draw attention to the restrictions on cultural freedom in Europe — but perhaps that was naive. After all, Muslim activists are on the lookout for such material. And Arab governments are eager to defend Islam. The Egyptian ambassador to Denmark encouraged a radical preacher of Palestinian birth living in Denmark and a young Lebanese agitator to fan the flames of the controversy.
But it was Syria that made the most of this opportunity. The regime asked the highest clerics to preach against the Danish government. The Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut were sacked; there was a call to boycott Danish products. Denmark had been on the outer margins of Europe’s Muslim diaspora. Now its peace and relative seclusion were punctured.
The storm that erupted this past week at the gates of American diplomatic outposts across the Muslim world is a piece of this history. As usual, it was easily ignited. The offending work, a 14-minute film trailer posted on YouTube in July, is offensive indeed. Billed as a trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims,” a longer movie to come, it is at once vulgar and laughable. Its primitiveness should have consigned it to oblivion.
It was hard to track down the identities of those who made it. A Sam Bacile claimed authorship, said that he was an Israeli American and added that 100Jewish businessmen had backed the venture. This alone made it rankle even more — offending Muslims and implicating Jews at the same time. (In the meantime, no records could be found of Bacile, and the precise origins of the video remain murky.)
It is never hard to assemble a crowd of young protesters in the teeming cities of the Muslim world. American embassies and consulates are magnets for the disgruntled. It is inside those fortresses, the gullible believe, that rulers are made and unmade. Yet these same diplomatic outposts dispense coveted visas and a way out to the possibilities of the Western world. The young men who turned up at the U.S. Embassies this week came out of this deadly mix of attraction to American power and resentment of it. The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that took the lives of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, appeared to be premeditated and unconnected to the film protests.
The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it.
These cultural contradictions do not lend themselves to the touch of outsiders. President George W. Bush believed that America’s proximity to Arab dictatorships had begotten us the jihadists’ enmity. His military campaign in Iraq became an attempt to reform that country and beyond. But Arabs rejected his interventionism and dismissed his “freedom agenda” as a cover for an unpopular war and for domination.
President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his sympathy for the aspirations of Muslim lands — would help repair relations between America and the Islamic world. But he’s been caught in the middle, conciliating the rulers while making grand promises to ordinary people. The revolt of the Iranian opposition in the summer of 2009 exposed the flaws of his approach. Then the Arab Spring played havoc with American policy. Since then, the Obama administration has not been able to decide whether it defends the status quo or the young people hell-bent on toppling the old order.
Cultural freedom is never absolute, of course, and the Western tradition itself, from the Athenians to the present, struggles mightily with the line between freedom and order. In the Muslim world, that struggle is more fierce and lasting, and it will show itself in far more than burnt flags and overrun embassies.
outlook@washpost.com
Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Syrian Rebellion” and “Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey.”

Insecurity: Community Policing Gets The Vote

BY TOPE TEMPLER OLAIYA
ON August 15, the Lagos State Neighbourhood Watch apprehended four suspected armed robbers, who had been terrorising communities in Oto-Awori area of the state. The suspects, Akanye Chidozie, Ch2-+rles Nwozuzu, Ifeanyi Felix and Jude Ugoh, were allegedly rounded up by the community’s security outfit, while ransacking homes in Ajangbadi at about 1.50am.

The suspects, in addition to the Volkswagen Golf car with the number plate BK121FKJ, filled with assorted vehicle spare parts used for the operation, were later handed over to the police at the Rapid Response Squad, Alausa, Ikeja. Mr. Musibau Oguns, who led the team that apprehended the men, told newsmen that the arrest of the suspected robbers was a huge success in the outfit’s efforts to rid the area of criminals.

“For about two years, the people of Oto-Awori have been sleeping with their two eyes open. They can’t just rest or sleep because these criminals keep attacking residents every now and then. The situation got so bad that residents thought all the criminals in the state had relocated to the area. We are glad that our collaboration with the police, to displace criminals from the area is yielding results. We are glad with this arrest,’’ Oguns said.

This is a characteristic example of the success of community policing, which had brought respite to most parts of the state, until two Sundays ago, when armed men shattered Lagos peace and violent robbery rocked the city. It was a day the Lagos State Police Command went to sleep for a moment and it proved fatal for some Lagosians, including one-year-old Taiwo Ibrahim.

While the police is responding to the security slack by sounding tough and declaring fresh and far-reaching war on criminals in the state, there have been renewed calls for the state government to strengthen community policing.

Ejigbo Local Council Development Area (LCDA) Neighbourhood Watchers on parade during the visit of the Police Area Commander to the council.

A member of the Vigilante group in Orile-Agege, Hakeem Lawal, said it was difficult to say in specific terms the number of attempts at crime foiled by the outfit, since they do not arrest but mainly serve as informant by reporting suspicious activities to the police.

“We and the Neighborhood Watch have performed creditably well despite several challenges facing the outfit in combating crime. We need to be equipped properly and remunerated very well.

“You will discover that it has become extremely difficult for robbers to invade communities at night in any part of Lagos. It is as a result of our collective effort at policing. What we are saying is that we can also assist the police during the day if we are properly equipped to perform effectively and efficiently,” he said.

Some of the security equipment required by the group include batons, handcuffs, uniforms, walkie-talkie radios, crowd dispersers, bulletproof vests and vehicles.

The Deputy State Co-ordinator of Neighbourhood Watch, Mr. Bankey Adenusi, lamented that most local government bosses, who are supposed to assist the outfit in terms of remuneration and other financial support, have abandoned their responsibilities.

He said if adequate incentives are provided for personnel, they would discharge their responsibilities effectively, adding that the outfit had lost many of its members in the course of combating crime in the state.

Chairman of Ejigbo Local Council Development Area, Mr. Kehinde Bamigbetan, said the LCDA has constantly empowered the Neighbourhood Watch and encouraged Community Development Associations (CDAs) to enforce council rules in their domain.

In a chat with The Guardian, Bamigbetan said “we operate a CDA Patrol Unit of our Neighbourhood Watch in Ejigbo, in which each CDA has a patrol officer paid by the council, who is able to identify black spots, who is coming in and going out in a community, and who has questionable means of income.

“We are involved in this because the Neighbourhood Watchers are not ghosts. They are human beings who live in these communities and know who is who. They also interface with the Divisional Police Officer (DPO), which makes the work of the DPO easier, as they provide the police with important intelligence,” he said.

Citing an example of other areas in which the CDAs have partnered the local government in providing adequate security, chairman of Isolo LCDA, Alhaji Shamsudeen Olaleye, said recently, there have been complaints of some communities locking up their gates.

“This was brought to the attention of the council and a meeting was called with the Community Development Committees (CDC) to address the problem. Though we have the legal power to enforce the state government’s directive on the closure of gates, particularly streets that adjoin major roads, we cannot go all out to effect the order without first consulting with community leaders, who are in control of the gates.

“We had to listen to their fears and the concern has always been that once they open their gates, all manner of people flood those areas, which is a security risk. Some others complained that most people have turned the major roads into car parks. In response to this, the LCDA is organising a public hearing on a proposed bill, which will seek to reprimand those who park indiscriminately on our streets.

“The CDC always bring to the attention of the council security concerns and social menace in the communities and we in turn pass these security tips to the police, while the council pays the salaries of the Neighbourhood Watch, who are our foot soldiers, though it may not be compared to the wage of a civil servant.”
For Pita Okute, a public affairs analyst, the number of uniforms paraded on the streets in every state and local government of the federation does not guarantee security. “From bank and hotel security outfits to street neighbourhood watches, village vigilante, local government, ethnic and state policing organisations, including the entire federal security apparatus, the evidence suggests very strongly that Nigeria is adequately policed.

Okute states in an opinion piece published by The Guardian on September 14, 2012: “But the reality leaves much to be applauded, because of the wide gap in information sharing and networking with the prime security agency in the country, which is the Nigeria Police. So, rather than canvass for dubious control of extra-legal instruments for coercion of indigenes and residents, governors should work for assiduous deployment of the various private and public security agencies into a seamless, efficient nationwide effort to grapple effectively with the security challenges confronting the nation.”

He continued: “Are bank securities and other private guards sufficiently trained to report suspicious behaviour around them, and not necessarily limited to their places of work, to appropriate channels for prompt investigation and action? It is really high time everyone –from the Neighbourhood Watch and village level vigilante to the private security agencies got involved in a collective, properly organised assault on the criminal underworld in Nigeria.”

Nigerian Loses Valuables At Hilton Newport Hotel

BY TOPE TEMPLER OLAIYA
A Nigerian has lost all his valuables at the Hilton Newport Hotel room, Wales in the United Kingdom (UK). The victim, Mr. Tony Okwoju, who visited the United Kingdom recently, said he returned to the hotel one evening to find that his room had been breached and bolted from the inside such that a member of the hotel staff had to come and cut the bolt before he could gain access into the room.

“I lost all my valuables, including my international passport, cheque book, laptop, iPad, books, manuals and cash.” Okwoju said beyond reporting to the police, the hotel did not do anything to help him in any way to secure travel documents to return home to Nigeria.

He explained that several e-mails by himself and other friends that stayed at the hotel to senior management of Hilton worldwide had been completely ignored, wondering whether it is because he is a foreigner from an African country.

Condemning the attitude of the hotel management to the issue, Mr. Neil Egbor, a member of the group that stayed at the hotel, said “if this had happened to a Briton in a Nigerian hotel, the western media would have been awash with the story, telling everybody how risky it is to visit Nigeria.”

To draw attention to the injustice and compel the management of Hilton Newport, Wales to act, Okwoju has sent a petition to http://www.change.org, a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join and win campaigns to change the world.

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/hilton-hotels-compensate-me-for-my-laptop-valuables-stolen-hilton-newport-wales

Okada Riders Nab Forex Thieves, Share Loot

By MARCEL MBAMALU
IT took the intervention of the men and officers of the Ajao Estate, Isolo police station to save two foreign Exchange (forex) fraudsters from being clubbed to death by okada riders at the weekend.

The suspects, who arrived in a Honda Accord saloon car, at the Haji Camp Burea de Change located near NA Bust Stop, along the Murtala Muhammed International Airport Road, had allegedly defrauded an operator of the sum of N1.550,000 after handing him fake $10,000 bills.

The operator reportedly raised the alarm when the suspects sped off immediately the money (the Naira equivalent) was handed over to them, prompting Okada riders within the area to initiate a chase that ended up along the streets of Ajao Estate.

Confused and decelerated by the labyrinth of bad roads around the Estate, the thieves were eventually cornered and beaten to pulp by hundreds of okada riders and residents, before being rescued and taken into custody by a patrol team of the Ajao Estate Police Station.

MOB ACTION: The two Forex thieves getting some beating by passers-by.

Not even the several gunshots from the patrol team could disperse the people, who were bent on taking out their anger on the two middle-aged men. The okada riders, who inflicted serious damage on the car, also scrambled for and helped themselves with an undisclosed amount removed from the car.

The mob followed the suspects to the police station insisting on getting jungle justice until a series of gunshots kept them in check.

At the police station, one of the suspects, who gave his name as Shedrack, denied the allegation, saying he was a genuine customer but decided to run for dear life after the operator branded him a thief.

The operator (name withheld) said the fraud was a recurring event at the Hajj Camp Burea de Change.

Sundays No Longer Safe In Lagos

By Ekenyerengozi Michael
Sundays as work free days are always peaceful for most people and in particular Christians who throng their churches for fellowship and worship in their best wears. Others visit friends and relatives to exchange greetings.

The day is also free of the usual hustle and bustle of business days with traffic wardens and law enforcement agents having little or nothing much to do. But not anymore in Lagos as chilling reports of the victims of daring armed robbers and hired killers have left residents of the commercial hub of Nigeria in fear and anxiety.

Only last Sunday morning, unknown gunmen attacked and shot a young couple, Mr. Duke and Mrs. Tina Adigwe in their four-wheel car in Surulere, and left them with gunshot wounds with their two little children wailing helplessly before the police arrived.

Tina Adigwe died of gunshot wounds before she got to the nearest hospital whilst her husband, Duke was bleeding from his own gunshot wound as doctors and nurses at the Randle General Hospital responded quickly to save his life in the emergency ward.

It was also on a Sunday that a young man was attacked and killed in front of his church by armed robbers using the popular Okada motorbike, which is now what highway robbers and other criminals use for their operations, including the dreaded Boko Haram terrorists on rampage in the northern states.

The grief-stricken bereaved families, relations, friends, associates and others in Lagos are now scared of going out on Sundays. If it is no longer safe to go to church or visit on Sundays, then things have really fallen apart in the country, as Nigerians are no longer at ease if I may use the titles of the popular novels of the famous writer Chinua Achebe who is also the author of The Trouble With Nigeria.

And indeed, Nigerians are facing many troubles in every region and the future looks bleak in the present terrifying circumstances of flagrant acts of corruption and lawlessness threatening the existence of the most populous country in Africa.

The police must no longer be caught napping on Sundays and other days since the evil men can attack their targets anytime anywhere. And law abiding people should help the police to keep all nooks and crannies of our streets under constant surveillance and report suspicious looking characters and suspicious movements to neighbourhood vigilante groups, first to alert others and then report to only trusted security intelligence agencies and the armed forces within the vicinity.

Moreover, the Lagos State government and other state governments must stop paying lip service to the provision of modern medical facilities, because if the emergency rooms or wards of the public clinics and general hospitals are well equipped with modern life saving medical facilities as provided in other civilized modern states, many unfortunate deaths would have been prevented as the victims would not have died from their wounds or trauma.

The life of every law abiding citizen is a priceless asset to the survival and welfare of everyone else in every community and everyone must be committed to the survival and welfare of the next person in our common ecosystem for our mutual existence.

Nobody has the right to attack or take the life of another person when you can never give or restore the precious life the maker and owner God has given each of us and made the greatest sacrifices from Adam to Jesus Christ and continues to make more sacrifices through others till date to preserve and save you and I.

Everybody deserves a good life, whether rich or poor and no matter your race, class or creed. We must get rid of anyone who does not want another person to live in peace and unity, because such an evil person is an enemy of our collective survival and welfare on earth.

Saving the life of every law-abiding citizen is not only the duty of the police and other law enforcement agencies, but also the responsibility of everyone in every community 24/7.

Michael wrote from Lagos.

Darkening Nigeria Further

Darkening Nigeria Further.

Agonising Over Improved Electricity

BY TOPE TEMPLER OLAIYA
THE saying that every problem in Nigeria presents an opportunity to make money rings true for roadside black marketers of petroleum products. With many people finding it a task to go to a petrol station to buy fuel that will power their generators, before now, the unstable power situation in the country had not only created business opportunities for importers and retailers of generating sets, but also for black market hustlers.

Today, it is a different story for those who once hit goldmine on power outage.

What also rings true today is the maxim that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. While Nigerians are expressing optimism at the new improved supply of electricity, a few others are at pains on why there is light.

Until a few weeks back when noticeable increase in electricity supply became apparent, the sale of petroleum products outside designated and approved outlets had kept many youths busy aside from other common business ventures such as phone call centres and riding of commercial motorcycle, popularly called okada.

While the business thrived, no thought was spared for the risks involved, such as an outbreak of fire, which can be triggered by any slight exposure of fuel to fire, naked flame or answering of phone calls, which could even escalate into a wild fire, as many of the fuel retailers don’t have fire extinguishers.

Though dealers of petroleum products are mandated to register with the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), for the agency to ensure full compliance to safety standards, the increasing number of micro-fuel dealers, especially in residential neighbourhoods, has boldly defied this procedure, thereby exposing the masses to a preventable risk.

NO LONGER AT EASE: Fuel vendors and black market hustlers experiencing a downturn due to improved electricity in mnay parts of Nigeria.

OLALEKAN Akinbayo, a black marketer, cannot fathom how tides could change so soon in a space of weeks. Aged 38, Akinbayo is a family man with two children. He has been a petrol vendor for more than five years and had used the money earned from the business to raise a family and also help his siblings, who are pursuing their academic careers.

According to him, until the lull in the black market business, he made more than the money spent in buying petrol from the depot. The depot sells to him at N97 per litre, while he sells to end users at N130 per litre, making a profit of N33 for every litre sold.

“Usually, I buy over 300 litres of petrol daily from the depot and the gain from it in a day is enough to put food on my table and make me comfortable. But these days, the chant of Up Nepa and stable electricity is ruining my business.

“People come to buy from me because of the stress of going to the filling station, since it is only convenient for those who have cars to fuel their generators from the filling stations in town. But for most people, it did not make economic sense to transport themselves to a filling station to purchase a gallon of four litres.

“With our service, you just need to pay for the amount of fuel you are buying without taking a bus or waiting on a queue to be attended to. Nigerians don’t like stress; they liked to be served. Our business was booming because a lot of people used generators everyday but since the story has changed, we have been forced to changed too with the times,” he said.

Another roadside fuel retailer, Tayo Gbamila, who operates at Ikotun area of Lagos, said until the recent transformation in Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), he sold his petrol for N110 to beat competition and attract more patronage, while mixing the fuel with engine oil at the cost of N20.

His words: “People that come to buy petrol are mostly people that use it for their generators. When they buy petrol for N110 per litre, they also need to buy engine oil, which they will use to mix the petrol. So, I sell at N130 per litre but with an added incentive of mixing it with engine oil.”

He, however, bemoaned the end to a lucrative venture with the advent of regular power supply in most parts of the country.

It is a different twist for residents, some of whom confided in The Guardian that they had always nurse the grudge that some sharp activities of black marketers in their area were compounding the non-availability of electricity, listing the alleged acts of sabotage to include stealing PHCN cables and causing transformers to develop faults frequently.

Olaotun Ayobami, a resident of Mafoluku, Oshodi, said until the serious attention given to power failure by the present administration, he had always suspected activities of the petrol mercenaries to have a hand in the situation.

“They have an association of their own where they talk about their business and other matters arising, which I don’t know about. What I hear is that they are now trying to bride PHCN officials not to give us light at night. And in the last one week since the removal of Prof. Barth Nnaji as Minister of Power, we have been having light steadily during the day but once it is 8pm, the light is off till the next day.

“Also, we noticed that our transformers are developing faults these days. I believe they have a hand in it, because whenever we invite PHCN officials to effect repairs on the transformers, they will discover that some fuse are missing and it will take us days or even weeks to get it fixed, since everybody in the area has to contribute money. It is during this period everyone in the area patronise them. Whenever there is light, you will notice they are not happy, because that (selling fuel) is their means of livelihood.”

He, however, calls on the government not only to check the activities of petrol vendors, but also allow petrol stations open sales outlets in neighbourhoods. “While I appreciate government’s efforts at providing regular power supply with ongoing power reforms. People won’t be so mischievous to keep us in darkness because they want to sell petrol.

“Also, authorized sales outlets of major petroleum marketers should be encouraged in residential areas, as they would keep to the safety standards required by regulatory agencies, while keeping the risk of power outbreak low in the communities,” he said.

Curiosity, Fear As Mad Woman Berths At Clifford Orji Spot

By PAUL ADUNWOKE
A middle-aged woman with an average height, fair in complexion and who appears to be harebrained has taken up residence under the bridge close to Toyota bus-stop, along Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, the exact spot where a man-eater, Clifford Orji, was captured 13 years ago.
This development has raised a red flag among residents and passersby, who recall how Orji, who died last month, was presumed to be mad until he was caught with human parts under the bridge.
Many people are willing to second-guess the actual status of the woman presently occupying the bridge, as the question on the lips of those who are aware of the development remain: “Is the woman really mad or not.”
And there are reasons to be doubtful. On several occasions, the woman would be gaily dressed and she changes clothes daily, but she spends most of her day carrying her bag and sleeping mat around as she walks the road down to the International Airport and back countless time in a day.
She also changes her route by strolling down to Ladipo Spare-parts Market. Some other time, she would be sighted walking around the area in her undies or washing her clothes at the spot. Once it is evening, she remains at the spot and stares into space until nightfall.
While she could be easily ignored by passersby and neighbours going about their businesses in the area, her emergence at the spot immediately after the death of Orji raises cause for concern. As the days go by, it is yet to be seen if it is just happenstance or she is there on a mission.

Toyota under-bridge: A mad woman resides at the exact spot where Clifford Orji was picked up 13 years ago. PHOTO: PAUL ADUNWOKE

Just like in the Clifford Orji days, both sides of the road are occupied by block-makers and gardeners; but they are only around during the day for their businesses and vacate the area once it is evening, leaving behind the mad woman alone till the dawn of the next day.
Mr. Udoh Ntiokiet, a bricklayer, who has been under the bridge for over two decades, said the woman do not appear to be insane because she relates well with them. “Most times, she is always neat and whenever her clothes are dirty, she would wash it. Whenever she roams around, she acts as if she is praying. She does not disturb people or pick things on the road.”
Udoh, however, added that it would be wrong to jump into conclusion as the woman and Clifford are behaving differently. “When Clifford was here, he was fond of putting tyres on the road at night. We could not challenge him then because it is a government road, but we have learnt our lesson. We are here to do business; we won’t allow anything that can implicate us to happen again. Clifford was a complete mad man, who was tested and confirmed to be lunatic, which was why we overlooked him.
“I lost over N80,000 after Clifford was caught as the people who thronged to this area were so disgusted wuth what they saw that they destroyed everything here, including my work tools.”

Udoh disclosed that the area is a black spot notorious for armed robbery incidents. “There are a lot of unreported robbery attacks happening here. Even during the day, people rob with motorcycles and at night, boys from Mafoluku come to hang around, trying to hide in between the flowers to rob. This is why we trim the flowers to bring it very low; we also try to open up the hill so that people would have a good view of the area.
“But government should play its part by providing adequate security. Everybody working here leave this area latest 6:30pm. Whoever you meet here after that time has a sinister mission.
Another bricklayer said the woman appears to be mentally disturbed. “I can’t see the reason why a normal human being would be taking her bath in public. I also do not think somebody who is alright would come and live all alone in the bush.”
A gardener in the area, Tony James, said the woman is there on a mission.
“I don’t believe she is a mad woman because this is a woman who takes her bath everyday. Whenever her cloth is dirty, she will buy soap and wash it immediately. Whenever she wants to cross the road, she makes sure there is no vehicle coming. I believe the woman has a mission here,” he said.