Same villainous estimation is heaped on his wife, influential Colonial Editor of The Times, Miss Flora Louise Shaw, over her choice of Nigeria as name in a piece she wrote for Times on January 8, 1897. In her preference for “Nigeria” ahead of other choices like “Sudan,” “Royal Niger Company Territories,” “Central Sudan,” as well as earlier name suggestions like Negrettia and Goldesia, many conservatives believe that Nigeria’s stagnation is traceable to Miss Shaw’s christening.

One of those who recently poured vitriol on Lugard for yoking together unequals is Head Pastor of the House on The Rock Church, Pastor Paul Adefarasin. In a sermon delivered by him and which went viral, Adefarasin labeled Lugard a “devil incarnate” – an expression derived from William Shakespeare’s Henry V – for soldering together Nigeria’s Northern and Southern protectorates, in spite of their disparities of mind, incongruent cultures, dissimilar beliefs and worldviews. This forced unity is perceived to be the foundation of Nigeria’s interminable and intractable challenges.

John Riddick, in his Master’s thesis entitled Sir Fredrick Lugard, World War 1 and the Amalgamation of Nigeria 1914-1919, submitted to the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan in August, 1966, said that, between 1886 and 1900, Britain, through its nineteenth century chartered mercantile company founded in 1879 by Tubman Goldie named the United African Company, renamed National African Company in 1881 and Royal Niger Company in 1886, explored Nigeria’s interior resources. In 1894, the Royal Niger Company gave Lugard the task to obtain a treaty with Borgu, on a western Nigerian border and he subsequently got another offer from the British West Charterland Company for the exploration of mineral concessions in Lake Ngami in Bechuanaland. Her Majesty, in 1897, also made him Commissioner for the Hinterland of Nigeria, with the responsibility for raising the West African Frontier Force.

By 1912, in the words of Riddick, the Colonial Office had concluded that the amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates had to happen. This was because, while the Southern protectorate was recording huge budget surpluses, the north was bedeviled by deficit and crippling Britain which had to subsidize its operations to the tune of about 400 pounds. Southern Protectorate’s annual budget surplus was thus needed to save Britain of the northern drainpipes.

The marriage was consummated in Zungeru, present Niger State, a sparsely populated town of railwaymen and civil servants working for the colonial administration. Zungeru, then capital of colonial administration in Northern Nigeria before it was relocated to Kaduna, was not just where the documents that brought Nigeria into existence were signed, for a brief period, Zungeru served as Nigeria’s capital in the hands of Lugard. According to late British historian, Africanist and human rights activist, Stephen Ellis, a short ceremony consisting of a military parade was held on this day inside a shack that was then Lugard’s office, a place which, like anything Nigerian, is now in total ruins.

In the words of Elis, speaking in a “high-pitched voice,” “clipped assent,” and “strangled vowels characteristic of British upper classes in the age of empire,” Lugard announced that “His Majesty the King has decided that… all the country… shall be one single country.” Ellis however believed that His Majesty King George V, being a mere ceremonial figurehead of the British parliamentary system of government, never personally sent Lugard on this amalgamation expedition but that the soldier, who had earlier in 1907 been the Governor of Hong Kong, with the assistance of his influential journalist mistress, Miss Shaw, lobbied the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Levis Vernon Harcourt, in whose memory Port Harcourt was named, to get this amalgamation consummated. That union has since brought so much bile, prickly hurts and tears to Nigerians. Lamenting amalgamation’s destructive tendencies, Northern Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had quipped that “God did not create Nigeria; the British did.”

For the benefit of Adefarasin and Nigerian religionists who heap expletives on Lugard, the choice of Fredrick by Britain as “the only man who could successfully inaugurate the (amalgamation) policy” was as a result of his competence. His ability and experience were due to the fact that he had spent the greater part of his life in various parts of Africa, especially having worked in East Africa’s Buganda, the principal Kingdom of Uganda and Lake Nyansa. Lugard was also born of Anglican missionary parents in Southern India. His mother, ex-Mary Jane Howard, labored in the vineyard of the Church Missionary Society while his father, Frederick Grueber Lugard, was a chaplain who served the Madras section of an East India Company. Jane was pious, devoted to Christianity and this was said to have been transposed to his son, Frederick who was reputed for “affection and Christian ardor throughout most of his life.” While Frederick inherited from his father “the heritage of great physical strength and tenacity” he would need this in his subsequent endurance of the “climatic extremes and the rigors of his efforts in Africa.”

I went into all the above resume of Lugard’s to tease out the fact that he was a damn good officer who came to Nigeria to do a job which he did satisfactorily, to the admiration of Britain, his employer. Britain obviously didn’t embark on amalgamation because it loved Nigeria or with Nigeria’s bright future in view. In fact, if you asked Lugard while alive, he would likely tell you that Christ sent him on the mission, just like Adefarasin and other religious leaders do in claiming this as motive for their exploitation of the poverty-stricken minds of the Africans. By the way, upon retirement in 1919, Lugard left Nigeria and settled to a life of writing and contributions to the British society.

Since his exit, Nigeria has been visited by worse internal colonialist afflictions ever. This came in the form of “big fat tummy” soldiers in huge military epaulettes, babanriga and agbada-wearing civilians “with necks like ostrich” – apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti – who are worse than Lugard and who gawked while Nigeria collapsed gradually. The latest among this gang is one led by Muhammadu Buhari. Were they to be as half committed to duty, half dedicated to the ideal of their offices as Lugard was, Nigeria would certainly not be in her present quagmire. So, still holding a man who left Nigeria to her fate almost a century ago, a man who didn’t hide the fact that he was an emissary of a rapacious colonial behemoth, Britain in her quest to better the lot of Her Majesty’s England and not necessarily some conquered territory reputed not to have the ability to govern themselves, is not only escapist, it is silly.

Yes, we may argue, as Adefarasin insinuated, that what Britain bequeathed onto Nigeria was quicksand, a shell if you like, upon which she was expected to erect an edifice. However, since 1960, Nigeria has had the opportunity to dismantle the makeshift, hamstringing colonial structure, both mentally and physically and build an enduring skyscraper. For the sake of argument still, we may say that between Kaduna Nzeogwu, Aguiyi Ironsi and successive military opportunists who used a combination of their youthful exuberance and naivety to destroy the today of Nigeria, we had villains who thwarted Nigeria’s effort at a great country. However, the teething animosities of Nigeria’s civilian rulers too contributed immensely in quashing Nigeria’s growth. The leaders were not only shortsighted; they were corrupt, wasteful and lacked vision. It is said that, among a succession of Nigerian rulers, an estimated $20 billion was stolen from Nigerian public coffers in 30 years, more than total of aids to the country in same number of years. Did Lugard give them the stealing technique? Did he opaque their vision? Were they sub-human? Leaving all these, the most fundamental question to ask today is, what has happened in the last unbroken 22 years of civilian administration in Nigeria?

Apart from the Olusegun Obasanjo government’s squandering of opportunities to set Nigeria on the path of greatness, the health failings of Umaru Yar’Adua, the gross lack of depth of Goodluck Jonathan and the ethnically bigoted mental constitution of the Buhari government, a major reason why Nigerians, not Lugard, should be blamed for why the country has never grown beyond its Lilliputian size, is the opera on display at the National Assembly biosphere in the last few weeks. It was at the national legislators’ attempt to consider the controversial section 52(3) Electoral Act via an Amendment Bill.

As I watched the grisly opera, in my mind, I thanked Waliu Ismaila, a Shaki, Oyo State-born Nigerian doctoral student who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, who sent me two books – How To Rig An Election, by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas; This Present Darkness: A history of Nigerian organized crime by Stephen Ellis. Those two books explain the shame of the electoral act amendment, the Petroleum Industry Bill and even Lai Mohammed’s remote-controlled amendments to the Nigerian Press Council (NPC) Act, as well as the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Act.

Looking at the universe of elections in the world, Cheeseman and Klaas said that election rigging begins with rigging of election laws. In other words, elections are not rigged basically at the polls but from its fundamentals; its laws. According to the authors, there is a growing cult of counterfeit democrats, especially in Africa, who ensure that elections are incapable of delivering democracy. We now have an equation of rigged elections that don’t succeed in toppling dictators but which help to keep them in power through electoral manipulations. Said the authors, “Thirty years ago, the main aim of the average dictator was to avoid holding elections; today, it is to avoid losing… sophisticated authoritarian regimes begin manipulating the polls well before voting begins.” This is true of Section 52(3) of Nigeria’s Electoral Act.

The truism subsists that any nation that gets its election process right is on the path of a democratic Eldorado. However, since elections give birth to democracy, dictators of yore have moved into the maternity ward to tamper with the births. It is obvious that, for many of the Nigerian political elite, it is not in their interest for the country to get better. As a matter of fact, in free and fair elections, most of them cannot win. It is reason why Section 52(3), which says “The Commission (INEC) may transmit results of elections by electronic means where and when practicable,” which gives INEC total discretion on when to deploy electronic transmission of results needed to be hijacked and put in the hands of a malleable executive accomplice, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

No wonder why the Electoral Act now arrived at the dangerous juncture of an amendment that reads: “the commission may consider electronic transmission provided the national network coverage is adjudged to be adequate and secure by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and approved by the National Assembly.” What that means is that our electoral destiny is in the hands of Mullah Isa Pantami Ali Ibrahim, also known as Sheikh Pantami, a man for whom no one else deserves to live except Mullahs and extremists. Did Lugard vote in that spurious and unconscionable amendment?

It is why, with due respect to highly revered Pastor Adefarasin, his slipping into the usual Nigerian false piety of externalizing our national problem nauseates. His religious constituency has underdeveloped Nigeria more than Lugard and his colonial clique did since the soldier-colonialist left Nigeria in 1919. On Sundays, nay, every day of the week, the church and mosque colonize the people’s minds, using the instrumentality of religion as unseen manacles. In terms of shedding of the blood of Nigeria, Nigerian religionists are not different from each of the legislators who voted against the electronic transmission of election results. They are enemies of Nigeria, worse than Lord Lugard and are united by treachery.

In saner societies, Orji Uzor Kalu, Teslim Folarin, Ajibola Basiru and all others in that category deserve to be consigned to the gallows of public disdain. What they inflicted on Nigeria’s electoral sanity is worse than the violence of an insurgent. Like the double-edged sword that violence is on both victim and victimizer, as they stabbed the voting process, they and us are equally dehumanized. Frantz Fanon, in his The Wretched of the Earth, puts the mutual stab and mutual dripping of blood on both of us succinctly. Aime Cesaire, Francophone and Afro-Caribbean author, politician and poet, one of Francophone founders of the Négritude movement, who in fact coined the word “negritude” in French, also treated same theme of our mutual dehumanization in his Discourse on Colonialism. Fannon said that, as French soldiers who tortured Algerian poor later lapsed into extreme neurosis, committing suicide thereafter, the blood that Nigeria’s national legislators spilled from our electoral corpus belongs to us all as a collective. Borrowing from Bukola Elemide, a.k.a. Asa, both of us – jailer and the jailed – are prisoner

If, according to the team from NCC, led by a Ubale Maska, which briefed the legislators on deployment of electronic transmission of election results in Nigeria, only 50.3% of the 109,000 polling units surveyed by INEC in 2018 had 3G/2G network coverage, while 40% had only 2G and 10% lack network of any category and only 3G/2G combination is capable of transmission of results, why can’t the legislators mandate NCC to aggressively upgrade the networks? When you add this to the naive, simplistic and superficial argument of some of the jaundiced-minded legislators who claim that electronic transmission is vulnerable to cyber-attacks and hacking as reason for their voting against it, then you will understand why Jesus wept for Nigeria last week. You will equally realize why Nigeria has been sentenced to an interminable walk in the darkness of the night, a la South African writer, Alex La Guma.

Dr. Festus Adedayo, writes from Ibadan

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Italy have beaten England on penalties to win the Euro 2020, denying the Three Lions their first major trophy in 55 years. 

The Italians defeated England 3-2 on penalties in Sunday’s Euro 2020 final as Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka missed in the shoot-out following a 1-1 draw after extra time at Wembley.

England’s defender Luke Shaw (R) celebrates after scoring the first goal during the UEFA EURO 2020 final football match between Italy and England at the Wembley Stadium in London on July 11, 2021. Andy Rain / POOL / AFP

Luke Shaw scored for England inside two minutes, the fastest ever goal in a European Championship final, but Leonardo Bonucci bundled in an equaliser at a corner midway through the second half.

Needing to score to keep England alive in the shoot-out, Saka’s spot-kick was saved by Italy goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma as the Azzurri won the tournament for the second time.

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Italy, Wales, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, England, Croatia, Czech Republic, Sweden, France, Ukraine, Spain

Last-16 fixtures:

Saturday, June 26

In Amsterdam

Wales v Denmark (1600)

In London

Italy v Austria (1900)

Sunday, June 27

In Budapest

Netherlands v Czech Republic (1600)

In Seville, Spain

Belgium v third-placed team (1900)

Monday, June 28

In Copenhagen

Croatia v Spain (1600)

In Bucharest

Group F winners v third-placed team

Tuesday, June 29

In London

England v Group F runners-up

In Glasgow, Scotland

Sweden v third-placed team

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Fans could be in English stadiums for the final weekend of the Premier League season and there are hopes Wembley may be packed for the Euro 2020 final under plans to ease coronavirus restrictions unveiled on Monday.

The British government’s roadmap to easing a nationwide lockdown means elite sport will continue behind closed doors until at least May 17.

If there are no setbacks during the implementation of the four-stage plan, crowds of up to 10,000 or 25 percent of seated capacity, whichever is lower, will be allowed to return.

The Premier League season is due to finish on May 23. Other than a small number of matches played in front of 2,000 spectators late last year, the entire 2020/21 season has been played behind closed doors.

All further restrictions would then be lifted on June 21 in time for a series of major sports events in England.

The semi-finals and final of Euro 2020, which has been delayed by a year due to the pandemic, are scheduled to take place at Wembley from July 6 to 11.

Wimbledon, which was abandoned in 2020 for the first time since World War II, is due to start on June 28.

Golf’s British Open runs from July 15 to 18 at Royal St George’s in Kent.

Monday’s announcement is the first big step towards restoring normal life, nearly a year after Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed the first of three stay-at-home orders that have devastated the country and its economy.

Johnson told MPs that with a mass vaccination programme easing pressure on overstretched hospitals, “the end really is in sight”.

A Sunday Times report at the weekend said Britain could offer to host more Euro 2020 matches or the whole tournament due to the potential for crowds to return earlier than in other countries across Europe.

On top of the semi-finals and final, Wembley and Hampden Park in Glasgow are due to host four matches each in the group stages and last 16.

UEFA has so far publicly insisted it is sticking to the original plan of using 12 host cities across the continent despite the logistical challenges.

Dublin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Saint Petersburg, Bilbao, Munich, Budapest, Baku, Rome and Bucharest are all due to host matches.

However, British health secretary Matt Hancock said on Sunday he was unaware of any offer to host the tournament.

Hancock told Sky News: “I haven’t seen anything on that, I understand that that’s not right.”

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The measures, which include the closure of primary and secondary schools, will come into effect Wednesday, he said in a televised address, after Scotland announced similar measures would come into force from midnight (0000 GMT) on Tuesday.

Some 44 million people or three-quarters of the population of England are already living under the toughest restrictions, as Britain grapples with one of the worst mortality rates from coronavirus in the world.

But they have failed to halt an upward trend in positive cases, which have been blamed on a more infectious new variant.

Johnson said that as of Monday, almost 27,000 people with Covid were in hospital — 40 percent more than at the peak of first wave of the outbreak on April last year.

Last Tuesday, more than 80,000 people tested positive in just 24 hours.

“With most of the country already under extreme measures, it’s clear that we need to do more, together, to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” he said.

“In England, we must therefore go into a national lockdown.”

The new measures are similar to those during the first, three-month lockdown from late March to June last year.

They include the closure of schools, working from home wherever possible, limits on leaving home, except for exercise, essential shopping and for medical supplies, and no household mixing.

A decision on whether to hold annual national exams for 16- and 18-year-olds will be made after consultations between the education secretary and qualifications bodies, said Johnson.

Shortly before Johnson’s announcement, the four chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said the country had moved to the highest coronavirus level five.

That means the state-run National Health Service is at risk of being overwhelmed within 21 days if no action is taken.

Johnson said he hoped the restrictions could start to be lifted after the next school holidays in mid-February, and acknowledged the weeks ahead “will be the hardest yet”.

But he said he was encouraged by the roll-out of two Covid vaccines, including one developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, which could see the four most vulnerable groups inoculated in the next six weeks.

“With every jab that goes into our arms, we are tilting the odds against Covid and in favour of the British people,” he added.

Source: AFP

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The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) confirmed Moses’ arrival on their verified Twitter handle, stating also that all the expected Eagles players are in camp now.

“Victor Moses has joined the team in camp. Everybody is in now,” the NFF tweeted.

https://iso.keq.mybluehost.me/moscow-hit-with-unprecedented-booze-ban-for-2018-world-cup/

With Moses, the team now has 26 players in camp, including the doubtful Moses Simon who is battling with a thigh injury.

Moses who won the Emirates FA Cup with Chelsea should be in contention for a starting place when the Eagles face England.

The Eagles departed Abuja for London on Wednesday after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari.

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Abraham, who is on loan at Swansea City from Chelsea, has been called up by Aidy Boothroyd ahead of the Euro 2019 qualifiers against Scotland and Andorra next month.

The striker had met with the president of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) and the African nation were optimistic of persuading him to play for them.

But Abraham, who has three goals in nine under-21 caps having also played at Euro 2017 this summer, insisted he remained available for England.

“I can confirm I met the President of the NFF after our last game against Tottenham at Wembley on Saturday given he is a friend of my father.

“However, any suggestion that I have made a decision to change my international representation is incorrect and wide of the mark.

“I have informed the FA that I remain available for selection for England,” he said.

Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Nottingham Forest’s Joseph Worrall and goalkeeper Dean Henderson, on loan at Shrewsbury from Manchester United, are the uncapped trio in the group.

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