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It is the nightmare
of every security planner. But the low intensity, tit-for-tat killings
and despoliation that has been going on in Plateau State for months now
is exactly the kind of situation that unmakes even the best laid
security plan.

Locked in a vicious circle of violence and
insecurity, all that patrolling security officers are likely to see are
smiling (or scowling) faces of the people seemingly going about their
business, and after the patrol is gone, these same people launch
attacks on their neighbours in a fit of misapplied rage.

It is opportunistic. It could be unplanned. But it
is no less effective in sending terror and despair into the ranks of
perceived opponents. With the deployment of more troops to Jos and
outlying districts, this appears the only form of action that is safe
for the aggressors in the conflict.

Early last Tuesday, a horrific example of this
form of attack was carried out on a community in the state. A murderous
gang creeps on a community already asleep by 1am, rouses the people by
unleashing guns and arrows on them and creeps back under cover of
night. At the end of the killing frenzy, about 18 people – men, women
and children – lay dead.

It has also been going for far too long and the
inability of security agencies to have fashioned out a response to it
is a pointer to the fact that the crisis cannot be resolved by military
means alone. A people intent on killing one another need higher
incentives than the threat of a Spartan whiplash to make them desist
from their self destruction.

You can dispatch the entire contingent of the
Nigerian Army into the state and the killings would not stop unless the
political leaders summon the needed courage and sincerity to tackle the
underlying issues. Sadly, this political leadership has been missing at
both the local and national levels.

It is not as if the unfolding tragedy was
overlooked by government officials. President Goodluck Jonathan visited
the area about two times last year; several senior military and
civilian leaders have also been there.

Following the last major outbreak of violence in
the area in 2009, the government, both at the state and at the federal
level, constituted two panels of enquiry. Even though the last two
panels were a reflection of the sectarian trouble on the ground – the
state government expressed a lack of trust in the federal
administration then led by the late Umaru Yar’Adua – the panels managed
to collate a large body of evidence on the perceived injustices by the
two major sides in the conflict and what they expect government to do
to resolve the crisis.

It is a tragedy of leadership that no action was
taken on this until the latest outbreak, which started last year. It is
trite to mention that the longer this continues, the harder it will get
to resolve the crisis. Unfortunately, our political leaders are
distracted now. Some watchers of the cycle of outbursts say it is no
surprise that this is happening at this time, when politicians are
focused on reelection and governance has taken a back seat in their
minds.

By this weekend, some of the madness of the
campaign frenzy will have subsided with the completion of the party
primaries. The Plateau State governor has won the ticket of his party,
the Peoples Democratic Party. His estranged deputy, Pauline Tallen, and
her supporters have ensconced themselves in the Labour party. They
appear set to face off at the general election in April.

Neither would command any respect – or the right
to ask their people to vote for them – if they refuse to show
leadership in seeking a resolution to the crisis destroying their
homeland. The two politicians and the constellation of interest groups
and politicians swirling around them need to shed partisanship on this
matter for the sake of the people they seek to govern.

Of course, Mr. Jonathan also needs to be more
hands on in this case. Jos is like a tinderbox that should not be left
to smoulder for too long else it will explode and suck in other parts
of the country. He should put politics aside and tackle the crisis in
Plateau with the decisiveness it deserves. The national shame and
tragedy must be stopped.

Twenty-seven.
That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before
surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him.
Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province,
was assassinated on Tuesday – my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday –
outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.

The guard accused
of the killing, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to
protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to
officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his
car after lunch, Qadri opened fire.

Qadri and his
supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly
mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s
voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular
vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

My father’s life
was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and
remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling
Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in
the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a
writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and
freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take
kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.

One particularly
brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s
Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for
months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils
each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he
was dead. She never believed that.

Determined, she
made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and
asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he
swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a
reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns
easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.

He often quoted
verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even
if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand
for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz. Especially as
governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those
who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir
earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were
lynched by a mob in August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket
match.

After 86 members of
the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were
murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore in May, to the
great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the
survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last
summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the
homeless and building shelters.

My father believed
that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by Zia have been frequently
misused and ought to be changed. His views were widely misrepresented
to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet
Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility
by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to
happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the
blasphemy law was what drove Qadri to kill him.

There are those who
say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant
Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we
buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week
two leading conservative politicians – former Prime Minister Chaudhry
Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan –
have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they
want amendments to prevent misuse.

To say that there
was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was
brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked,
“Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis
should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the
governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?

It may sound odd,
but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he
had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands,
improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential.
He lived and died for Pakistan. To honour his memory, those who share
that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice.
We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.

Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan

© 2011 The New York Times

One
of 2010’s landmark events was Julian Paul Assange’s publication of
secret diplomatic US government cables on WikiLeaks, his whistle
blowing website-company. Nahu bis dis man sef?

Julian Paul
Assange, born 3 July 1971, is an Australian publisher, journalist,
software developer and Internet activist. Assange has worked as a
computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in
several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the
world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and
investigative journalism.

Assange founded the
WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has
published material about extra judicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste
dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, and Guantanamo Bay
procedures.

In 2010, he
published classified details about American involvement in the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media
partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. The White House
has called Assange’s release of the diplomatic cables “reckless and
dangerous”.

Assange is
currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual
offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is
currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an
extradition hearing. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed
that they are politically motivated.

Assange has
received awards and nominations for his work including the Economist
Freedom Expression Award (2008), and the Amnesty International Media
Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya. He
was most recently named Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year”. (From
Wikipedia, free Encyclopedia).

In local parlance,
what Assange has done is called tatafo or tatafo witaut waya. One who
commits such an act is also addressed as a Tatafo or Tatafo witaut
waya. The information leaked may be in favourable to one party but the
reverse for another. Julian Assange’s release of the many secrets of a
big power like America and other countries like Nigeria is definitely
not in their interest.

However, there are
individuals, non-governmental organisations and nations that are happy
about this development for reasons best known to them.

At the level of the
private individual, with particular reference to large residential
compounds or the popular fes mi a fes yu eria dem, tatafowit aut waya
is synonymous with rumour mongering. As an unsolicited act, it is
presumed as something that usually happens through the back door.

This is underscored
by the fact that in those days of the NITEL brand of analogue telephone
(called waya in Naija), any information sent through this medium was
generally presumed to be official and genuine. Information passed
outside of this medium, was perceived or described as wit aut waya (not
via the telephone) and therefore fake and capable of creating unhealthy
situations. The Americans dubbed Mr. Assange’s actions as “reckless and
dangerous”.

If you have ever
lived in big compounds wie pipul plenti, there’s no way you would have
missed seeing wetin tatafo witaut waya don du to relationships and
marital homes.

Most Tatafo witaut
waya derive pleasure in leaking secret information but not without the
following caveat: “no tok se na mi tel yu o”.

Tatafo has its bad
and good sides, but the case of Julian Assange is a different ball game
because he operates with a duly registered website branded as
“dangerous” by those opposed to his views.

Despite the fact
that the government of Goodluck Jonathan was not pleased with Julian
Assange’s leaks about Nigeria, The Guardian, one of Nigeria’s respected
newspapers has named him as the paper’s Man of the Year.

Whether for good or
bad, we have people that are averse to keeping secrets and Julian
Assange happens to be one. Another name for a Tatafo is Amebo. Julian
Assange is a komfam Amebo who could be described as Tatafo wit waya we
pas waya. Na Tatafo wit intanet. Weda pesin de du tatafo wit waya oo
not, tatafo na tatafo an na wahala fo evribodi. Nobodi send am. Kpakam!

Mr. Oribhabor is a promoter of Naija (Nigerian Pidgin), and writes from Abuja

There is something about Ogbono soup
that requires both technique and light handedness. The best Ogbono soup
that I have ever eaten is from twenty years ago. Although my mother had
taught me not to ask for seconds when eating outside our home, I asked
for thirds and was abruptly put in my place with that sort of bruising
facial expression that said that I must be very badly brought up
indeed.

Whatever! The soup was that good; well
worth the rebuff. In my mind’s eye, I can bring up the soup in vivid
palm oil colour; not moody dark brown, but beautiful turmeric, lightly
viscose, velvety and embellished with juicy fresh giant prawns.

I have to say that I wish it were not
called “Ogbono” soup. The name is just so inelegant, so heavy, so
frumpy, so mouth contortingly ugly. Even the Yoruba’s “Apon” sounds
equally malignant. It is like naming a beautiful girl without
considering how the letters that make up the name flow through the
lips… I beg your pardon, no matter how time honoured the name is, if
it doesn’t glide around the lips, it somewhat takes away from the
girl’s beauty doesn’t it?

It is a simple soup only in so far as
one considers it from the point of beginning to cook, but I think that
in order to give it its due, one needs to think back to the point of
harvesting bush mango seeds, the ridiculous incommensurate effort in
cracking open thousands and thousands of bush mangoes and saving only
little white seeds that are then dried and sold to market traders.

Ogbono seeds are a major source of
income for many communities in Cross River State. They also arrive in
Calabar from as far away as three days journey from Bamenda in
Cameroun, travelling in large old rice sacks stacked on boats. When I
buy them in N50 heaps from the market, I wonder how anyone can make a
decent living from selling these undervalued imperfect seeds. Another
N50 and I have my roughly ground Ogbono flakes courtesy of a wiry man
who works his arm vigorously at some machine that looks like it belongs
in an archeological museum. The sweetish earthy smell quickens my steps
towards home.

The secret of my Ogbono soup is that
every single ingredient is considered and reconsidered lovingly,
meticulously. Apart from my Ogbono flakes, there is my palm oil.

At Christmas, I received a present of
an eight litre keg of first grade palm oil produced by Real Plantation.
The smell of it is like that of those gorgeous cardiac arrest Ofada
stews. The palm oil is blood red not bright red, and the bottom thick
dark orange coloured sediment is no more than an inch in depth.

My fish is dry-smoked catfish, skin
removed, rehydrated in simmering boiled water. I have often written
about how much I hate the heavy fishy smell of crayfish, made much
worse by grinding it to fine powder and adding it to soups, as
fundamental as crayfish addition is to cooking in Cross River. Yet I
have to recommend some large smoked prawns (crayfish) that I was given
in Calabar.

In the first instance, they are nothing
like the dark red smoked prawns that are called crayfish in the market.
These were carefully smoked to a coral almost pink colour, and have a
delicious aroma. And instead of grinding them to fine powder, I
rehydrate them along with my catfish, thereby drowning away some of
that overwhelming fishiness.

I am not of the school of thought that
onions and Ogbono don’t go together. I in fact use one whole white
onion; expensive but well worth it for giving my Ogbono a subtler onion
flavour than the cheaper purple onion.

For heat, I use both dried and fresh
Cameroonian peppers. There is a logic to this: the fresh pepper is
added to my simmering fish and prawns to flavour and animate them. I
can risk this, since I’m, going to discard of the water and not use it
in my soup. The dry pepper, more mellowed goes into the soup proper.

For anyone wondering why I have to use
Cameroonian peppers, the answer is that they are grown in soil fertile
and dark as chocolate in Santa Mbei, and Akum and Pinyin and in
Bamenda… these peppers are special, and I have not yet found any
peppers that compare in flavour and travelling heat. Last but not least
is a bunch of organically grown Ugwu washed and shredded thinly.

My finely chopped onion, a little
garlic, ginger and a bay leaf are added to heated palm oil. Everything
is sautéed until my onions are translucent. My rehydrated fish and
crayfish are added. Some dry Cameroonian pepper is added, and water,
enough to give the impression of a watery stew. My Ogbono flakes are
mixed with a little palm oil, and then constituted with boiling water
then added to my onion fish water mixture. More and more water is added
until my desired viscosity is reached. A little salt is enough. My Ugwu
goes in at the very end, just before the soup is taken off the fire.

There is nothing left to do but to make some Garri the size of my fist… as usual, and sit and devour!

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