Nigeria Content Online

The military and
other emergency workers struggled against time and nature on Sunday to
reach at least 10,000 people trapped by collapsed bridges and flooded
roads and threatened by rising water brought by the worst monsoon rains
in Pakistan’s history.

The army announced
Sunday night that it had reached up to 20,000 people, but the
government’s response to the disaster – which has already claimed
hundreds of lives – has been widely assailed as slow and inadequate.
Criticism was further fed by a decision by President Asif Zardari,
already deeply unpopular, to leave the country this week for political
talks in Europe.

“We’re out of
bridges, so it’s the necessity of time to reach them by air,” said
Adnan Khan, an official at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority
of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, who called the situation “very
urgent.”

The crisis is
especially catastrophic in Swat, once famed as a tourist valley, where
the army defeated militants last year. Local leaders said at least 900
Swatis have died, and nearly all the bridges that the army built after
last year’s war have collapsed.

Officials said at
least 10,000 people were stranded in Upper Swat and Dir Ismail Khan,
which were inaccessible by road because 40 bridges had fallen. Efforts
were under way to erect temporary spans, but officials were skeptical
that they could be built in time.

Estimates of the
total death toll on Sunday ranged up to 1,100, although the national
government put the figure at 730. The nation’s largest and most
respected private rescue service, the Edhi Foundation, predicted the
death toll would reach 3,000.

The great disparity
in numbers reflects the challenge facing the government and other
emergency workers struggling to reach isolated areas and to gain
reliable information.

Officials said the
deluge was the worst since 1929 – 18 years before Pakistan gained
independence – in what is now the country’s northwest, where water
levels at dams continued to rise.

The growing
frustration with the government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is a large blow
to Islamabad, which is often criticised for being disconnected from the
needs of the people in the province, which represents a pivotal
battleground against the Islamic insurgency.

For the past year,
the government and the military have been engaged in a “hearts and
minds” campaign to restore public services after fighting displaced
more than three million people last year. But reconstruction efforts
have been painfully slow, and the public mood has shifted from
frustrated to furious.

The demanding
relief effort in the coming days and weeks will provide yet another
test for the government to nurture the population in the nation’s
northwest. Last summer, during the mass displacement, Pakistani
authorities refused to allow American officials and planes to deliver
aid to the refugee camp. The authorities did not want to be associated
with their unpopular ally.

In the absence of
effective government aid, hard-line Islamist charities pounced, using
aid to sour public opinion against the war and the United States.

Pakistani TV showed
entire villages under water, and dozens of bridges and roadways ravaged
across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which has been economically decimated by
terrorism in recent years.

In the village of
Torwali Bahrain in Upper Swat, the market was washed away, leaving more
than 1,200 people with minimal food and no government assistance,
according to the Swat Peace Council, an independent advocacy group.

Adnan Khan, the
provincial disaster official, said it might take up to four days to
reach people cut off without food and drinking water.

The Pakistani
military said it had dispatched more than 30,000 troops to rescue
survivors in boats and, using about 35 helicopters, by air. Officials
said helicopters were delivering food to clusters of people and
returning with small groups of survivors.

The United States said it would offer $10 million for relief, and said it provided 50,000 meals on Sunday.

Many survivors
sought refuge in schools. But just 20 miles from the regional capital,
Peshawar, displaced people were lying along the road without tents,
food or assistance, except for boiled rice from nearby villagers.

A U.N. warehouse
storing rations in Nowshera was under four feet of water, but through
other warehouses, the organization managed to feed about 21,000 people
on Sunday.

Fazl Maula Zahid, a
regional manager at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Swat, said
100,000 acres of soil along the Swat River had been washed out. He said
it would take up to 10 years to restore the fertility of this critical
area that feeds 50,000 people.

“These lands will be changed into desert,” Zahid said. “And you know what kind of plant can be planted in a desert? Nothing!”

“It was a big disaster,” Khan said. “Our infrastructure over the last 50 years has been washed away.”

It is the first
week in August, and I have a newfound passion for scent leaf, wild
basil, ocimum gratissimum, clove basil, efirin; whatever you like to
call it. In Calabar, it is raining almost every day, and the pineapples
are bursting with tangy sweet juice, they arrive in the house on stems
as thick as a man’s arm; the corn is absurdly fresh, giving way under
your fingers and the plantains are yellow and fragrant when ripe.

Even when it isn’t
raining, the flame of the forest is swaying its own rain of pollen. It
might be why they say Calabar people can’t get their minds off matters
pertaining to the appetites. At every turn, I want to put something in
my mouth.

Scent leaf can be
grown by a toddler in this environment. It is as aggressive, as
prolific as a weed. A thick bush of it costs nothing more than fifty
naira, and the taste of it is complex, bitter, sweet, minty, earthy,
like basil, like cloves, like soil and rain mixed together. Its
complexity confuses even scientific categorisation. There is a tonic
made out of it that is said to alleviate if not cure absolutely
everything that goes wrong with the human body.

On the Internet it is linked to erectile dysfunction, malaria, diabetes, sickle cell anaemia, salmonella poisoning etc.

Plantain porridge
is a delicacy for the Ikom people. Their own version is cooked with
grass cutter (bush meat) and green unripe plantains. My first plate of
plantain porridge was given to me after a long period of anticipation
in which I imagined that the porridge was made from ripe plantains. I
have never successfully overcome that first disappointment.

Green plantains are
a chore for me to eat. They don’t taste of anything, and if the
plantains are not very good ones, then they taste like cardboard. It is
so much a bone of contention that I have had many back and forth
arguments on the matter with people who I suppose have acquired a taste
for it over lifetimes where there was no contention that plantain
porridge is made from unripe plantains.

I begged Theresa,
the lady who came to teach me to cook this dish, to include ripe as
well as unripe plantains. Grass cutter is of course one of the reasons
why this dish is a delicacy. It isn’t meat that one can just go to the
market and buy, so our version had to be made with goat meat.

It didn’t take long
for Theresa to become exasperated with me; first I wanted ripe
plantains, then I said she couldn’t cook with Maggi, and then we
discovered that I didn’t have any crayfish in the house. She put the
washed goat meat at the bottom of a large pot with a chopped large
onion; garlic, ginger and plenty of hot peppers blended with water, and
salt.

The meat was left
to boil until very soft. Half a bunch of green plantains were peeled,
cut into small pieces and put aside, as well as my requested ripe
plantains. A large bunch of scent leaf was washed rolled up and
shredded into strips with a knife; prepared towards the very end of
cooking.

The body of a
rolled-up smoked fish, head removed, washed with salt and hot water,
bones removed, was added to the pot of goat meat with the plantains,
plenty of water and what seemed like a whole container of red palm oil.
(More exasperation and rolling of eyeballs at my request that the oil
be used in moderation).

More salt was added
as seasoning, the porridge was left to thicken, plantains softening and
adding fragrance and body. At the very end of cooking, the scent leaf
was stirred in, the heat turned off so the leaf wouldn’t cook but keep
its texture and freshness.

I must tell what it
is like to eat this porridge…I have met a few people who claim that
they don’t get full when they eat pasta or ogi or potatoes, I didn’t
believe them until I ate my plantain porridge…What it did in terms of
expanding my stomach was nothing less than astonishing, and I have
never been one to eat large portions of food.

The more porridge I ate, the hungrier I became. My ripe plantains
gave the porridge that beautiful balance of sweet and savoury that I
like in my food. It also gave my palate the playful quest of finding
that odd sweet mouthful among many savoury mouthfuls. The hot
stodginess of the mashed plantains and fish and oil made me find a
comfortable chair in the house where I tucked my legs under my body and
just ate for what seemed like hours. The smell of the palm oil, the
flesh of the he-goat, the minty basil smell of scent leaf completely
intoxicated me. This is not food that I can eat regularly. I would
become that quintessential fat Efik female that Yorubas affectionately
call Iya Calabar.

The South African
newspaper The Star went one step ahead in its reporting of the 15 year
sentence for Jackie Selebi a former head of police, president of
Interpol and struggle veteran, as activists in the fight against
apartheid are called.

Reporter Shaun
Smilie tracked down ex convict and gangster Allen Heyl and asked him
what the former top cop should expect in prison.

Heyl who has spent
a total of 27 years behind bars told Smilie that Selebi must, “speak no
evil, see no evil, hear no evil. Don’t trust anyone, don’t stick your
nose in anyone’s business and hope to find a friend soon.” Heyl added
that if he was well behaved Selebi could expect to get privileges such
as a radio and iron in time, but on the whole former president of
Interpol could count on getting ‘the best of what hell can offer.”

Judge Meyer Joffe
who announced his retirement from the bench minutes after he handed
down the sentence for corruption covered all the bases in the statement
he delivered. It was a measured preamble that traced the arguments for
and against incarceration as a form of deterrence, cited previous cases
and laid down precedent, examined the religious, philosophical
foundations of the concept of mercy and its place in the implementation
of justice.

Meyer went back to
Selebi’s acceptance speech when he was appointed Commissioner of Police
by his friend and protector former president Thabo Mbeki and
recalledthat the man did understand the importance of his role as the
country’s chief law officer and the weight of the position he was sworn
to uphold.

Selebi he said had
insulted the court with his mendacity and rubbished the honour of the
lowly men who put their lives on the line for a salary that was a
fraction of the sums he was receiving monthly in bribes from his
convicted drug smuggling friend Glen Agliotti. Meyer excoriated Selebi
for his lack of respect for the court’s processes and reserved his most
biting criticism for Selebi’s arrogance and lack of remorse for what he
had done.

The conclusion was unavoidable: no one is above the law, not even a hero of the struggle for freedom and human rights.

In fact especially
not a hero of the struggle for freedom: Selebi has gone from prisoner
of conscience to one imprisoned for graft. The system of justice and
accountability is still working.

South Africa can in
spite of the battle now being waged for the moral centre of the
political imperative, still draw these parallels: such a one would be
the timeline of events running from a now more beatified than ever
Nelson Mandela to a Jacob Zuma, a tale of two opposites if there ever
was one. Is it not remarkable that the more time passes the more heroic
Mandela seems?

No one coming
behind matches him and the high energy invested in finding more ways to
sanctify him simply throws into even starker relief the emptiness
around.

There is a strong
feeling that the ANC has lost, or is in the process of losing its moral
and ethical compass, just as much as there is the sense that the blame
for this can be shared all round to the pro-Mbeki and pro-Zuma factions
and all others in between currently jostling and kicking under that
great umbrella.

But foundations
laid can be refurbished; aspiring new generation leaders have a
precedent to follow, and a history of sacrifice and service to call
upon for inspiration and rebirth.

When will such
simple lessons penetrate the consciousnesses of Nigeria’s current crop
of government officials: good and bad, right and wrong, crime and
punishment?

Corruption in high
office for our Inspector Generals is treated, with retirement and a
lump sum of benefits, if at all. Once you have guzzled your fill you
are politely asked to move aside for someone else to get a turn.
Ill-gotten gains are not questioned. Declarations of assets remain
secret. Governor and legislators fight like urchins to claim
responsibility for a tiny bridge that someone else initiated as if
there are not enough projects crying out to be done!

And the irony is
lost on them in the money grubbing haze that overtakes their senses. In
October the bunch that cannot provide pipe-borne water and electricity,
will cut the biggest 50th anniversary cake in the world.

A cake to beat all cakes from those who specialise in devouring, not baking, the national cake.