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It is two years
this month since Abayomi Ogundeji was gunned down by unidentified
assailants on his way from work. If anyone expected the Nigeria Police
to find his killers, the expectation was in vain as it would have
amounted to asking the Police not to be what it is – an incompetent
force.

Abayomi was a
friend. I knew him since 1992 just after our national youth service. I
first met him when he joined the African Guardian as a budding
reporter. It did not take long for Abayomi to prove the stuff he was
made of. He distinguished himself as a writer to watch. When the
Babangida government closed down The Guardian newspapers as part of its
destructive agenda for Nigeria, Abayomi joined us at Theweek magazine
in 1995 and our friendship blossomed. With the likes of the late Godwin
Agbroko and Muyiwa Akintunde as editor and deputy Editor, Abayomi’s
writing style found vent.

He returned to The
Guardian later and thereafter moved to The Punch where he became its
features editor and The Comet as its Sunday editor. After about three
years as editor, Abayomi quit in 2005 saying he was done with
mainstream journalism and started a media consultancy. His first major
client was Tokunbo Afikuyomi. Given who Abayomi was, it was
unsurprising that the relationship did not last. He then became a
publicist to Femi Pedro, Bola Tinubu’s deputy governor, and this ended
after the 2007 governorship elections.

Abayomi returned to
journalism as a member of Thisday editorial board. He had hardly made
his mark there when he was killed by agents of darkness; in the same
manner Agbroko, Thisday’s former editorial board chairman was killed.
No doubt, the police have forgotten about Agbroko’s case, a trend that
started in 1986 with the murder of Dele Giwa.

Abayomi had this
easy flow with words and communicated in a way that distinguished him
as an intellectual. I am, however, not remembering him today because of
his writings but because of who he was and what he stood for. We shared
a lot in common, principally the state of the nation. We often agonized
about Nigeria, why we are not where we should be and why we are good at
manufacturing bad leaders.

Abayomi was a
humanist, an intellectual and a patriot. He studied history at the
University of Ibadan. He loved life. Though a Baptist from Ogbomoso, it
was not until late 2007 that I knew that he was named Paul.

When I teased him
that ‘Paul’ did not fit the near-Marxist Abayomi, he responded, “I am
not only Paul; I was a soprano in the church choir in Ogbomoso where I
grew up! Father was the head of the ushers; mother a deaconess.
Religion suffused my background, as Ogbomoso people are Baptists.

Yet I became a
Marxist at the first opportunity to be independent in University of
Ibadan. Now, I am back as an aspiring capitalist and, you never know,
possibly a pastor as old age knocks. See, we will become our fathers!”
The killers’ bullets aborted these dreams.

After I left Lagos,
we lost touch, but during the period, Abayomi married Jennifer, a
banker from Edo State. Before he was killed at 40, they had two sons, a
scenario regarding which he humoured that his wife “is petitioning the
Girls’ Guide in preparation for the third child!” His is a great loss
to his immediate family, friends, colleagues, and the nation at large.
Worse, his killers still prowl the land unmolested. To think that
journalists, who are very visible, could get killed without the
criminals being apprehended signposts the precarious security situation
in Nigeria. Often, people blame the poor handling of crime in Nigeria
on the lack of adequate funding for the Police. Nothing could be
farther from the truth.

I argue that the
police is over-funded relative to most other sectors. In yearly
budgets, provision to the NPF in particular and security/defence in
general, is one of the highest.

But two main
reasons, corruption in the police and high rate of unemployment, make
the Force unable to discharge its constitutional responsibilities. The
National Bureau of Statistics has put the number of unemployed
Nigerians at 12 million by December 2009. That is a time bomb, a ready
army for crime of all shades. So, most of the jobless youths go into
one form of crime or the other for survival.

Governments are not
providing jobs. For example the Niger Delta states receive 13%
derivation with nonexistent employment opportunities.

Except in one or
two states, unemployment is high. But these are states that receive
several billions of naira monthly from the federation account. Much of
the money is used to provide luxury facilities to be enjoyed by 1
percent of the states’ population.

The National Bureau
of Statistics records show that the national unemployment rate as at
March 2009 was 19.7% (of people aged 15 to 64), a steep rise over the
14.9% figure in the corresponding period in 2008.

In the absence of
social security, it is only when unemployment is brought to the lowest
level that crime can reduce and the police can adequately fight it. It
is only when the police are able to arrest perpetrators of crimes that
we can safely say that the likes of Abayomi Ogundeji did not die in
vain.