I was planning to have an extended morning sleep last Saturday, to make up for the rest I lost the day before on Good Friday. For where! First, I saw WhatsApp and Facebook messenger chats trickling in, which I ignored. Then came text messages, quickly followed by phone calls on my two main lines and even a call on my phone line of last resort. I wondered what the fuss was all about. Could they all be calling to wish me Happy Easter in advance? I finally saw a call that I could not ignore, from a senior politician. I sleepily answered it, and he urgently said, “Where are you now? Are you in the bushes or have you come into town”?
Which bush? I wondered. The last time I wandered in any bush was more than forty years ago, when as kids we roamed the bushes around my hometown to hunt birds, catch rats and climb wild trees to pick whatever fruit was in season. This oga solved my mystery when he said, “Have you seen the story that online newspapers posted? It is also there in Weekend Trust.” Story? Unlike in the old golden days of print newspapers when stories were only broken once a day, online newspapers in this age are posting stories 24/7. If one were to try to remain “current” with online newspaper stories these days, he will never go to sleep because every minute they have one story or another to break, many of them of dubious authenticity.
He then said, “The story that you have just founded a new terrorist group.” At that point, sleep hurriedly abandoned my eyes. What are you talking about? Me, founded a terrorist group? It suddenly reminded me of the old journalism teachers’ maxim of Five W’s and H: Who, what, where, when and how?
He finally gave me the run down. On top of Boko Haram, ISWAP, IPOB, Lakurawa, bandits, communal warriors, pipeline vandals and all other terror groups that we have in this country, a new one has just been unveiled in the North Central states of Niger and Kwara, along the shores of River Niger bordering the thick forests of the Kainji Lake National Park. I said ok, if there is a new terror group in Nigeria, what has that got to do with me? Why not call National Security Adviser Malam Nuhu Ribadu and Chief of Defence Staff General Chris Musa?
A common newspaper man like me, and before that a common Fish Biology lecturer, how is it part of my remit to fight bandits and terrorists? With what? With pen or, these days, with computer keyboards? Because old timers used to say that the pen is mightier than the sword, do you believe it? Which pen, whether a Bic biro or a Cartier, Rado or Rolex fountain pen can match the weapons in the hands of Dogo Gide, Ado Aleiro, Bello Turji or Gwaska Dan Karami, not to mention ISWAP’s bombs, IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades mounted on gun trucks?
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The new terror group is named after you. It is said that you founded it, just like Abubakar Shekau founded Boko Haram, Uwazurike founded MOSSOB and Nnamdi Kanu founded IPOB. That is why it is named after you. You gave your name to it as a brand.” In one split second, I proceeded from half asleep to lying down to sitting up in bed to kneeling on the floor to standing by the window and then rushing to the balcony. “Named after me? Which name did they use?” “Mahmuda,” he said. “That is the new terror group’s name.
I quickly began mental preparation for a possible summon to DSS headquarters for interrogation. My first alibi will be, that is not my real name. It depends on who you ask. Most of my grandparents, parents and siblings call me Mamudu. My father called me Adibu. One grandma, Shayau, used to call me Yar Mudanya. My late uncle Sule Jega, who died in the January 1973 hajj plane crash, used to call me “Gargada maza ci taya,” after a popular 1960s radio song. A few slip-tongued mates call me Mamuda. In my primary school register, my name was Mamudu. In secondary school, I modernised it to Mahmoud, after the then Arab League Secretary General Mahmoud Riad of Egypt. In secondary school, I was variously known as Debate Captain or House Prefect. At university I was called President [of the Students Union] and later Speaker [of the Students Parliament]. Later on, some people began to write my name as Mahmood. During my NYSC service year at Nnobi Girls in Anambra State, fellow teachers called me Mr. Mohammed while the students called me [Biology] Master. Later on during my working life, it occurred to me that I no longer needed any fancy spelling, so I simplified my name to Mahmud. My students at UDUS called me Malam. Other people variously call me Alhaji, Editor, Oga; one media Oga called me Living Encyclopaedia; the Deputy MD of Arise TV calls me Sheikh, while Bishop Kukah calls me Elephant Memory.
The new terror group that adopted Mahmuda as their name, did they register it at the Corporate Affairs Commission? If it is not in the comprehensive list of registered companies published by CAC, how do they claim any patent to the name? Assuming another person assumes the same name, can they claim that he infringed on their copyright? Did they publish the name in three national newspapers as required by CAC before they could register the name? My name has been with me for several decades. Quite alright it was not registered at CAC, but it was publicly announced by the town crier during my naming ceremony at Mubi. It was my father’s friend and colleague, Khadi Mahmud from Katsina, who brought a huge ram to my naming ceremony when I was seven days old and named me after himself. Was that not better than CAC registration? When CAC registers a company or an association, do they slaughter even a chicken, not to mention a whole ram?
I managed to ask the man, where is this new terror group located? He said their camps are based near the Kainji Lake National Park, somewhere astride Niger and Kwara states. Very good. Me, have I ever been to Kainji Lake National Park? During my secondary school days, a visit to the park was planned by the Quiz and Debating Society, of which I was the captain, but it was cancelled at the last minute. All the park rangers that are inside that park today, even the Airforce base at Kainji, plus the hundreds of Boko Haram members that are undergoing trials three, including the fishermen and trappers that are all over the Niger riverside, and even the engineers of Mainstream Energy genco that is operating the Jebba and Kainji dams, did anyone of them ever see me there? Just because I used to teach undergraduate courses in Chordate Biology, Embryology, Hydrobiology, Fish Biology, Ecology, Taxonomy, Systematics and Evolutionary Biology, is that enough reason to link me to River Niger, Kainji Lake Park and any terrorist group lurking alongside them?
Am I the first person in Nigeria whose name resembled that of a terrorist group? Why are people not making jest of Brigadier General Muhammadu Buba Marwa? Is it because he is a soldier, who heads the Drug Law Enforcement Agency, and you fear that its agents can rope you in for alleged drug offences, and it will take you years to wriggle out of it? His name closely resembles that of the late Alhaji Muhammadu Marwa, alias Maitatsine, who in 1980 turned Kano City’s Yan Awaki Quarters into a living hell, until Army Brigade Commander Colonel Y.Y. [Yohanna Yerima] Kure and Operations Commander Major Haliru Akilu moved in and dislodged him.
Even after Yan Awaki, Maitatsine’s supporters staged violent uprisings at Maiduguri’s Bulunkutu ward and at Kaduna’s Tudun Wada quarters in 1982, followed by a major uprising in Yola in 1984, and then another one in Gombe in 1985, and finally one at Funtua in 1993. I covered the latter as a reporter for Citizen magazine. There was a motor mechanic in Sokoto called Musa. I once went to him in the late 1980s and said, “Musa Mechanic, please come and check my car.” He flared up! The leader of Yola 1984 uprising was Musa Makanike!
I know a man in Kaduna whose name was Mohammed Yusuf. After the Boko Haram founder was extra-judiciary executed in 2009, the man raced to an Imam’s house, bought a ram, collected nine brothers and friends and asked the Imam to announce his new name as Mukhtari Idris Dangaladima Rijau, as far away from the former name as possible. There was a young man on social media who used to stylishly call himself al-Barnawi, meaning from Borno. When his namesake emerged as leader of ISWAP, he hurriedly changed his name to Mai Modu Idirissa Maiduguri.
Among the people who called at the weekend to make jest of me as a new terror group leader is the Chief Executive Officer of Daily Trust, Ahmed Shekarau. Remove the “ra” from his surname and it becomes Shekau, the most blood thirsty terrorist leader that ever walked the Nigerian landscape. During a visit to Rwanda in 2012, the hotel desk man printed Shekarau’s name on the room keycard as Shekau! He picked race and demanded a change, lest Interpol come after him as an internationally wanted terrorist. I have already sent a letter to the Daily Trust editor, asking her to change the company’s management staff line up on the editorial page and reflect the GCEO’s new name as Abu Muhammad ibn Muhammad Ahmad al-Shekarawi.
Is it only in Nigeria? You mean there is no one else in USA called Jim Jones [of People’s Temple], no one else in Texas called David Koresh [of Waco], no one else in Britain called Gerry Adams [of the Provos], no one else in Germany called Andreas Baeder or Ulrike Meinhoff, no one else in Italy called Renato Curcio [of Red Brigades] and no one else in Japan called Shoko Asahara [of Aum Shinrikyo]?
I have now sent a petition to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, His Excellency Ambassador Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, By The Grace of God the next Governor of Bauchi State, to help me send a diplomatic circular to all the foreign embassies in Nigeria and advise that Mahmud Muhammadu Jega is NOT the founder of the new terrorist group Mahmuda, and that any assumed similarity in the two names is purely coincidental.
