EXCUSE ME: Nervous conditions

On Thursday morning before 11am, things were already up in the air. These days of Blackberry, news travels faster than rumours. A friend sent me the message ‘Police HQ blasted in Abuja' and there were accompanying images of the building covered by thick smoke and flames. Apparently, somebody, or a group, wants to send a message and make it very clear by striking at the very heart of the Nigerian police force that is supposed to protect the country. It is now obvious to us that the crocodile cannot protect its own eggs; therefore, the chicken must be on super alert. The more I looked at the images that soon started pouring in, the more I wondered: why the bombings? Are we at war, and with whom and for what?

We all know that in this country when calamity happens to the ordinary citizen, there seems to be a lackadaisical attitude and senseless politicisation at the top. But I am sure this new one will wake everybody up, hopefully. The security forces in Nigeria will now realize that the stick that was used to beat a fool, if not broken, will eventually be used on the wise. The people behind the spate of bombings in the country are getting bolder and cleverer by the day while the security agencies keep getting caught with their pants down. Stamping out fires after hundreds of lives and property have been lost is the order of the day these days. Since the first instance of bombing, nothing substantial has been done by the government to check its continuation because as usual, they think it will go away like a bad hangover. What began like an amateurish skirmish has become very sophisticated, yet we haven't heard any new story from those that should checkmate the brains behind the bombings.

We have had many instances of things that will not just go away until they are tackled head on. The world order on securing a nation has since changed - even before September 11 in America. We do not need a soothsayer to tell us that we are not ready to fight terrorism in the country at the moment, but that does not mean we cannot start from somewhere now. Our government needs to take the issue of security very seriously and find capable hands to man the various agencies. The time of finger pointing or appointing the best lobbyists to handle security issues should be over and done with. In the wake of the September 11 bombings, the American government did not waste time in creating a security powerhouse called Homeland Security, with the sole responsibility of protecting US territory against any form of terror ism. Although they have not been able to stamp out terrorist acts completely, the agency has significantly reduced the rate of American citizens being slaughtered on a daily basis. And may I quickly add that the war against terrorism is not cheap because the budgetary allocation for Homeland Security for 2011 was close to $100 billion.

Dick's Blog: Christmas Day 1914 - Miracle in the Trenches

In a totally new type of defensive warfare, the soldiers lived in hellish conditions in these trenches, exposed to the weather, constant shelling, and small arms fire. Occasional attacks ordered by the various high commands required the men to climb up out of the trenches and advance over the ground between, usually strewn with barbed wire entanglements, where hundreds would be slaughtered in “no-man’s land” by the waiting machine guns of the enemy. “On Christmas morning I awoke very early and emerged from my dug – out into the trench. It was a perfect day. A beautiful, cloudless blue sky. The ground hard and white, fading off towards the wood in a thin, low-lying mist. It was such a day as is invariably depicted by artists on Christmas cards – the ideal Christmas day of fiction.” Dick began his career in meteorology when he started with the Bureau of Meteorology way back in 1971, after a two-year stint in the Army as a National Serviceman. He worked his way through the ranks and was Senior Forecaster in the NSW office for a nine-year period before becoming NSW Manager of the Bureau’s commercial arm, the Special Services Unit in 1993. Dick left the Bureau in 2002, but never lost the “weather bug” and came out of retirement to begin his own meteorological consultancy business. He is very interested in meteorological education, particularly through television, radio, and books, and has authored, co authored and edited twelve meteorological publications. Dick is a now Senior Meteorologist with The Weather Channel in Australia and appears regularly on radio and television.

Leadership in the trenches, officer-man relations, morale and discipline in the British Army in the era of the First World War

In the trenches, selected speeches and writings of an American Jewish activist

Water & sewage works

JAP

The Fortnightly