Lions on the prowl

Most families who have one or more of their members deployed for election duties in Ekiti State during the last Saturday governorship polls were apprehensive and many took time to offer special prayers for them. This apprehension was necessitated because of the history of electoral violence which the state was known for and also because the countdown to the election had been characterised by violence.

However, to ensure that there was no breakdown of law and order on the election day, security agents were fully mobilised for the election. Some hours before the polls, the Deputy Commandant General, Operations, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Evans Ewurum, who led NSCDC personnel to Ekiti State, while addressing journalists said that the agency had deployed 150 sniffer dogs from Russia in addition to over 15,000 officials deployed for the polls.

He said, “We have also mobilised our sniffer dogs; the latest dogs that arrived from Russia and Ukraine are all here to watch over the process and all the black spots in case anybody wants to plan any mischief.”

These special species of dogs were thought to be lions or other wild animals by some local residents of Ogbese, a community not far from Ise Ekiti. On getting to the community on the election day, I overheard two women who discussing in hushed voices that government had released some lions from their dens to move round the state in search of anybody who might want to foment trouble.

One of them said that she still was not convinced that what she saw at the back of a patrol van were dogs and not lions. She expressed surprised at the kind of food the animals were being fed to make them taller than an average human and with their heads far bigger than her own head.

The other woman, who seems to be more ‘civilised’ than her colleague, said to the first woman in Ekiti dialect, “Do you expect dogs being fed by the whole nation to look like Baba Ojo’s dog which is easily frightened by lizards?”

But despite the fact that the security agents deployed were very strict, most of them, especially soldiers, exhibited a high sense of professionalism.

Most times having identified journalists and election monitors by their Independent National Electoral Commission accreditation tags and their organisation’s identity cards and having their vehicles checked, they were allowed to pass but officials of Counter-Terrorism Unit of the Nigeria