Nura Dalhatu’s  aborted “Coup” As Metaphor For Officers’ Disenchantment in Customs 

Penultimate week, July 8th, 2019, Nigerians were treated to a mild drama at the Abuja Headquarters

of the Nigeria Customs Service where an Assistant Superintendent of Customs (ASC) wanted to unseat his Comptroller-General, Hameed Ali, in a ‘palace coup’

According to the accounts of the melo- drama, Nura Dalhatu, an ASC, has sauntered into the Customs House in a full  resplendent regalia of a Deputy Comptroller-General.

Lanky, handsome with benign looks, the bespectacled Dahaltu, with the full complement of Deputy Comptroller-General,  was said to have stormed the office of Hameed Ali, demanding he (CGC) vacate his seat for him to take over as he(Dahaltu) has just been appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari as the new CGC.

Before he could accomplish his mission, he was said to have been arrested, interrogated and detained.

It was in the course of his interrogation that he was discovered “not to be of sound mind” for which he was admitted for treatment.

Just like the Customs spokesman, Joseph Attah, admonished that rather than be amused by this incident, people should engage in an intense prayer session for Dalhatu.

Nigeriamaritime360.com, as much as we are amused by this spectacle, nonetheless heeds the plea of the Customs spokesman for prayers.

Beyond our prayers for Dalhatu  however, it is instructive to interrogate the rationale behind his action, even with an ‘unstable mind’.

Even though the only ‘diagnosis’ of the state of mind of Dahaltu known to the public is the one given by the Customs spokesman who said this position was arrived at as a result of the incoherent response of the ‘actor’ during interrogation, we shall however give him the benefits of  the doubt until the real diagnosis is made by a professional.

Given this scenario, we are puzzled that the only thing Dalhatu could think of in his state of “unsound mind” was to unseat his CG.

Couldn’t he have done any other things to display his state of “unsound  or unstable mind”?

Wasn’t his action an outward manifestation of the workings of his mind, his sub-conscious being?

Isn’t it possible that Dalhatu merely acted what had pre-occupied his sub-conscious mind?

We may be accused of feasting on mere conjectures that may not have basis in any emphatical evidence.

However,  we are not alone in this thinking.

Many stakeholders, who are equally amused by the drama at the Customs House,believed that the incident may have  been a poignant pointer to the general state of mind of the majority officers in the Customs.

Though we did not dispute the fact that Dalhatu may have been of ‘ unsound mind’ while acting out the drama, but we believe whatever the “thought of a drunken man before he gets drunk, that is what he acts out when he eventually gets drunk”., so says a wise saying.

We want to advise the Customs authority not to be hasty in dismissing the incident as a product of ‘unsound  or unstable mind’ but to draw a lesson  from it that what happened has deeper meaning than what it appeared it to be.

Why has this type of  incident not happened during the tenure of Ali’s predecessor?

There may be many Nura Dalhatus in the Service who may have the same mind set as Nura but lack courage to express it.

Nura Dalhatu’s aborted ‘coup’ may be a sad reflection of the dominant mood among officers about their state of disenchantment with the system.

We may not want to single out CGC Ali as the target  of this general level of discontentment among the officers but Ali may have represented the resented system in the Customs which the ‘protest’ was meant to redress.

Nura may have given expression to the state of mind of not a few officers that lack the gut to complain aloud but endure the “jack boot” administrative style of Ali in solitary silence.

Rather than “court marshall” Nura after he might have regained his “sanity”, the Customs hierarchy should rather look inward to identify the causative factors of Dahaltu’s momentary loss of “sanity” with a view to making amends.