The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Saraki’s sour grapes

    By Sam Omatseye

    It was not a building alone that crumbled to the floor in Ilorin. The Kwara State government’s Christmas act brought to mind a passage in scriptures that tells us that the birth of Jesus was for the rising and falling of many. The night of his birth was a night of prophesy. As Apostle Paul himself warned, we should not “despise prophesying.” As we can see, the prophecy echoed through centuries and over seas and mountains to a house designated as Ile Arugbo – the house of the aged. For irony, it was an old and dying man known as Simeon, who uttered his last prophesy of the birth of Jesus as a sign for the rising and falling of many. “Let thy servant depart in peace,” his hoary voice crooned before he faded. “For my eyes have seen thine salvation.” His aftermath was not that sanguine as we saw in Ilorin in the Yuletide season.

    A lot of dramatics has lingered with the tale of the land. Son who dueled father is fighting for father in the grave. Sister who duels brother is on the side of brother with no hint of embrace or even innuendoes between the siblings. Blood siblings in bloodied mud fights just yesterday are on the same stage, if not the same page.

    A chapter of sympathy runs through it. An old people’s home, a matter of the weak and fragile, pumps a narrative as to whether we should put the law over love. Is the old above the law? Shall they live so impunity may abound? Kwara State and Governor AbdulRahman AbulRazaq say the ‘law forbid.’

    A matter of investment, too. The owner of the land, according to Bukola Saraki, aka Eleyinmi, is a company called Asa Investments Ltd. For those who understand a little of Yoruba like this writer from Itsekiriland, Asa is double barrel. It can mean tradition or custom. Which is interesting because if the Oloye and the Sarakis are known for anything, it is for being a mainstay of power for a generation or two. That is a tradition of power grabbing, of prebendal arrogance, of determining who got what post, who didn’t, who lost and won a poll, canned what contract, who cried on the streets and whose daughter glided to the pricy wedding.

    That was the asa, the tradition, the power sovereignty that Oloye – which means the title owner or bearer – foisted over the people of Kwara.  But asa is also a bird, the hawk, the sort that  Ted Hughes wrote about in his famous poem. Haughty in the sky and a portent in the tree before pouncing.  So, if the the Sarakis were an asa, which was it, the tradition or the hawk? Or shall we say they were a tradition of the hawk. So, the Kwara State government brought down the hawk at Christmas. The rising and falling…

    Or was it an open show of the Otoge act. A public replay of the swansong of the 2019 poll when Eleyinmi fell not only as senator or senate president but as a power force. He was eying the president of the Federal Government, but for now he cannot even see an electoral chair. How art the Eleyinmi fallen. Well, asa-a can also mean, with a stretch, let’s gather the crumbs. Maybe that is what is going on with the Eleyinmi. He is both Lazarus and rich man, losing and puffing simultaneously. An oedipal tragic flaw. Kwara State is taking a property here, the EFCC is not letting go there. We can remember when he was senate president, Eleyinmi was so powerful that he became a prophet of his own landed prosperity, who owned a land in his assets declaration before he owned it.

    We cannot forget the women. At Christ’s birth, two groups kept watch, those who wanted the birth and those who wanted the baby’s death. Each will claim to be the good party. The women of Saraki, some of who had the passion of the Oloye, who remembered his many acts of glad-hand and generosity, kept watch. Many too, for all the critics know, enjoyed berths from Eleyinmi. They wanted the land for him, for all of them. The governor’s men also kept watch, looking for the right time to strike. The women would say, men love darkness more than light. The men, the bulldozers, would say they were the women of the night. In the end, Christ would claim neither: “I never knew you…”

    It was here that Gbemisola Saraki hit the bulls’eye. Why did the security fire teargas at the women? That is where she turned livid and fittingly righteous. The women had lost, why did the government have to fire at the women? Thank God, at the time of writing, no tragedy reported. They can’t lose to lose. They lost the old people’s home. They should not lose their lives. Even impunity has its rights, like the right to protest.

    Gbemi and Eleyinmi fit the proposition that the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, like the battles in today’s Syria and the United States and Iran’s battle against ISIL. The Saraki story is self-destruct like the Buendia family in Marquez’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude or the self-whittling Buddenbrooks clan of German novelist Thomas Mann. But it is the sin of the father that has now been visited upon the children. As Prophet Jeremiah put it, “the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

    In the day of real estate demolition, what we don’t want to come down is the law. Any building can fall if the law stands. So, the Ile Arugbo theatre is the saga of law and custom. In our history, law and custom have always cohered, one propping the other. But we have had individuals appropriate custom in this era of the strong man in our democracy. Customs worked for feudal strongholds. But democracy applauds law without necessarily upholding custom. That is why the rule of law is the cornerstone of our system. The late Professor Claude Ake lamented the intrusion of strong men in what he described as the “privatisation of the public sphere.” That is what Kwara State governor is lamenting.

    One could easily say, if Eleyinmi and AbdulRazaq were in the same party, no bulldozers will creak around Ile Arugbo. Perhaps. But it is beside the point. It is the law, as Shakespeare points out in Merchants of Vernice.

    The last Punch

    I didn’t want to comment on The Punch editorial on Buhari after my last offering, but the newspaper wrote what seemed, at bottom, a sort of editorial remorse, a militant mea culpa. Why did it have to repeat itself on the issue of prefix to Buhari’s name by insisting they would still call him president? President is very ideology-neutral even if he is so addressed in the constitution. We have had presidents in autocracies as we have had them in democracies. We had IBB as we had Anwar Sadat. Even social organisations crown unelected presidents. The point is, the editorial did not even say president as prefix but major –general. That was the spirit and letter of the otherwise elegant write-up.

    Again, why did the editorial’s second coming have to define ‘regime,’ as though it wanted to show that the word has a suggestion of democracy. Then it would not have needed to call it a regime if the board wanted to present Buhari as undemocratic. Here I saw a reflex of remorse. The board was referring to some subtle points some commentators like In Touch made about undercutting the very basis of its premise by referring to the government as regime. If it is a democracy, it cannot be a regime. If you call it a regime, you undermine the very basis of the rule of law that prompts the write-up in the first place. You cannot take a Machiavellian backdoor to enforce the law. The result is anarchy.

    The Daily Trust was panned for replying an editorial with an editorial. But who has the right to legislate a statute of limitation for an editorial board. That will be doing harm to free speech. On the Daily Trust editorial though, the writers failed to give In Touch kudos for my logic, although they used my language, especially the word “delegitimise,” a word I patented for that debate. Like we do as journalists, the newspaper gave credit to the non-journalists who added their voices to the polemic. It is gratifying nonetheless that in the reporting of how Sowore was freed, those who persuaded the President deployed the word lionise, which I also patented for the debate. Win some, lose some is winsome.

  • Boko Haram: Reality and unreality

    Femi Macaulay

     

     

    A governor should know if some parts of the state he governs are under the control of a rival power, shouldn’t he? So there was no reason to doubt Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum when he revealed that three local government areas in the state were still under the control of Boko Haram. The captured areas are Marte, Kukawa and Abadam, according to the governor.

    The bad news was revelatory because the Federal Government had led the public to believe that the terrorist group had been incapacitated, claiming it had been “technically defeated.”

    Zulum raised the issue when the Minister of Defence, Major-General Bashir Magashi (retd), visited the Government House in Maiduguri, the state capital, on December 16. Magashi was in Borno to assess the counter-insurgency operations.

    Zulum was quoted as saying: “Under Kukawa local government area, Baga, Cross-Kauwa and Kukawa town itself need to be retaken; there must be military presence and with the resettlement of communities back in these three locations with immediate effect.”

    The minister didn’t contradict the governor. Rather, the minister repeated the Federal Government’s time-worn reassurances: “We intend to re-design the battle to suit the environment we are operating so that with seriousness we can take on the Boko Haram and see to their end.

    “I assure you; the Federal Government is doing its best to provide resources, both human, capital and equipment to ensure that the operation is done properly and with the speed it deserves.”

    Magashi added: “We are in this operation for the past 10 years and the country cannot afford to continue in this battle. We must take the bull by the horns.

    “We can do it and I reassure the people of Borno that the situation will soon come back to normal.”

    But about a week later, Defence Headquarters (DHQ) spokesman Brig-Gen Onyema Nwachukwu, possibly in response to Governor Zulum’s information, declared that “Boko Haram is not occupying any part of this country.” He must have expected the public to take him seriously. But did his assertion reflect reality?

    A December 24 report quoted him as saying: “I want to make it clear that Boko Haram and Islamic State of West Africa (ISWAP) have been defeated and pushed into what we call the Tombus Islands.

    “These are the islands between Nigeria and neighbouring countries of Niger and Chad, where they have their enclave and from where they come out and carry out attacks on soft targets. Boko Haram is not holding any inch of the country.”

    Obviously, the minister of Defence and the Defence Headquarters spokesman are not on the same page. What is the true situation? Of course, the governor is expected to know if some parts of the state he governs are under the control of Boko Haram. Is Brig-Gen Nwachukwu spreading disinformation? The conflicting statements by Zulum and Nwachukwu about the dominance of Boko Haram are thought-provoking.

    Ten years after the Boko Haram insurgency started, it is tragic that the war on terror is looking like a war without end. The President Muhammadu Buhari government says it has “degraded” Boko Haram, which means nothing if the insurgents are still in control of three local government areas in Borno State.

    It is clear that the insurgents are still dangerously active. The objective of the war on terror should be to make the insurgents inactive. Indeed, the Nigerian military needs to demonstrate that it can win the war on terror.

    A situation where some parts of the country are under the control of Boko Haram makes a mockery not only of the military but also the Federal Government.

    It is a discredit to the Federal Government that Leah Sharibu, Boko Haram’s best-known captive, is still in captivity.

    Christmas Day 2019 has come and gone. It was the second Christmas after Leah was kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists on February 19, 2018. She was among 110 schoolgirls kidnapped by Islamic extremists from the Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State.

    Sadly, five of the kidnapped girls were reported to have died in captivity. Others abducted with Leah were set free on March 21, 2018. Those released were Muslims. Leah, a Christian, was not released because she refused to renounce her faith and convert to Islam.

    A December 29, 2018, report quoted a friend of Leah’s mother, Dr. Gloria Samdi Puldu: “Leah Sharibu’s mother had a devastating Christmas; she has been down with serious fever and she is just recovering. It has not been easy spending Christmas without Leah. The hope of the entire family was that by this time, the assurances that the Federal Government gave to us when the three honourable ministers visited that Leah was going to be released would come true.”

    She added: “We all had our hopes high, November passed, we are in December and thought that she would be out from captivity and be around on Christmas Day. Her birthday was on May 24 when she turned 15 years. It was a very devastating Christmas, despite the fact that our hopes had been completely in God.”

    That was last year. This year, a few days to Christmas Day, the Northern Elders Christian Forum released a statement, urging President Muhammadu Buhari to give them Leah as “our gift for Christmas.”

    The group’s chairman, Ejoga Inalegwu, who signed the statement, said: “We plead with the President, Muhammadu Buhari, to give the Christian community of this great nation, the Christmas gift by ensuring the release of our dear child, Leah Sharibu, from the brutal custody of the Boko Haram. We believe the government has the wherewithal and competency to effect her release.”

    It is believed that Leah is alive. But she shouldn’t be alive in captivity. The Federal Government needs to do more than making promises to get her released. Leah has been in captivity for too long. As another year ends with Leah in captivity, the Presidency should redouble its efforts to bring her back home, since it claims to be making efforts to do so.

    The Dapchi abduction compounded the still unresolved mass kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, in April 2014. Many of the Chibok captives are still in captivity. It is sad that an estimated 27,000 lives have been lost since the insurgency started in 2009. Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states are the most affected. The destructive activities of the terrorist group have made about 1.8 million people homeless and caused a humanitarian crisis. Worse still, Boko Haram is alive and well.

    In the final analysis, disinformation won’t work. When Boko Haram becomes powerless, its powerlessness will be obvious.

  • THEME-ing ahead

    Like mock beads, the sweat told the story not of the past hour but of his day.

    “It’s been hell,” he said, unable to transcend clichés to explain his navigation through the Lagos traffic. The sweat beads connected like neck chains, transforming his face into a map upon a map. Water dots on flesh. His neck was immune from the invasion, clammy but deceptively clean.

    “All because of Christmas?” his taciturn struggles continued.

    I sniggered, and he knew why. Earlier in the year, he had said he wanted the state governor to get the boys on the road, rain or no rain, to fix the infrastructure torture of the city. It was in those days when the heavens screamed, flashed and roared, and pall followed pall in reckless downpour.

    In the United States where he spent a few years, I had asked him if anyone fixed any road in winter. He said the road never descended that bad, so it was never an emergency. The argument stalemated when I asserted that emergency in Nigeria and the United States are different matters.

    Well, the rains have now shrunken back into the skies, and weather now smiled for construction. He said part of the reason he spent that many hours behind the wheels were construction work going on in Lagos.

    “Now, I can explain why you cannot find the words today,” I challenged him.

    He knew the traffic pain was because of the boys of the BOS of Lagos. They were now in intersections and nodal pulses of the city. They were taking advantage of the dry berth. Turning triumphal, I compared him to the children of Israel who griped over Pharaoh’s oppressive rod. After Moses shepherded them through the Red Sea, they waxed livid with nostalgia to the days of Pharoah’s beneficence of free bed and bread.

    “Cool down,” I advised. “Manna will soon fall from heaven when much of the roads are in good shape.”

    Hitting back, he warned that if I appealed to heaven, I might be calling for rainfall. Let us leave the heavens in peace for now, he seemed to surrender. The days of Manna are no longer here, he implied.

    But he raised another issue germane to Nigeria’s iconic city: the surge of migrants. This Christmas may be the first in a generation when the city did not feel the hollowness from human outflow. The city seemed to sea. No matter how much leaves, a sense of its fullness remains. It is the time bomb of today’s development. The population keeps swelling. That was where my friend found traction as he could not pass any other polemical muster on the traffic issue.

    Hence the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, is making his focus three-fold, in spite of the vast ambition of his THEME agenda. They include infrastructure, education and health care. For a city ballooning out of control in numbers, we cannot forget what Roman Historian and philosopher Tacitus emphasised in his voluminous opus. He noted that we must learn to build the body and soul. The body must be nourished in order for the mind to flourish.

    The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, is making his focus three-fold, in spite of the vast ambition of his THEME agenda. They include infrastructure, education and health care.

    This was also Awolowo’s wisdom when he pushed for free education and health care, as building blocks of his vision. In one of his campaign stops in the Southwest, he had roared as his voice of low-decibel grandeur could go: “The Unity Party of Nigeria is dedicated to giving you light in your head, light in your spirit and light in your body.”

    To build a city, you must build the people. But the people cannot work their health and minds without the right environment. Hence we need infrastructure of hardware before the software. The hardware has been a hard road. When his name popped up from relative obscurity, and his moment turned into momentum with chants of Sanwo-Eko – pay Lagos bills – he hardly knew what was afoot. First, that he would meet an almost empty treasury, and would have to wait it out in the quest of a John Bunyan’s pilgrim.

    Then the weather. The elements and capital became two capital vexations for the captain of the city. He did not know how to frown or growl in public. He kept a sunny and tranquil persona, working the city to a hope and future, a vision some believed and many who doubted are coming around. His stage presence is gradually growing Obama-esque. His public rhetoric, at first halting and tentative, has cruised into cadences all his own.

    In a city like Lagos, doubt is easy. More than half of the country relies on whether it works or stumbles. The bar is always high. Now he is working out with his new budget a steady 2020, and it will be his year of revelation. He is showing signs of that already.

    He is not only a Lagosian, but a true Metropolitian, who like his predecessors like Tinubu and Fashola, know how to relate to all and sundry.

    At the annual luncheon of Government College, Ughelli, he stunned the old boys with his memories of his youthful days in the old Bendel State, drawing a mental map of the delta. With cheerful swagger, he plunged among the old boys, some of them septuagenarians and octogenarians like the Sam Amuka of The Vanguard and Professor Itse Sagay. “You know Guiniwa?” he asked a stunned old boy who thought him a stranger. Guiniwa is a popular road that bifurcates Warri. When he took on the stage, he spoke of his exploits as a young man in the area, reeling out names like Okumagba Layout, Eneren, Abraka, Ughelli all the way to Bomadi and the riverine reaches of the state. Nor were his taste buds about starch and banga out of the tale. Claps, roars, kaboom!! The roof fell.

    Lagos needs not just minds like Governor Sanwo-Olu, we need the president and the national legislature to understand that holding Lagos is holding Nigeria. If Lagos is poorly managed, the nation will fall off a tragic cliff. That is why he wants to hold the mind and body as policy foci, as software on the hard infrastructure. The three will undergird his THEME.

    The Yuletide season has happened with glee and no drama of blood and mayhem. It is a testament to good work. So, as we enter 2020, Sanwo-Olu seems set not just to THEME ahead, but steam.

     

     

    Unzipping Okowa’s borrowed robes

    I did not know that former Delta State Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan, with his soft voice and unflappable face, had a gift for devastating metaphor. It took a wrong celebration for him to growl. He did by unzipping his mouth. On his Facebook page, he took 15 un-zips at his successor Governor Ifeanyi Okowa, who was receiving accolades from traditional rulers for work that Uduaghan accomplished. One post after another, Uduaghan ripped the robes that Okowa was wearing, coats of many colours, none of which he tailored. Uduaghan was particularly miffed by the airport in Asaba for which many have attacked him and now praise him.Ifeanyi Okowa and Emmanuel Uduaghan

    Okowa has been governor for about five years. He won the election not on merit but on quota, and he should know that he ought to start showing what he did rather than wearing his predecessor’s robes. Where are his hospitals and major roads, or schools? The event of the hungry monarchs took place at a structure Uduaghan built.

    It’s time for some governors to show the dignity of achievement, not the shame of borrowed robes.

  • Kalu’s herbalist

    Femi Macaulay

    Traditional medicine has an unlikely promoter in the person of jailed senator and former Abia State governor Orji Kalu. He carried out the promotion unintentionally, but it was significant enough to attract attention.

    Less than two weeks after Kalu was convicted and sentenced to prison on December 5, he bizarrely requested the Federal High Court in Lagos to grant him bail pending an appeal against his conviction. Kalu claimed he needed to consult his “herbalist,” adding that the medical facilities in the custodial centre were inadequate for the treatment of his health condition. He didn’t elaborate on his health condition.

    Kalu’s request to be allowed to see his herbalist is food for thought. It reflects Kalu’s confidence in traditional medicine. Who is Kalu’s herbalist? Where is his herbalist based? How long has he been the herbalist’s patient? How many people of Kalu’s status are the herbalist’s patients? Are the herbalist’s services expensive?

    Interestingly, Kalu, the Senate Chief Whip and senator representing Abia North District, also said granting him bail would enable him to play his legislative role.

    Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) counsel Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), opposed the bail application, saying: ”Although bail is generally a right of an accused as guaranteed by the constitution, it is not a right available to a convict because the presumption of innocence had crystallised into guilt and conviction.”

    Jacobs further argued that bail pending appeal didn’t apply to Kalu’s case. Such a bail could be granted in a situation where the term of imprisonment would have elapsed before determination of the appeal, he said, which isn’t the case in Kalu’s situation.

    Although Kalu was sentenced to 12 years in prison for N7.65billion fraud and money laundering after a 12-year trial, it is expected that the determination of his appeal will not take that long.

    Kalu’s health condition could be handled at the Ikoyi Custodial Centre, Jacobs stated. “He says he needs his herbalist to treat him, but he has not said that his herbalist came to the prison and was not allowed to see him.

    “In one breath, the applicant is saying that he wants to be released on health grounds while in another breath, he is saying that as a senator, he needs to be released on bail so as to carry out his official functions.”

    Justice Mohammad Liman will rule on Kalu’s bail application on December 23. Whether or not Kalu is granted bail to see his herbalist, his request is good for the image of traditional medicine, particularly at a time when medical tourism is popular among people in power.

    Kalu’s inadvertent promotion of traditional medicine should fuel the efforts of the National Association of Nigerian Traditional Medicine Practitioners (NANTMP) to gain respect.

    In 2015,  the then NANTMP President, Prof. Omon Oleabhiele, had called for a traditional medicine bill at an event organised by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to mark the 2015 African Traditional Medicine (ATM) Day in Lagos State. Oleabhiele urged the National Assembly to sponsor a bill in support of traditional medicine and its practitioners in the country. He also argued for the creation of a Traditional Medicine Board in all the states of the federation for the regulation of traditional medicine.

    It is a measure of the importance of traditional medicine and traditional healers that since 2003 African Traditional Medicine Day has been observed every year on August 31. Ministers of Health adopted the relevant resolution at the 50th session of the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Committee for Africa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The special day is meant to promote the critical role of traditional medicine in Africa.

    African traditional medicine has been described as “the African indigenous system of health care.”  It has been argued that “In fact, the frequently quoted statement that 85 per cent of the people in Africa use traditional medicine is an understatement because this figure is much higher and continues to increase.”

    M. Kofi-Tsekpo illustrates the thinking about African traditional medicine at decision-making levels since the 1970s: “At the Alma Atta Declaration of 1978, it was resolved that traditional medicine had to be incorporated in the health care systems in developing countries if the objective of the “Health for All by the Year 2000” was to be realised. Notwithstanding this strategy, African countries did not come near the objective at the end of the 20th century. Therefore, the Member States of the WHO African Region adopted a resolution in 2000 called “Promoting the role of traditional medicine in health care systems: A strategy for the African Region.” This strategy provides for the institutionalisation of traditional medicine in health care systems of the member states of the WHO African Region.

    “Furthermore, the OAU (African Union) Heads of State and Government declared the period 2000 – 2010 as the African Decade on African Traditional Medicine. In addition, the Director General of the World Health Organization also declared 31st August every year as African Traditional Medicine Day. All these declarations signify the importance and the approval by Governments and international institutions of the need to institutionalise African traditional medicine in health care. Therefore the mechanisms for institutionalisation have to be developed to make these resolutions a reality.”

    It is obvious that the establishment of NANTMP in December 2006 by the Federal Government through the Federal Ministry of Health, although well-intentioned, has not made traditional medicine more acceptable at formal levels of governance in the country.

    A NANTMP communiqué is noteworthy: “We thank the Governors of the states that have formed the Traditional Medicine Board in their states such as Edo, Lagos, Anambra and Bauchi states.

    “We urge other Governors whose Commissioners of Health and State House of Assembly have not created the Traditional Medicine Board to kindly request them to do so with dispatch.”

    The body added: ”We also pray the Governors to ensure that genuine and registered members of the NANTMP be made Chairmen and members of the Board to protect the interest of the practice, unlike the present practice in some states whereby Medical Doctors and Pharmacists are made Chairmen of Traditional Medicine Board. What does a Medical Doctor who doesn’t want traditional medicine to be given to his patient want to do in a Board that is set up for regulation and promotion of Traditional Medicine Practice?”

    Kalu’s need for his herbalist puts a spotlight on traditional medicine.  It is useful in getting Nigeria to further think about developing traditional medicine.

     

  • Catch the rich at Christmas

    By Sam Omatseye

    Nothing set the scene for the subject of class and poverty more than the crowd. At his 70th birthday party, former Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi, all toothy with gratitude, invited not only men from the marble perch of society. Where you saw a governor, the orderly and other underlings loomed behind. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, for all his common touch, was a class even apart from the very rich around. A class within a class.

    Governors came in flourish: The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was unmistakable in his vintage white agbada. Kano State Governor Ganduje arrived in two robes: as a chief executive and in-law. His daughter, a Fulani heiress, wedded Ajimobi’s only son, an Ibadan descendant of republican warriors. No better testament of a unified nation in an era of divisive mantra. Others were Ekiti’s Dr. Kayode Fayemi, Akeredolu of Ondo and Dapo Abiodun of Ogun. Ex-governor Aremo Segun Osoba, whose men had just rejected Abiodun’s executive council nominees, also materialised. I wondered if the flow of drinks and chop chop did not meet throat bumps as one thought about the other across tables. Of course, the presence of the cerebral monarch of the west Oba Lamidi Adeyemi gave the party some panache.

    Yet the moment of inequality cast its tale in royal apparel. The Ooni’s train, that is. A trumpeter ushered in the monarch. What if the king could not hear the crooner. How awkward if the fellow with the trumpet had run out of oxygen. How awkward, if because of that little guy, the Ooni sat paralysed for hours in the cosy corner of his car.

    An overwhelmed Ajimobi failed to balance modesty with self-glorification when noted that he had not seen a party that drew such an illustrious crowd in that city.  He was also happy over the drummer, the meek civil servant, the cleaner who attended. The hall at the University of Ibadan Conference Centre was an assemblage of all, the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful, the professional and the worker, the skilled and skillful, the city fellow and the rural.

    But no one saw this as a matter of interest until Interior Minister Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola ruffled a few feathers. As one of the discussants of the lecture from the erudite Professor Ayo Olukotun,who also writes a pithy column for The Punch, the former Osun State governor projected his Marxist face. He said he was no pro-rich or anti-rich, but he was pro-poor. In order to attack the question of poverty, he called for a drastic tax policy to shave off what he saw as the excess and flamboyant wealth of the rich. He wanted a sort of leveling. The rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor.

    I thought the minister, no poor man himself although he likes pawing the society’s peacocks, hit something fundamental about Nigeria. Some misunderstood him. He said he wasn’t calling for the abolition of wealth. He was not anti-rich.

    That, I think, was the first time that a man at that high office in such a high caliber event would be launching such a broadside at the rich. But I think he was looking at something more fundamental than many know. In Nigeria today, we have what I will call a beggar’s paradise. Many poor get by not by their income, but by what looks like the mercy of the haves. Everyone who has a little fortune, maybe N50k, must part up to N1k or N2k to the one who earns N11K. The one who earns N11k must give N200 Naira one time or the other for the one who cannot afford a meal. It is what Richard Joseph calls the economy of affection. The gateman, the cleaner, the washer man, the cook cannot earn a living wage. They depend on the big man.

    A former governor who is now a senator bewailed a rising scenario where a senator’s office is a destination of beggars not only from their constituencies but anywhere in the country. They undertake a trip to Abuja and walk into the office and ask for favours to pay rents, schools fees, or even to bury their mothers. In as high a place as the presidency, big men who come to see the president, chief of staff or any other position of importance,  must face the beggary mien and pleas of the man at the gate, or the man who ushers him in or who makes him tea as he awaits his appointment.

    The French philosopher Voltaire once asserted that “it is not inequality that is the problem, but dependence.” More and more people though depend not because they cannot work, but because they cannot earn. It is easy to demean the beggar as lazy, whereas the indolents are the ones who cannot work but turn our patrimony into personal wealth. It is not the fight between the haves and have-nots as it is the contest between the thief and thief-nots. In the beggar, though, there is a cynical sneer that accuses their beneficiaries as thieves who must give them a part of what they have taken from the public till. So, when they beg the haves, they are not ashamed. They believe they are not asking for mercy, or even sacrifice. They are groveling for their rights.

    But the man who has acquired much believes he has worked hard. After all, it takes guts to gut the purse. Some end up in jail. Many face spiritual comeuppances in their family tragedies and personal failings and health adversities. So, the giver thinks the beggar  lazy, the beggar thinks the giver shifty. The scenario complicates what Aristotle said when he asserted that “the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”

    The wealthy in our society are not like what sociology Thorstein Veblen proclaims when he argued that they turn their excess into building institutions of leisure. Ours create leisure as soap bubble. While they create charities, we party in Dubai and south of France. A middle class fellow and a millionaire can be neighbours in the United States. It is beneath the millionaire in Nigeria to exchange morning greetings with the neighbour who cannot fly a private jet like him. That is why Aregbesola made a good point.

    The rich in Nigeria are even lightly taxed. For one, those who are taxed pay little. Maybe 15 percent, or 20 percent. They find ways out of it even at the figures they push. The progressive tax was inaugurated in the home of capitalism, the United States. Even some rich pay over 50 percent. It is always a campaign issue every election season. The rich Republicans believe the taxes are too high. Others say the rich are too rich and at the poor’s expense.

    No matter how rich you are in the Scandinavian countries, they scrape much of your profit and pour it into the public pool. A student in a Scandinavian country had an accident that cost her about $40k. As a reporter I asked the father who flew in from Sweden whether he expected the United States to pay part of the bill. He looked at me with haughty sympathy and said, his government would pick up the whole bill. That is the nature of welfare states. America is grappling with that burden today, throwing up candidates like Sanders and Warren.

    After Aregbesola  made his point, I rose to interrogate his position. I asked, how can we get the money to tax. The rich never declare their money. Barely 10 percent of taxable income from the very rich fall into the tax bracket. We have billionaire dodgers. I am talking of trillions of Naira. If we cannot catch the rich, how can we tax them? That is the problem today. That is why we cannot give enough money to build infrastructure and hospitals and schools, and give pride to the beggar who can tap the environment to prosper. We don’t have the infrastructure of capture, so the rich will elude us while they flaunt their takings at us.

    So, this Christmas the only way the poor are catching the rich is to beg for money for rice and chicken. The rich in their subconscious are saying, “catch me if you can.”

     

    Nigeria a-GLO-w

    It is often a great thing when the Nigerian entrepreneur is an ambassador. We have so many in music and sports, though nothing to gripe about. In the eyes of the world, the money man in Nigeria is the thief. But when a company tops a contest and the world cheers, it tells us much exists in Nigeria that can wake up. Hence the award to GLO as the brand of the year recently in the world cannot but make us think well about ourselves.

    It was conferred by the World Branding Forum. It followed a rigour of a format that included online voting, brand evaluation and market research. It was not just an elite assessment, but drew its position from over 230,000 participants in the process.

    GLO is a truly Nigerian original, and we should be proud of it. It is also an opportunity for the brand to do more, especially since it rubbed shoulders with the world’s marquee names like Shell, Apple, NetFlix, Adidas, etc. A great accolade is a chance for more accolades.

  • Buhari’s 2023 polls’ promise

    With raging apprehension on the future of democracy following the outcome of the last elections, President Buhari’s promise of free, fair and credible polls in 2023 would seem a welcome development. But the promise curiously threw up its own challenges.

    The president told some of his aides who came to felicitate with him on his birthday: “what I want to promise Nigerians is that I will work very hard on free and fair elections. All those that are going to succeed in the National Assembly and the Presidency have to work very hard because I will make sure using the law enforcement agencies that elections are free and fair. Nobody will use his office or resources to force himself on his constituents”

    The issues the president seeks to cure in the 2023 elections are prominent in the list of infractions that have overtime, vitiated the collective will of the electorate. Given the debilitating rancor that trailed the last general elections and the most recent governorship polls in Kogi and Bayelsa states, Buhari’s promise gives new hope that our democracy is after all, not headed to the precipice.

    Even as it may not be necessary to rehearse all that went wrong with those elections including the wanton losses in lives and properties, suffice it to say that those elections detracted substantially from the standard gauge of free and free engagement. Observers and the international community were unanimous in their ratings that the outcome of those elections was a minus from the gains recorded in 2015.

    It is therefore not for nothing that the prevailing feeling is that unless very far-reaching and fool-proof measures are taken to guarantee the credibility and sanctity of future elections, the future of democracy is bleak. It would seem the president’s promise is essentially targeted at halting this slide. However, there are three strands of the statement that gave the inkling that all along he knew all that was wrong with our electoral process. Its’ corollary is an admission of the dismal performance of leadership in providing effective therapeutic responses to them.
    First, by promising to work very hard to guarantee free and fair elections, he has admitted his shortcomings in previous elections. The interpretation is that it is either he did not make enough efforts previously or the energies he deployed were not sufficient to achieve the desired results or both. He could also have had other personal reasons for not going beyond those efforts.

    Secondly, there are deductions arising from his admonition of prospective aspirants for national assembly positions and the presidency to work very hard as he will make use of the security agencies to ensure that the 2023 elections are free and fair. It can be inferred that many of those who had vied and won these positions in the past did not work hard enough and may have gotten their mandate due to compromise positions of the security agencies.

    There is the additional suggestion that political office holders have been in the habit of using their offices and resources to foist themselves on the electorate irrespective of their popularity standing in their constituencies. No doubt about that. Buhari intends to halt all these in 2023. But some of the promises are not novel at all.

    Given that security agencies had always been deployed ostensibly, to guarantee the sanctity of elections, Buhari’s new promise seems to suggest that their previous outings fell short of the neutrality expected of their offices. Or are we envisioning a new template of rules and behavior that will now ensure that security agencies do not compromise their positions in the manner we have seen in previous elections? The issue is not just the deployment of security agencies but the brief they are given by the leadership in ensuring a free playing ground for all political parties. That is what has been lacking.

    In the last governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa states, more than 30,000 security agencies were deployed to maintain the peace. Yet, even the rudimentary enforcement of restrictions on movement proved futile. That enabled thugs to move freely in vehicles attacking opponents and leaving in their trail sorrow and awe. And after all that transpired during those elections, we are left with a conspiracy of silence of some sort. Incidentally, this has fuelled rumors that they were actually doing the bidding of the powers above.
    A government that is committed to free and fair elections should have set up an investigative panel to probe events of those elections. Such investigation would unravel who did what in the orgy of violence and sundry electoral infractions that reduced those elections to a verity of military warfare. It is vital to get at the root of all that transpired to better equip the president in his new confidence in the capacity of security agencies to ensure free and fair polls.

    Beyond that however, is the suspicion raised by the president’s choice of 2023 as the commencement date for his sanitization of the electoral process. Why wait till 2023 instead of initiating immediate measures to ensure that all future elections conform to the new thinking? We ask this question because there are outstanding elections arising from the judgments of the courts on the last elections that are coming up in various states. There are other states with different calendar for the governorship polls that will definitely come up before his target date.
    Governorship elections in Edo and Ondo states will come before that date. Is it going to be business as usual? We had expected the president to give immediate commitment to all the issues impeding the successful conduct of elections given the fast eroding public confidence in the process. It is strange he is only concerned with the 2023 polls.

    More seriously, there are also questions on the propriety in using an election in which the president is not a candidate as a true test of his commitment to free and fair polls. Such commitment is better measured when he is a candidate in the election. We saw that in the 2015 elections he ran and won with former president Jonathan still on the saddle.

    Ironically, the 2019 elections he superintended over did not show any improvement in the one that brought him to power. In fact, they detracted substantially from the gains recorded in the 2015 outing. All the same, it is still good a thing the president has given commitment to sanitizing the electoral process to restore the confidence of the people in it.

    A government that has the fight against corruption as one of its cardinal programs can ill-afford to allow the do-or-die contests that are fast assuming the culture of our democratic engagement to persist. For, there is an intricate link between corruption and the sundry electoral malfeasance that have virtually robbed us of the gains of virile democracy which free and fair contests engender. If the government is serious in the fight against corruption, it must take urgent measures to stamp out corruption in our electoral process.

    The bitter competition that characterize our politics; the deployment of devious means and all criminal strategies by politicians to win elections, are intricately linked to the ease of access to wealth which political offices offer. Thus, as long as this perverse culture persists, so long will it be difficult to check corruption in public places. So, it does not seem we have an alternative to sanitizing the electoral process to discourage the pervading feeling that it is the surest way to quick wealth.

    More fundamentally, the president must go beyond these promises to initiate actions in conjunction with the national assembly to effect such constitutional amendments that will ensure the sanctity of future elections. It is time to dilute the huge powers of the center that accentuate bitter competition for its resources for personal and clannish interests.

  • NBS corruption survey

    The second corruption survey by the National Bureau of Statistics NBS unveiled interesting data on the state of the war against that malfeasance in the country.

    Released in the seventh month of the second term of an administration that has the fight against corruption as one of its three cardinal programmes, the report could not have come at a more auspicious time. This is especially so as some of its findings conform to subsisting deficits in the current prosecution of the war against graft in public offices.

    In the latest survey, the police topped the chart as the most corrupt public agency. It posted similar unenviable record in the first report presented in 2016 though it had a drop from its 46 per cent rating then to 33 per cent in the current survey. Next to the police in this high corruption ladder are land registry officers with a posting of 25 per cent.

    However, the most comforting news was that health workers came last, posting five per cent as the least corrupt officials. This is something to cheer given the critical and very sensitive roles they play in the lives of the citizenry. Thus, for the war against corruption to be meaningfully and realistically prosecuted, the government must as a matter of urgency focus attention on the institution of the police and the land registry. It is imperative to get the police institution key into the war given mounting public complaints of extortion, bribery and corruption brazenly going on in that agency.

    It was nonetheless gratifying that there was a slight drop in the general level of corruption cases, particularly bribery from 32.3 per cent in 2016 to 30.2 per cent in 2019. This infinitesimal drop is a measure of the level of success recorded in the anti graft war.

    Perhaps, the most revealing aspect of the survey is in the area of its rating of states within the corruption index. In its state-by-state record, the NBS rated Kogi as the most corrupt state in the country with a 48 per cent score followed by Gombe State which had 45 per cent. Rivers State scored 43 per cent and Adamawa 41 per cent. Interestingly, the report rated Imo State as the least corrupt state with 17.6 per cent followed by Jigawa, Kano and Plateau states in that order. This contrasts very sharply with the high corruption profile Imo State posted in the first NBS survey.

    But, the good standing of Imo State within the corruption index has turned out a subject of claims and counter claims. This arose as aides to the former governor, Rochas Okorocha sought to appropriate credit for the current good standing of the state in the NBS corruption chart.

    Their argument is that since the last survey was done in 2016, much of the timeframe covered by the current one was when Okorocha held sway. For this, they would want the credit for the good outing to go to that regime. Apparently hiding under this claim, they saw the good rating as an opportunity to launder Okorocha’s image especially given the allegations of corruption hanging on his neck.

    But the Ihedioha-led administration dismissed the claims, insisting that the favorable placing of the state was a consequence of the several measures it initiated in several fronts to plug leakages and position the state on the path to steady growth by enthroning probity and accountability in public offices. Part of the measures the governor adopted on assuming office to check corruption was the introduction of the Treasury Single Account TSA. The state government rolled the TSA into quick motion by signing Order 005 which streamlined remittances into government’s coffers.

    Before the coming into being of the TSA, the previous government operated over 250 bank accounts leading to scandalous leakages in the revenue accruing to the state government. All these loopholes and avenues for financial leakages were plugged with the operation of the TSA.

    They also contended that the uncovering of 8,546 ghost worker by an audit committee on pensions which saved the state a monthly revenue of N280 million was a good evidence of a government with strong aversion for corruption and corrupt practices. Additionally, the sharp rise in Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, from its N200 million position when Okorocha held sway to nearly N1 billion since Ihedioha mounted the saddle could not but have earned the state good rating in the fight against corruption.

    They argued that these leakages had a free reign during the last administration and bore positive link with the first NBS report which rated Imo State very high in the corruption matrix.  And if all these leakages subsisted as Okorocha was leaving office, it is difficult to fathom how that regime could have posted a record different from its very embarrassing outing in the first survey report. That is as far as the arguments have been canvassed. Both claimants are entitled to their views.

    But there are issues arising from the NBS survey report and other facts in the public domain that should resolve which of the two administrations should take the credit for the current outing of the state. The NBS said the second report assessed the impact of measures put in place by ministries, agencies and departments of government in fighting corruption after the first report.

    Whereas we can find ample evidence of these measures since Ihedioha came on stream, there is nothing to show that Okorocha considered such measures relevant. Neither did his aides point at such measures by his regime before he left office. But then, Okorocha had boasted on many occasions that he had no room for due process.

    Again, the NBS said the report covered bribery during elections while observing that one out of five Nigerians took bribe or gift to vote during the last elections. It is very evident from the foregoing that the report is largely a recent one since it captured events during the last elections. A survey that covered the last elections is expected to have captured developments since the new administrations took over.

    The point being made here is that the measures taken by the current governors were critical factors in the standing of their states in the corruption ladder. So it is difficult for Okorocha and his supporters to ambush the credit for the current success of Imo State government in the fight against corruption. Moreover, there is adjunct information in the public domain that would render such claims an exercise in wishful thinking.

    During the last elections which the NBS said it captured in the report, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission EFCC had seized N5 billion of Imo funds. The anti graft agency said it seized the money because “Okorocha was spending too much money in a suspicious manner on the eve of the general elections”. The agency said about N8 billion from the Paris Club refund meant for workers salaries were kept by the state government only to begin spending it ‘frivolously’ just before the elections.

    Again, shortly before the expiration of his office, Okorocha had cried out that some members of his party were plotting with the EFCC to arrest him immediately his immunity expired. He even obtained a restraining order from the court to thwart his arrest. Even then, he has been grilled by the EFCC over alleged money laundering after leaving office. This is in addition to several high profile properties traced to him and members of his family that have been sealed up by the EFCC. Facts are sacred and they speak for themselves.

    It is difficult to figure out how a regime plagued by serious corruption scandals, could seek to appropriate the gains recorded in the current corruption chart. If Okorocha’s aides are anxious to launder his image, they are at liberty. But they are bound to hit the rocks in this contrived revisionism, if they lay claims to probity, accountability and due process.

  • The comfort revolutionary

    Sam Omatseye

    The Sowore saga shows a state in search of a sage. They set up a stage, filled it with a cast so peculiar and they treated us to a theatre of the absurd. It first seemed improbable, then it was a laugh, then a farce and now it is unveiling what seems like the beginnings of a tragedy.

    What were they thinking when they transformed a non-event into a cause celebre? In media philosophy, it is called a pseudo-event. You fake it to make it. The DSS faked a non-protest into a storm.

    How did the Buhari government allow itself to lionise a fellow who cannot even bark like a dog? He whined and the DSS lost its balance, went for a chain and locked up Sowore. Did they find out who this fellow was before their desperate frenzy? Did they know they were operating a democracy? Of course, they have operated from the premise that democracy must bow to the strong-arm view of state security. Dasuki, El Zakzaky and others are examples. Just as the United States democratic Czars did with Guantanamo Bay, they have suspended the law and become the lawgivers.

    The man said he wanted revolution. And he was locked up. Where is the evidence that he belched out more than a vapor of words? Did he amass arms to overthrow a system? Where is the armoury? Were they in some faraway country? If so, what country? If in Nigeria, where? If so, he would not be acting alone? Who financed it? For sure, he is no Karl Marx with resources. Even Marx winced. You must be some sort of billionaire to overthrow a system or enjoy the backings of men of money. In that case, it would not be Sowore alone in the narrative of subversion. The DSS would have to name accomplices, nations, arms dealers, etc.

    But they keep telling us they have facts they would not tell us. It is like a tale of calling a house fly a tsetse fly. The latter sucks blood, the former dumps filth. The vampire insect sets one to sleep or death. You swat the house fly. You do not swat when the tsetse fly buzzes into view. You reach for the insecticide. Sowore is no more than a housefly. But the DSS bombed the air.

    Sowore had just run to be president. He ran a puny contest. He lit no democratic fire. He did not impress with logic, rhetoric or charisma. He was just a publisher who failed to whet a national appetite. Then afterwards, he wanted a last word, an after word. He sought the attention that eluded Sowore the candidate. It is a sort of Pavlovian yearning for fame. The DSS allowed itself to yield to his craving. He is not Lenin, who struggled for bread and butter outside his home country trying to give his country to Karl Marx. He is no Mao, who groveled like John the Baptist on the mountains plotting to wrest his home country from a feudal cenacle. Nor is he Castro in the bushes before the Batista government fell.

    He is a comfort revolutionary. he is not like economist John Galbraith, who urged that we “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Sowore never wanted the classic agony of a revolutionary. He called off his hunger strike when he became hungry. His family is ensconced in what many see as the bourgeois languor of the United States. Not like Mengistu Haile Mariam, who yelled, when he was in his “revolutionary trenches,” that the state could kill his wife and children and even butcher them. Sowore’s is what Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as “revolutionary cretinism,” in his novel titled Lenin in Zurich.

    Nor is he a moral light. Did he respond to former Inspector General Mike Okiro’s charge that he jumped bail over raping a girl?

    So, I keep wondering why the Federal Government would do such a grave infamy to itself, and allow a military-style impunity to reign when it has nothing to save and nothing to gain from it. As we speak, the  military keeps working fruitlessly to rein in the Boko Haram goons making themselves landlords in most of Borno State. Even the national security adviser cannot go to his home village, Monguno, without a full detachment of security forces to protect him. Yet the DSS still is playing haughty in the city while those who cannot eat, or farm, or secure shelter have become refugees as a routine in their own country.

    Maybe the Federal Government is trying to save face by the act of the attorney general Abubarkar Malami, who has now called for the files. Is it a transfer from impunity to law? It is evidence that Buhari’s men are still in turf wars because the commander in chief has left too much power in their hands. A hands-off approach will drop the egg. If they are trying to save face, they should do it fast. Keeping Sowore under lock and key would not give them peace. The world will continue to clamour, and the man will continue to grow in grace. They already have made a tyro into a hero. We have to follow the constitution. It is the document that separates us from a tribe of savages.

    Somebody needs to convey to the president that his men are ruining things for him. Democracy does not work this way. The whole world is now going through what political scientist Neil Diamond calls a “democratic recession.” Whether it is the U.S, India, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Israel or Hungary, the world is getting weary of liberal ideas. Nigeria seems to embrace this and it is a bad omen.

    The editorial that hit the waves saying the newspaper henceforth will call Buhari major General instead of president of a democracy and call his administration a regime was a beautiful piece written with rigour and wit and finesse until it reached its conclusion. It stumbled and undermined the very basis of its logic. You cannot ask for the president to obey the rule of law and the constitution while undercutting the same constitution.

    The Punch editorial, while showing rage for a president adrift, drowned itself. It sought to delegitimise a presidency that is a fruit of the constitution. It sought to delegitimise the constitution by calling it a regime though the constitution says it is a democracy.  A feudalist has the right to hate the king, but not the throne. Democracy, not a newspaper, voted Buhari to office. A newspaper has no vote in an election; it’s the people’s voice. A newspaper, like the presidency, owes its legitimacy to the constitution. A democrat is Machsvilan if he appeals to a dictations cudgel to pursue a democratic end. You cannot torpedo same constitution and serve the higher virtues of a republic. The editorial affirmed a right by expressing its views, but it wanted to deny Buhari his right to run an administration, both guaranteed by the same constitution.

    But all of this would not happen if the DSS does not create a case that turns public sentiment against it. Abraham Lincoln warned that a government’s fortunes lies in how it manages such sentiment. Sowore is the winner at the moment.

     

     

    Gbaja’s sparks of light

     

    THE speaker did something revolutionary for the country in the past week, but the Sowore din drowned it. House Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila sponsored a bill that scaled second reading calling for free education across the country. In an age of illiteracy, Boko Haram, extreme poverty and sectarian implosions, the speaker hit the bull’s eye. It is a panacea for the youths and a pathfinder for the future. For whosoever neglects learning in his youth, wrote playwright Euripides, loses the past and is dead forever. The speaker has, with one shot, exploded a thousand points of light. We know what it did when Awolowo fought generations ago, and the fruits today.

    It is time to make it a Nigerian compulsion. We have to force fathers and mothers who oppose their sons and subdue their daughters that a time of light has come. Education and health, wrote the philosopher, are the two ingredients for a whole human being. Speaker Gbaja has evinced extraordinary strength. He has also shown extraordinary political leadership that the bill did not spark controversy but light. He has mobilised the House.

    I hope when it swivels to the executive floor from the House, no force of regression will obstruct this law of the future. Gbaja has laid the egg; all we want is how this grows into a full fowl. It is a legislation of great transformation if we take it seriously and with democratic urgency.

     

  • The footprints of an Oguta boy

    Text of a book review by The Nation Editorial Board Chairman Sam Omatseye in honour of former Inspector General of Police Sir Mike Okiro.

     

    When we look at celebrities, men and women who have made an epic out of their lives, we see only the glitter. It is like the ephemeral white foam on the brand of coffee sometimes called café latte, its true colour, a deep blackness, smothered in a sort of royal froth.

    We see them on television, speaking with humble hauteur.

    Whether a political hero, an entrepreneurial maven, a soldierly avatar, a cultural pathfinder, a literary torch, an engineering disruptor, a police firebrand, or a social icon, an inventor, an innovator, a revolutionary, or even a martyr, they seem not to be like the rest of us. Somehow, God made them complete, as though they were a masterpiece that the master did not make from pieces.

    On the public square, their swagger is unmistakable, like a glamour lion roaring harmless before our eyes.

    We admire their attires, the babaringas, or Wole Soyinka’s mockery of the opera Wonyosi, the fez and bowler hats, or the suit from Manhattan, the ties knotted with the delicacy of the hands of the Brooks Brothers, the shoes at once pointing up to the heavens and the earth.

    They exoticise the concept of the automobile, their homes playing host to more cars that the car dealership. We see a blend of the lofty and the vain, of God and Mammon, of what that American novelist Scott F. Fitzgerald calls the beautiful and the damned. And some of us want to be beautiful even if it means we should first be damned.

    We weave myths about them because we know little about how they grew. May be their fathers were from Mars, and their mothers were related to the woman who sat beside Jesus and said her two sons, James and John, must sit beside him in the kingdom of heaven.

    If we don’t go that high, we come down and say, well, maybe their mothers were mammy water, and their fathers descended from Sango or Amadioha. That is why when they die, we see them on the moon, or we don’t just build statue in their honour, we honour them like deity.

    That is why biographies and autobiographies are necessary. They justify the humanisation of the hero, they clutch them from the skies, they free them from the fable, and put the epic into a narrative of their toils, grind and sweat; they see the blood, the sweat, the tears, the rise and fall of the human spirit, the dynamo of the march of history. Hence Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.”

    So, many might have woven a story about the life of Mike Mbama Okiro. Who was this guy who rose to become the commissioner of police in Lagos and Benue States, who earned double promotion to become the deputy inspector general of police, and then became an inspector general of police in a force where that position of DIG was often a death knell of careers? He finished it and became the chairman of the Nigerian Police Commission.

    All of these are in the public space. Yet in spite of his visibility over the past two decades at least in the public eye, the average Nigerian, even those who live in Oguta where he hails, know that an inquiry into Okiro’s life is still like peering into the dark.

    Few know what I know having read the biography ably put together by the writer Dozie Kingsley Bonseh Okebalama.

    His story reads like a novel, a boyhood of truancy and brilliance, of daring and obedience, of naivety and defiance, of a charmed life unknown to the fellow himself.

    How many know for instance, that Okiro is a firstborn but not the firstborn of his father Samuel Okiro and mother Amaruomunma Okiro.

    That they gave birth to thirteen children, and only four survived? And Okiro was by that cruel fate the first one that survived and thrived, opening the way to three others, although in between some of them still passed on.

    Some at birth, others in infancy. These strokes of ill-fortune turned the couple into refugees from infant mortality, moving from place to place, hoping the air and water and ambience and the spirit of a new place would save their children.

    The couple stuck together in spite of entreaties and pressures to break the marriage.

    But Okiro’s story is that of escapes and paradox, ultimately showing triumph of surprising beauty.

    He started, for instance, as a seminarian and that meant he was headed for the priesthood, but later he developed a love of writing and wanted to be a journalist like me, but ended up doing what he himself described as a gamble: he became a police man, to the shock of his father; and, looking back, to his own amazement.

    So, even when he resigned over principle as an officer years into the career, his letter was rejected. So, a man who started by trying to be a servant of God, rejected the pulpit and was unlike Paul who could not resist the heavenly calling.

    He then opted for the pen, but ended up with kondo and gun. He exchanged the frock for the police uniform. He did not want to wrestle with spirit like Jacob but with flesh and blood in the underbelly of society, the criminals who arguably were the devil made flesh.

    The other irony was that as a writer in school, especially as a student at the University of Ibadan, he became a discomfort for the authorities, and a young man who was going to confront students later in life as a police man was earlier in life a scourge of the police as a student, such that when students wanted to stage a protest, one of his bosses called Okiro and described the student protesters as “your people,” and was asked to take charge.

    But as a pupil, he was exemplary, scoring high marks. In fact, how do we explain how a person scores 105 marks over 100? Read the book and find out? Read how a boy who was believed to be too small to attend school wowed teachers by answering questions that pupils could not and earned  double promotion, just as it happened later as a police officer.

    But his gifts are manifold, a great swimmer, a cunning chess player, a drummer of taste, net-maker of intricate fingers, a marksman that prophesied his future not in priesthood but security, et al. But he was awful in the queen of all sports: soccer.

    As a swimmer, he became a local hero when he saved the life of a friend who was drowning. He became a drum major in the civil war. As a chess player, he beat the best in the country and he was going to represent Biafra in Switzerland just before the civil war ended.

    As a young man, his civil war exploits are benumbing. More so because he was not a soldier. At one time he ran home stranded in his village when he went in search of parents who had all fled from an advancing Nigerian army to Owerri.

    His only hope was a man and his son, who would not take him along. If the fellow looked away after his visceral plea, the soldiers might have caught up with him. A few minutes after he joined the ferry, their shouts of oshobe resounded and bullets landed frantically in the water beside them.

    Or shall we recall his conscription by a detachment of the Biafran forces. He was to go on a battle. But before then a certain priest saw him and identified him as a seminarian and he was let go.

    Everybody in that group was wiped out later by a Nigerian force. We cannot forget, of course, his many acts of truancy. One was being caught in a group of hemp-smoking boys, who had special names, but Mike was sober enough to call himself Mike as nickname.

    Or the fellow known as Baba Agba who sent him as a courier of hemp and set him up to buy it while hiding in the bush. A naïve Mike was lucky not to get caught.

    He also showed himself a man of great integrity when in the dormitory, he committed with his peers what was described as cockroaching, that is prowling about at night when all students should be on their beds.

    The school master caught them but Okiro and was to send them out of school. Okiro turned himself in and identified himself as the fellow he could not pick out. Because of him, everybody was freed. He probably learned this from his mother during the civil war.

    A woman had run away and left her huge sum in the boat as everyone scampered to safety. The money was in his mother’s hands for a long time.

    She went to the market to announce for the owner. The woman eventually found Okiro’s mother and his father insisted she counted it to be sure it was all complete.

    One of the great escapes was as an officer when Okiro’s car burned in an accident, and everyone stood watching until a strapping fellow drew him out of the flames.

    His wife was in the car, but saved. She thought she had been widowed. She went to the mortuary to look for him afterward. Okiro recovered through an Indian doctor’s recommendation of a certain variant of salt sold in the market, for him to regain not only consciousness but the use of a tongue that was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

    Ironically, his dear wife was going to lose her life in a freak accident and rather than being widowed, it was Mike that was widowered.

    Paradoxically, he also escaped lynching by students of the University of Nigeria when as an activist he spoke to them about the virtue of resisting the Gowon regime.

    The students were miffed that when they did so in the throes of the Nigerian crisis no other school joined them. So, they saw Okiro as trying to disrupt their academic tranquillity. His uncle bundled him out in a truck of livestock in the wee hours of the next day.

    His escapes were not of his life alone. His academics joined the trail. When he was a student at Ibadan, a certain unnamed female student took fancy to him and followed him around the campus until a friend told him he did not want to graduate because he was too close to a lady who was a professor’s mistress.

    Mike decided to avoid the lady including coming late to class so she could not sit beside him. He was on the cusp of making a second class upper, but the same unnamed professor argued that Mike did not deserve it because he was too busy playing about campus instead of focusing on his studies.

    The man was the dean of the faculty, and if anyone wants to probe a bit later for his identity, the archives are available.

    Because of that same fellow, Mike turned down an offer to work in the university because of the bullying spectre of the love-struck professor or, we may call him the professor of desire, apologies to Philip Roth. Here, Okiro’s escape was with scratches.

    We cannot forget the family saga when his younger brother Tony, whom he fought for when they were much younger, subjected him to a frog-jumping punishment because Tony was a Biafran officer. He bullied his older brother with his assistants in their own home, until their mother came to the rescue.

    The story of Okiro as a police officer was full of escapades and compassion. Was it his role in reducing crime in Lagos from its whirlwind years by over 85 percent, or was it the quelling of the restive days of OPC, or the serenity he evinced when the bombs of the Ikeja Cantonment quaked and lit up the whole city?

    Was it his ability to understand the scent of cohabiting with other ethnic groups? We cannot forget how he made a case for M.D. Abubakar before President Goodluck Jonathan when the latter asked him to recommend an IGP candidate. Jonathan said MD Abubakar was not a graduate.

    Okiro said the fellow may not be a university graduate but if you put 10 IGPs together and gave them an assignment, Abubakar would beat them all. This was loyalty not only to a fellow professional; he did not hear tribe.

    His appointment as IG reads like a piece of stage drama. I spare you the juicy detail but a man who went to congratulate his friend who was announced on NTA as IG ended up being the IG. What an awkward situation, and the man helped the disappointed man afterward to succeed him.

    After all, it fit just as two of them, Okiro and Onovo, wore the same size of shoes, trousers and shirts.

    The book is a work of great detail and research, and the writer took pains to shed lights on unknown reaches of life. Okiro also wrote some of the pages, expressing his skill in clear earnest.

    The prose flows without condescension or flattery. But the story flows for pages on end without quotes, which takes away some of its appeal of verisimilitude.

    But he does well to compensate with a deluge of pictures that tell their own stories. We also do not see Okiro’s thoughts as a young man about the civil war, his thoughts about pacifism or justice. Nor do we get a good read of how the mobile life of a soldier affected his family.

    Yet, it is a work of great episodes and events, of escapes and escapades, of a young man daring to be himself, a novelistic description of scenes, a probe of a life of a man who loved the adventure of life and tried, in the words of Emerson, to “live the life he imagined.”

    While following the words of the Poet Robert Browning that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp but what is heaven for,”Okiro had ambition but not greed; fervour but not fanaticism and energy but not excess, audacity without recklessness and kindness without cynicism.

    He abided by Apostle Paul’s injunction that “let your moderation be known to all men.” If six children died and by being the seventh, he decided to hold on to life, he made a theatre of it and did it at the very top of human striving.

    So, he worked with all the presidents and heads of state of his generation, loved his God and his fellow men, and was not afraid to fail. But he did not fall to death because his God was with him like the famous quote that shows God as saying,

    “The times that you have seen only one set of footprints, Child, is when I carried you.” He is, like the hero of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, one of us, but one with a difference.

    So, like the words of President Goodluck Jonathan in the forward to the book, Striking Footprints, I deeply recommend this book.

     

  • The Oraifite killings

    Emeka Omeihe

    Why an intra-communal feud turned bloody in Oraifite community in the Ekwusigo Local Government Area of Anambra State last week is a puzzle the authorities should entangle without much delay.

    Was the matter escalated and given a lethal dimension because the name of Ifeanyi Ejiofor, lawyer to Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the proscribed Indigenous Peoples of Biafra IPOB featured in the report lodged with the police? Is it one of those instances of poor handling of a misunderstanding by the police, error of judgment or both? These are the searing posers thrown up by that unfortunate encounter.

    They are further given fillip because of the losses both in humans and properties of inestimable value that were said to have been snuffed out and destroyed during that incident.  In the aftermath of the encounter, the police claimed two of their senior officers were killed by IPOB members when they visited the family home of Ejiofor to effect his arrest following a report of his alleged involvement in a case of abduction, assault occasioning harm and malicious damage of properties.

    But the stories making the rounds from the community had it that the security operatives drafted to the scene by the police unleashed mayhem on the family of Ejiofor leading to the alleged killing of two people even as many others received varying degrees of injury with properties of innocent citizens of the community razed down. Photographs of houses burnt down in the family home of the Ejiofors’ have also been trending in the social media.

    For now, we are left with blame trading; claims and counterclaims as to the real circumstances of the event, the number of those killed, what provoked the killings and their motive. It is also yet to be ascertained between the police, the Ejiofor family and the IPOB who is responsible for the mishandling and escalation of the incident.  A judicial commission of inquiry where all parties will give evidence as to what actually transpired will resolve the riddle surrounding the unfortunate incident.

    Before then however, there are basic facts of the unfortunate incident that will be hard to controvert. And these must be taken in their proper perspective for us to get at the root of the matter. The first is that Ejiofor was in his home town for the burial of his late elder step-brother, Louis Ejiofor and the burial ceremonies were just being concluded when the incident happened. Secondly, there was a crisis at another funeral ceremony in the community on Saturday, November 29, between two rival masquerade groups. Ejiofor is said to be the legal adviser of one of the rival masquerade groups. The feud had resulted to fisticuffs, injuries on both sides, abductions and the subsequent lodging of a report at the divisional police office in the area by one of the masquerade groups.

    Those who lodged the report mentioned Ejiofor as one of the suspected masterminds of the fracas.  Following the report, the police sent some of their men to the house of Ejiofor apparently to arrest him. It is also very evident that prior to the report, Ejifor had no issues with the police authorities in that division. It is also a fact that deaths were recorded in the ensuing fracas. These are basic facts none of the contending parties can controvert. They will come handy in situating the role of the police in the turn of events that were to follow.

    But there are divergences in the accounts of the police, eyewitnesses and the IPOB as to the sequence of events that followed on the arrival of the police; who attacked first and the issues that provoked that attack. This should not be surprising in matters of this nature that turned out awry. Buck passing is usually the game when issues that should have been handled more professionally are bungled. In such instances, we should expect blame game, denials, cover ups and half-truths. What are the real issues to the conflict?

    Independent accounts, had it that when the police came to the family home of the Ejiofors’ the second time, they demanded to see him on account of the allegations levied against him. But on learning that he had not returned, they went furious and began to fire their weapons indiscriminately. The ensuing attacks killed two people and left many injured.

    But in a statement on Monday, the police claimed that there was a report against one “Barr. Ifeanyi Ejiofor, ‘m’ (a member of the proscribed IPOB) in Oraifite on alleged case of abduction, assault occasioning harm and malicious damage of property”. They claimed when their team went to arrest Ejiofor over the complaints made against him, IPOB member immediately attacked them killing two of their men and setting their van ablaze.

    Hear them: “Consequently, the command deployed reinforcements from the state headquarters comprising PMF, SARS, and special anti-cult units in conjunction with the army/other sister agencies who cordoned the area to flush out the culprits”.

    The following day, the Anambra State Police Commissioner declared Ejiofor wanted in connection with the alleged killing of two police officers by members of the IPOB.

    It is now the words of the police against that of Ejiofor and the IPOB. But the police admitted that they asked for reinforcement. It is not clear why they asked for reinforcement and the type of resistance they met on ground that required the aid of the army and other security agencies. Neither were we told that Ejiofor was arrested at the scene after the crisis since it was the main reason the police came to the place.

    However, there are a number of fallouts from the two statements issued by the police on the matter. The first is the error in describing Ejiofor as a member of the proscribed IPOB. The second issue which evolved from his declaration as a wanted man is that he was not at home when the police visited and throughout the duration of the crisis. Had he been there, the police would have arrested him thus forestalling his being declared a wanted man the following day.

    If these assumptions are right, on whose behalf were those alleged to have attacked he police team killing two of their men fighting? Who were they protecting since the IPOB lawyer was not around and who would have given them the order to attack the police?

    These questions arise because the impression created was that the IPOB lawyer was at home at the time of the invasion and his resistance of arrest was responsible for the maximum force the police and its sister agencies unleashed on the community. But we cannot find evidence of this suggestion since Ejiofor was not there when the attack ensued.

    There is no intention to hold brief for any of the parties to the conflict. But it is difficult to ignore the yawning gaps created by the narratives of the police on the issue. Not unexpectedly, those gaps have been at the heart of accusations that the security agencies acted the way they did because of their presumption that Ejiofor was a member of the IPOB. How they failed to make a distinction between a counsel to Nnamdi Kanu and membership of the outlawed self-determination group says a lot of the ruins that were visited on the home of the Ejiofors.

    With such a mind-set, it was not surprising that excessive force was brought to bear in the attempt to arrest a man accused of abduction, assault and malicious damage of properties. It would seem the error of the police in tagging the lawyer a member of the IPOB was responsible for the level of damage wrought on that quiet community.

    The incident was evidently mismanaged. And it says volumes on the attitude of law enforcement agencies in matters relating to the proscribed IPOB. That is something really to worry about. A serious inquisition into the Oraifite mayhem will unravel the riddle thrown up by the incident.