Category: Monday

Jesus said the poor will always be with us.

Nigeria fulfilled it last week. We thought we had scored for the indigent with a new minimum wage. But it is still the same maximum weight on the dispossessed. It is the wages of upper class sin with organised labour in cahoots.

Labour thrashed about like an enraged elephant. The government begged. 0ver N60k was the first bargaining chip. They chipped it down to about half, and the labour leaders hailed themselves as the kings of the little guy. Of course, they are kings of the little guy, not for the little guy.

They are all riding the poor, both labour and government. They also put into the mix the legal opprobrium that says every five years we shall review the wages. We are just a nation that brings on the people after the horse has torn away. The people cannot even ride a horse or a cart. They have to walk to death as the contraption barrels into a dust bowl in the far distance.

We increase wages in tandem with two things. One, inflation and cost of essentials. Two, the economy’s productivity. Tragically, we have one, that is inflation. The other, which is productivity, should trigger the wage rise. The economy is anything but productive.

Yet, the poor man is poorer. His health limps. His rents soar. His transport costs strain long treks in place of a seat in a prostrate bus. He cannot pay school fees. The impact spirals all over the economy. So does he deserve a wage increase? Yes. But that is the wrong question.

The question should be, does the economy provide for wage increase? The clear answer should be no. But the poor man who nearly suffocates at night from power outage looks at Abuja and the well-feathered men at the top. They live the life of flamboyance and opulence, and turn the poor into prayer warriors and citizens of heaven. The Jerusalem here on earth is gone. It is like Apostle John’s proclamation in the Revelations, Babylon the Great has fallen! Our leaders are whoring like the prostitute. So the poor would rather go to heaven and leave the powerful to the abundance and glamour of earth.

What labour and government have agreed is to give them the illusion of the whore. They are the rich man giving Lazarus the crumb. Lazarus is so happy. Better to be crumb rich than stomach empty. It is the Hobson’s choice of the Nigerian masses.

It is the perfect illusion. The economy is in such bad shape that even the state governments that cannot pay less than N20k have now agreed to add more than half. It is an easy win. An easy political victory for labour, and easy triumph for the governments.

Labour goes and tells the workers, “we have been faithful servants. We have warred and won against the whores of power.”

The government will tell the masses, “we have agreed to what your representatives bargained.” The people, in their grand lie, will say, “thank you for listening to us.”

But who is deceiving whom? Pundits say it is better to increase wages and the government should get the money, whether by scavenging, borrowing, etc.

We all know it’s all a lie. The federal government may be able to pay, but most state governments cannot. Most private concerns cannot. The minimum wage does not apply out of government anyway. There are many workers in private firms around the country who earn less than N10K a month, and they are happy just to  leave the home each morning. How they survive and move from day to day is a subject for research. They are the trapped.

Tomorrow will come, and the crisis will rock. The governors will say they cannot pay. No one will provide the money, and labour will yell in bad faith.

But the faith is without works. More clearly, without work. There are some things we ought to do to guarantee a five-year wage review, and also to make it workable. First, we must tackle waste. Corruption and waste go hand in hand in this society. That explains why a few are so rich that they afford for one meal what many spend in a month.

The present anti-corruption war is the best we have had, even if it is not fundamental. It has not addressed lifestyle. And the judiciary, for all its self-scrutiny, is still very loose. The second point arises from the first, and that is a merit-based system. Reward those who serve and work, not those who doodle as loyal courtiers, flatterers and sycophants.

But all of those cannot work without a federal system where the units account for their own income by tapping their own natural and human resources. For instance, every local government has a mineral resource. Is that not enough to keep the nation working rather than allow brigands to dig up our gold and kaolin and bauxite and fatten their purses at our collective expense.

That is what I mean by productivity. An economy that has not put itself in a position to be fertile should not be craning for lush fruits on tree branches. The N30k deal was faith without works. Or shall I say, faith with cunning, or cunning in the name of faith.

We merely put off the evil day. The poor will return to their poor wages. We started this with the Adebo Award, and we had Udoji Award and a few more such cynical bribes over the decades. But the poor did not improve in welfare. They had a month or two of swagger before inflation subdued them.

The poor will again lament, and scripture was right when it said, the destruction of the poor is their poverty. In her book, Nickle and Dimed, American writer Barbara Ehrenreich investigated America’s poor by living with them for a year. He detailed with chilling details how most of them have no pathway out of their misery. It is the bane of capitalism.

Capitalism brought wealth and ruin. Because of its potential for human misery, the welfare state was born to counter the depredation of communism. At the end of the Second World War, many European countries flirted with soviet-style communism, and that compelled the Marshal Plan. It saved capitalism, and it was about that time that the idea of the minimum wage came into being. Capitalism has had a great and brutal triumph for decades until the crash a few years ago.

The problem now is inequality, and it has grown worse and difficult to reverse. One of the best books in the past half-decade, Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty, has stressed the urgency of treating inequality. If it is so serious there, can we wonder why someone is struggling to pay N30k when someone else buys a piece of cake with tea at that amount. It tells us how poor we have made ourselves because we have oil and too many drones growing fat.

 

Watch out

While we are yet to settle the dust over the Osun dancer, the nation ought to pay attention to the certificate saga in Adamawa State. The Governor, Mohammed Jibrilla Bindow, is being sued for perjury and forgery by an NGO, Global Integrity Crusade Network for not stating the facts about his secondary school certificate results. They sue him with lying and that he presented different certificates when he ran for senate and subsequently for governor.

This is an interesting development. We may recall that like some other APC primaries, the Adamawa story was intriguing. It was first an indirect primary until they opted for an open one. The result gave victory to Bindow, while Mahmood Halilu came second and Nuhu Ribadu third. The losing duo publicly disputed the polls and called it fraudulent.

This is not Ogun State or Imo State when the jury has flushed out the governors’ choices. This is different, potentially an earthquake for a sitting governor. It’s brewing in the court. Watch out.

A pond is not a place for glum news. A host to fishes and nourisher of a neighbour of green lands, flowers and trees, it evokes romance. The worshipper sees God and even the atheist exorcises demons. Winds stir the water. Sunsets subdue it with tremors of golden colours, and sunshine with a velvet of hues. It is more a tapestry for the dreamer than observer.

There the flesh is weak, the eyes glaze, the ear succumbs to the harmony of water and birds. There also we now hear of sadness. A retired general falls to civilian bands. A soldier without arms. It is not the sort of news you look for in a pond. But in Nigeria, as the racist philosopher Pliny predicted about Africa, something new always pops out.

The pond, on the outskirts of Jos, was not just a body of water. It is now a water of bodies. Yet no one saw the remains of Idris Alkali in the water. The killers gave a decoy. The car, a corolla, was soaked in the water. The army saw his clothes, but not the man. The criminals committed the crime with despatch but had no rhyme. They left evidence: clothes, car, shoes.

But the other quality of the story is the veneration of the water. Local women became divine activists of the pond. Half-naked and deviant, they protested to the army. They may not be mammy water in the mythical sense. But by virtue of their devotion to the pond, they were mammy water in flesh and blood. Even if death walked into the water, the soldier’s eye and gun should stay off. It was a water too sacred for the temporal truth of investigation. Gods lay in the water. It was poison for human step. They drank the water for sustenance and healing. They kept it like a sacred forest. It overthrows the Christian idea that warns not to touch the unclean thing. In the traditional world, you should not touch the clean thing. The Christian feels superior to things. The traditionalist feels inferior. That inspires the song, Babalawo mowa be be. (Priest I come to beg). To beg to reduce things the subject must not do to live a safe and happy life.

The army defied tradition. Soldiers have always been taught to fear no such thing. The so-called Bini Massacre probably would have been averted if Captain Philips and his men dreaded the dance and visuals of ritual on Benin streets when the white man dared one of Africa’s flourishing empires. Canon fell to cannon. Gods fell to guns.  With colonialist rage unhinged, the Oba Ovonramwen was eventually captured. But it was not in Benin alone, but all over West Africa.

In the book: The West African Resistance edited by Michael Crowther, our historians documented this tension between faith and weaponry as state after state collapsed under the firepower of the Europeans. Similar myths engulf the soldiery of late Brigadier Adekunle, aka Black Scorpion, during the civil war. I met him once and asked him if he disappeared as the legends claimed. He laughed it dismissively as efforts by humans to mythicise what they cannot understand. I learned from Alabi Isama’s classic, A Tragedy of Victory, that Adekunle was hardly in the teeth of battle.

Sat Guru Maharaji paid a visit to The Nation a few days ago, and I put this question to him to showcase the fragility of our supernatural claims to superiority over military hardware. Sat Guru, with aplomb temper, said it was because the Africans did not get the right principle. I asked, so all of them missed it? And what was the principle that only he seemed to know? I said he seemed to be answering a question of mysticism with mysticism. But he was not one to faze.  He probably thought I was a secularist upstart.

In Jos, the army upended the locals. Video shows how the car was pulled out of the pond. It turned out the army had more work to do. They probed and eventually identified some culprit who confessed the body lay in a shallow grave. The pond is apparently a host to human ferocity. Other deaths have occurred there, evidence other car parts, human parts, clothes, etc. It is pond of mystery.

The intriguing part of the story is the breath-taking professionalism with which the army followed the investigation till they found the remains of their lost colleague. I have yet to excavate from our history any investigation with such painstaking attention to detail and alacrity. It shows we can do it as a people if we want. If the soldiers pay such diligence to the investigation of other crimes in the country, like the butchery in Kaduna and many episodes of the Fulani-locals imbroglio, we should have been a nation of law and decency. Boko haram still skulks and devastates in the North east, if in sporadic barbarism. The so-called herdsmen-farmers clashes have substantially gone under leash, thanks to some of the work the Buhari administration has put in place, especially with the deployment of Russian aircraft, Mi35. But the violence has mutated to highway robbery and a slew of kidnappings.

If what the army did in Alkali’s case is done in the judiciary, in education, in tackling random violence among us, the country would have been happier and healthier.

Alkali was just a retired soldier on his way to Bauchi. But a rash of young men, around expired mines, mounted a barricade. Was he a target or an accidental victim? Some arrests have been made.

This is not a story to slow down. In view of revived violence in parts of Plateau State, a new law is being drafted to try  local criminals locally. The idea is to avoid the bureaucracy of Abuja.

This is the second major step of Governor Simon Lalong on security. The first was to install a template for peace that worked for all of three years until rogue elements sullied it with bloodshed. The template is remarkably still working in most of the state, and it should be a work in progress.

The law, as the Governor has indicated, is in the state house of assembly. Speed is of the essence so the criminals can meet the furious majesty of the law. Just like other victims, Gen. Alkali also should get justice even in the silence of the grave.

The pond will now be avenged. It has lost its innocence to sacred savagery. This is different from the Walden Pond that Henry David Thoreau wrote lyrically about over a century ago, a bible of the environmental movement that preceded President Theodore Roosevelt or Rachel Carson’s 20th century masterpiece, Silent Spring.

We want the pond to return as a body of water, pure and peaceful among leafy bowers and throaty birds. It should not be a water of bodies.

He walks like a teen. Short, eyes alert, his feet and arms crackle as though the fellow is about to leap in and out of his labour attire. Unlike his days as governor, he has no beauty, no svelte figure beside him, to chasten his speed. Sometimes he rails, sometimes he cajoles, but often with a visceral brutality. Some party members hold their breaths until they are about to lose them. Welcome Adams, goodbye wheeler dealer. Oyegun now sulks in silence.

When he stepped in as APC chair, no one expected him to carry on the mercantile drollery of his septuagenarian ancestor.  No under-the-carpet, shadowy politics. Adams Oshiomhole could not have promised anything else. His labour past, a soldierly profile in the trenches of aluta, presents him as a sort of contradiction in politics. The activist meets the cunning. But such contradictions are good when put to good use.

“Do I contradict myself,” asks the American poet of democracy, Walt Whitman. “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Adams is an example of a strong man in democracy. The view often is that a strong man is bad for democracy. Since it is an ideology that privileges the collegial over hubris, it is wrong to think of a big man in a system of popular persuasion.

But history has given us many. Churchill. Washington. De Gaulle. Lincoln. Ghandi. Mandela. Awolowo. They are not big because they bully. They do not wield guns or rally mobs with blood in their eyes. They fall into what Max Weber describes as charismatic figures. They draw their strengths from moral example, intellectual power and courage. They are not like Franco, Mobutu, Hitler, or Mussolini, the sawdust Caesar. They exploit what Rousseau called the collective will.

The good big men give the ideology role models. They are a sort of contradiction of royalty in the society of equals. They are big because they are like us. They ride on us. They do not ride us. The rise from us, not in spite of us. They are the sort of man Lord Jim aspired to be in Joseph Conrad’s novel.

So, Adams is playing that sort of game in the APC. He is bringing sanity to the decay that Oyegun left. His ancestor brought the party to the brink. It did not help that the real leader of the party, President Muhammadu Buhari, looked on as elements like Bukola Eleyinmi Saraki, became a fifth columnist until he was naturally cauterised. Or a man like Dogara, who became speaker because of the northern guilty conscience about northern Christians being marginalised. Dogara cannot win a senatorial race in Bauchi State, yet he tries to challenge Governor Abdullahi Abubakar in a duel in which just one punch will fell him.

He is not always elegant. He does not have to be. His diction is sometimes uneven for the purpose. But it is not a game for accurate shots. Some misses are acceptable as long as the main goal is within sight. On his watch, a new idea has shaken the Nigerian political history: the open primaries. It has scared many, especially some governors who cannot stand the popular test. And we have seen that even when it was not open primaries, it rattled some who lay regal claims to political offices. The concept has opened the eyes of the party to a new way of politics. They have seen the forbidden fruit, lush primaries that provide the people’s wish. If not exactly the people’s wish, something close to it. A hint of progress.

When such men emerge, we confront obstacles. Hence the stories in some states, like Ogun, Zamfara and Imo. In Kaduna State, Shehu Sani has failed to make his way, because the dwarf governor, Nasir El-Rufai has turned himself into a monarch. But it is not only the story of a hectoring chief executive, but also about Sani’s sometimes juvenile outbursts in the course of his brief senatorial stewardship. He may not return as senator. He started a fight with a man when he had not sized up the foe to understand how much firepower he had to duel him down.

Well, Sani the activist overpowered Sani the politician, and he may be sharpening his tool to return to his old trade. His naivety has given us some nuggets, though. Through him we know the pay and moral payload of our lawmakers. It was an extraordinary moment in our democracy. He blew the wind to a hen’s behind and we saw all the muck and bumps. No one denied, and he did it without shame or shamefacedness, and without drawing alienation. He kept taking the pay. He was like a man who carted away the loot after confessing to his iniquity. But we shall remain indebted to his tainted honesty.

The story of Zamfara, Imo and Ogun are examples of how not to be a big man in a democracy. Ibikunle Amosun has been crying like a three-year-old, just the age of the party in power. Amosun, who has carried on like a little Pol Pot in Ogun politics is amazed how suddenly he has become an underdog in his party. The father thinks he is roaring. The children are asking why he is crying.  He does not know that there is a difference between a Kabiyesi and elected governor. He sees himself as his excellency kabiyesi Amosun. He saw the grandiose emptiness of Daniel’s reign. He brought his own and he could not even own it.

Right before his eyes, he looked at a primary that upended his candidate. Out of illusory confidence, he had accompanied Akinlade to the mosque and proclaimed, in vacuous prophecy, that he would accompany him in the next Sallah as a friend to the governor. How soon he became a false prophet.

He also took a real kabiyesi to see Mr. President without telling him the purpose. Well, he did not know that Buhari is not one to fight for anyone who is not Buhari. This is Buhari that Amosun always wanted to stand beside for photo ops. The story is told that when other governors were with the president, Amosun would jostle his way through his colleagues, brushing them away to create a path for himself to stand beside the big man. Where is the camera man!

Okorocha’s story has been well documented in this column. It is not that his in-law cannot be governor. He should let the people agree with him. But he wants to be the wrong big man in politics. The same with Yari. Yoruba will say Oti yari o. (He has turned desperate). INEC has disavowed any APC candidacy. The big men are seeing, for the first time in eight years, that they are just human.  Shakespeare describes such a person as “proud man, dressed in a little brief authority.”

They are trying to act in the philosophy of Plato that “might makes right.” In the slavery era, Abraham Lincoln declared that “right makes might.” It is that right that Adams is clutching and the Amosuns are crying over.

 

Kanu and his dog

 

Kanu the ethnic entrepreneur surfaced at last, in the land of David. Pictured with his skull cap and swaddle, he thought he was the ascetic hero. But he is the coward who revealed himself at last. He may think he is Odumegwu Ojukwu, who fled after the civil war. Ojukwu earned the right to a second act, although what anti-climax he became. He came to NPN, and wanted his people to support the very cabal that tied them in blood and tears for 30 months. At least, he was with his people for that long, and he died in the graces of many Igbo for his heroics during the war.

But Kanu started wailing about his dog, and it was its only name he remembered, not his suffering followers. This is the man for whom some died, and others, including a famous lawyer and constitutionalist, called a hero. He is how not to make an epic. He jolted a country to tempest and ran for cover.